12255	----	Formatting notes: Footnotes are in [square brackets] and embedded in the e-text at the location of the superscript number in the original text. Words and phrases in italics are surrounded with _underlines_. Everything that appears in all-caps in this e-text was in all-caps in the original text. THE EGYPTIAN CONCEPTION OF IMMORTALITY The Ingersoll Lecture, 1911 by GEORGE ANDREW REISNER THE INGERSOLL LECTURESHIP Extract from the will of Miss Caroline Haskell Ingersoll, who died in Keene, County of Cheshire, New Hampshire, Jan. 26, 1893. First. In carrying out the wishes of my late beloved father, George Goldthwait Ingersoll, as declared by him in his last will and testament, I give and bequeath to Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., where my late father was graduated, and which he always held in love and honor, the sum of Five thousand dollars ($5,000) as a fund for the establishment of a Lectureship on a plan somewhat similar to that of the Dudleian lecture, that is--one lecture to be delivered each year, on any convenient day between the last of May and the first day of December, on this subject, "the Immortality of Man," said lecture not to form a part of the usual college course, nor to be delivered by any Professor or Tutor as part of his usual routine of instruction, though any such Professor or Tutor may be appointed to such service. The choice of said lecturer is not to be limited to any one religious denomination, nor to any one profession, but may be that of either clergyman or layman, the appointment to take place at least six months before the delivery of said lecture. The above sum to be safely invested and three fourths of the annual interest thereof to be paid to the lecturer for his services and the remaining fourth to be expended in the publishment and gratuitous distribution of the lecture, a copy of which is always to be furnished by the lecturer for such purpose. The same lecture to be named and known as the "the Ingersoll lecture on the Immortality of Man." CONTENTS I. Introduction II. Sources of the Material III. The Ideas of the Primitive Race IV. The Early Dynastic Period V. The Old Empire VI. The Middle Empire VII. The New Empire VIII. The Ptolemaic-Roman Period IX. Summary I. INTRODUCTION Of the nations which have contributed to the direct stream of civilization, Egypt and Mesopotamia are at present believed to be the oldest. The chronological dispute as to the relative antiquity of the two countries is of minor importance; for while in Babylonia the historical material is almost entirely inscriptional, in Egypt we know the handicrafts, the weapons, the arts, and, to a certain extent, the religious beliefs of the race up to a period when it was just emerging from the Stone Age. In a word, Egypt presents the most ancient race whose manner of life is known to man. From the beginning of its history--that is, from about 4500 B.C.--we can trace the development of a religion one of whose most prominent elements was a promise of a life after death. It was still a great religion when the Christian doctrine of immortality was enunciated. In the early centuries of the Christian era, it seemed almost possible that the worship of Osiris and Isis might become the religion of the classical world; and the last stand made by civilized paganism against Christianity was in the temple of Isis at Philae in the sixth century after Christ. It is clear that a religion of such duration must have offered some of those consolations to man that have marked all great religions, chief of which is the faith in a spirit, in something that preserves the personality of the man and does not perish with the body. This faith was, in fact, one of the chief elements in the Egyptian religion--the element best known to us through the endless cemeteries which fill the desert from one end of Egypt to the other, and through the funerary inscriptions. It is necessary, however, to correct the prevailing impression that religion played the greatest part in Egyptian life or even a greater part than it does in Moslem Egypt. The mistaken belief that death and the well-being of the dead overshadowed the existence of the living, is due to the fact that the physical character of the country has preserved for us the cemeteries and the funerary temples better than all the other monuments. The narrow strip of fat black land along the Nile produces generally its three crops a year. It is much too valuable to use as a cemetery. But more than that, it is subject to periodic saturation with water during the inundation, and is, therefore, unsuitable for the burials of a nation which wished to preserve the contents of the graves. On the other hand, the desert, which bounds this fertile strip so closely that a dozen steps will usually carry one from the black land to the gray,--the desert offers a dry preserving soil with absolutely no value to the living. Thus all the funerary monuments were erected on the desert, and except where intentionally destroyed they are preserved to the present day. The palaces, the towns, the farms, and many of the great temples which were erected on the black soil, have been pulled down for building material or buried deep under the steadily rising deposits of the Nile. The tombs of six thousand years of dead have accumulated on the desert edge. Moreover, our impression of these tombs has been formed from the monuments erected by kings, princes, priests, and the great and wealthy men of the kingdom. The multitude of plain unadorned burial-places which the scientific excavator records by the thousands have escaped the attention of scholars interested in Egypt from the point of view of a comparison of religions. It has also been overlooked that the strikingly colored mummies and the glaring burial apparatus of the late period cost very little to prepare. The manufacture of mummies was a regular trade in the Ptolemaic period at least. Mummy cases were prepared in advance with blank spaces for the names. I do not think that any more expense was incurred in Egyptian funerals in the dynastic period than is the case among the modern Egyptians. The importance of the funerary rites to the living must, therefore, not be exaggerated. II. SOURCES OF THE MATERIAL With the exception of certain mythological explanations supplied by the inscriptions and reliefs in the temples, our knowledge of Egyptian ideas in regard to the future life is based on funerary customs as revealed by excavations and on the funerary texts found in the tombs. These tombs always show the same essential functions through all changes of form,--the protection of the burial against decay and spoliation, and the provision of a meeting-place where the living may bring offerings to the dead. Correspondingly, there are two sets of customs,--burial customs and offering customs. The texts follow the same division. For the offering place, the texts are magical formulas which, properly recited by the living, provide material benefit for the dead. For the burial place, the texts are magical formulas to be used by the spirit for its own benefit in the difficulties of the spirit life. These texts from the burial chambers are found in only a few graves,--those of the very great,--and their contents show us that they were intended only for people whose earthly position was exceptional. From the funerary customs and the offering texts, a clear view is obtained of the general conception, the ordinary practice. We see what was regarded as absolutely essential to the belief of the common man. From the texts found in the burial chambers we get the point of view of the educated or powerful man, the things that might be done to gain for him an exceptional place in the other world. Both of these classes of material must be considered, in order to gain a true idea of the practical beliefs. For it must be emphasized from the beginning that we have in Egypt several apparently conflicting conceptions of immortality. Nor are we anywhere near obtaining in the case of the texts the clearness necessary to understand fully all the differing views held by the priestly classes during a period of over two thousand years. III. THE IDEAS OF THE PRIMITIVE RACE The earliest belief in immortality is that which is shown to us by the burial customs of the primitive race,--the prehistoric Egyptian race. About 4500 B.C. we find the Egyptian race was just emerging from the Stone Age. All the implements and weapons found are of flint or other stone. The men of that time were ignorant of writing, but show a certain facility in line drawings of men, plants, and animals. We have found thousands of their graves which all show the same idea of death. Each person was buried with implements, weapons, ornaments,--no doubt those actually used in life,-- with a full outfit of household pots and pans, and with a supply of food. The man was dead, but he still needed the same things he used in ordinary life. By a fortunate chance we have even recovered bodies accidentally desiccated and preserved intact in the dry soil. These bodies do not show any trace of mutilation, mummification, or any other preparation for the grave except probably washing. The dead body was simply laid on a mat in the grave, covered with a cloth and a mat or a skin, and then with clean gravel. But with it was placed all those things which the man might need if his life were to go on in some mysterious, unseen way, as life went on among those on earth. Possibly his relations as in later times brought offerings of food to the grave, but here even the dry soil of Egypt fails to furnish positive evidence. All this shows a plain simple belief in the persistence of the life of a man as distinguished from the body --a belief widely prevalent among primitive people. It contains nothing unusual, and is probably perfectly explicable psychologically by means of dreams. There is little or no change in this underlying belief to be observed in the burial customs of the Egyptians during the late predynastic period. Copper weapons and implements succeed stone in the graves. All those objects in whose manufacture the new tools are used show changes of technique and form. It is even curious to note that some of the older stone and flint objects, some of the older pots and pans, are still made as a matter of tradition. The importance of this is not to be overlooked. For centuries men had used flint knives and they had baked their bread in flat mud saucers set in the ashes. For the centuries these flint knives and these cakes with their saucers had been placed in the graves. Gradually metal knives and better bread pans displaced these more primitive objects in daily life; but the older primitive objects were still placed in the graves as a matter of tradition. It must be remembered, of course, that these traditional objects were also in use in ancient traditional ceremonies on earth. The sacrificial animals were still slaughtered with flint knives. The old-style cakes were still offered in the holy places. In other words, life on earth now consisted of ordinary material life and a traditional life--a life that clung to the forms of a more primitive civilization as somehow more effective with the divine powers. This view is closely reflected in the grave furniture; here, too, were the practical objects and the traditional ceremonial objects. Life after death is still always the same as life on earth--with the same physical needs, with the same need of help from supernatural powers or against supernatural powers. The spirit of the man needed the spirit of the copper axe to swing in battle; but just as much he needed the spirit of the flint knife to make the first cut across the throat of the spirit bull of sacrifice. Remember this--the other world, in which lived the spirit of the dead, was filled with the spirits or ghosts of all things and animals. The other, the unseen, was a duplicate of this world; all things which have shape were there --even to the black fields and the broad river of Egypt. This is the foundation of the Egyptian conception of immortality. Through all the modifications and accretions of the following three thousand years, this foundation idea is always clearly visible. All the statues, the carved and painted tombs, all the curious little model boats and workshops, all the painted mummies, all the amulets, the scarabs, the little funerary statuettes,--all this mummery which seems to be so characteristic and so essential, is only the means to an end, and an ever changing means to secure a successful comfortable existence of the spirit in the life after death,--in the ghostly duplicate of life on earth. IV. THE EARLY DYNASTIC PERIOD It is clear that the effort to attain an immortality which is merely a ghostly continuation of life on earth must reflect the general development of Egyptian culture,--especially the advance in arts and crafts. One of the most striking examples of this fact is the introduction of metal working mentioned above and the consequent placing of both flint and copper in the grave, --the division of grave furniture into practical objects and ceremonial objects, which is the foundation for the use of symbolic objects in later times. The advance in arts and crafts not only suggests new ideas of the necessities of the spirit, but it provides the necessary technical skill for the more effective satisfaction of all the needs of the dead. This takes, first of all, the form of supplying a place for the burial, which furnishes greater security to the body and a better communication between the living and the dead. From the First Dynasty, say from 3300 B.C. down, as soon as the Egyptian had mastered the use of mud-brick and wood, we gain the certainty of an idea which could only be guessed at in the primitive period. A place is provided above the grave at which the living could meet the spirit of the dead with _periodical_ offerings of food and other necessities. In the life after death, spirit food and drink, once used, ceased to be, just as in life on earth, and had to be renewed from day to day, lest the spirit of the dead suffer from hunger and thirst. One of the great developments of the first six dynasties looked to the provision of these daily necessities. The invention of writing was immediately utilized. About the beginning of the First Dynasty writing was invented for administrative and other practical purposes. Gravestones, bearing in relief the name of the dead, were set up in the offering places of the kings and court people. These were probably reminders for use in some simple formula recited in presenting the periodical offerings. As the Egyptians became more familiar with the use of writing, the offering formula was written out in full, enlarged and modified. Sculptures, both relief and statuary, in every stage of their development, were used as magical accessories to the offering rites. So, also, the whole history of Egyptian architecture was reflected in the tomb; for every advance brought about some change in the form or structure. In fact, the whole development of the form of the Egyptian tomb depended on the development of technical skill. The same funerary functions are served throughout. As all the great artisans were at the command of the king, all the great technical discoveries and inventions were first made in his service. But every permanent gain in knowledge was a benefit to the race and utilized by the common people. So, for example, the skill acquired in stone-cutting, during the construction of the great pyramids, was utilized a little later in producing rock-cut tombs from one end of Egypt to the other. The functions of the grave remained the same. Yet with the changes in form resulting from the growth of skill, modifications in the funerary customs crept in. The mud-brick tombs of the early part of the First Dynasty, like the pre-dynastic graves, had only one chamber, limited in size by the length of logs obtainable to form the roof. The growing desire for ostentation found a way to enlarge the tombs by building them with a number of chambers. The burial was placed in the central chamber and the burial furniture in the additional chambers. In this way the separation of the furniture and the actual burial was brought about. V. THE OLD EMPIRE Another change comes in the Fourth Dynasty, and is to be noted first in the royal tombs, as is always the case. The Egyptians had now learned to cut stone and build with it. The burial chambers hollowed in the solid rock were necessarily smaller than the old chambers dug in the gravel and no longer sufficient to contain the great mass of furniture gathered by a king for his grave. On the other hand, the chapels with the increase in architectural skill could be build of great size. Corresponding to these technical conditions we find a great increase in the importance of the chapel. It becomes a great temple, whose magazines were filled with all those objects which had formerly been placed in the burial chamber and were so necessary to the life of the spirit. The temples of the third pyramid, for example, contained nearly two thousand stone vessels. Great estates were set aside by will, and the income appointed to the support of certain persons who on their side were obliged to keep up the temple, to make the offerings and to recite the magical formulas which would provide the spirit with all its necessities. Following closely the growth in importance of the royal chapels, the private offering places assumed a greater importance. The custom of periodic offerings and the use of magical texts grew until it reached its highest point in the Fifth Dynasty. At this time there is a burial chamber deep underground where the dead was laid securely in ancient traditional attitude, with his clothing and a few personal ornaments. As a rule, it is only the women, always conservative, that have anything more. Above this grave, there is a solid rectangular structure, with a chapel or offering place on the side towards the valley. The offering place is always there, no matter how poor or small the tomb. But to understand just what the Egyptian thought, we must turn to the better tombs. The walls are of limestone carved with reliefs representing the important processes of daily life,--sowing, reaping, cattle-herding, hunting, pot-making, weaving,--all those actions which furnish the daily supplies. The dead man is represented overseeing all this. Finally, near the offering niche, he is represented seated, usually with his wife at a table bearing loaves of the traditional _ta_ bread. Beside him are represented heaps of provisions--meat, cakes, vegetables, wine and beer. A list of objects is never missing, marked with numbers,--a thousand loaves of bread, a thousand head of cattle, a thousand jars of wine, a thousand garments, and so on. We know from latter inscriptions that these words, properly recited, created for the spirit a store of spirit objects in equal numbers. Below the niche is an altar for receiving actual offerings of food and drink. It is clear that the living, coming to this offering place with or without material offerings, could, by proper recitation, secure to the spirit of the dead all its daily needs. This offering niche is the door of the other world --symbolically and actually. In many graves the niche is carved to represent a door--sometimes opening in, and sometimes opening out. Moreover, in several cases the figure of the dead is carved half emerging from the opening door--a figure in all ways like the figure of the dead as he is represented in the scenes from life. Beyond this door lives the spirit of the dead. In many offering chambers there is a small hole in the wall, either in the offering niche or in another place. If this hole be properly lighted and the space beyond has not been changed by decay or violation, the light falls on the face of a statue of the dead looking forth to the world of the living. For behind the wall is another chamber, closed except for this small hole. This hidden chamber contains statues of the dead often accompanied by statues of his family and his servants. These statues of the dead are labeled with his name, and are said to be the abode of his spirit, his _ka_, as the Egyptians called it. Moreover, all the offering formulas named the _ka_ as the recipient of the food and drink. The duplicate spirit of the man is his _ka_. In these statues we have, then, a simulacrum of the man provided for use of his _ka_--perhaps to assist the _ka_ to the persistence of his earthly form, and to the remembrance of his name. But what were the uses of the subsidiary statues? What spirit resided in them? The man's son in his turn died, and a similar room was made for him with his statue and his subsidiary statues. Did his _ka_ live both in the statue placed with his father's statue and also in the statue in his own grave? We have no answer. Probably the Egyptian mind never formulated the difficulty. But the new idea is clearly expressed. It is no longer necessary to fill the burial chamber with a mass of household furniture for the use of the dead. All these things can be carved on the wall of the burial chamber and so made effective for his use. It was in any case necessary to supply his food by means of the offerings, and it was quite as easy to supply all his other necessities in the same way. In other words, there is a distinct growth in the use of magic to benefit the dead. At the same time, we find the growth of the custom of supplying a special abode for the _ka_--a simulacrum of the man, which assisted the _ka_ to retain the form of the living man and to remember his identity. The tendency of this period is then to place a greater dependence on magic than on food, drink, and grave furniture. It is, therefore, not surprising to find introduced, for the first time, the use of magical texts in the burial chamber,--the so-called Pyramid Texts. In the burial chamber in the pyramid of Unas, last king of the Fifth Dynasty, and in the pyramids of the kings of the Sixth Dynasty, the walls are covered with long magical texts or chapters--the oldest form of the so-called book of the dead or "book of the going forth by day." The texts were probably somewhat older, but are now used for the first time in this manner, no doubt owing to the increased facility in carving stone. In these the various powers of the other world are invoked by the incidents of the Osiris-Isis legend, to preserve the dead body, to feed the _ka_, and to assist the other spirit, the _ba_, in its struggles with supernatural powers. The pyramid texts introduce us to three important ideas,--(1) a curious plurality of the spirit existence, (2) a condition of immortality better than that of the old underworld or Earu, and (3) most important of all, the identification of the king with Osiris according to the terms of the Osiris-Isis legend. In all the older offering formulas it is only the _ka_ spirit which is mentioned. Here is the body perishable and destructible; here is the life, the _ka_ which fills every limb and vessel of the body and must, therefore, have the same form. When death comes, the _ka_ spirit, the image of the man, remains near the body, and this spirit it was which was the object of the rites and offerings in the funerary chapel. But besides this _ka_, it appears for the first time that the king at any rate possesses also a soul called a _ba_. In later times we see that every man possessed a _ba_, and we learn that each god possessed several _ba's_. But it is in the pyramid texts that we learn for the first time of the _ba_ of a man, and that man is a king. When death comes, the _ba_ takes flight in the form of a bird or whatever form it wills. All seems confused. The _ka_ was near the body, the _ka_ was in the field of Earu, under the earth ploughing and sowing; the _ba_ is fluttering on the branches of the tree on earth, the _ba_ has fled like a falcon to the heavens, and has been set as a star among the stars. The dead king lives with the gods and is fed by them. The goddesses give him the breast. He lives in the Island of Food. He lives in Earu, the Underworld, a land like Egypt, with fields and canals and flood and harvest. He shares with the gods in the offerings made in the great temples on earth. It is quite clear that all this is an expression of dissatisfaction with the old belief in the simple duplicate world, the world of Earu under the earth. It is noteworthy that this first appears in royal tombs. These texts are written for kings alone. It is only many centuries later that the texts of the book of the dead showed similar possibilities open to the common man. This is the usual course of all advances in Egypt,-- architecture, sculpture, writing, whatever gain in skill or knowledge there is, appears first in the service of the royal family. Thus, even in the conception of immortality, the new ideas, the better immortality was first thought out for the benefit of the king. The basis for this lay simply in the life on earth. The king had come early to have a sort of divinity ascribed to him. His chief name was the Horus name. Menes was the Horus Aha; Cheops was the Horus Mejeru; Pepy II was the Horus Netery-khau. But he was also the son of Ra, the sun-god, endued with life forever. The king was a god, and it could only be that in his future life he shared the life of the gods. Thus, all is no more confused or mysterious than is the conception of the life of the gods themselves. But the texts go even further than this and identify the dead god-man, who as Horus was king on earth, with the father of Horus, the dead god of the earth, Osiris. This identification of the dead man with the dead god Osiris was later enlarged to include all men, and became in the Ptolemaic period the most characteristic feature of the Egyptian conception of life after death. The Osiris story as it can be pieced together from the pyramid texts [See A. Erman: _Die Aegyptische Religion_, p. 38 ff.] was briefly thus: Keb, the earth-god, and Nut, the goddess of the sky, had four children,--Osiris and Isis, Seth and Nephthys,-- who were thus paired in marriage. Keb gave Osiris his dominion, the earth, and made him the god of the earth, and he ruled justly and powerfully. Seth, his brother, was jealous, and by treachery enticed Osiris into a box, which he closed and threw into the water. Isis sought for the body of her husband until she found it, and Isis and Nephthys, her sister, sat at his head and feet and bewailed him. Re, the greatest of the gods, heard Isis's complaint; his heart was touched, and he sent Anubis to bury Osiris. Anubis re-joined his separated bones, bound him with cloths, and prepared him for burial,--that is, mummified him. This is the form in which Osiris is represented,--as a mummy. Isis then fanned her wings, and the air from her wings caused the mummy to live. His life on earth, however, was over, could not be recalled, so that his new life could only be passed in the other world, the world of the dead. Here Osiris became king, as he had been king on earth. But Isis conceived from the dead-living Osiris, bore a child in secret, and suckled him, hidden in a swamp. When the child, the sun-god Horus, grew up, he fought against Seth to recover his father's kingdom, and to avenge his death. Both gods were injured in the fight. Horus lost an eye. But Thoth intervened, separated the fighters, and healed their wounds. Thoth spat upon the eye of Horus and it became whole. Horus, however, gave his eye to Osiris to eat, and thereby Osiris became endowed with life, soul, and power (i.e. in the underworld). But Seth disputed the legitimacy of the birth of Horus, and the great gods held a court in the house of Keb. In this court, justice was done, the truth of Horus's claims was established, and he was placed on the throne of his father. Osiris became the ruler in the land of the dead, Horus in the land of the living. The kernel of the story appears to be this: Osiris is the god of the earth, and his life is the life of the vegetation, dying and reviving with the course of the seasons, mourned by his wife Isis and succeeded by his son Horus, the sun-god. It is apparently a form of the common Tammuz or Adonis story of the Semites. This fact brings with it a suggestion which requires consideration. The racial connection of the Egyptians may seem to have little to do with immortality. But I beg a moment's consideration. The two great dominating ideas of immortality are those held by the Christians and by the Mohammedans, and these are essentially the same idea. Both these religions are creations of the Semitic race. It is, therefore, decidedly of importance to find that the Egyptian race, the creator of a third great religion, has also a large Semitic strain. In fact, the investigations of the last ten years appear to show that this Semitic strain it was which gave the Egyptian race its creative power and made possible the development of the Egyptian civilization. The Egyptian language furnishes us with indisputable proof of the Semitic affinity, as Professor Adolf Erman showed years ago. The anatomical examination by Professor Elliot Smith of a large number of skeletons, dated by careful excavations, has given us a further clue. There is a prehistoric race found in the earliest cemeteries--neither Negroid nor Asiatic in characteristics. In the late predynastic and the early dynastic periods, when the great development began, this primitive race had become modified by an infiltration of broad-headed people from the north. In the Old Empire, this broad-headed people had become predominant, and remain so throughout all Lower and Middle Egypt until the present day. This intruding race, whose advent marks the beginning of Egyptian civilization, I believe to have been Semitic. Remember this--the texts show clearly older ideas in conflict with the Osiris belief. The primitive race was not, I believe, a race of Osiris followers. Professor Erman has stated that the Osiris belief is as early as 4200 B.C. That I am certain is absolutely untenable. It is a question of Egyptian chronology in which I beg to differ radically both from Eduard Meyer and Professor Erman. In the formal calendar year of three hundred and sixty-five days, there are twelve months of thirty days and five intercalary days. These intercalary days are called the birthdays of Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis, and Nephthys--the five most important figures in the Osiris myth. According to Professor Meyer and Professor Erman, this formal calendar was introduced in 4200 B.C., one of the occasions when the heliacal rising of the star Sothis fell on the first of the month Thoth of the calendar. However, if we accept with them the date 3300 B.C. as the date of the First dynasty, then in 4200 B.C. the Egyptians were just emerging from a neolithic state. They were culturally incapable of making a formal calendar and could have no possible use for one. Either the calendar did not originate in Egypt, or it was introduced in 2780 B.C., when again the heliacal rising Sothis fell on the first of Thoth. At this time the Osiris story was dominant, in the religion. We have a race almost certainly Semitic, fusing the primitive race during the period 3500-3000, and a few centuries later we have a new religious idea dominating the fused race. When we examine this new idea, the Osiris belief, we find its earliest form nothing more nor less than the common tammuz or Adonis story of the Semites. The conclusion lies very near at hand, that the Osiris story is in fact the Tammuz story, brought into Egypt by the earliest Semitic tribes. In any case it was a race with a large Semitic mixture which utilized this story in working out a theory of immortality; and in all probability we have in the Osiris-Isis religion a third great religion due to the Semitic race. However this may be, it is clear that the craving of the king for a special immortality, for an exalted future life, found its justification through the Osiris-Isis myth. Horus was the successor of Osiris as lord of the earth and the living. The kings of Egypt were the successors of Horus. The chief name of the king was his Horus name; Menes was the Horus Aha, Cheops the Horus Mejeru. When the king died, he became Osiris, and passed to the kingdom of Osiris. He passed through the underworld with the sun-god, abode there as Osiris, the god-king, or sped to the heavens to the celestial gods. Thus comes the entering wedge of a great change in the conception of immortality--an ordinary immortality for the common man, a special divine immortality for the divine man, the king. [It appears probable that the deification of the king and the assumption of a divine immortality for him was prior in time to the statement of these beliefs in the terms of the Osiris story.] Even at this early age, it was, of course, clearly stated that the king must be righteous, morally satisfactory in the eyes of the world and of the gods. The gods, as always, were on the side of the moral code, and especially on the side of the organized religion. It is perhaps significant that the chief sins of the kings of the Fourth dynasty, so execrated by the Egyptian priests in the Ptolemaic period, were sins against the great gods. The other charges are for the most part plainly slanders. In practice every king whose family remained in power was justified before gods and men, and took his place among the gods in the islands of the blessed in the northern part of the heavens. The dead body was laid in the grave, supplied with all these magic texts which were to restore and revive the soul and guide it across waters and through dangers to the place of Osiris. But the chapel was not wanting, the cult of the _ka_ was maintained, the statues were placed in the hidden room, the food and drink were brought daily to the door of the grave. Thus, while a special immortality was evolved for the king, the funeral customs continue to show the same service of the _ka_ as in the earlier period. In the Sixth Dynasty, there is a return to the older practice of placing objects in the grave itself. At present we are unable to point out the reasons for this. Possibly experience had taught men that endowments and craved walls left to the care of descendants were insecure supports for a life after death which was to last forever. At any rate, the custom arose of making small models in wood or stone or metal of those scenes and objects which were carved in relief on the walls of the chapel, --models of houses, granaries, of kitchens, of brickyards; models of herds and servants and soldiers; models of boats and ships; models of dance-halls with the man seated drinking wine, around him musicians, before him dancing girls; models of swords, of vessels, of implements. Poorer people must be contented with poorer things, down to the peasant who is buried with the few little necessary pots and pans of his daily life. But always, in every grave, the chapel, small or great, is there. The endowment of funerary priests continues. Every man, I suppose, however poor, had some one to make at least one offering at his grave. And so it was down to the New Empire. VI. THE MIDDLE EMPIRE During the Middle Empire, the burial and offering customs show the persistence of the old belief in life after death as on earth. Pots, vessels, tools, weapons, ornaments, clothing, and models of scenes from life, continue to be placed in the burial chamber. The walls of the offering chambers of the nobles, at this time cut in the rock, still bear representations from life carved in relief. The symbolical doors and the offering formulas still mark the spot where the dead receive the necessities of life from the living. All graves of every class testify to the faith in a life after death similar to life on earth. Yet certain modifications are apparent which are significant for the future development of the conception of immortality: (1) the pyramid texts are used by the provincial nobles for their own benefit; (2) Abydos assumes a great importance as the burial place of Osiris; (3) the swathed mummy comes into general use in burials. The first identification of the king with Osiris in the pyramid texts marks the conception of a better immortality for him. So, as the possibility of a better immortality was claimed by wider and wider circles of men, the use of the pyramid texts, or similar texts, also became wider. In the Middle Empire, texts practically identical with the pyramid texts, but furnished with illustrations somewhat like those of the later books of the dead, are found in the coffins of provincial nobles. The power of the monarchy had been weakening during the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, partly owing to the dissipation of national resources by royal extravagance, partly owing to other causes. After the Sixth Dynasty, the country was clearly in a period of economic depression; and the government was broken up into a series of nearly independent baronies corresponding roughly to the later division into provinces or nomes. Our material is scanty. The tombs of very few great men have been found. But when in the Twelfth Dynasty an abundance of material is at hand, we see, alongside the old forms of the burial customs, the use of the pyramid texts on the inside walls of the coffins of the great man. It was now possible for the _ba_ of the great landed noble to seek refuge with the gods in the northwest heavens and share their life. The increasing importance of Abydos as the burial place of Osiris is of still greater significance. The tomb of a king of the First Dynasty was identified by the priests as the actual burial place of Osiris. Many great people made graves for themselves in the same field; or, if they lived at a distance, built empty cenotaphs there. A great temple of Osiris stood near by, and became the centre of the celebration of mysteries illustrating the death and revival of Osiris. Fortunately, a certain high official named I-kher-nofret has left us an account of the Osiris passion-play as performed under his oversight in the nineteenth year of Sesostris III, nearly two thousand years before Christ [See Schafer's article, "Die Osiris-mysterien," in Sethe's _Untersuchungen zur Geshichte Aegyptens_, IV, 2, pp 1-42.]. The play began by the procession of the statue of the jackal-god Wep-wawet (the road-opener) going forth to help his father Osiris. Then the statue of Osiris himself in the Neshemet boat came forth as triumphant king of the earth. Sham battles took place referring to the conquest of the earth by Osiris. These processions were only introductory. The principal procession took place on the following day (or days), when Osiris went forth to his death at Nedit. The actual death scene certainly took place in secret. But when the dead body was found, the multitude joined in the wailing and the lamentations. The god Thoth went forth in a boat and brought back the body of Osiris. The body was prepared for burial and taken in funeral procession to the grave at Peker. Osiris was avenged on his enemies in a great battle on the water at Nedit. Finally, the god, his life revived, comes from Peker in triumphant procession and enters his temple at Abydos. Osiris mysteries were celebrated at other places, at least in later times and perhaps even in the Middle Empire; but it is not easy to discern the part these mysteries played in the Middle Empire in the beliefs of the common people regarding their immortality. The Osiris story was one of the most widespread in Egypt, and, powerful in its effect on the feelings of all classes, was certain, sooner or later, to prepare the way for a general belief in a better immortality; but if we may judge from the burial customs, the great mass of the people still believed merely in an underworld, Earu, a duplicate of the earthly life, but with greater possibilities of danger and evil. During the course of Egyptian history the position in which the body is buried undergoes a series of remarkable changes. During the early pre-dynastic period, the body, loosely enfolded in cloths and skins, is laid in the grave double up on the left side, _usually_ with the head south (i.e. upstream). This position becomes the custom, with very few exceptions, during the late predynastic period and the first three dynasties. Throughout the Fourth to Sixth Dynasties, the body was in the same position, but with the head north, loosely covered with shawls and garments. The crouching position, with some slight modifications, continues to be used for the poorest class down to the New Empire. Among the Nubians, it is universal to the New Empire and customary even later in unmixed Nubian communities. The swathed extended burials begin in Egypt in the Fourth Dynasty, so far as remains are preserved. Some members of the royal family of Cheops were buried in swathed wrapping, lying extended on the left side with the knees bent. During the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties this extended position on the side becomes customary for the better classes; and during the Middle Empire it becomes almost universal. The final burial position, the swathed mummy lying extended on the back, does not become general until the New Empire, about 1600 B.C. although it is the position hitherto regarded as the characteristic Egyptian burial position. A few isolated cases, some of them perhaps accidental, occur as early as the Old Empire; but in the New Empire the extended burial on the back is practically the only one to be observed. In other words, beginning in the predynastic period with a burial position which may be called natural and primitive, the Egyptian gradually adopted a position which imitated the form of the dead Osiris, the god of the dead. Each new change is first adopted by the royal family, and is taken up by the other classes in turn until it becomes universal. In the final form, the mummy was a simulacrum of the dead as Osiris. Alongside these changes in the burial position progressed the art of preserving the body. The earliest attempts were made on the body of the king; and the knowledge of embalming gained in preserving his body was gradually utilized for the higher classes and finally for all but the poorest. It seems indisputable that the royal personages of the Fourth and Sixth Dynasties were mummified--i.e., the entrails were drawn, the body prepared with spices and resins and wrapped tightly in cloths smeared with resin. But the mummies of the nobles, even of this period, show no trace of such treatment. The receptacles for the viscera are sometimes found in their graves in the Sixth Dynasty, but are, as a rule, empty, being mere dummy vases. Even in the Middle Empire, the preservation of the bodies of the better classes was extremely imperfect. The bundles of wrappings have kept their form to the present day and it seems as if the mummy were still intact; but an examination of the interior shows only loose bones. Successful mummification appears among better-class people in the New Empire for the first time and becomes a general custom in the Late Period. The processes of successful mummification necessitated the practical destruction of the body. In the Middle Empire, which is the period under discussion, the process of mummification had reached a middle stage, and, while we are unable to explain exactly the causal relationship, it is clear that this advance in the treatment of the body accompanied a spread of the belief in the Osirian immortality. VII. THE NEW EMPIRE The New Empire (1600-1200 B.C.) was the great period of foreign conquest. The Hyksos, Asiatic invaders, had held Egypt for a century or more. The Theban princes who drove them out became kings of Egypt, and followed them into Asia. With an army trained in war by the long struggle with the Hyksos, the Egyptian kings, having tasted the sweetness of the spoils of war, entered on the conquest of western Asia and the Sudan. The plunder of both these regions poured into Egypt. Under Thothmes III an annual campaign was conducted into Syria to bring back the spoils and the tribute. Foreign slaves and the products of foreign handicraft were for sale in every market-place. The treasury was filled to overflowing. A large share was assigned to Amon, the god of the Theban family. Temples were built for him; estates established for the maintenance of his rites; thousands of priests enrolled for the service of his properties. The god became, in a material sense, the greatest god of Egypt, the national god; and his priesthood became the most powerful organization in the kingdom. The high priest of Amon usurped the power of the king and finally supplanted him. Such was the period in which the next great development of the Egyptian idea of immortality is to be noted-- a period of priestly activity in the beginning and of priestly domination in the end. The priests are the scribes, the men of learning. They have the lore of all magic, medicine, rules of conduct, religious rites. It is not mere chance, therefore, that the New Empire was marked by a great increase of magic in all its forms--texts and symbolic objects--and by a great development in the knowledge of the other world. In some of the texts the geography of the underworld, in which Osiris is king, is worked out in great detail. When the sun sets in the west, Ra in his boat enters the underworld and passes through it during the twelve hours of the night, bringing light and happiness to those who are in the underworld. In the effort to secure the tomb against plundering, the royal graves had been cut in the solid rock,--long and complicated passages with false leads and deceptive turns and the burial chamber in an unexpected place. The long walls of these rooms presented a great surface suitable to decoration, and they were utilized to depict scenes from the underworld and the passage of Ra through it, so that the tombs became in fact representations of the land of the dead, and were so considered. These royal tombs were at a distance from the cultivated land, hidden in valleys in the desert. Their funerary temples were built on the edge of the desert beside the temples of the gods of the place. Such fantastical reconstructions of the other world, however, never found general favor and are confined to a few royal tombs. The priests and other prominent people have rolls of papyrus buried with them, bearing copies of books of the dead. These books of the dead are made up of a series of chapters, each complete in itself and each dealing with some phase of the future life. There is no set order of chapters. There is no fixed number of chapters. Each scribe seems to have selected the chapters which he considered useful. The general title is: Chapters of the going forth by day. The general character may be given by a paragraph attached to one of the chapters in the Book of Ani the Scribe [Edited by E. A. W. Budge, p. 26]: "If this book be known on earth and written on the coffin, it is my mouth. He shall come forth by day in any form he desires and he shall go into his place without being prevented. There shall be given to him bread and beer and meat upon the altar of Osiris. He shall enter in, in peace, to the field of Earu according to this decree of the one who is in the City of Dedu. There shall be given to him wheat and barley there. He shall flourish as he did upon earth. He shall do his desires like these nine Gods who are in the underworld, as found true millions of times. He is the Osiris: the Scribe Ani." There are chapters to overcome all the evil which a soul may encounter; there are words to greet all the gods whom the soul desires to visit. The Scribe Ani had an exceptional position on earth; he desires to do his desire in the other world; and in the names of Osiris he recites the magic words that bring him the power. He is Ani, but he calls himself Osiris; just as the priestly doctor mixes his dose of medicine and calls it "the eye of Horus tested and found true." In addition to magical texts, there are also magical, or symbolic, objects placed in the graves,--amulets of various kinds which were to be used in the other world. Some of these were simply the amulets used in daily life to guard against sickness, bite of snake, and other earthly evils which were also incident to the life after death. Other amulets, like the so-called _Ushabtiu_, were to meet special conditions of the other world. These _Ushabtiu_, or "answerers," were little images of workmen bearing agricultural implements whose duty it was to take the place of the dead in the fields of Earu when Osiris as king called him to do his share of the field work. Even the king appears liable to this service, and for him thousands of these figures were made,--sometimes labeled each with the day of the year. In a few cases there was even a charm written on the figure to prevent it hearing the command of any one but its master. Alongside these manifold manifestations of the belief in magic, other furniture--implements, weapons, and utensils--are still placed in the grave. The offering places are still maintained. All burials are now extended on the back and wrapped in bandages. Yet the common graves lack the receptacles for the viscera, lack magical texts, lack ushabtiu, and--in a word--lack all those things which are typical of the better-class graves of the period. The conception of the future life among the common people is apparently not essentially different from that of the Old Empire. But the books of the dead and the offering formulas show that the priests and high officials at death were called Osiris. By the end of the Late Period the Osiris cult of the dead had come to be universal. No doubt political events had much to do with this. The absorption of the powers of the king by the priesthood of the national god Amon-Ra, the crushing of the nobility by a succession of foreign invaders, and the general uncertainty of life, had disturbed the old fixed relations. The hope of every Egyptian turned to a glorified future life as Osiris. The tendency to use magical texts and symbolic objects reached its height. About 700 B.C. a revival of national life, brought about by the establishment of the Egyptian kings of Sais as kings of Egypt, led to a renaissance of Egyptian art. The old monuments were copied and imitated, the old funerary texts and offering formulas were sought out in the older graves. Even the pyramid texts reappear after one thousand years of practical oblivion. The value of master words was so firmly fixed in the Egyptian mind that misunderstood texts of all sorts were copied out and placed in the graves to secure to the dead some vague benefit in the other world. The process of mummification was at its height. The bodies were no longer preserved. The process was merely the creation of a simulacrum of the dead Osiris So-and-So. All the perishable parts of the body were removed or destroyed by chemicals. Only the skin, bones, hair, and teeth remained to be padded with mud and resin, wrapped in cloths, covered with a painted and gilded _cartonnage_ to represent the glorified Osiris mummy. VIII. THE PTOLEMAIC-ROMAN PERIOD In the Ptolemaic-Roman period we see the final stage of the Osiris cult. Every dead man is laid in his grave without furniture, prepared as a simulacrum of Osiris. The wealthiest people have gilded and painted mummy cases with amulets and funerary papyrus. The poorer are merely bundles of wrappings. Every dead man is Osiris, and no doubt carried with him words learned on earth to gain his way to a place in the kingdom of Osiris. The offering places above the grave are still made and offerings are still brought. To gain some idea of the way in which these two conceptions of the living dead were worked out in actual life, one has only to turn to the funerary customs of the modern Egyptians. In the case of both Christians and Moslems, the grave rites are similar; but with those of the Moslems I am more familiar. The grave consists still of the two parts, the burying place and the offering place. The swathed body is laid on the right side, with the right hand under the cheek and the face towards Mecca. At the burial the confession of the faith is recited over and over, lest the dead forget it. Korans are sometimes placed in the graves; and I have even seen a confession of the faith written on paper and placed on a twig before the face of the dead. At the appointed seasons-- especially at the great Feast of Sacrifice--offerings are brought to the grave. The family party passes through the cemetery, the women bearing baskets of bread and bottles of water, the men turning the head to the right and to the left and reciting the _fatha_ in propitiation of the spirits. The party enters the offering inclosure of the grave of their relative. The wives greet the dead--"Peace unto thee, oh, my husband, oh, my father, we have wept until we have watered the earth with our tears on thy account." The offerings are laid before the tomb. A scribe is called and recites or reads some chapter of the Koran over and over, one hundred, one hundred and fifty, five hundred, one thousand times, and concludes: "I have read this for thee, oh, such and such a one." Or, "I have transferred the merit of this to thee." When you question these people as to the particulars of their belief, you find their ideas vague and indefinite. Among the men a dispute quickly starts,--the people who have been found good by the examining angels on the night of the burial are there, but the bad are somewhere else. No, says another, they are all in their graves, but the bad suffer torment. Still another maintains that the good have already passed to the lowest heaven. These are all mere remnants of theological discussions caught from the sheikhs. The women stolidly maintain that the dead are in their tombs and the offerings must be brought. When you inquire which are the good and which are the bad, there is again a great divergence of opinion; but it is clear that every man believes in his heart that a knowledge of the prayers and forms of the Moslem religion is absolutely essential and entirely sufficient to gain a desirable future life. The great master word is the confession of faith--there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. So it must have been in the last stage of the Osiris cult. Immortality, a glorified future existence as an Osiris in the kingdom of Osiris, with all the pleasures and comforts of life, was secured to him who was buried with the proper rites and knew the magic words. And yet the old feeling was never lost that the dead was somehow in the grave and might suffer hunger and thirst. When Christianity came into Egypt, all the gaudy apparatus of the Osiris religion was swept out of existence. The body was to rise again and might not be mutilated. Mummification, which destroyed the body in order to preserve a conventional simulacrum, ceased abruptly. Grave furniture was of course unthinkable. But the use of charms did not cease. Crosses were embroidered in the gravecloths; or small crosses of metal or wood placed on the breast or arm; the gravestone bore a simple prayer to the Holy Spirit for the peaceful rest of the soul. But the offering place was still maintained; prayers were recited on the feast days; lamps were allowed to remain at the grave; food was brought, but given to the poor. In all periods there are thousands of graves of poor people without a single thing to secure their future life,--people who were probably content simply to lay down the burdens of life. In the Christian period these thousands of unnamed dead all have one mark. They are laid with their feet to the east. Each one was a Christian and secure in his future life, according to his faith and his life on earth. IX. SUMMARY To sum up, the essential idea of the Egyptian conception of immortality was that the ghost or spirit of the man preserved the personality and the form of the man in the existence after death; that this spirit had the same desires, the same pleasures, the same necessities, and the same fears as on earth. Life after death was a duplicate of life on earth. On earth life depended on work, on getting food from the fields and the herds, on forming stone and metal, hide and vegetable fibre, into useful objects. In other words, life depended on human power over the natural materials of the earth. At the same time there were many things which could not be controlled by power over the earth and its elements,--the sting of the scorpion, the bite of the adder, the rise of the Nile, sickness, the sudden onslaught of the enemy, the straying of cattle, the disfavor of the god. For these evils man's only hope was magic,--the set words spoken in the proper manner which have power over all unseen influence. So in the case of life after death, all which human strength can provide of stores of grain and drink and garments must be secured for his use; but he must also be provided with the magic words to meet the chance evils of the future life. It is not surprising that the unknown future presented to the imagination many evils unknown on earth. The spirit might forget its name, it might lose its heart, it might be bound fast by evil powers in the grave and unable to come forth by day. The mummy might decay; the spirit might forget its form. So, as time went on, the use of magic words became of greater and greater importance, until, to modern eyes, it seemed to overshadow all else in the Egyptian conception of life after death. As a part of the magical provisions of the dead, the Osiris myth, probably built up in explanation of old rites, was drawn into the belief in a future life, and apparently at the beginning _solely for the benefit of the king_, for the benefit of those who claimed a certain divinity on earth. The earth-god Osiris, god of the living, had died and had been brought to life as god of the dead. So, also, the earth-king, the Horus, the son of Ra, must die, but he also would live again in the other world and share the throne of Osiris. More than this even, he became Osiris. He was admitted to the life of the gods. Of course the ideas of the existence of the gods were never clear and consistent. They lived in secret places, their whole life was mysterious as well as powerful. These are the field of knowledge which the Egyptian mind could not oversee with any satisfaction to itself. The most it could do was to formulate the magic words, invoking the names of the gods and conjuring them by the events in the Osiris myth to accept this king as Osiris. The exceptional man, the super-man, must have an exceptional future life; but to obtain it, he must have the knowledge of the names and words necessary to force the powers of the other world. Thus the idea of an exceptional future life, a heaven, was brought into the Egyptian conception of life after death. Admission to it depended on the exceptional position on earth of those admitted. As even this exceptional position was only of avail when combined with the knowledge of certain formulas, it is not difficult to see how the knowledge of these formulas might be considered sufficient to obtain the better future life, even for others than the king. When in the depression that followed the extravagance of the pyramid age the central monarchy lost its power, Egypt broke up into a series of tribal baronies (nomes). In each was a ruler almost independent of the king, a man who might presume with the proper knowledge to claim a glorified future life similar to that of the king. And, indeed, we find from the burial inscriptions of the Middle Empire that such was the result. Feudalism extended the possibilities of heaven to the great nobles. In the New Empire, the royal power was gradually absorbed by the priestly organization of the national religion-- the religion of Amon-Ra; and the principle comes into practice that any priest having the necessary knowledge could obtain for himself an exceptional place in the future life. The Osirian burial customs spread even among the people. The swathed body extended on the back becomes universal, even though true mummification was still only for the rich. In the Ptolemaic period, the preparation of all the apparatus of the Osiris burial was divided up into trades. Factories, one may say, turned out mummy cases of various kinds, with a scale of prices to fit every purse. Other factories turned out amulets and charms. Magical texts, the preparation of the body, the construction of the grave--all things were done by regular crafts. The cheapening of the apparatus is most striking. At the same time all but the poorest burials bear direct evidence of their character as Osiris burials. On the side of the moral requirement we must not look too closely. There were powerful words which could compel even the great judges of the dead to return a favorable verdict. There were magic hearts of stone which might be worn in place of the heart, and, laid in the scales by Anubis, weigh heavier than the truth. One might by words compel Anubis to accept this stone heart instead of the real heart. In general, one may say that the hope of immortality had little influence on the moral life of the ordinary Egyptian. The moral code was simple and sound and not greatly different from other primitive codes,--forbidding all those things which the body of men regard as unpleasant in others, commanding the plain virtues which were found pleasant in others. Here, again, I think we may well look to modern Egypt for a picture of ancient Egypt. We must not exaggerate the influence of the belief in immortality on general morality. We must not think too well of the life of the people--nor, on the other hand, too evil. They had their sins and their virtues. The common herd was driven by necessity and lived as it could. They clung to the belief in a life in the grave. The greater people had leisure to learn and to provide the magic necessary to secure a comfortable future life. They loved life and hated death. Thus it was when the priests of the Osiris-Isis religion made their bid to the classical world. They offered immortality by initiation. Learn the proper rites, learn the master words, and secure eternal life among the great gods. It was a religion for the exceptional man down to the last; it required training and knowledge. Even in its most popular form in the Ptolemaic period, a specially instructed class was required, who sold for money the benefits of their knowledge, and men took rank in their security of future life according to their means. Not until Christianity came, offering eternal life free and without price, did the common people find at last a road open to equal immortality with the great men of the earth. 
50884	----	Today is Forever By ROGER DEE Illustrated by EMSH [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Boyle knew there was an angle behind the aliens' generosity ... but he had one of his own! "These Alcorians have been on Earth for only a month," David Locke said, "but already they're driving a wedge between AL&O and the Social Body that can destroy the Weal overnight. Boyle, it's got to be stopped!" He put his elbows on Moira's antique conversation table and leaned toward the older man, his eyes hot and anxious. "There are only the two of them--Fermiirig and Santikh; you've probably seen stills of them on the visinews a hundred times--and AL&O has kept them so closely under cover that we of the Social Body never get more than occasional rumors about what they're really like. But I know from what I overheard that they're carbonstructure oxygen-breathers with a metabolism very much like our own. What affects them physically will affect us also. And the offer they've made Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand of Administrative Council is genuine. It amounts to a lot more than simple longevity, because the process can be repeated. In effect, it's--" "_Immortality_," Boyle said, and forgot the younger man on the instant. The shock of it as a reality blossomed in his mind with a slow explosion of triumph. It had come in his time, after all, and the fact that the secret belonged to the first interstellar visitors to reach Earth had no bearing whatever on his determination to possess it. Neither had the knowledge that the Alcorians had promised the process only to the highest of government bodies, Administrative Council. The whole of AL&O--Administration, Legislation and Order--could not keep it from him. "It isn't _right_," Locke said heatedly. "It doesn't fit in with what we've been taught to believe, Boyle. We're still a modified democracy, and the Social Body _is_ the Weal. We can't permit Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand to take what amounts to immortality for themselves and deny it to the populace. That's tyranny!" The charge brought Boyle out of his preoccupation with a start. For the moment, he had forgotten Locke's presence in Moira's apartment. He had even forgotten his earlier annoyance with Moira for allowing the sophomoric fool visitor's privilege when it was Boyle's week, to the exclusion of the other two husbands in Moira's marital-seven, to share the connubial right with her. But the opportunity tumbled so forcibly into his lap was not one to be handled lightly. He held in check his contempt for Locke and his irritation with Moira until he had considered his windfall from every angle, and had marshalled its possibilities into a working outline of his coup to come. He even checked his lapel watch against the time of Moira's return from the theater before he answered Locke. With characteristic cynicism, he took it for granted that Locke, in his indignation, had already shared his discovery with Moira, and in cold logic he marked her down with Locke for disposal once her purpose was served. Moira had been the most satisfactory of the four women in Boyle's marital-seven, but when he weighed her attractions against the possible immortality ahead, the comparison did not sway his resolution for an instant. Moira, like Locke, would have to go. * * * * * "You're sure there was no error?" Boyle asked. "You couldn't have been mistaken?" "I heard it," Locke said stubbornly. He clenched his fists angrily, patently reliving his shock of discovery. "I was running a routine check on Administration visiphone channels--it's part of my work as communications technician at AL&O--when I ran across a circuit that had blown its scrambler. Ordinarily I'd have replaced the dead unit without listening to plain-talk longer than was necessary to identify the circuit. But by the time I had it tagged as a Council channel, I'd heard enough from Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand to convince me that I owed it to the Social Body to hear the rest. And now I'm holding a tiger by the tail, because I'm subject to truth-check. That's why I came to you with this, Boyle. Naturally, since you are President of Transplanet Enterprises--" "I know," Boyle cut in, forestalling digression. Locke's job, not intrinsically important in itself, still demanded a high degree of integrity and left him open to serum-and-psycho check, as though he were an actual member of AL&O or a politician. "If anyone knew what you've overheard, you'd get a compulsory truth-check, admit your guilt publicly and take an imprisonment sentence from the Board of Order. But your duty came first, of course. Go on." "They were discussing the Alcorians' offer of longevity when I cut into the circuit. Bissell and Dorand were all for accepting at once, but Cornelison pretended indecision and had to be coaxed. Oh, he came around quickly enough; the three of them are to meet Fermiirig and Santikh tomorrow morning at nine in the AL&O deliberations chamber for their injections. You should have heard them rationalizing that, Boyle. It would have sickened you." "I know the routine--they're doing it for the good of the Social Body, of course. What puzzles me is why the Alcorians should give away a secret so valuable." "Trojan horse tactics," Locke said flatly. "They claim to have arrived at a culture pretty much like our own, except for a superior technology and a custom of prolonging the lives of administrators they find best fitted to govern. They're posing as philanthropists by offering us the same opportunity, but actually they're sabotaging our political economy. They know that the Social Body won't stand for the Council accepting an immortality restricted to itself. That sort of discrimination would stir up a brawl that might shatter the Weal forever." Deliberately, Boyle fanned the younger man's resentment. "Not a bad thing for those in power. But it _is_ rough on simple members of the Social Body like ourselves, isn't it?" "It's criminal conspiracy," Locke said hotly. "They should be truth-checked and given life-maximum detention. If we took this to the Board of Order--" "No. Think a moment and you'll understand why." Boyle had gauged his man, he saw, to a nicety. Locke was typical of this latest generation, packed to the ears with juvenile idealism and social consciousness, presenting a finished product of AL&O's golden-rule ideology that was no more difficult to predict than a textbook problem in elementary psychology. To a veteran strategist like Boyle, Locke was more than a handy asset; he was a tool shaped to respond to duty unquestioningly and to cupidity not at all, and therefore an agent more readily amenable than any mercenary could have been. "But I _don't_ understand," Locke said, puzzled. "Even Administration and Legislation are answerable to Order. It's the Board's duty to bring them to account if necessary." "Administration couldn't possibly confirm itself in power from the beginning without the backing of Order and Legislation," Boyle pointed out. "Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand would have to extend the longevity privilege to the other two groups, don't you see, in order to protect themselves. And that means that Administrative Council is not alone in this thing--it's AL&O as a body. If you went to the Board of Order with your protest, the report would die on the spot. So, probably, would you." He felt a touch of genuine amusement at Locke's slack stare of horror. The seed was planted; now to see how readily the fool would react to a logical alternative, and how useful in his reaction he might be. "I know precisely how you feel," Boyle said. "It goes against our conditioned grain to find officials venal in this day of compulsory honesty. But it's nothing new; I've met with similar occasions in my own Transplanet business, Locke." He might have added that those occasions had been of his own devising and that they had brought him close more than once to a punitive truth-check. The restraining threat of serum-and-psycho had kept him for the greater part of his adult life in the ranks of the merely rich, a potential industrial czar balked of financial empire by the necessity of maintaining a strictly legal status. Locke shook himself like a man waking out of nightmare. "I'm glad I brought this problem to a man of your experience," he said frankly. "I've got great confidence in your judgment, Boyle, something I've learned partly from watching you handle Transplanet Enterprises and partly from talking with Moira." Boyle gave him a speculative look, feeling a return of his first acid curiosity about Locke and Moira. "I had no idea that Moira was so confidential outside her marital-seven," he said dryly. "She's not by any chance considering a _fourth_ husband, is she?" "Of course not. Moira's not _unconventional_. She's been kind to me a few times, yes, but that's only her way of making a practical check against the future. After all, she's aware it can't be more than a matter of--" He broke off, too embarrassed by his unintentional blunder to see the fury that discolored the older man's face. The iron discipline that permitted Boyle to bring that fury under control left him, even in his moment of outrage, with a sense of grim pride. He was still master of himself and of Transplanet Enterprises. Given fools enough like this to work with and time enough to use them, and he would be master of a great deal more. Immortality, for instance. "She's quite right to be provident, of course," he said equably. "I _am_ getting old. I'm past the sixty-mark, and it can't be more than another year or two before the rejuvenators refuse me further privilege and I'm dropped from the marital lists for good." "Damn it, Boyle, I'm sorry," Locke said. "I didn't mean to offend you." The potential awkwardness of the moment was relieved by a soft chime from the annunciator. The apartment entrance dilated, admitting Moira. She came to them directly, slender and poised and supremely confident of her dark young beauty, her ermine wrap and high-coiled hair glistening with stray raindrops that took the light like diamonds. The two men stood up to greet her, and Boyle could not miss the subtle feminine response of her to Locke's eager, athletic youth. _If she's planning to fill my place in her marital-seven with this crewcut fool_, Boyle thought with sudden malice, _then she's in for a rude shock. And a final one._ "I couldn't enjoy a line of the play for thinking of you two patriots plotting here in my apartment," Moira said. "But then the performance was shatteringly dull, anyway." Her boredom was less than convincing. When she had hung her wrap in a closet to be aerated and irradiated against its next wearing, she sat between Boyle and Locke with a little sigh of anticipation. "Have you decided yet what to do about this dreadful immortality scheme of the Councils, darlings?" * * * * * Boyle went to the auto-dispenser in a corner and brought back three drinks, frosted and effervescing. They touched rims. Moira sipped at her glass quietly, waiting in tacit agreement with Locke for the older man's opinion. "This longevity should be available to the Social Body as well as to AL&O," Boyle said. "It's obvious even to non-politicals like Locke and myself that, unless equal privilege is maintained, there's going to be the devil to pay and the Weal will suffer. It's equally obvious that the Alcorians' offer is made with the deliberate intent of undermining our system through dissension." "To their own profit, of course," Locke put in. "Divide and conquer...." "Whatever is to be done must be done quickly," Boyle said. "It would take months to negotiate a definitive plebiscite, and in that time the Alcorians would have gone home again without treating anyone outside AL&O. And there the matter would rest. It seems to be up to us to get hold of the longevity process ourselves and to broadcast it to the public." "The good of the Body is the preservation of the Weal," Locke said sententiously. "What do you think, Moira?" Moira touched her lips with a delicate pink tongue-tip, considering. To Boyle, her process of thought was as open as a plain-talk teletape; immortality for the Social Body automatically meant immortality for Moira and for David Locke. Both young, with an indefinite guarantee of life.... "Yes," Moira said definitely. "If some have it, then all should. But how, Philip?" "You're both too young to remember this, of course," Boyle said, "but until the 1980 Truth-check Act, there was a whole field of determinative action applicable to cases like this. It's a simple enough problem if we plan and execute it properly." His confidence was not feigned; he had gone over the possibilities already with the swift ruthlessness that had made him head of Transplanet Enterprises, and the prospect of direct action excited rather than dismayed him. Until now he had skirted the edges of illegality with painstaking care, never stepping quite over the line beyond which he would be liable to the disastrous truth-check, but at this moment he felt himself invincible, above retaliation. "This present culture is a pragmatic compromise with necessity," Boyle said. "It survives because it answers natural problems that couldn't be solved under the old systems. Nationalism died out, for example, when we set up a universal government, because everyone belonged to the same Social Body and had the same Weal to consider. Once we realized that the good of the Body is more important than personal privacy, the truth-check made ordinary crime and political machination obsolete. Racial antagonisms vanished under deliberate amalgamation. Monogamy gave way to the marital-seven, settling the problems of ego clash, incompatability, promiscuity and vice that existed before. It also settled the disproportion between the male and female population. "But stability is vulnerable. Since it never changes, it cannot stand against an attack either too new or too old for its immediate experience. So if we're going after this Alcorian longevity process, I'd suggest that we choose a method so long out of date that there's no longer a defense against it. _We'll take it by force!_" * * * * * It amused him to see Moira and Locke accept his specious logic without reservation. Their directness was all but childlike. The thought of engaging personally in the sort of cloak-and-sword adventure carried over by the old twentieth-century melodrama tapes was, as he had surmised, irresistible to them. "I can see how you came to be head of Transplanet, Boyle," Locke said enviously. "What's your plan, exactly?" "I've a cottage in the mountains that will serve as a base of operations," Boyle explained. "Moira can wait there for us in the morning while you and I take a 'copter to AL&O. According to your information, Cornelison and Bissell and Dorand will meet the Alcorians in the deliberations chamber at nine o'clock. We'll sleep-gas the lot of them, take the longevity process and go. There's no formal guard at Administration, or anywhere else, nowadays. There'll be no possible way of tracing us." "Unless we're truth-checked," Locke said doubtfully. "If any one of us should be pulled in for serum-and-psycho, the whole affair will come out. The Board of Order--" "Order won't know whom to suspect," Boyle said patiently. "And they can't possibly check the whole city. They'd have no way of knowing even that it was someone from this locale. It could be anyone, from anywhere." * * * * * When Locke had gone and Moira had exhausted her fund of excited small talk, Boyle went over the entire plan again from inception to conclusion. Lying awake in the darkness with only the sound of Moira's even breathing breaking the stillness, he let his practical fancy run ahead. Years, decades, generations--what were they? To be by relative standards undying in a world of ephemerae, with literally nothing that he might not have or do.... He dreamed a dream as old as man, of stretching today into forever. Immortality. * * * * * The coup next morning was no more difficult, though bloodier, than Boyle had anticipated. At nine sharp, he left David Locke at the controls of his helicar on the sun-bright roof landing of AL&O, took a self-service elevator down four floors and walked calmly to the deliberation chamber where Administrative Council met with the visitors from Alcor. He was armed for any eventuality with an electronic freeze-gun, a sleep-capsule of anesthetic gas, and a nut-sized incendiary bomb capable of setting afire an ordinary building. His first hope of surprising the Council in conference was dashed in the antechamber, rendering his sleep-bomb useless. Dorand was a moment late; he came in almost on Boyle's heels, his face blank with astonishment at finding an intruder ahead of him. The freeze-gun gave him no time for questions. "Quiet," Boyle ordered, and drove the startled Councilor ahead of him into the deliberations chamber. He was just in time. Cornelison had one bony arm already bared for the longevity injection; Bissell sat in tense anticipation of his elder's reaction; the Alcorian, Fermiirig, stood at Cornelison's side with a glittering hypodermic needle in one of his four three-fingered hands. For the moment, a sudden chill of apprehension touched Boyle. There should have been _two_ Alcorians. "Quiet," Boyle said again, this time to the group. "You, Fermiirig, where is your mate?" The Alcorian replaced the hypodermic needle carefully in its case, his triangular face totally free of any identifiable emotion and clasped both primary and secondary sets of hands together as an Earthman might have raised them overhead. His eyes, doe-soft and gentle, considered Boyle thoughtfully. "Santikh is busy with other matters," Fermiirig said. His voice was thin and reedy, precise of enunciation, but hissing faintly on the aspirants. "I am to join her later--" his gentle eyes went to the Councilors, gauging the gravity of the situation from their tensity, and returned to Boyle--"if I am permitted." "Good," Boyle said. He snapped the serum case shut and tucked it under his arm, turning toward the open balcony windows. "You're coming with me, Fermiirig. You others stay as you are." The soft drone of a helicar descending outside told him that Locke had timed his descent accurately. Cornelison chose that moment to protest, his wrinkled face tight with consternation at what he read of Boyle's intention. "We know you, Boyle! You can't possibly escape. The Ordermen--" Boyle laughed at him. "There'll be no culprit for the Ordermen," he said, "nor any witnesses. You've wiped out ordinary crime with your truth-checks and practicalities, Cornelison, but you've made the way easier for a man who knows what he wants." He pressed the firing stud of his weapon. Cornelison fell and lay stiffly on the pastel tile. Bissell and Dorand went down as quickly, frozen to temporary rigidity. Boyle tossed his incendiary into the huddle of still bodies and shoved the Alcorian forcibly through the windows into the hovering aircar. Locke greeted the alien's appearance with stark amazement. "My God, Boyle, are you _mad_? You can't kidnap--" The dull shock of explosion inside the deliberations chamber jarred the helicar, throwing the slighter Alcorian to the floor and staggering Boyle briefly. "Get us out of here," Boyle said sharply. He turned the freeze-gun on the astounded Locke, half expecting resistance and fully prepared to meet it. "You fool, do you think I'm still playing the childish game I made up to keep you and Moira quiet?" A pall of greasy black smoke poured after them when Locke, still stunned by the suddenness of catastrophe, put the aircar into motion and streaked away across the city. Boyle, watching the first red tongue of flame lick out from the building behind, patted the serum case and set himself for the next step. Immortality. * * * * * Locke took the helicar down through the mountains, skirting a clear swift river that broke into tumultuous falls a hundred yards below Boyle's cottage, and set it down in a flagstone court. "Out," Boyle ordered. Moira met them in the spacious living room, her pretty face comical with surprise and dismay. "Philip, what's _happened_? You look so--" She saw the alien then and put a hand to her mouth. "Keep her quiet while I deal with Fermiirig," Boyle said to Locke. "I have no time for argument. If either of you gives me any trouble...." He left the threat to Locke's stunned fancy and turned on the Alcorian. "Let me have the injection you had ready for Cornelison. Now." The Alcorian moved his narrow shoulders in what might have been a shrug. "You are making a mistake. You are not fitted for life beyond the normal span." "I didn't bring you here to moralize," Boyle said. "If you mean to see your mate again, Fermiirig, give me the injection!" "There was a time in your history when force was justifiable," Fermiirig said. "But that time is gone. You are determined?" He shook his head soberly when Boyle did not answer. "I was afraid so." He took the hypodermic needle out of its case, squeezed out a pale drop of liquid and slid the point into the exposed vein of Boyle's forearm. Boyle, watching the slow depression of the plunger, asked: "How long a period will this guarantee, in Earth time?" "Seven hundred years," Fermiirig said. He withdrew the instrument and replaced it in its case, his liquid glance following Boyle's rising gesture with the freeze-gun. "At the end of that time, the treatment may be renewed if facilities are available." _Immortality!_ "Then I won't need you any more," Boyle said, and rayed him down. "Nor these other two." Locke, characteristically, sprang up and tried to shield Moira with his own body. "Boyle, what are you thinking of? You can't murder us without--" "There's a very effective rapids a hundred yards down river," Boyle said. "You'll both be quite satisfactorily dead after going through it, I think. Possibly unrecognizable, too, though that doesn't matter particularly." He was pressing the firing stud, slowly because something in the tension of the moment appealed to the sadism in his nature, when an Orderman's freeze-beam caught him from behind and dropped him stiffly beside Fermiirig. * * * * * The details of his failure reached him later in his cell, anticlimactically, through a fat and pimply jailer inflated to bursting with the importance of guarding the first murderer in his generation. "AL&O kept this quiet until the Council killing," the turnkey said, "but it had to come out when the Board of Order went after you. The Alcorians are telepathic. Santikh led the Ordermen to your place in the mountains. Fermiirig guided her." He grinned vacuously at his prisoner, visibly pleased to impart information. "Lucky for you we don't have capital punishment any more. As it is, you'll get maximum, but they can't give you more than life." Lucky? The realization of what lay ahead of him stunned Boyle with a slow and dreadful certainty. A sentence of life. Seven hundred years. Not immortality-- Eternity. 
38312	----	The Mansion [Illustration: [See page 57 "BUT HOW HAVE I FAILED SO WRETCHEDLY?"] THE MANSION BY HENRY VAN DYKE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELIZABETH SHIPPEN GREEN [Illustration] HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON . M . C . M . X . I COPYRIGHT 1910, 1911, BY HARPER & BROTHERS PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1911 [Illustration] The Mansion There was an air of calm and reserved opulence about the Weightman mansion that spoke not of money squandered, but of wealth prudently applied. Standing on a corner of the Avenue no longer fashionable for residence, it looked upon the swelling tide of business with an expression of complacency and half-disdain. The house was not beautiful. There was nothing in its straight front of chocolate-colored stone, its heavy cornices, its broad, staring windows of plate glass, its carved and bronze-bedecked mahogany doors at the top of the wide stoop, to charm the eye or fascinate the imagination. But it was eminently respectable, and in its way imposing. It seemed to say that the glittering shops of the jewelers, the milliners, the confectioners, the florists, the picture-dealers, the furriers, the makers of rare and costly antiquities, retail traders in luxuries of life, were beneath the notice of a house that had its foundations in the high finance, and was built literally and figuratively in the shadow of St. Petronius' Church. At the same time there was something self-pleased and congratulatory in the way in which the mansion held its own amid the changing neighborhood. It almost seemed to be lifted up a little, among the tall buildings near at hand, as if it felt the rising value of the land on which it stood. John Weightman was like the house into which he had built himself thirty years ago, and in which his ideals and ambitions were incrusted. He was a self-made man. But in making himself he had chosen a highly esteemed pattern and worked according to the approved rules. There was nothing irregular, questionable, flamboyant about him. He was solid, correct, and justly successful. His minor tastes, of course, had been carefully kept up to date. At the proper time, pictures by the Barbizon masters, old English plate and portraits, bronzes by Barye and marbles by Rodin, Persian carpets and Chinese porcelains, had been introduced to the mansion. It contained a Louis Quinze reception-room, an Empire drawing-room, a Jacobean dining-room, and various apartments dimly reminiscent of the styles of furniture affected by deceased monarchs. That the hallways were too short for the historic perspective did not make much difference. American decorative art is _capable de tout_, it absorbs all periods. Of each period Mr. Weightman wished to have something of the best. He understood its value, present as a certificate, and prospective as an investment. It was only in the architecture of his town house that he remained conservative, immovable, one might almost say Early-Victorian-Christian. His country house at Dulwich-on-the-Sound was a palace of the Italian Renaissance. But in town he adhered to an architecture which had moral associations, the Nineteenth-Century-Brownstone epoch. It was a symbol of his social position, his religious doctrine, and even, in a way, of his business creed. "A man of fixed principles," he would say, "should express them in the looks of his house. New York changes its domestic architecture too rapidly. It is like divorce. It is not dignified. I don't like it. Extravagance and fickleness are advertised in most of these new houses. I wish to be known for different qualities. Dignity and prudence are the things that people trust. Every one knows that I can afford to live in the house that suits me. It is a guarantee to the public. It inspires confidence. It helps my influence. There is a text in the Bible about 'a house that hath foundations.' That is the proper kind of a mansion for a solid man." Harold Weightman had often listened to his father discoursing in this fashion on the fundamental principles of life, and always with a divided mind. He admired immensely his father's talents and the single-minded energy with which he improved them. But in the paternal philosophy there was something that disquieted and oppressed the young man, and made him gasp inwardly for fresh air and free action. At times, during his college course and his years at the law school, he had yielded to this impulse and broken away--now toward extravagance and dissipation, and then, when the reaction came, toward a romantic devotion to work among the poor. He had felt his father's disapproval for both of these forms of imprudence; but it was never expressed in a harsh or violent way, always with a certain tolerant patience, such as one might show for the mistakes and vagaries of the very young. John Weightman was not hasty, impulsive, inconsiderate, even toward his own children. With them, as with the rest of the world, he felt that he had a reputation to maintain, a theory to vindicate. He could afford to give them time to see that he was absolutely right. One of his favorite Scripture quotations was, "Wait on the Lord." He had applied it to real estate and to people, with profitable results. But to human persons the sensation of being waited for is not always agreeable. Sometimes, especially with the young, it produces a vague restlessness, a dumb resentment, which is increased by the fact that one can hardly explain or justify it. Of this John Weightman was not conscious. It lay beyond his horizon. He did not take it into account in the plan of life which he made for himself and for his family as the sharers and inheritors of his success. "Father plays us," said Harold, in a moment of irritation, to his mother, "like pieces in a game of chess." "My dear," said that lady, whose faith in her husband was religious, "you ought not to speak so impatiently. At least he wins the game. He is one of the most respected men in New York. And he is very generous, too." "I wish he would be more generous in letting us be ourselves," said the young man. "He always has something in view for us and expects to move us up to it." "But isn't it always for our benefit?" replied his mother. "Look what a position we have. No one can say there is any taint on our money. There are no rumors about your father. He has kept the laws of God and of man. He has never made any mistakes." Harold got up from his chair and poked the fire. Then he came back to the ample, well-gowned, firm-looking lady, and sat beside her on the sofa. He took her hand gently and looked at the two rings--a thin band of yellow gold, and a small solitaire diamond--which kept their place on her third finger in modest dignity, as if not shamed, but rather justified, by the splendor of the emerald which glittered beside them. "Mother," he said, "you have a wonderful hand. And father made no mistake when he won you. But are you sure he has always been so inerrant?" "Harold," she exclaimed, a little stiffly, "what do you mean? His life is an open book." "Oh," he answered, "I don't mean anything bad, mother dear. I know the governor's life is an open book--a ledger, if you like, kept in the best bookkeeping hand, and always ready for inspection--every page correct, and showing a handsome balance. But isn't it a mistake not to allow us to make our own mistakes, to learn for ourselves, to live our own lives? Must we be always working for 'the balance,' in one thing or another? I want to be myself--to get outside of this everlasting, profitable 'plan'--to let myself go, and lose myself for a while at least--to do the things that I want to do, just because I want to do them." "My boy," said his mother, anxiously, "you are not going to do anything wrong or foolish? You know the falsehood of that old proverb about wild oats." He threw back his head and laughed. "Yes, mother," he answered, "I know it well enough. But in California, you know, the wild oats are one of the most valuable crops. They grow all over the hillsides and keep the cattle and the horses alive. But that wasn't what I meant--to sow wild oats. Say to pick wild flowers, if you like, or even to chase wild geese--to do something that seems good to me just for its own sake, not for the sake of wages of one kind or another. I feel like a hired man, in the service of this magnificent mansion--say in training for father's place as majordomo. I'd like to get out some way, to feel free--perhaps to do something for others." The young man's voice hesitated a little. "Yes, it sounds like cant, I know, but sometimes I feel as if I'd like to do some good in the world, if father only wouldn't insist upon God's putting it into the ledger." His mother moved uneasily, and a slight look of bewilderment came into her face. "Isn't that almost irreverent?" she asked. "Surely the righteous must have their reward. And your father is good. See how much he gives to all the established charities, how many things he has founded. He's always thinking of others, and planning for them. And surely, for us, he does everything. How well he has planned this trip to Europe for me and the girls--the court-presentation at Berlin, the season on the Riviera, the visits in England with the Plumptons and the Halverstones. He says Lord Halverstone has the finest old house in Sussex, pure Elizabethan, and all the old customs are kept up, too--family prayers every morning for all the domestics. By-the-way, you know his son Bertie, I believe." Harold smiled a little to himself as he answered: "Yes, I fished at Catalina Island last June with the Honorable Ethelbert; he's rather a decent chap, in spite of his ingrowing mind. But you?--mother, you are simply magnificent! You are father's masterpiece." The young man leaned over to kiss her, and went up to the Riding Club for his afternoon canter in the Park. So it came to pass, early in December, that Mrs. Weightman and her two daughters sailed for Europe, on their serious pleasure trip, even as it had been written in the book of Providence; and John Weightman, who had made the entry, was left to pass the rest of the winter with his son and heir in the brownstone mansion. They were comfortable enough. The machinery of the massive establishment ran as smoothly as a great electric dynamo. They were busy enough, too. John Weightman's plans and enterprises were complicated, though his principle of action was always simple--to get good value for every expenditure and effort. The banking-house of which he was the chief, the brain, the will, the absolutely controlling hand, was so admirably organized that the details of its direction took but little time. But the scores of other interests that radiated from it and were dependent upon it--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, that contributed to its solidity and success--the many investments, industrial, political, benevolent, reformatory, ecclesiastical, that had made the name of Weightman well known and potent in city, church, and state, demanded much attention and careful steering, in order that each might produce the desired result. There were board meetings of corporations and hospitals, conferences in Wall Street and at Albany, consultations and committee meetings in the brownstone mansion. For a share in all this business and its adjuncts John Weightman had his son in training in one of the famous law firms of the city; for he held that banking itself is a simple affair, the only real difficulties of finance are on its legal side. Meantime he wished the young man to meet and know the men with whom he would have to deal when he became a partner in the house. So a couple of dinners were given in the mansion during December, after which the father called the son's attention to the fact that over a hundred million dollars had sat around the board. But on Christmas Eve father and son were dining together without guests, and their talk across the broad table, glittering with silver and cut glass, and softly lit by shaded candles, was intimate, though a little slow at times. The elder man was in rather a rare mood, more expansive and confidential than usual; and, when the coffee was brought in and they were left alone, he talked more freely of his personal plans and hopes than he had ever done before. "I feel very grateful to-night," said he, at last; "it must be something in the air of Christmas that gives me this feeling of thankfulness for the many divine mercies that have been bestowed upon me. All the principles by which I have tried to guide my life have been justified. I have never made the value of this salted almond by anything that the courts would not uphold, at least in the long run, and yet--or wouldn't it be truer to say and therefore?--my affairs have been wonderfully prospered. There's a great deal in that text 'Honesty is the best'--but no, that's not from the Bible, after all, is it? Wait a moment; there is something of that kind, I know." "May I light a cigar, father," said Harold, turning away to hide a smile, "while you are remembering the text?" "Yes, certainly," answered the elder man, rather shortly; "you know I don't dislike the smell. But it is a wasteful, useless habit, and therefore I have never practised it. Nothing useless is worth while, that's my motto--nothing that does not bring the reward. Oh, now I recall the text, 'Verily I say unto you they have their reward.' I shall ask Doctor Snodgrass to preach a sermon on that verse some day." "Using you as an illustration?" "Well, not exactly that; but I could give him some good material from my own experience to prove the truth of Scripture. I can honestly say that there is not one of my charities that has not brought me in a good return, either in the increase of influence, the building up of credit, or the association with substantial people. Of course you have to be careful how you give, in order to secure the best results--no indiscriminate giving--no pennies in beggars' hats! It has been one of my principles always to use the same kind of judgment in charities that I use in my other affairs, and they have not disappointed me." "Even the check that you put in the plate when you take the offertory up the aisle on Sunday morning?" "Certainly; though there the influence is less direct; and I must confess that I have my doubts in regard to the collection for Foreign Missions. That always seems to me romantic and wasteful. You never hear from it in any definite way. They say the missionaries have done a good deal to open the way for trade; perhaps--but they have also gotten us into commercial and political difficulties. Yet I give to them--a little--it is a matter of conscience with me to identify myself with all the enterprises of the Church; it is the mainstay of social order and a prosperous civilization. But the best forms of benevolence are the well-established, organized ones here at home, where people can see them and know what they are doing." "You mean the ones that have a local habitation and a name." "Yes; they offer by far the safest return, though of course there is something gained by contributing to general funds. A public man can't afford to be without public spirit. But on the whole I prefer a building, or an endowment. There is a mutual advantage to a good name and a good institution in their connection in the public mind. It helps them both. Remember that, my boy. Of course at the beginning you will have to practise it in a small way; later, you will have larger opportunities. But try to put your gifts where they can be identified and do good all around. You'll see the wisdom of it in the long run." "I can see it already, sir, and the way you describe it looks amazingly wise and prudent. In other words, we must cast our bread on the waters in large loaves, carried by sound ships marked with the owner's name, so that the return freight will be sure to come back to us." The father laughed, but his eyes were frowning a little as if he suspected something irreverent under the respectful reply. "You put it humorously, but there's sense in what you say. Why not? God rules the sea; but He expects us to follow the laws of navigation and commerce. Why not take good care of your bread, even when you give it away?" "It's not for me to say why not--and yet I can think of cases--" The young man hesitated for a moment. His half-finished cigar had gone out. He rose and tossed it into the fire, in front of which he remained standing--a slender, eager, restless young figure, with a touch of hunger in the fine face, strangely like and unlike the father, at whom he looked with half-wistful curiosity. "The fact is, sir," he continued, "there is such a case in my mind now, and it is a good deal on my heart, too. So I thought of speaking to you about it to-night. You remember Tom Rollins, the Junior who was so good to me when I entered college?" The father nodded. He remembered very well indeed the annoying incidents of his son's first escapade, and how Rollins had stood by him and helped to avoid a public disgrace, and how a close friendship had grown between the two boys, so different in their fortunes. "Yes," he said, "I remember him. He was a promising young man. Has he succeeded?" "Not exactly--that is, not yet. His business has been going rather badly. He has a wife and little baby, you know. And now he has broken down,--something wrong with his lungs. The doctor says his only chance is a year or eighteen months in Colorado. I wish we could help him." "How much would it cost?" "Three or four thousand, perhaps, as a loan." "Does the doctor say he will get well?" "A fighting chance--the doctor says." The face of the older man changed subtly. Not a line was altered, but it seemed to have a different substance, as if it were carved out of some firm, imperishable stuff. "A fighting chance," he said, "may do for a speculation, but it is not a good investment. You owe something to young Rollins. Your grateful feeling does you credit. But don't overwork it. Send him three or four hundred, if you like. You'll never hear from it again, except in the letter of thanks. But for Heaven's sake don't be sentimental. Religion is not a matter of sentiment; it's a matter of principle." [Illustration: "It is not a good investment"] The face of the younger man changed now. But instead of becoming fixed and graven, it seemed to melt into life by the heat of an inward fire. His nostrils quivered with quick breath, his lips were curled. "Principle!" he said. "You mean principal--and interest too. Well, sir, you know best whether that is religion or not. But if it is, count me out, please. Tom saved me from going to the devil, six years ago; and I'll be damned if I don't help him to the best of my ability now." John Weightman looked at his son steadily. "Harold," he said at last, "you know I dislike violent language, and it never has any influence with me. If I could honestly approve of this proposition of yours, I'd let you have the money; but I can't; it's extravagant and useless. But you have your Christmas check for a thousand dollars coming to you to-morrow. You can use it as you please. I never interfere with your private affairs." "Thank you," said Harold. "Thank you very much! But there's another private affair. I want to get away from this life, this town, this house. It stifles me. You refused last summer when I asked you to let me go up to Grenfell's Mission on the Labrador. I could go now, at least as far as the Newfoundland Station. Have you changed your mind?" "Not at all. I think it is an exceedingly foolish enterprise. It would interrupt the career that I have marked out for you." "Well, then, here's a cheaper proposition. Algy Vanderhoof wants me to join him on his yacht with--well, with a little party--to cruise in the West Indies. Would you prefer that?" "Certainly not! The Vanderhoof set is wild and godless--I do not wish to see you keeping company with fools who walk in the broad and easy way that leads to perdition." "It is rather a hard choice," said the young man, with a short laugh, turning toward the door. "According to you there's very little difference--a fool's paradise or a fool's hell! Well, it's one or the other for me, and I'll toss up for it to-night: heads, I lose; tails, the devil wins. Anyway, I'm sick of this, and I'm out of it." "Harold," said the older man (and there was a slight tremor in his voice), "don't let us quarrel on Christmas Eve. All I want is to persuade you to think seriously of the duties and responsibilities to which God has called you--don't speak lightly of heaven and hell--remember, there is another life." The young man came back and laid his hand upon his father's shoulder. "Father," he said, "I want to remember it. I try to believe in it. But somehow or other, in this house, it all seems unreal to me. No doubt all you say is perfectly right and wise. I don't venture to argue against it, but I can't feel it--that's all. If I'm to have a soul, either to lose or to save, I must really live. Just now neither the present nor the future means anything to me. But surely we won't quarrel. I'm very grateful to you, and we'll part friends. Good-night, sir." The father held out his hand in silence. The heavy portière dropped noiselessly behind the son, and he went up the wide, curving stairway to his own room. Meantime John Weightman sat in his carved chair in the Jacobean dining-room. He felt strangely old and dull. The portraits of beautiful women by Lawrence and Reynolds and Raeburn, which had often seemed like real company to him, looked remote and uninteresting. He fancied something cold and almost unfriendly in their expression, as if they were staring through him or beyond him. They cared nothing for his principles, his hopes, his disappointments, his successes; they belonged to another world, in which he had no place. At this he felt a vague resentment, a sense of discomfort that he could not have defined or explained. He was used to being considered, respected, appreciated at his full value in every region, even in that of his own dreams. Presently he rang for the butler, telling him to close the house and not to sit up, and walked with lagging steps into the long library, where the shaded lamps were burning. His eye fell upon the low shelves full of costly books, but he had no desire to open them. Even the carefully chosen pictures that hung above them seemed to have lost their attraction. He paused for a moment before an idyll of Corot--a dance of nymphs around some forgotten altar in a vaporous glade--and looked at it curiously. There was something rapturous and serene about the picture, a breath of spring-time in the misty trees, a harmony of joy in the dancing figures, that wakened in him a feeling of half-pleasure and half-envy. It represented something that he had never known in his calculated, orderly life. He was dimly mistrustful of it. "It is certainly very beautiful," he thought, "but it is distinctly pagan; that altar is built to some heathen god. It does not fit into the scheme of a Christian life. I doubt whether it is consistent with the tone of my house. I will sell it this winter. It will bring three or four times what I paid for it. That was a good purchase, a very good bargain." He dropped into the revolving chair before his big library table. It was covered with pamphlets and reports of the various enterprises in which he was interested. There was a pile of newspaper clippings in which his name was mentioned with praise for his sustaining power as a pillar of finance, for his judicious benevolence, for his support of wise and prudent reform movements, for his discretion in making permanent public gifts--"the Weightman Charities," one very complaisant editor called them, as if they deserved classification as a distinct species. He turned the papers over listlessly. There was a description and a picture of the "Weightman Wing of the Hospital for Cripples," of which he was president; and an article on the new professor in the "Weightman Chair of Political Jurisprudence" in Jackson University, of which he was a trustee; and an illustrated account of the opening of the "Weightman Grammar-School" at Dulwich-on-the-Sound, where he had his legal residence for purposes of taxation. This last was perhaps the most carefully planned of all the Weightman Charities. He desired to win the confidence and support of his rural neighbors. It had pleased him much when the local newspaper had spoken of him as an ideal citizen and the logical candidate for the Governorship of the State; but upon the whole it seemed to him wiser to keep out of active politics. It would be easier and better to put Harold into the running, to have him sent to the Legislature from the Dulwich district, then to the national House, then to the Senate. Why not? The Weightman interests were large enough to need a direct representative and guardian at Washington. But to-night all these plans came back to him with dust upon them. They were dry and crumbling like forsaken habitations. The son upon whom his complacent ambition had rested had turned his back upon the mansion of his father's hopes. The break might not be final; and in any event there would be much to live for; the fortunes of the family would be secure. But the zest of it all would be gone if John Weightman had to give up the assurance of perpetuating his name and his principles in his son. It was a bitter disappointment, and he felt that he had not deserved it. He rose from the chair and paced the room with leaden feet. For the first time in his life his age was visibly upon him. His head was heavy and hot, and the thoughts that rolled in it were confused and depressing. Could it be that he had made a mistake in the principles of his existence? There was no argument in what Harold had said--it was almost childish--and yet it had shaken the elder man more deeply than he cared to show. It held a silent attack which touched him more than open criticism. Suppose the end of his life were nearer than he thought--the end must come some time--what if it were now? Had he not founded his house upon a rock? Had he not kept the Commandments? Was he not, "touching the law, blameless"? And beyond this, even if there were some faults in his character--and all men are sinners--yet he surely believed in the saving doctrines of religion--the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, the life everlasting. Yes, that was the true source of comfort, after all. He would read a bit in the Bible, as he did every night, and go to bed and to sleep. He went back to his chair at the library table. A strange weight of weariness rested upon him, but he opened the book at a familiar place, and his eyes fell upon the verse at the bottom of the page. "_Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth._" That had been the text of the sermon a few weeks before. Sleepily, heavily, he tried to fix his mind upon it and recall it. What was it that Doctor Snodgrass had said? Ah, yes--that it was a mistake to pause here in reading the verse. We must read on without a pause--_Lay not up treasures upon earth where moth and rust do corrupt and where thieves break through and steal_--that was the true doctrine. We may have treasures upon earth, but they must not be put into unsafe places, but into safe places. A most comforting doctrine! He had always followed it. Moths and rust and thieves had done no harm to his investments. John Weightman's drooping eyes turned to the next verse, at the top of the second column. "_But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven._" Now what had the Doctor said about that? How was it to be understood--in what sense--treasures--in heaven? The book seemed to float away from him. The light vanished. He wondered dimly if this could be Death, coming so suddenly, so quietly, so irresistibly. He struggled for a moment to hold himself up, and then sank slowly forward upon the table. His head rested upon his folded hands. He slipped into the unknown. * * * * * How long afterward conscious life returned to him he did not know. The blank might have been an hour or a century. He knew only that something had happened in the interval. What it was he could not tell. He found great difficulty in catching the thread of his identity again. He felt that he was himself; but the trouble was to make his connections, to verify and place himself, to know who and where he was. At last it grew clear. John Weightman was sitting on a stone, not far from a road in a strange land. The road was not a formal highway, fenced and graded. It was more like a great travel-trace, worn by thousands of feet passing across the open country in the same direction. Down in the valley, into which he could look, the road seemed to form itself gradually out of many minor paths; little footways coming across the meadows, winding tracks following along beside the streams, faintly marked trails emerging from the woodlands. But on the hillside the threads were more firmly woven into one clear band of travel, though there were still a few dim paths joining it here and there, as if persons had been climbing up the hill by other ways and had turned at last to seek the road. From the edge of the hill, where John Weightman sat, he could see the travelers, in little groups or larger companies, gathering from time to time by the different paths, and making the ascent. They were all clothed in white, and the form of their garments was strange to him; it was like some old picture. They passed him, group after group, talking quietly together or singing; not moving in haste, but with a certain air of eagerness and joy as if they were glad to be on their way to an appointed place. They did not stay to speak to him, but they looked at him often and spoke to one another as they looked; and now and then one of them would smile and beckon him a friendly greeting, so that he felt they would like him to be with them. There was quite an interval between the groups; and he followed each of them with his eyes after it had passed, blanching the long ribbon of the road for a little transient space, rising and receding across the wide, billowy upland, among the rounded hillocks of aerial green and gold and lilac, until it came to the high horizon, and stood outlined for a moment, a tiny cloud of whiteness against the tender blue, before it vanished over the hill. For a long time he sat there watching and wondering. It was a very different world from that in which his mansion on the Avenue was built; and it looked strange to him, but most real--as real as anything he had ever seen. Presently he felt a strong desire to know what country it was and where the people were going. He had a faint premonition of what it must be, but he wished to be sure. So he rose from the stone where he was sitting, and came down through the short grass and the lavender flowers, toward a passing group of people. One of them turned to meet him, and held out his hand. It was an old man, under whose white beard and brows John Weightman thought he saw a suggestion of the face of the village doctor who had cared for him years ago, when he was a boy in the country. [Illustration: "Welcome! Will you come with us?"] "Welcome," said the old man. "Will you come with us?" "Where are you going?" "To the heavenly city, to see our mansions there." "And who are these with you?" "Strangers to me, until a little while ago; I know them better now. But you I have known for a long time, John Weightman. Don't you remember your old doctor?" "Yes," he cried--"yes; your voice has not changed at all. I'm glad indeed to see you, Doctor McLean, especially now. All this seems very strange to me, almost oppressive. I wonder if--but may I go with you, do you suppose?" "Surely," answered the doctor, with his familiar smile; "it will do you good. And you also must have a mansion in the city waiting for you--a fine one, too--are you not looking forward to it?" "Yes," replied the other, hesitating a moment; "yes--I believe it must be so, although I had not expected to see it so soon. But I will go with you, and we can talk by the way." The two men quickly caught up with the other people, and all went forward together along the road. The doctor had little to tell of his experience, for it had been a plain, hard life, uneventfully spent for others, and the story of the village was very simple. John Weightman's adventures and triumphs would have made a far richer, more imposing history, full of contacts with the great events and personages of the time. But somehow or other he did not care to speak much about it, walking on that wide heavenly moorland, under that tranquil, sunless arch of blue, in that free air of perfect peace, where the light was diffused without a shadow, as if the spirit of life in all things were luminous. There was only one person besides the doctor in that little company whom John Weightman had known before--an old bookkeeper who had spent his life over a desk, carefully keeping accounts--a rusty, dull little man, patient and narrow, whose wife had been in the insane asylum for twenty years and whose only child was a crippled daughter, for whose comfort and happiness he had toiled and sacrificed himself without stint. It was a surprise to find him here, as care-free and joyful as the rest. [Illustration: That free air of Perfect Peace] The lives of others in the company were revealed in brief glimpses as they talked together--a mother, early widowed, who had kept her little flock of children together and labored through hard and heavy years to bring them up in purity and knowledge--a Sister of Charity who had devoted herself to the nursing of poor folk who were being eaten to death by cancer--a schoolmaster whose heart and life had been poured into his quiet work of training boys for a clean and thoughtful manhood--a medical missionary who had given up a brilliant career in science to take the charge of a hospital in darkest Africa--a beautiful woman with silver hair who had resigned her dreams of love and marriage to care for an invalid father, and after his death had made her life a long, steady search for ways of doing kindnesses to others--a poet who had walked among the crowded tenements of the great city, bringing cheer and comfort not only by his songs, but by his wise and patient works of practical aid--a paralyzed woman who had lain for thirty years upon her bed, helpless but not hopeless, succeeding by a miracle of courage in her single aim, never to complain, but always to impart a bit of her joy and peace to every one who came near her. All these, and other persons like them, people of little consideration in the world, but now seemingly all full of great contentment and an inward gladness that made their steps light, were in the company that passed along the road, talking together of things past and things to come, and singing now and then with clear voices from which the veil of age and sorrow was lifted. John Weightman joined in some of the songs--which were familiar to him from their use in the church--at first with a touch of hesitation, and then more confidently. For as they went on his sense of strangeness and fear at his new experience diminished, and his thoughts began to take on their habitual assurance and complacency. Were not these people going to the Celestial City? And was not he in his right place among them? He had always looked forward to this journey. If they were sure, each one, of finding a mansion there, could not he be far more sure? His life had been more fruitful than theirs. He had been a leader, a founder of new enterprises, a pillar of Church and State, a prince of the House of Israel. Ten talents had been given him, and he had made them twenty. His reward would be proportionate. He was glad that his companions were going to find fit dwellings prepared for them; but he thought also with a certain pleasure of the surprise that some of them would feel when they saw his appointed mansion. So they came to the summit of the moorland and looked over into the world beyond. It was a vast, green plain, softly rounded like a shallow vase, and circled with hills of amethyst. A broad, shining river flowed through it, and many silver threads of water were woven across the green; and there were borders of tall trees on the banks of the river, and orchards full of roses abloom along the little streams, and in the midst of all stood the city, white and wonderful and radiant. When the travelers saw it they were filled with awe and joy. They passed over the little streams and among the orchards quickly and silently, as if they feared to speak lest the city should vanish. The wall of the city was very low, a child could see over it, for it was made only of precious stones, which are never large. The gate of the city was not like a gate at all, for it was not barred with iron or wood, but only a single pearl, softly gleaming, marked the place where the wall ended and the entrance lay open. A person stood there whose face was bright and grave, and whose robe was like the flower of the lily, not a woven fabric, but a living texture. "Come in," he said to the company of travelers; "you are at your journey's end, and your mansions are ready for you." John Weightman hesitated, for he was troubled by a doubt. Suppose that he was not really, like his companions, at his journey's end, but only transported for a little while out of the regular course of his life into this mysterious experience? Suppose that, after all, he had not really passed through the door of death, like these others, but only through the door of dreams, and was walking in a vision, a living man among the blessed dead. Would it be right for him to go with them into the heavenly city? Would it not be a deception, a desecration, a deep and unforgivable offense? The strange, confusing question had no reason in it, as he very well knew; for if he was dreaming, then it was all a dream; but if his companions were real, then he also was with them in reality, and if they had died then he must have died too. Yet he could not rid his mind of the sense that there was a difference between them and him, and it made him afraid to go on. But, as he paused and turned, the Keeper of the Gate looked straight and deep into his eyes, and beckoned to him. Then he knew that it was not only right but necessary that he should enter. They passed from street to street among fair and spacious dwellings, set in amaranthine gardens, and adorned with an infinitely varied beauty of divine simplicity. The mansions differed in size, in shape, in charm: each one seemed to have its own personal look of loveliness; yet all were alike in fitness to their place, in harmony with one another, in the addition which each made to the singular and tranquil splendor of the city. As the little company came, one by one, to the mansions which were prepared for them, and their Guide beckoned to the happy inhabitant to enter in and take possession, there was a soft murmur of joy, half wonder and half recognition; as if the new and immortal dwelling were crowned with the beauty of surprise, lovelier and nobler than all the dreams of it had been; and yet also as if it were touched with the beauty of the familiar, the remembered, the long-loved. One after another the travelers were led to their own mansions, and went in gladly; and from within, through the open doorways, came sweet voices of welcome, and low laughter, and song. At last there was no one left with the Guide but the two old friends, Doctor McLean and John Weightman. They were standing in front of one of the largest and fairest of the houses, whose garden glowed softly with radiant flowers. The Guide laid his hand upon the doctor's shoulder. "This is for you," he said. "Go in; there is no more pain here, no more death, nor sorrow, nor tears; for your old enemies are all conquered. But all the good that you have done for others, all the help that you have given, all the comfort that you have brought, all the strength and love that you have bestowed upon the suffering, are here; for we have built them all into this mansion for you." The good man's face was lighted with a still joy. He clasped his old friend's hand closely, and whispered: "How wonderful it is! Go on, you will come to your mansion next, it is not far away, and we shall see each other again soon, very soon." So he went through the garden, and into the music within. The Keeper of the Gate turned to John Weightman with level, quiet, searching eyes. Then he asked, gravely: "Where do you wish me to lead you now?" "To see my own mansion," answered the man, with half-concealed excitement. "Is there not one here for me? You may not let me enter it yet, perhaps, for I must confess to you that I am only--" "I know," said the Keeper of the Gate--"I know it all. You are John Weightman." "Yes," said the man, more firmly than he had spoken at first, for it gratified him that his name was known. "Yes, I am John Weightman, Senior Warden of St. Petronius' Church. I wish very much to see my mansion here, if only for a moment. I believe that you have one for me. Will you take me to it?" The Keeper of the Gate drew a little book from the breast of his robe and turned over the pages. "Certainly," he said, with a curious look at the man, "your name is here; and you shall see your mansion if you will follow me." It seemed as if they must have walked miles and miles, through the vast city, passing street after street of houses larger and smaller, of gardens richer and poorer, but all full of beauty and delight. They came into a kind of suburb, where there were many small cottages, with plots of flowers, very lowly, but bright and fragrant. Finally they reached an open field, bare and lonely-looking. There were two or three little bushes in it, without flowers, and the grass was sparse and thin. In the center of the field was a tiny hut, hardly big enough for a shepherd's shelter. It looked as if it had been built of discarded things, scraps and fragments of other buildings, put together with care and pains, by some one who had tried to make the most of cast-off material. There was something pitiful and shamefaced about the hut. It shrank and drooped and faded in its barren field, and seemed to cling only by sufferance to the edge of the splendid city. "This," said the Keeper of the Gate, standing still and speaking with a low, distinct voice--"this is your mansion, John Weightman." An almost intolerable shock of grieved wonder and indignation choked the man for a moment so that he could not say a word. Then he turned his face away from the poor little hut and began to remonstrate eagerly with his companion. "Surely, sir," he stammered, "you must be in error about this. There is something wrong--some other John Weightman--a confusion of names--the book must be mistaken." "There is no mistake," said the Keeper of the Gate, very calmly; "here is your name, the record of your title and your possessions in this place." "But how could such a house be prepared for me," cried the man, with a resentful tremor in his voice--"for me, after my long and faithful service? Is this a suitable mansion for one so well known and devoted? Why is it so pitifully small and mean? Why have you not built it large and fair, like the others?" "That is all the material you sent us." "What!" "We have used all the material that you sent us," repeated the Keeper of the Gate. "Now I know that you are mistaken," cried the man, with growing earnestness, "for all my life long I have been doing things that must have supplied you with material. Have you not heard that I have built a school-house; the wing of a hospital; two--yes, three--small churches, and the greater part of a large one, the spire of St. Petro--" The Keeper of the Gate lifted his hand. "Wait," he said; "we know all these things. They were not ill done. But they were all marked and used as foundation for the name and mansion of John Weightman in the world. Did you not plan them for that?" "Yes," answered the man, confused and taken aback, "I confess that I thought often of them in that way. Perhaps my heart was set upon that too much. But there are other things--my endowment for the college--my steady and liberal contributions to all the established charities--my support of every respectable--" "Wait," said the Keeper of the Gate again. "Were not all these carefully recorded on earth where they would add to your credit? They were not foolishly done. Verily, you have had your reward for them. Would you be paid twice?" "No," cried the man, with deepening dismay, "I dare not claim that. I acknowledge that I considered my own interest too much. But surely not altogether. You have said that these things were not foolishly done. They accomplished some good in the world. Does not that count for something?" "Yes," answered the Keeper of the Gate, "it counts in the world--where you counted it. But it does not belong to you here. We have saved and used everything that you sent us. This is the mansion prepared for you." As he spoke, his look grew deeper and more searching, like a flame of fire. John Weightman could not endure it. It seemed to strip him naked and wither him. He sank to the ground under a crushing weight of shame, covering his eyes with his hands and cowering face downward upon the stones. Dimly through the trouble of his mind he felt their hardness and coldness. "Tell me, then," he cried, brokenly, "since my life has been so little worth, how came I here at all?" "Through the mercy of the King"--the answer was like the soft tolling of a bell. "And how have I earned it?" he murmured. "It is never earned; it is only given," came the clear, low reply. "But how have I failed so wretchedly," he asked, "in all the purpose of my life? What could I have done better? What is it that counts here?" "Only that which is truly given," answered the bell-like voice. "Only that good which is done for the love of doing it. Only those plans in which the welfare of others is the master thought. Only those labors in which the sacrifice is greater than the reward. Only those gifts in which the giver forgets himself." The man lay silent. A great weakness, an unspeakable despondency and humiliation were upon him. But the face of the Keeper of the Gate was infinitely tender as he bent over him. "Think again, John Weightman. Has there been nothing like that in your life?" "Nothing," he sighed. "If there ever were such things, it must have been long ago--they were all crowded out--I have forgotten them." There was an ineffable smile on the face of the Keeper of the Gate, and his hand made the sign of the cross over the bowed head as he spoke gently: "These are the things that the King never forgets; and because there were a few of them in your life, you have a little place here." * * * * * The sense of coldness and hardness under John Weightman's hands grew sharper and more distinct. The feeling of bodily weariness and lassitude weighed upon him, but there was a calm, almost a lightness, in his heart as he listened to the fading vibrations of the silvery bell-tones. The chimney clock on the mantel had just ended the last stroke of seven as he lifted his head from the table. Thin, pale strips of the city morning were falling into the room through the narrow partings of the heavy curtains. What was it that had happened to him? Had he been ill? Had he died and come to life again? Or had he only slept, and had his soul gone visiting in dreams? He sat for some time, motionless, not lost, but finding himself in thought. Then he took a narrow book from the table drawer, wrote a check, and tore it out. He went slowly up the stairs, knocked very softly at his son's door, and, hearing no answer, entered without noise. Harold was asleep, his bare arm thrown above his head, and his eager face relaxed in peace. His father looked at him a moment with strangely shining eyes, and then tiptoed quietly to the writing-desk, found a pencil and a sheet of paper, and wrote rapidly: "My dear boy, here is what you asked me for; do what you like with it, and ask for more if you need it. If you are still thinking of that work with Grenfell, we'll talk it over to-day after church. I want to know your heart better; and if I have made mistakes--" [Illustration: "God give us a good Christmas together"] A slight noise made him turn his head. Harold was sitting up in bed with wide-open eyes. "Father!" he cried, "is that you?" "Yes, my son," answered John Weightman; "I've come back--I mean I've come up--no, I mean come in--well, here I am, and God give us a good Christmas together." THE END 
39455	----	Transcriber's Note: Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including non-standard spelling and punctuation. Some changes of spelling and punctuation have been made. They are listed at the end of the text. OE ligatures have been expanded. Italic text has been marked with _underscores_. Bold text has been marked with =equals signs=. _Sacrificing the earth for paradise is giving up the substance for the shadow._ --Victor Hugo. Is Life Worth Living Without Immortality? A Lecture Delivered Before the Independent Religious Society, Chicago By M. M. MANGASARIAN I may be doing you an injustice, Bertie, but it seemed to me in your last that there were indications that the free expression of my religious views had been distasteful to you. That you should disagree with me I am prepared for; but that you should object to free and honest discussion of those subjects which above all others men should be honest over, would, I confess, be a disappointment. The Free-thinker is placed at this disadvantage in ordinary society, that whereas it would be considered very bad taste upon his part to obtrude his unorthodox opinion, no such consideration hampers those with whom he disagrees. There was a time when it took a brave man to be a Christian. Now it takes a brave man not to be. SIR A. CONAN DOYLE, The Stark Munro Letters--Fourth Letter. Is Life Worth Living Without Immortality? Is life worth living? If we are in good health, it certainly is. In a certain sense, even to ask such a question implies that we are not at our best. It is the sick, mentally as well as physically, who question the value of life. We cannot appreciate health too highly. Our philosophy of life is more profoundly affected by the condition of our body than we have any idea. If I were composing a new set of beatitudes, one of them would be in exaltation of health: _Blessed are they that have health, for they shall take pleasure in life._ Health also inspires _faith_ in life. The first commandment of the decalogue, instead of reading, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," which is metaphysical and without definite meaning, could with much advantage be altered to read: _Thou shalt not trifle with thy health._ How fortunate it would have been for man had the "Deity" given that as his first and best thought to the world! Then, indeed, would he have been the friend of man. We cannot preserve our health without observing all the other commandments--of temperance, purity, sanity, self possession, contentment, and serenity of mind. "Behold I bring unto you health" ought to be the glad tidings of salvation. Give us that, and all the rest will be added unto us. Health is the foundation of character. If the foundation is insecure--if we have inherited disease and corruption, we can be sound, neither in our thoughts nor in our actions. The time may come when to be sickly will be considered a crime. A revolution in our feelings in this matter is already taking place. Formerly it was thought that the path to self-development is through sorrow and suffering, and that the sick were the saints. The verdict of science today, which has been confirmed by the growing experience of man, is that pleasurable activity is the most wholesome environment for man. Happiness has upon human nature the same effect that the sunshine has upon the soil. Man is a failure if he is not happy. The highest accomplishment is the ability to enjoy life. To those who say that service or usefulness is the noblest aim of life, we answer, "Why should those who serve the noblest ends of life be unhappy?" But let me first present to you the answer which one of America's best known psychologists, Prof. William James, of Harvard, gives to this most interesting question. Prof. James is a teacher not only of the young men in one of our leading Universities, but his ideas have become a part of the furniture of the American mind. Both his thought and the candor with which he expresses himself have secured for him a large following. Prof. James has an engaging style. Not that he is not also a profound thinker, but his sentences are as symmetrical as they are solid. He writes to be understood. That, I take it, is the secret of the masters of style. The gods always speak from behind "clouds and darkness." That explains why it is so difficult to understand what they say. But the great teachers permit no screens, draperies, curtains, or hangings of any sort to come between them and the public. There is nothing hidden about their thoughts. Neither do they speak in parables. Whoever can not make himself understood should hold his peace. The parents of this renowned psychologist were Swedenborgians, and I believe the professor is still, nominally, at least, a member of the Swedenborgian church. Swedenborg, as you know, was a mystic; he was, indeed, a sort of a medium, who claimed to have seen and conversed with God face to face, and to have received from him a supplementary revelation, in some such sense that Mrs. Eddy or Joseph Smith received one. Of course, Swedenborg was also a philosopher, which Smith and Eddy are not. The early connections and training of Prof. James explain in part his interest in the work of the Psychical Research Society, of which he is one of the officers. So-called spiritist or occult phenomena, such as automatic slate writing, table tipping and telepathy, have always interested Prof. James, but he is by no means an easy victim, though he looks forward hopefully to the time when science will definitely locate the undiscovered country whose bourne has not yet been sighted. Some years ago when Prof. James and I were summer neighbors in New Hampshire--near Chocorua lake--I heard the professor deliver a lecture on hypnotism in the village church of Tamworth. An incident occurred at the time which has its bearing on the experience our Society is having with the directors of the Orchestral Association. While Prof. James was explaining the phenomena of hypnotism from the pulpit, I saw, from where I was sitting, an elderly woman showing signs of restlessness in her seat. Presently she rose to her feet, walked up the aisle slowly, and taking her stand directly in front of Prof. James on the platform, she upbraided him for desecrating the House of God by delivering in it a lecture on hypnotism. In clear, though trembling tones, she ordered him out of the church. Naturally the professor was greatly embarrassed, as was also his audience. The old woman, however, was soon prevailed upon by the elders of the church to resume her seat and keep the peace. But she was trying to oust Prof. James from the church, as the trustees of this building are trying to oust our Society from this hall, on account of religious differences. The old woman of New Hampshire was not successful, and I trust that the old woman of Chicago will not fare any better. To close a hall to a movement is an easy thing, but to close the ear of the world to its message is not so easy. I have spoken of the early education of Prof. James in order to explain the metaphysical bent of his mind. As a psychologist, he has an international reputation, but his greatest vogue is among, what are called, the liberal Christians. The orthodox have no use for him, but to those who are endeavoring to interpret Christianity so as to make it harmonize with modern thought--who are filling the ancient skins with wine newly pressed--he is a defender and a champion of the faith. Prof. James seems to have discovered a way by which one can be a scientist and a supernaturalist at the same time. He appears to be of the opinion that a person may deny or reject many of the orthodox dogmas, and still be justified in calling himself a Christian. He is, in fact, one of the New Theologians, who are supposed to have reconstructed Christianity, and saved the supernatural. For this service, Prof. James and his _confreres_ are held in high esteem by those who would have had to give up Christianity but for their timely help. In his lecture on, "Is Life Worth Living," the professor admits that he is writing for the pessimists. It is they who are in the "to be or not to be" mood of mind. The optimist does not need consolation, for he is incapable of even suspecting that life is not worth living. Some temperaments are as incapable of depression or gloom, as others are of happiness. If there are parts of the world on which the sun never goes down, so there are natures which know no night. We make a mistake, however, if we think that the pessimist represents a lower type of mental evolution. On the contrary, pessimism comes with civilization, and it generally attacks men and women of a higher culture. Suicide is rare among the negroes or the less advanced races; but in the United States, representing the most perfect type of civilization, dowered magnificently, and rich in the possession of the treasures of art and nature; in America, the home of hope and opportunity--with its immense prairies, its great West, its army of earth-subduers, empire-builders, large-natured, generous, daring, enduring, restless, resistless pioneers--more than three thousand people every year kill themselves. If we were to seek for an explanation of this strange phenomenon, the nearest we can come to it would be to say that these people prefer death to life because they do not find life worth their while. There is not enough in it to satisfy them. To use an Emersonian phrase, life is to them no more than "a sucked orange." When the perfume, the aroma, the taste, the tints, and the juices have been extracted from the fruit--who cares for what is left. Of course, these remarks have no reference to the cases of sudden suicide, committed in a moment of frenzy--when a man driven, as it were, by a storm in the brain, lets go of his hold and slips into the darkness. The professor has in mind rather those who even though they do not commit suicide, live on reluctantly, under protest, and who treat life as we would a guest who has overstaid his welcome, and to whose final departure we look forward with pleasure. But there is still another class of pessimists who need to be reasoned with. These are the people who brood over the existence of evil in the world, and feel the misery of the many so keenly, that they think it involves a point of honor to consent to be happy in such a world. The contemplation of human sorrow, the surging waves of which break upon every shore; and the cry of human anguish rising like the blind cry of all the seas that roll, has a tendency to slacken the hold of the reflective mind upon life. Prof. James admits that pessimism is essentially a religious disease, in the sense that it results from the inability of man to entertain two contradictory thoughts at the same time: A father in heaven, whose tender mercies are over all his children, and children dying of hunger and neglect! Infinite wisdom enthroned in heaven, and a world running topsy-turvy. The refined mind cannot contemplate this contradiction without distress. If God is everywhere, why is there darkness anywhere? If there is within reach an ocean of truth, why is it doled out to us in driblets which hardly wet our lips, when we are burning with thirst? Religion provokes desires which it cannot satisfy, and makes promises which it will not fulfil. It is this contradiction which bites the soul black and blue. God is infinite! and behold we are starving. God is light! and we grope in darkness. God is great! and we cannot budge without crutches. It is this thought which teases us out of our peace of mind. The idea of a God, gifted with infinite parts, measured against the helplessness of man, makes for pessimism. But in the opinion of Prof. James, religion alone can cure the disease which religion creates. By religion, he does not mean merely loving one's neighbor and being loyal to one's best thoughts. Religion, according to Prof. James, means the belief that beyond this present life, "there is an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive but in its relation to which the significance of our mundane life consists." If this is the first act of an unending drama, it would have great worth and significance, but if it is a detached and disconnected piece, upon which the curtain will soon fall never to rise again--if it is never going to be finished--it loses, according to Prof. James, its seriousness. In other words, it is the belief that man is an eternal being whom no catastrophe can crush or annihilate, which makes our present existence worth while, and which also reconciles us to the discipline of pain and evil. Life is worth living, in short, if man is immortal. This is the drift of Prof. James' teaching, as it is also that of all supernaturalists. What evidence does the professor offer to prove the existence of an unseen world and the immortality of man? He offers none. He admits that science has not as yet demonstrated the reality of an invisible world. Perhaps it never will, but what of that? "You have got a right to believe in an unseen world," declares the professor. Is it not interesting? It will be seen that if the professor has no evidence, he has many arguments. One of his arguments is that, since, we must either believe or disbelieve in a future life, neutrality in the matter being an unattainable thing, why not take our choice, and while we are at it, choose immortality. Another argument is, that as our longings and yearnings in other directions have turned out to be prophetic, we have every reason to believe that the desire for eternal life also will be fulfilled. Art, science, music, health, have come to us because of an inner impulse which prompted us to go after them. A similar impulse urges us to seek the divine, which is a sort of proof that the divine exists. Still another argument is this: All the great successes or achievements of life came as a result of the courage that takes risks. Without audacity, man would never have crossed the ocean, or invented the aeroplane. If the belief in immortality requires the taking of risks, if it is hazardous even to hold it, we should not hesitate on that account, since some of the best things have come to us by taking risks. Start out for God and immortality; and some day you may cast anchor in the shining waters that lap the shores of a divine continent. "We are free to trust at our own risk anything that is not impossible," concludes the professor. Finally, there is the argument from analogy, which I may explain by a personal experience. In the Pasteur Institute in Paris, last summer, I saw in the vivisection room, physicians in their white aprons, operating upon live rabbits, cutting and dissecting them, while the helpless creatures were so fastened to the tables that they could not move a muscle. Now all this must seem very cruel to the rabbit. It must think the physician a butcher, devoid of all feeling, or justice, and it must perforce denounce the world in which such wanton torture is inflicted by the strong upon the weak. But if the rabbit could take a larger view, if it could be made to see that its sufferings are contributing to the progress of science and the amelioration of the conditions of life upon this planet, and thereby helping to hasten the day when disease shall be conquered, would it not be reconciled to the physician's knife and the operating table? The larger view which would embrace the world unseen will help to give to evil, suffering and misery, which now we do not understand, a _raison d'être_. The part of wisdom as well as of courage then, is to "believe what is in the line of our needs, for only by the belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself." It will be seen by what has preceded, that Prof. James of Harvard University, throws the weight of his influence on the side of those who have always maintained that God and immortality are indispensable to the happiness of man. In his opinion, what a man would be if deprived of his reason, the universe would be if deprived of a God, and life, of a future existence. The eminent psychologist takes the further position that it is immaterial whether or not there is any evidence to prove the existence of a God or of a life after death. If the belief is essential to our happiness and usefulness, he thinks we have got the right to entertain it, irrespective of the question of evidence. "If there is a belief of any kind to which you have taken a special fancy, or one that you feel like crying for," the professor seems to say, "help yourself to it; you have only yourself to suit." Even if such a belief should involve an element of risk, we are urged to take the risk. If it requires audacity even to believe in a God and immortality, we are told to have the audacity. It is his idea that when we are dealing with the unknown, the important thing is the heart's desire, and not the question of evidence. In passing, I might suggest that Prof. James would never have thought of pushing aside with such nonchalance, the question of evidence, were it not for an irrepressible suspicion that the evidence is against him. He hopes to do without the evidence because the evidence will not help him. This reminds us of the saying of the philosopher Hobbes, that, men are generally against reason when reason is against _them_. As already intimated, the liberal party in the church regards Prof. James as a defender of the faith. He is classed with such men as Sir Oliver Lodge and Lord Kelvin, who though scientists still believe in the supernatural, and by their example have made such a belief respectable. It must be borne in mind, however, that these distinguished men are Christians only, if at all, in a very loose sense of the word. All the cardinal doctrines of revelation, such as the creation, the atonement, the incarnation, and a personal God--even one, to say nothing of a trinity--they reject. These gentlemen have not enough faith to be baptised to-day, had they not been baptised in their childhood,--or to be received into any Christian church without greatly stretching the rules in their behalf. It remains then quite true, and the argument has not yet been answered, that there is not a single eminent thinker in the world to-day who will subscribe to the creed of Christendom without first going through it with a blue pencil, or a pair of scissors. But Prof. James, as also Lodge and Kelvin, if they are not supernaturalists in the ordinary sense of the word, neither are they anti-supernaturalists. They are between and betwixt, if I may use that phrase--not quite ready to part with supernaturalism altogether, nor yet able to hold on to it in its entirety, and so they linger somewhere on the borders or the edge of it. The first remark I have to make on the position of these newly recruited defenders of supernaturalism--even though the supernaturalism which they defend be of the attenuated kind--is, that their argument is not even an improvement on that of the theologian. I like the dogmatic and autocratic, "thus saith the Lord," of theology, much better than the "suit yourself" of these gentlemen. The one position is as destructive of intellectual integrity, as the other. The theologian starts with the fallacy that God can make a thing true by an act of his will--that his _say so_ makes all need of evidence superfluous. Prof. James and the men of his school start with a proposition equally fatal to the truth--namely; that whatever we wish to be true concerning the unknown is true. All that is needed, for instance, to give the universe a God is to wish for one. All that is necessary to make a man immortal is to desire and believe that he is. "The Will to Believe," which is the title of one of the professor's writings, makes truth the creature of man, as theology makes it the creature of God. You see that after all, the theologian and the "scientific" supernaturalist pull together. That is to say, when science lends itself to theology, it ceases to be scientific. It is not theology that goes over to science, but science that goes over to theology. As soon as science appears at the camp of theology, it is forthwith swallowed up. When Prof. James speaks of the "will to believe," and never mind the evidence, he is borrowing from theology, the "will to create" of God. Even as the Deity in creating did not have to consider anything but his glory and pleasure, likewise man in believing does not have to consider anything but his needs and desires. Ask, "What is Truth?" and the theologian answers: "Whatever God wants it to be." Ask now the scientist allies of the supernatural, "What is Truth," and they answer: "Whatever man desires or craves it to be." Of course, it may be objected that it is only concerning the unknown that man is permitted to dispense with evidence and consult his will. But there is no merit, for instance, in a man not telling any falsehoods where he is sure of being found out; his character is tested by his refusal to lie where he is sure he never will be found out. It is concerning the unknown about which we can say anything and everything we please without the fear of ever being caught, that we should restrain ourselves and show our loyalty to the everlasting law of honor, never to depart from veracity. To make any assertions about the unknown is to take an undue advantage of one's neighbors. "Truth is not mine to do with it as I please," said Giordano Bruno, "I must obey the truth, not command it." But the theologico-scientific position is the very reverse of this. If a god were to ask the question, "What is Truth?" His priests would answer, "Lord, suit thyself." If men asked, "What is Truth?" the Harvard professor and his colleagues would reply, "It depends upon your will to believe." The name given to this "free and easy philosophy," if I may use such an expression--is pragmatism, which is a word from the Greek root _pragmatikos_, whence our word "practice" and "practical." The idea at the basis of this philosophy is that whatever is practical and business-like--whatever is necessary to a given program, is authoritative. The philosopher, Kant, was one of the first to urge that we have a right to believe as we please concerning the things which we can neither prove nor disprove by evidence, if such beliefs are necessary to morality. His modern disciples following his leadership, take the position that it is the usefulness of a hypothesis or a belief, and not its truth, that should concern us. "Does it work," is the test, they say, of the value of a scheme or statement, and not, "Is it true?" If it works, what do we care whether or not it be true. If it does not work, it is of no help to us even if it were true. This is identically the same argument which is advanced by the Roman Catholics, to justify for instance, the belief in the existence, somewhere in the universe, of a place called purgatory. "The doctrine of purgatory works," argues the priest, and therefore, it makes no difference whether or not such a place really exists. It is a useful, consoling and profitable doctrine. Therefore it is as good as true. In the phraseology of pragmatism, millions of people want a purgatory, therefore, there is one. And once again, to the question, "What is Truth," the answer of both the theologian and the pragmatist is, "Do not bother about it." And this describes the attitude of the Protestant as well as of the Catholic toward truth. They do not bother about it. Yes, _they do not bother about it_. That is why progress limps and the darkness lingers. People have been brought up not to bother about truth, which explains why error is still king of more than half of the world. I cannot find the words--all words fail me to express my disappointment that a teacher of the youth in one of our great institutions, who are to be the America of tomorrow, should in any way contribute to the impression that truth is secondary; that our needs, our interests, our inclinations, or our whims, come first, and that if we have not the courage to look the truth in the face, we can turn around and make terms with myth and fable. If we were disposed to trip the professor, or by one single thrust to disqualify him for further action in the arena of thought, we could say that even from the point of view of the pragmatist, truth comes first, and that by no imaginable manoeuvring can truth be shifted to a subordinate rank. It cannot be done. Listen! You may not have to prove the existence of a God, or of a future, or of a purgatory, before believing in it. Granted: but you have to prove and you are trying to prove, that it is _true_ that you do not have to prove them. Even pragmatists who say that utility is before truth, labor to prove that it is _true_ that utility is before truth. In other words, they have got to prove the truth of their theory, whatever that may be, before they can make it have any value, or before it can command our respect. Things have to be true else they cannot exist. All the labor of Prof. James has for its object the demonstration of what he considers to be a truth, namely: that the truth of the belief concerning the unknown is not essential. In other words, God may be true or not, a future life may be true or not, but it has to be true that it makes no difference whether they are true or not. Wiggle as we may, we cannot escape the ring of reason that embraces life. This is what I mean when I say that the stars fight for Rationalism. Truth is so tightly screwed and made fast to the top of the flag-pole that even hands of iron and steel cannot pull it down to a lower notch. A second remark I would make on Prof. James' manner of reasoning is that such arguments as he uses to prop up the belief in God and immortality show, not confidence, but desperation, if it is not too strong a word to use. Urging us to take risks, to have the audacity, to ignore the question of evidence, to suit ourselves, and, not to mind the facts, is not the language of sobriety, but of recklessness. To say to a man standing on the edge of a precipice and looking down into a chasm of unknown depth and darkness, to jump over, because, perchance, he may discover his heart's desire at the bottom, is frantic advice, and a man has to be in a panicky state of mind to let go of the sun and of the green earth for a possible world at the bottom of the abyss. It was a thought of Emerson that the humblest bug crawling in the dust with its back to the sun, and shining with the colors of the rainbow, is a thing more sublime than any possible angel. If there were the slightest foundation for the belief in an unseen world, no one would think of resorting to such extreme measures as our learned professor does, to uphold it. When I see a man huffing and puffing, I do not conclude that he has a strong case, on the contrary, I am apt to suspect that it is the weakness of his cause which has disturbed his serenity. To tell us that we can will ourselves immortal, or will God into existence, and that all we need is the audacity to plunge into the unknown, whatever the risks, reminds me of La Fontaine's parable of the frog--who thought he could will himself into the size of a cow--with fatal results. The beginning of wisdom is to recognize one's limitations. To tell a man that he can _will_ things into existence is to do him an injury. Pitiful is the God, and chimerical the immortality that has no better foundation than the whim of man. According to the doctrine of "The will to believe" there would be no God if there were no men to "will" his existence, and no immortality if men did not desire it. This is theology dressed up as philosophy or science. How was the world made? And the theologians answer, God said, "Let there be light, and there was light." How was God made? And the pragmatists answer, "Man said, let there be a God, and there was one." This is trifling. If the word is not too harsh, I shall call it sophistry, or mental gymnastics, to which men never resort except when straight reasoning will not help them. Sophistry is a plea of guilty. I was debating the other evening in a Milwaukee theater on the question of the responsibility for the burning of Joan of Arc. While listening to the defense of the gentleman who was trying to prove that the Catholic Church was not responsible for her martyrdom, I said to myself that such a defense would never have been thought of were it not for the fact that the old claim that the church of God cannot err had not broken down. In the same way the defense that the bible should be taken allegorically, proves that the old position that the bible is from cover to cover the word of God with every letter and punctuation, as well as word and meaning inspired, is no longer tenable. To say that the bible must not be taken literally is but another way of saying that the bible is not true, or that you can make it mean what you please. Men never put up such a defense for anything unless they are driven to it by sheer desperation. My third remark on the pragmatic philosophy of Professor James is that, besides doing violence to our reason, his doctrine that an unseen world is indispensable to make life worth living, or to help make the world moral, places man not only in an unenviable light, but it also does him a great injustice. If it is true that a man will make a beast of himself if he finds out that he is not a God, I take the position that he is beyond hope. Nothing can save him. But it is not true. It is a priestly tale that a man will not behave himself unless we can promise him the moon, or the sun, or eternity. A man would only be a contemptible animal if he must be given toys and trinkets and sawdust dolls to divert his attention from mischief. The claim of the preachers that unless men are assured of black-eyed houris and golden harps, or at least,--some sort of a ghostly existence,--somewhere and at sometime in the future, they will convert life into a debauch, is simply a falsehood. Man is not so depraved as that. Indeed, the doctrine of total depravity was invented by the priests to create a demand for the offices of the church. The priest cannot afford to believe in human nature. If a man can save himself, or if he can do good by his own effort, what need would there be of the mysteries and the sacraments,--the rites and the dogmas? I had occasion to tell you a few Sundays ago that if a lily can be white, or a rose so wondrous fair, or a dog so loyal and heroic, without dickering with the universe for a future reward, man can do, at least, as much. Would this be expecting too much of him? In France, there is, in one of the close-by suburbs of Paris, a cemetery for dogs. Of course, no priest or pastor would think of officiating at the interment of a dog, however useful or faithful the animal may have been. They are brought here by their owners and quietly buried. The visitor finds here, however, many tokens of appreciation and gratitude for the services and value of the dog to man. Little monuments are raised over the remains of some of the occupants of the modest graves. One of these bears the inscription: "He saved forty lives, and lost his own in the attempt to save the forty-first." He did his best without the hope of a future reward. Is man lower than the animal? Does he require the help of the Holy Ghost, the holy angels, the holy Trinity, the holy infallible church, and all the terrors of hell fire to make him prefer sense to nonsense, cleanliness to dirt, honor to disgrace, the respect of his fellows to their contempt, and a peaceful mind to one full of scorpions? Do we have to swing into existence fabled and mythical beings and worlds before we can induce a human being to be as natural as a plant and as faithful as a dog? The doctrine of total depravity is a disgrace to those who have invented it, and a blight to those who believe in it. It is not true that we have to be put through acrobatic exercises,--make our reason turn somersaults, resort to sophistry,--become frantic with fear about our future,--postulate the existence of ghosts, Gods, and celestial abodes before we can prefer the good to the bad and the light to darkness. Supernaturalism is both negative and destructive. It denies goodness, and it destroys in man the power of self-help. Von Humboldt's indignation seems pardonable, when he used the word "infamous," to characterize the theologian's attempt to make the well-being of the human race depend upon such supernatural gossip as he had to market. And what is the verdict of history on this question? Does the belief in God and immortality make for morality? How then shall we explain the dark ages which were ages of faith, and why are not the Moslems, whose faith in Allah and in a future life is very much stronger than ours, a more moral people than the Europeans or Americans? Why was King Leopold, the Christian, a moral leper to the hour of his death, while Socrates, the pagan, who was uncertain about the future, has perfumed the centuries with his virtues? Has the belief in the supernatural prevented the criminal waste of human life, protected the child from the sweat-shop and the factory, or even robbed religion of its sting--the sting whose bite is mortal to tolerance, brotherhood and intellectual honesty? There are excellent people who believe in the supernatural and equally excellent people who ignore the supernatural, from which it would follow that excellence of character is independent of one's speculations about either the eternal past, or the eternal future. It is not true then that we have to prove to man that he has always existed, or that he shall always exist before we can make him see that the sunset is beautiful, or that the sea is vast, or that love is the greatest thing in the world. A man will be careful of his health whether he expects to live again or not. He will avoid headaches, fevers, colds, anaemia, nervous prostrations and diseases of every kind which rack the body and make life a misery, irrespective of his attitude to the question of survival after death. The question of health, then, which is a very important one, is independent of any supernatural belief. It would not affect our health a particle were the heavens empty or full of gods. In the same way, men will continue the culture of the mind irrespective of theological beliefs. Will a man neglect the pleasures of the mind, despise knowledge and remain content in his ignorance, if he cannot be sure that he is going to live forever? But if neither the culture of the body nor that of the mind is in danger of being neglected, is there any reason to fear that the culture of the affections and the conscience will suffer without a belief in an unseen world? We have only to look into the motives which govern human actions to recover our confidence in the essential soundness of human nature, and in the ability of morality to take care of itself without the help of ghosts and gods. You love your country and you are willing to defend its institutions, if need be, with your life, but is it because your country is immortal? Is America going to live forever? Is it going to have a future existence? And yet Washington and his soldiers loved it dearly and risked their lives for it. Were the ancient Greeks and Romans, to whom patriotism was a religion, and who loved and fought for their country--fools, because they did not first make sure that their country was going to live forever? You are devoted to art, you have built palaces for the treasures of the brush and the chisel. You have paid fabulous prices for the works of a Rembrandt and a Titian. Is it because these paintings are never going to perish? Is the canvas which you adore immortal? You prize the works of genius--of a Shakespeare, a Goethe, a Voltaire, a Darwin. You have edifices of marble and steel in which to house the great books of the world. And yet a fire tomorrow may wipe them out of existence--they may become lost, as many great works have been lost in the past. Nevertheless, are they not precious while we have them? If a humane society will interest itself in the welfare of the horse and the cat and the dog, which live but a few years; if the flower which blooms in the morning and fades in the evening can command our attention and devotion--must a man be a god before we can take any interest in him? Must somebody be always whispering in our ears, "Ye are gods; ye are gods," to prevent us from doing violence to ourselves or to our fellows? And men seek health for the present, not for the future. And they cultivate the mind to make life richer now and here. And love is desired because it makes each passing moment a thrill and an ecstasy. What then is the value of any speculation about the unseen world, since man can care for his body, mind and heart, without venturing out on an ocean for which he has neither the sails nor the compass? * * * * * But the unseen world is necessary, the professor seems to think, in order to explain the suffering and the injustice in this. In my opinion, such a belief has done more to postpone the reform of present abuses than anything else. The time to suppress injustice and to relieve human suffering is now, not in some distant future,--here and not in an undiscovered country. The belief in God has tempted man to shirk his responsibilities. He has left many things to be done by God which he should have done himself. It is a nobler religion that tells man to do all he can now, and to do it himself. Moreover, how can what is wrong here be made right in the next world? What, for instance, can make Joan of Arc's atrocious murder--a girl of nineteen, who had saved her country, roasted over a slow fire--right in heaven? What explanation can the Deity give to us which shall reconcile us to so infamous a crime. A million eternities, it seems to me, cannot alter the character of that act. The deed cannot be undone. That frightful page cannot be torn from the book of life. You cannot destroy the memory of that injustice; you cannot rub so foul a stain from the hands of even a God. Suppose God were to say to us in the next world that this crime was necessary to the progress of civilization. Would that satisfy us? Would we not still wish for a God who could have contributed to the progress of civilization without resorting to so unspeakable a murder? And there you are. Another world can never reconcile us to a policy that required the commission of crimes whose stench rises to our nostrils. What is wrong can never be made right. You remember that to illustrate the thought of Professor James, I spoke of my visit to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where, in the vivisection hall, I saw the physicians operating on live rabbits. Professor James thinks that if the rabbit could see everything, it might say to the physician, "Thy will be done." But the rabbit might also say this: "It is well to advance science and civilization; and if it is a part of the _scheme_ to make me contribute to it by my sufferings, I am resigned; but what about the character of the _schemer_ who must torture to death some of his creatures--slaughter with excruciating pain a portion of his family--in order to make secure the lives of the rest?" The existence of evil in a world created by a perfect God is the rock upon which all religions go to pieces. If God can prevent misery and crime, but prefers to work through them, he is to be feared; if he cannot help himself, then he is to be pitied. Who would not rather be the rabbit on the operating table, with the knife in his flesh, than such a God! A God who cannot make a rose red except by dipping it in human blood can be sure that no human being would ever envy him his office. On the last day of judgment, if such a day there be, it will not be the rabbit, or man, who will fear the opening of the books; it will be God. And how do we know that things will be better in the unseen world? Suppose they should be worse? Jesus intimated that the next world would be worse, for he says in Matthew 7:13-14, "Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat; because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." Surely this is not an encouraging prospect. A future which offers happiness to a small minority cannot be looked forward to with enthusiasm. Neither is the thought of a few saved and the many damned a consolation. One of the oft-repeated claims is that the belief in God and immortality is such a happiness that he must be an enemy of his race who would deprive people of it. Even Rationalists are said to envy the believer his peace of mind. But the truth is the very opposite of this. There is abundant testimony to prove that of all people the real and consistent believer is the most unhappy being in the world. The proverbial unhappiness of the Rationalist, like the proverbial death-bed horrors of a Thomas Paine and a Voltaire, is a pure fabrication. While there is absolutely nothing in Rationalism to make anybody miserable, since it does away with fear, which is the only thing to fear, Orthodoxy, on the other hand, starts by not only calling this a vale of tears, but proceeds forthwith to make it so. If we were to place the greatest known Christian saints on the stand to interrogate them on this subject, they would one and all confirm our statement. Listen, for instance, to the confession of Thomas à Kempis: "Lord, I am not worthy of thy consolation.... Thou dealest justly with me when thou leavest me poor and desolate, for if I could shed tears as the sea, yet should I not be worthy of thy consolation. I am worthy only to be scourged and punished."[A] These are not the words of a buoyant and happy soul. And listen to the lamentation of John Bunyan: "Sometimes I could for whole days together feel my very body as well as my mind to shake and totter under the sense of this dreadful judgment of God.... I felt also such a clogging and heat in my stomach by reason of this terror that I thought my breast-bone would split asunder. Oh, how gladly would I have been anything but a man."[B] I could quote long chapters from the biographies of the saints to show the wretchedness, the despair and the agony of the believer, shuddering upon the brink of eternity--uncertain whether heaven or hell awaits to receive him. I could give you a similar chapter from my own experience. When I was much younger, I had implicit faith in the bible and the unseen world. What was the effect of this belief upon me? Did it make me happy? I can never forget the moments of agony I spent on my knees, at the "throne of grace." My pillow was often wet with weeping over sins I had never committed, and fearing a depravity I could never be guilty of. Christianity in its virile form took hold of my young heart as the roots of a tree take hold of the earth in which they grow. I was as sensitive and responsive to its influence as fire is to the wind that fans it into flame. "Am I saved? How can I be sure that God has forgiven me? Where would I open my eyes if I should die tonight? Oh, God! what if I should after all be one of the reprobates--damned forever." Such was the terrible superstition that cheated me out of a thousand glorious moments, and made my youth a punishment to me. One day a member of my church came to me in great distress of mind. He behaved like one who had actually seen hell. "I am damned, I am damned," he cried. "God has forsaken me; there is no hope for me." If a wild beast had its paws in his hair, or a hound its teeth in his flesh, he could not have been more scared. If he could have only laughed at the stupid superstition, all the devils of his distorted imagination would have melted into thin air. [A] _Imitation_--III 52. [B] Quoted by Cotter Morrison, _Service of Man_--34. * * * * * "Our religion does not trouble us that way," I hear the Christians say in reply. Of course not, they no longer believe in it. They let art, music, science, the drama, business, to divert their attention from this Asiatic fetish. Rationalism has dissipated the terrors of the future, and tinted the horizon with beauty and light. But let them believe in Christianity as their fathers believed in it, let them be sincere with it, and it will make life miserable for them as it has for thousands of others. Yes, believe in Christianity as the Apostle Paul did, for example, and you must agree with him, that, "If in this life only we have a hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." And listen to the cry of despair from the lips of the Son of God: "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" The nails in his hands and feet tore his flesh, but it was the thought that he had been forsaken by God that broke his heart. Surely, if a belief in a future life could make anybody happy, it should have made the death of Jesus a symphony, instead of a tragedy. * * * * * In conclusion: Not God, nor the unseen world, but Truth is the sovereign good. There is nothing more excellent. If there be philosophies, they shall pass away; if there be theologies, they shall pass away; if there be creeds, cults, gods, they shall pass away. But Truth is _from_ everlasting _to_ everlasting. In my mind's eye, I see a wonderful building, something like the Coliseum of ancient Rome. The galleries are black with people; tier upon tier rise like waves the multitude of spectators who have come to see a great contest. A great contest, indeed! A contest in which all the world and all the centuries are interested. It is the contest--the fight to death--between Truth and Error. The door opens, and a slight, small, shy and insignificant looking thing steps into the arena. It is Truth. The vast audience bursts into hilarious and derisive laughter. Is this Truth? This shuddering thing in tattered clothes, and almost naked? And the house shakes again with mocking and hisses. The door opens again, and Error enters,--clad in cloth of gold, imposing in appearance, tall of stature, glittering with gems, sleek and huge and ponderous, causing the building to tremble with the thud of its steps. The audience is for a moment dazzled into silence, then it breaks into applause, long and deafening. "Welcome!" "Welcome!" is the greeting from the multitude. "Welcome!" shout ten thousand throats. The two contestants face each other. Error, in full armor,--backed by the sympathies of the audience, greeted by the clamorous cheering of the spectators; and Truth, scorned, scoffed at, and _hated_. "The issue is a foregone conclusion," murmurs the vast audience. "Error will trample Truth under its big feet." The battle begins. The two clinch, separate, and clinch again. Truth holds its own. The spectators are alarmed. Anxiety appears in their faces. Their voices grow faint. Is it possible? Look! See! There! Error recedes! It fears the gaze of Truth! It shuns its beauteous eyes! Hear it squeak and scream as it feels Truth's squeeze upon its wrists. Error is trying to break away from Truth's grip. It is making for the door. It is gone! The spectators are mute. Every tongue is smitten with the palsy. The people bite their lips until they bleed. They cannot explain what they have seen. "Who would have believed it?" "Is it possible?"--they exclaim. But they can not doubt what their eyes have seen. That puny and insignificant looking thing called Truth has put ancient and entrenched Error, backed by the throne, the altar, the army, the press, the people, and the gods--to rout. The pursuit of truth! Is not that worth living for? To seek the truth, to love the truth, to live the truth? Can any religion offer more? What is the remedy for the pessimism that asks, "Is life worth living?" A sound mind in a sound body. There is no better preventive of that depression of spirits whence proceed the diseases which menace life, and mar the happiness of man, than health--moral, intellectual, physical--health; individual and social health. The highest ideal of Christianity is a man of sorrows. The highest ideal of Rationalism is a man of joy! THE STORY OF MY MIND OR HOW I BECAME A RATIONALIST _Price, Fifty Cents_ # In this latest publication of the Independent Religious Society, M. M. Mangasarian describes his religious experience--how, starting as a Calvinist, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, and a pastor of the Spring Garden Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, he thought and fought his way up to RATIONALISM # The book contains a dedication to "My Children," in which the author says: "I am going to put the story in writing, that you may have it with you when I am gone, to remind you of the aims and interests for which I lived, as well as to acquaint you with the most earnest and intimate period in my career as a teacher of men." _ORDER THROUGH_ THE INDEPENDENT RELIGIOUS SOCIETY CHICAGO EARLIER PUBLICATIONS BY MR. MANGASARIAN =A New Catechism.= Fifth Edition, Revised and Enlarged, with Portrait of Author. Price $1.00 =The Truth About Jesus: Is He a Myth?= A new book of 295 pages. Illustrated. Cloth, $1.00; Paper $0.50 =Mangasarian-Crapsey Debate on the Historicity of Jesus.= 25c. =Pearls.= (New Edition.) Brave Thoughts from Brave Minds. Selected and arranged by M. M. Mangasarian. 25c. Presentation Edition, limp leather $1.00 A FEW LECTURES--10c A COPY Is the Morality of Jesus Sound? Rome-Rule in Ireland, with Postlude on Ferrer. How the Bible Was Invented. Morality Without God. Sent postpaid on receipt of price. Ask for complete list. INDEPENDENT RELIGIOUS SOCIETY CHICAGO Transcriber's Note: The following is a list of changes made to the original. The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one. other gods before me" which is metaphysical and without other gods before me," which is metaphysical and without a _raison d'etre_. The part of wisdom as well as of courage then, a _raison d'être_. The part of wisdom as well as of courage then, take an undue advantage of one's neighbors," "Truth is not take an undue advantage of one's neighbors. "Truth is not manoeuvreing can truth be shifted to a subordinate rank. manoeuvring can truth be shifted to a subordinate rank. frantic advice, and a man has to be in a panicy state of mind frantic advice, and a man has to be in a panicky state of mind because it makes each passing moment a thrill and an ecstacy. because it makes each passing moment a thrill and an ecstasy. straight is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth instance, to the confession of Thomas A'Kempis: "Lord, I instance, to the confession of Thomas à Kempis: "Lord, I 
51801	----	THE IMMORTALS By DAVID DUNCAN Illustrated by Dick Francis [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Staghorn dared tug at the veil that hid the future. Maybe it wasn't a crime to look ... maybe it was just that the future was ugly! I Dr. Clarence Peccary was an objective man. His increasing irritation was caused, he realized, by the fear that his conscience was going to intervene between him and the vast fortune that was definitely within his grasp. Millions. Billions! But he wanted to enjoy it. He didn't want to skulk through life avoiding the eyes of everyone he met--particularly when his life might last for centuries. So he sat glowering at the rectangular screen that was located just above the control console of Roger Staghorn's great digital computer. At the moment Peccary was ready to accuse Staghorn of having no conscience whatsoever. It was only through an act of scientific detachment that he reminded himself that Staghorn neither had a fortune to gain nor cared about gaining one. Staghorn's fulfillment was in Humanac, the name he'd given the electronic monster that presently claimed his full attention. He sat at the controls, his eyes luminous behind the magnification of his thick lenses, his lanky frame arched forward for a better view of Humanac's screen. Far from showing annoyance at what he saw, there was a positive leer on his face. As well there might be. On the screen was the full color picture of a small park in what appeared to be the center of a medium-sized town. It was a shabby little park. Rags and tattered papers waggled indolently in the breeze. The grass was an unkempt, indifferent pattern of greens and browns, as though the caretaker took small pains in setting his sprinklers. Beyond the square was a church, its steeple listing dangerously, its windows broken and its heavy double doors sagging on their hinges. Staghorn's leers and Dr. Peccary's glowers were not for the scenery, however, but for the people who wandered aimlessly through the little park and along the street beyond, carefully avoiding the area beneath the leaning steeple. All of them were uniformly young, ranging from perhaps seventeen at one extreme to no more than thirty at the other. When Dr. Peccary had first seen them, he'd cried out joyfully, "You see, Staghorn, all young! All handsome!" Then he'd stopped talking as he studied those in the foreground more closely. Their clothing, to call it that, was most peculiar. It was rags. Here and there was a garment that bore a resemblance to a dress or jacket or pair of trousers, but for the most part the people simply had chunks of cloth wrapped about them in a most careless fashion. Several would have been arrested for indecent exposure had they appeared anywhere except on Humanac's screen. However, they seemed indifferent to this--and to all else. A singularly attractive girl, in a costume that would have made a Cretan blush, didn't even get a second glance from, a young Adonis who passed her on the walk. Nor did she bestow one on him. The park bench held more interest for her, so she sat down on it. Peccary studied her more closely, then straightened with a start. * * * * * "I'll be damned," he said. "That's Jenny Cheever!" Staghorn continued to leer at the girl. "So you know her?" "I know her father. He owns the local variety store. She's only twenty today, and there she is a hundred years from now, not a day older." "Only her image, Dr. Peccary," Staghorn murmured. "Only her image. But a very pretty one." Peccary came to his feet, unable to control his irritation any longer. "I won't believe it!" he said. "Somehow a piece of misinformation has been fed into that machine. Its calculations are all wrong!" Staghorn refused to be perturbed. "But you just said you recognize the girl on the bench. I'd say that Humanac has to be working with needle-point accuracy to put recognizable people into a prediction." "Then shift the scene! For all I know this part of town was turned into an insane asylum fifty years from now." The use of the past tense when speaking of a future event was not ungrammatical in the presence of Humanac. "Do you have the volume up?" "Certainly. Can't you hear the birds twittering?" "But I can't hear anyone talking." "Perhaps it's a day of silence." Staghorn took another long look at the girl on the parkbench and then turned to the controls, using the fine adjustment on the geographical locator. The screen flickered, blinked, and the scene changed. The two men studied it. "Recognize it?" said Staghorn. Peccary gave an affirmative grunt. "That's the Jefferson grammar school on Elm Street. I'm surprised it's still there. But, lord, as long as they haven't built a new one, you'd think they'd at least keep the old one repaired." "Very shabby," Staghorn agreed. It was. Large areas of the exterior plaster had fallen away. Windows were shattered, and here and there the broken slats of Venetian blinds stuck through them. The shrubbery around the building was dead; weeds had sprung up through the cracks in the asphalt in the big play yard. There was no sign of children. "Where is everyone?" Peccary demanded. "You must have the time control set for a Sunday or holiday." "It's Tuesday," Staghorn said. Then both were silent because at that moment a child appeared, a boy of about eleven. * * * * * He burst from the schoolhouse door and ran across the cracked asphalt toward the playground, glancing back over his shoulder as though expecting pursuit. Reaching the play apparatus he paused and looked around desperately. The metal standards for the swings were in place but no swings hung from them. The fulcrums for the seesaws were there but they held no wooden planks to permit teetering. The only piece of equipment that looked capable of affording pleasure was the slide. It was a small one, only about six feet high, obviously designed for toddlers and not for a boy of eleven. Nonetheless, the boy headed for it eagerly. But he'd hardly set foot upon the bottom step of the ladder when the schoolhouse door burst open a second time. A young woman charged toward him shouting, "Paul! Get down from there at once! Paul!" She was an attractive woman, but her voice held a note of panic. She ran so swiftly that Paul, whose ascent of the ladder was accelerated rather than retarded by her command, hadn't quite reached the top when she seized him around the legs and tried to drag him down. "Please, Miss Terry!" he pleaded desperately. "Just this once let me get to the top! Let me slide down it just once!" "Get to the top?" Miss Terry was aghast. "You could fall and kill yourself. Down you come this instant!" "Just one time!" Paul wailed. "Let me do it just once!" Miss Terry paid no heed to his anguished cries. She tugged at his legs while Paul clung to the handrails. But he was the weaker of the two, and in a few seconds Miss Terry had torn him loose and set him on the ground. Then, seizing him firmly by the hand, she led him back toward the schoolhouse. Paul went along, sniveling miserably. They entered the building and the play yard was once more silent and deserted. "By God, Staghorn," Peccary thundered, "you've doctored it! You've deliberately fed false information into Humanac's memory cells!" Staghorn turned to glare at his guest, his eyes flaming at the outrageous suggestion. "The only hypothetical element I've fed into Humanac is your Y Hormone, Dr. Peccary! You saw me do it. You watched me check the computer before we started." "I refuse to believe that my Y Hormone will bring about the consequences that machine is predicting!" "It's the only new factor that was added." "How can you say that? During the next hundred years a thousand other factors can enter in." "But the Y Hormone bears an essential relationship to the whole. Sit down and stop waving your arms. I'm going to see if we can get into the school." Peccary sat down, seething. * * * * * It had been a mistake to bring his Y Hormone to Staghorn. It was simply that he'd been thinking of himself as such a benefactor to the human race that he couldn't wait to see a sample of the bright future he intended to create. "Think of it, Staghorn!" he'd said happily, earlier in the evening. "The phrase 'art is long and time is fleeting' won't mean anything any more! Artists will have hundreds of years to paint their pictures. Think of the books that will be written, the music that will be composed, the magnificent cities that will be built! Everyone will have time enough to achieve perfection. Think of your work and mine. We'll live long enough to unravel all the mysteries of the universe!" Staghorn had said nothing. Instead, he'd uncorked the small bottle Dr. Peccary had given him and sniffed at it. The bottle contained a sample of the Y Hormone which Dr. Peccary had spent many years developing. Its principal ingredient was a glandular extract from insects, an organic compound that controlled the insects' aging process. If administered artificially, it could keep insects in the larval stage almost indefinitely. Dr. Peccary's great contribution had been to synthesize this extract--which affected only insects--with protein elements that could be assimilated by mammals and humans. It had required years of experimentation, but the result was his Y Hormone--Y for Youth. In his laboratory he now had playful kittens that were six years old and puppies that should have been fully grown dogs. The only human he'd so far experimented on was himself. But because he'd started taking the hormone only recently, he was as yet unable to say positively that it was responsible for the splendid health he was enjoying. His impatience to know the sociological consequences of the hormone had made him bring a sample of it to Staghorn. After sniffing at the bottle, Staghorn had poured its contents into Humanac's analyzer. The giant computer gurgled and belched a few seconds while it assessed the nature of the formula. Then Staghorn connected the analyzer with the machine's memory units. As far as Humanac was concerned, the Y Hormone was now an accepted part of human history. But, except for this one added factor, the rest of Humanac's vast memory was solidly based upon the complete known history of the earth and the human race. Its principles of operation were the same as those controlling other electronic "brains," which could be programmed to predict tides, weather, election results or the state of a department-store inventory at any given date in the future. Humanac differed chiefly in the tremendously greater capacity of its memory cells. Over the years it had digested thousands of books, codifying and coordinating the information as fast as it was received. Its photocells had recorded millions of visual impressions. Its auditory units had absorbed the music and languages of the centuries. And its methods of evaluation had been given a strictly human touch by feeding into its resistance chambers the cephalic wave patterns produced by the brains of Staghorn's colleagues. * * * * * An added feature, though by no means an original one, was the screen upon which Humanac produced visually the events of the time and place for which the controls were set. This screen was simply the big end of a cathode-ray tube, similar to those used in television sets. It was adapted from I.B.M.'s 704 electronic computer used by the Vanguard tracking center to produce visual predictions of the orbits of artificial satellites. Staghorn was constantly having trouble explaining to people that Humanac was not a time machine that could look into the past or future. Its pictures of past events were based upon information already present in its memory cells. Its pictures of future events were predictions calculated according to the laws of probability. But because Humanac, unlike a human, never forgot any of the million and one variables impinging upon any human situation, its predictions were startlingly accurate. Humanac had never been exposed to pictures of Dr. Peccary's home town nor to those of a girl named Jenny Cheever. It arrived at the likeness of both town and girl through a purely mathematical process. Staghorn's ultimate purpose in building the machine was to use it in developing a true science of history. Because Humanac was only a machine, Staghorn could alter its memory at will. By removing the tiny unit upon which the Battle of Hastings was recorded and then "re-playing" English history without it, he could find out what actual effect that particular battle had. He was surprised to discover that it had very little. According to Humanac, the Normans would have conquered England anyway a few months later. At another time, while reviewing the events leading up to the American Revolution, Humanac had produced a picture of Benjamin Franklin kissing a beautiful young woman in the office of his printing shop. On impulse Staghorn removed this seemingly insignificant event from Humanac's memory and then turned the time dial forward to the present to see what effect, if any, the episode had had upon history. To his amazement, with that single kiss missing, Humanac produced a picture of the American continent composed of six different nations speaking French, German, Chinese, Hindu, Arabic and Muskogean--the last being the language of an Indian nation occupying the Mississippi Valley and extending northward to Lake Winnepeg. It served as a buffer state between the Hindus and Chinese in the west and the French, Germans and Arabs to the east. * * * * * It was Humanac's ability to predict the future consequences of any hypothetical event, however, that made it an instrument capable of revolutionizing history. Once its dependability was thoroughly established, it would be possible for a Secretary of State to submit to Humanac the contents of a note intended for a foreign country, then turn the time controls ahead and get Humanac's prediction of the note's consequences. If the consequences were good, the note would then be sent. If they were bad, the Secretary could destroy the note and try others--until he composed one that produced the desired result. Humanac's flaw was that it had no way of explaining the predictions produced on its screen. It merely showed what would happen when and if certain things were done. It left it up to the human operator to figure out why things happened that way. This was what was troubling Dr. Peccary. He could see not the remotest relationship between his Y Hormone and the fact that a mathematical probability named Miss Terry should refuse another mathematical probability named Paul permission to climb to the top of a six-foot playground slide. Meanwhile Staghorn had been using the fine adjustment on the geographic locator and now grunted his satisfaction. "Good! We're in the building, at least." On the screen was a dusky corridor. On either side of it were classroom doors, some closed, some ajar. Staghorn moved his hand from the fine adjustment to the even more delicate vernier control which permitted him to shift the geographic focus inches at a time. The focus drifted slowly forward to one of the half-open doors, and then he and Dr. Peccary were able to see into the classroom. It was deserted. Desks were thick with dust. Books, yellow with age, were strewn on the floor. Staghorn's hand sought the vernier control again. The picture led them on down the corridor to another open door. Again it was a scene of desolation. "This can have nothing to do with my Y Hormone!" Peccary insisted. "Then why is your picture on the wall there?" Staghorn said with a note of malicious pleasure. Dr. Peccary looked and started. On the classroom wall was a faded photograph of himself. Except that he was wearing a different suit in the picture, he looked just as he looked at the present moment. Staghorn got a closer focus on the photograph so that Peccary could read the legend beneath it. _Dr. Clarence Peccary, the man who gave the world the Y Hormone._ "All right then," said Peccary, somewhat mollified by this tribute. "If they put my picture on school room walls a hundred years from now, it means I'm an honored man, a man the world admires. And therefore the Y Hormone _can't_ be the cause of all this desolation!" "I've found that Humanac's reasoning and human reasoning differ in many ways," said Staghorn. On the screen they were out in the corridor again when from somewhere ahead came a woman's voice. "You may recite now, Paul. Please stand up." "Ah, that sounds like Miss Terry," said Staghorn. He fingered the vernier control. The focal point slid forward along the corridor. "Stand up and recite, Paul," Miss Terry said more sharply. "I think they're in the room on the left," said Peccary. II The focus shifted to the open door and then Peccary and Staghorn could see into the classroom. This one was in slightly better order than the others and was occupied by two people. In front sat Miss Terry, obviously the teacher, and at one of the desks sat Paul. He seemed to be the entire class. At Miss Terry's urging he was coming to his feet, his face still stained with tears. He held his book a few inches from his nose and stared over the top of it sullenly. "Go ahead, Paul," said Miss Terry, sweetly stubborn. "I'm waiting." Paul looked at his book and read from it in a monotone, enunciating each word carefully as though it had no relationship to the other words. "I am a human being and as long as I obey the six rules I shall live forever." "Very good, Paul. Now read the six rules." Paul sniffled loudly and commenced reading again. "Rule one: I must never go near fire or my clothing may catch aflame and burn me up. Rule two: I must keep away from deep water or I may fall in and drown. Rule three: I must stay away from high places or I may fall and dash my brains out." He paused to sniffle and wipe his nose on his sleeve, then sighed and continued dismally. "Rule four: I must never play with sharp things or I may cut myself and bleed to death. Rule five: I must never ride horses or I may fall off and break my neck." Paul paused, lowering his book. "And the sixth rule?" said Miss Terry. "Go ahead and read the sixth rule." Reluctantly Paul lifted his book. "Rule six: Starting when I'm twenty-one I must take Dr. Peccary's Y Hormone once a week to keep me young and healthy forever." "Excellent, Paul!" said Miss Terry. "And which rule were you breaking just now on the playground?" "I was breaking Rule Three," Paul said, then quoted sadly, "I must stay away from high places or I may fall and dash my brains out." * * * * * Dr. Peccary was on his feet stomping around in front of the computer. "Sheer idiocy," he muttered. "He doesn't have any brains to dash out! I'll admit that a computer with sufficient information about the state of the world might be able to make accurate predictions of events a few months or possibly a year into the future--but not one hundred years! In that long an interval even the most trivial error could distort every circuit in the machine." He jabbed a finger toward the screen where Paul was seated at his desk again. "And that's what that picture is--a distortion. I'm not going to let it influence me one bit in what I intend to--" He broke off because of what was happening on the screen. From somewhere outside the school building came the wail of a deep-throated alarm. Both Miss Terry and Paul were on their feet and by their expressions, terrified. "The Atavars!" Paul cried, his entire body shaking. "To the basement, Paul!" Miss Terry's face was blanched as she grasped Paul's hand and headed toward the door. But halfway there, both came to a halt, breathless and staring. A powerful bearded man strode into the classroom. Paul and Miss Terry fell back as he advanced. He was a man of about fifty, his bushy hair shot with gray, his eyes cold and blue. He was followed by two younger men who studied Paul and Miss Terry with interest. All three wore rough work clothing. The bearded man pointed at Paul. "There's the boy," he said quietly. "Take him." Paul let out a shriek of terror and fled into a corner as the two men advanced. He clawed futilely as they laid hands on him. "For God's sake, shut up," one of the men said with more disgust than anger. He pinioned Paul's arms while the other man bound them together with a strip of cloth. Miss Terry meanwhile had collapsed into her chair. One of Paul's captors glanced at her and spoke to the bearded man. "What about her?" The bearded man stepped close to Miss Terry and put a hand on her shoulder. She recoiled as from a snake. "How old are you?" he asked. Miss Terry made some inarticulate squeaks and the man spoke more sharply. "When were you born?" "Two thousand four," she managed to stutter. The bearded man considered this and shook his head. "Over fifty. By that time they're hopeless. Leave her and bring the boy." Miss Terry let out an agonized wail of protest and fainted across her desk. One of the men slung Paul over his shoulder and the bearded leader led the group from the room. * * * * * "Amazing," murmured Staghorn. "Absolutely amazing. One never knows what to expect." "Pure gibberish," said Peccary, then betrayed his interest by saying, "Can you follow them?" "I'm trying to." Staghorn worked at the geographic adjustment and finally got the screen focused on the corridor again. It was deserted. The bearded man and his companions had already departed. Staghorn touched the controls again, the screen flickered and once more the little park came into focus. But now it, too, was deserted. None of the ragged men and women were in sight, neither in the park nor on the street beyond. Staghorn twisted the focus in all directions without discovering anyone. "That whistle we heard was obviously some kind of alarm," he said. "Everyone must be in hiding--from the Atavars, whoever they are. I strongly suspect that bearded fellow of being one." "You might as well shut it off, Staghorn," Dr. Peccary said coldly. "It's too much nonsense for any sane man to swallow. And unless that machine can provide a full and satisfactory explanation as to why my Y Hormone will bring about the conditions depicted on that screen, I see no reason to keep the hormone off the market." Staghorn turned from the controls to study his companion. "The only possible way that Humanac could give us the entire background of events leading up to what we've just seen would be to set the time control to the present and then leave the machine running until it arrived at this same period again. That would take a hundred years, and I'm not going to sit here that long. What's more, I'm not going to touch your Y Hormone even if you do put it on the market." "There'll be plenty who will!" "That's what Humanac says, yes." Dr. Peccary gestured despairingly. After all, he did have a conscience. "I simply don't believe my hormone can be responsible!" "I'll remind you that your picture was on the classroom wall and that the sixth rule read by that boy indicated that he was supposed to start using your hormone when he reached the age of twenty-one. That would be about the age to stop growing older." "That boy is nothing but a mathematical probability!" * * * * * "That's all you and I are," Staghorn said owlishly. "Mathematical probabilities. Despite Omar, nothing exactly like either of us has ever existed before or will exist again." "But damn it, Staghorn...." Dr. Peccary sat down, his face in his hands. "It's worth millions! I've invested years of work and all the money I could scrape together. I don't see anything wrong in a scientist's profiting by his discoveries. And to keep it off the market just because that insane computer says that a hundred years from now--" He broke off, glaring at Humanac's screen which was still focused on the deserted park. "It simply doesn't make sense! The machine doesn't give any reasons for anything. If there were a way I could talk directly to some of those mathematical probabilities, question them, ask them what it's all about...." He was on his feet, striding back and forth before the computer again. "Perhaps there is a way," Staghorn said quietly. "Eh?" "I said that it may be possible for you to talk with them." "How?" "By making your mind a temporary part of the computer." Peccary studied the huge machine apprehensively--its ranks of memory units, its chambers of flickering tubes, the labyrinth of circuits. "How would you go about it?" "I put you in the transmitter," Staghorn said. He stepped away from the console and slid back a panel to reveal a niche with a seat in it. Above the seat was a sort of helmet that resembled a hair drier in a beauty parlor, except that it was studded with hundreds of tiny magnets and transistors. Staghorn indicated the helmet. "This picks up and amplifies brain waves. I've used it to record the cephalic wave pattern of about a hundred men and women. The recordings are built into the computer, enabling Humanac to assign a mathematical evaluation to the influence of human emotion in making historic decisions. In your case, instead of making a recording of your brain waves, I'd feed the impulses directly into Humanac's memory units." "And what would happen then?" "I'm not altogether sure," said Staghorn, and it seemed to Peccary that Staghorn was finding a definite relish in his uncertainty. "I've never tried the experiment before." "I might get electrocuted?" "No. There's no danger of that happening. The current that activates the transmitter comes from your own brain, and as you know, such electrical impulses are extremely feeble. That isn't what worries me." "Well then, what does?" "In some ways Humanac behaves peculiarly like a living organism. For example, there's one prediction it can never make. Several times I've fed into it the hypothetical information that the two opposing factions of the world have declared war. Naturally everyone would like to know about the outcome of such a war." Staghorn paused, gazing lovingly at his majestic creation. "And what happens?" Dr. Peccary said impatiently. "Nothing. That's just it. The moment I turn Humanac into the future to get a prediction, the screen goes dead. Do you know why it goes dead?" Staghorn looked at Peccary with a pleased smile and didn't wait for Peccary to cue him. "It goes dead because, if war were declared, Humanac would be the first target for enemy bombs. When it predicts a future event, it has to take all factors into consideration. If one of those factors is its own destruction, it can predict nothing beyond that moment." * * * * * Peccary repeated this sentence in his mind while he slowly digested its meaning. What it seemed to mean was that, although Staghorn and Peccary thought of Humanac as only a complicated machine, Humanac's opinion of itself was altogether otherwise. It could foresee its own death. "I often wonder," mused Staghorn, "about those people we see wandering around on Humanac's screen. To us they're only images made by a stream of electrons hitting the end of a cathode ray tube. Their space and time is an illusion. All the same, Humanac comprises an entire system--a system modeled as accurately as possible on our own. It's just possible that the boy we saw, Paul, was experiencing a real terror." Dr. Peccary examined Staghorn in amazement. He had often suspected that Staghorn's genius was tinged with madness. "You're not suggesting that those ... those images are conscious?" "Ah! What is consciousness?" "I didn't come here to get into a metaphysical argument." "No, but it's only fair for me to suggest the possible emotional hazzards involved in hooking you up to Humanac. Because you have to admit that _you'll_ be conscious during the experiment." "Certainly. But I'll be sitting right there." Peccary pointed to the seat in the transmitter unit. "In a sense, yes. Very well, take your seat." Peccary eyed the helmet uneasily. "I'm not sure I want to do this." "But you do want to make millions from the Y Hormone. And you want to enjoy it with a clear conscience. Perhaps it's as you say--there may be other factors involved. By knowing what they are you may be able to negate their influence." Staghorn's voice was a soft purr as he took Dr. Peccary's arm and urged him into the transmitter unit. Peccary sat down. The seat was small and hard. "Just bear one thing in mind," Staghorn said. "Don't get lost. It will be best if you stay in the little park where I can see you and where you'll be in focus. Unless you're in focus it might be impossible to--ah--disengage you." Dr. Peccary could find no meaning whatsoever in this statement, except confirmation of his suspicion that Staghorn was mad. He felt this so strongly that he started to rise from his seat and escape from the transmitter cell. But at that moment Staghorn lowered the helmet onto his head. The sensation he experienced was so novel and startling that he remained seated. For a second or two he could feel the tiny metallic contacts on the inside of the helmet pressing against his skull, but this sensation of physical pressure vanished almost at once. It was replaced by one of headlessness. His body up to his chin still seemed to be sitting in the transmitter--but his intellect had lost completely its sense of localization in the head. He could think clearly enough, but had no notion as to the spot where his thoughts originated. Indeed, the whole concept of relative position seemed ridiculous. At the same instant he felt tall as a mountain and as low as a rug. His mind could fill the entire universe, while resting neatly in a thimble. He could also see Staghorn, for his eyes continued to function and transmit optical patterns, but precisely where he was while receiving these patterns he couldn't possibly say. He heard Staghorn remark, "Fine. The connection is perfect. It's always better when the subject is bald. I'm going to switch you over into Humanac's circuits now." Staghorn's hand moved across the controls and one of his long fingers flipped a switch. * * * * * This was the last Dr. Peccary saw of Roger Staghorn. Instantly he found himself standing in the center of the small park in his home town. His reaction was not one of alarm. Quite to the contrary, his immediate thought was one of surprise that he wasn't alarmed. Standing there in the little square felt entirely normal and proper. Next he was jolted by the realization that he must be an image on Humanac's screen. He quickly looked about in all directions, half expecting to see Staghorn's huge face peering down from the sky like God. There was no sign of Staghorn, however. The world about him was as three-dimensional as any he'd ever known. He was in his home town a hundred years after he'd last seen it. Good lord! He was a hundred and forty-two years old! This realization was followed by a host of others. Like a man coming out of amnesia, his past began filling with memories. He was rich. He was the richest man on earth. His Y Hormone was used the world over. A mile away, on the outskirts of town, he could see a portion of his huge production plant. He lived in a majestic palace surrounded by every manner of automatic protective device. Protection? From what? And how had he dared to venture out here in the park alone? But wait ... wait. It was all an illusion. Actually he was only an image on Humanac's screen, a mathematical probability. He must keep that fact firmly in mind, or he might lose his mental balance. He gazed about at the town, dismayed by its appearance. Not a person in sight. Not even an automobile. Of course, the motor car might have become obsolete during the passage of a hundred years. There must be some new mode of transportation--something undreamed of a century ago! While he was wondering what this might be, he heard a clop-clop-clopping and was astonished to see three horsemen approaching the square. As they came closer he recognized them as the bearded man and his two companions. The boy Paul was bound firmly behind one of the saddles. A strange panic arose in Dr. Peccary's breast, but he managed to suppress it with a reminder that this was all illusion. He was here for purposes of information; he must have the courage to get it. So he forced himself to the curb at the edge of the park. When the riders were within speaking distance, he managed to hail them with, "Hey, you!" His nervousness made his words harsh. But then, there was no reason why he should speak politely to kidnapers. He saw that Paul was conscious. The boy had a gag over his mouth but his eyes were open. * * * * * The three riders reined in their horses and looked at Peccary with frank curiosity. "Here's one that didn't hide," one of them remarked, in a tone that Dr. Peccary decided was disrespectful. He stepped forward boldly. "May I ask what you intend to do with that boy?" he demanded. "He wants to know what we intend to do with the boy," said the same man. "Yes, I heard what he said," the bearded man remarked quietly. He hadn't ceased to study Peccary with his piercing blue eyes. Now he urged his horse closer. "You must be a stranger here, son?" "Not exactly," said Peccary. "As a matter of fact, I was born here. That was some time ago and it's true I haven't been here recently." The way the bearded man stared at him made him extremely nervous. "But I'm sure that kidnaping is against the law. If you don't release that boy I'll have to--to make a citizen's arrest!" Peccary knew that his words sounded ridiculous. From the way the three riders exchanged glances it was evident that they thought the same thing. "He's going to make a citizen's arrest," commented the one who liked to repeat whatever Peccary said. "Hush," said the bearded leader. And then to Peccary, "What's your name, son?" "Clarence Peccary. If you don't do as I say I'll--" He stopped short, his heart leaping as the force of his indiscretion struck him. The three men had been struck also. The two younger ones were already on the ground, one on either side of him. Only the bearded man remained mounted. He leaned forward. "I thought you looked familiar. You're _Doctor_ Peccary of the Y Hormone?" His voice was a menacing whisper. Peccary finally answered with a slow nod. "He must have flipped, running around alone like this," a man beside him said. "However, let's never insult fortune!" This was the last Dr. Peccary heard. For at that instant one of the men--he never knew which--struck him forcibly over the head with a blunt instrument. III At Humanac's controls Roger Staghorn leaped to his feet in alarm as he saw what was happening on the screen. Peccary had collapsed now. The two men were draping him across the bearded man's saddle. There wasn't an instant to lose! Staghorn leaped to the transmitter cell where Peccary's material body was seated, his eyes peacefully closed. Staghorn flipped the switch to disengage Peccary's consciousness from Humanac's circuits. Nothing happened. Peccary's body remained as before, blissfully asleep. Good lord, of course nothing happened! How could it? Peccary had just been knocked cold; at the moment he didn't _have_ any consciousness! Staghorn opened the circuit again and whirled back to the control console. He looked at the screen. All three men were mounted again. The bearded leader gestured them on. They set spurs to their horses and galloped away, taking the unconscious Peccary with them. "No!" Staghorn shouted at the fleeing images. "No, Dr. Peccary! Stay in focus!" The horsemen paid no heed--nor did Staghorn expect them to, rationally. His shouts were only involuntary expressions of despair. Grasping the geographic locator, he twiddled it wildly, managing to keep the three riders in focus for several blocks as they sped down a street of the deserted town. Then they rounded a corner and he lost them. By the time he got a focus on the area around the corner they were gone. For several minutes he continued to search, shifting the focal point all over town, but in vain. Dr. Clarence Peccary was lost inside Humanac's labyrinthean brain! Staghorn was stunned. There would be no difficulty in keeping Peccary's physical body alive indefinitely by intravenous feeding, but it was as good as dead while separated from its sense of identity. Worse yet were the probable consequences to Humanac of having a free soul loose in its mathematical universe. These were too dire to contemplate. The machine's reliability might be altogether ruined and Staghorn's life work destroyed. Under the circumstances there was but one course of action. He had to find Dr. Peccary and get him back into focus, so that he could be disengaged from the computer. First Staghorn focused the geographic locator on the town square, the point from which Peccary had been abducted; from there he could begin tracking him. Next he set the time control so that it would automatically disengage the transmitter units in exactly three hours. Whether or not he could find Dr. Peccary in that period of time Staghorn had no way of knowing; but at least he should be able to get himself back into focus at the proper moment. Then, in case he'd failed to find Peccary, he could reset the time clock and try again. Next he opened a second transmitter unit, sat down on the little seat and pulled the helmet down on his head. As sensations of vastness and lost dimensions spread through him, he reached out and pressed down the switch that would pour his own brain impulses into Humanac's circuits. * * * * * Instantly, as with Dr. Peccary, Staghorn found himself standing in the little park. He examined his hands and slapped his sides a few times, taking time to assimilate the fact that he felt perfectly solid. Ah, Bishop Berkeley was right all the time! The universe was subjective--a creation of consciousness! He left off these speculations and recalled himself to his mission. Glancing around, he saw that people were beginning to reappear. They came up from basements and out of the doors of the dilapidated houses and buildings. If there had been a panic, there was no sign of it now. The men and women moved indolently, returning toward the park and the sunlit streets. All were so much the same age and of such similar beauty that it was difficult to distinguish individual members of the same sex. But he finally recognized the girl Dr. Peccary had identified as Jenny Cheever. She had an attractive strawberry birthmark on her hip. She strolled back into the park accompanied by a young man. The two of them took possession of the bench where Jenny had been seated earlier. They sat well apart from each other, silently contemplating the other passers-by. Feeling that his knowledge of Jenny's name constituted a sort of introduction, Staghorn approached the couple. The man paid no attention to him but Jenny watched him curiously. Staghorn was not a man over whom women swooned, and it occurred to him that she found something odd about his dark suit and thick spectacles. He seemed to be the only man in town wearing either. "How do you do," he said to her. "I believe you're Ben Cheever's daughter." She continued to examine him languidly, slowly stroking a heavy strand of her auburn hair. "Am I?" she said at last. "It's been so long I've forgotten. But then I had to be someone's daughter and since my name is Cheever, you may be right. I don't remember you. We must have met ages and ages ago." "This is the first time we've met. You were pointed out to me by a friend." She considered this with a puzzled air, and, idly curious, said, "Do you want to marry me?" "Good heavens, no!" Jenny didn't seem to be insulted by his abruptness. "I just wondered why you'd speak to me," she said. "Because if you want to marry me you have to wait. I've promised to marry him first." She gestured to the man on the bench with her. The man looked at Staghorn for the first time. "Yeah," he said. * * * * * "I see," said Staghorn. "And when is this ... merry event to take place?" "Some day," Jenny said indifferently. "When we both feel like it. There's no use rushing things. I don't want to use up all the men too soon." "Use them up?" "He'll be my twenty-fifth husband." "Yeah," said the man. "She'll be my thirty-second wife." "Your marriages can't last very long," said Staghorn. Despite the physical attractiveness of both Jenny and her escort, Staghorn began to feel clammy in their presence. He had an impression of deep ill health, a sense of unclean, almost reptilian lassitude. "They get shorter all the time," said Jenny, and turned away as though the conversation bored her. The man too had lost interest. Staghorn stood ignored for a moment and then spoke bluntly. "Who are the Atavars?" The word produced the first genuine reaction. Jenny leaped to her feet. The man turned red. "Don't say that word!" Jenny said. "I'm sorry. I'm a stranger." "No one can be that much of a stranger!" "It's indecent," the man said. He stood up and touched Jenny's arm. "I feel my blood pounding. Let's go get married." Jenny nodded and, with a cold glance at Staghorn, moved away with her companion. Staghorn was tempted to follow and demand an answer to his question when he saw Miss Terry approaching. Miss Terry was more likely to have the information he needed, and in any case--since she was only in her fifties--she was less than half of Jenny Cheever's age. He hoped this would make a difference in her attitude. That she was capable of emotion he already knew. Her expression, as she approached, was disconsolate. Staghorn bowed low before her and introduced himself. "Good afternoon, Miss Terry. I'm a stranger to you but since you're a teacher by profession, you may have heard of me. I'm Dr. Roger Staghorn." He straightened, twisted his lips into a smile and waited for Miss Terry to associate his name with those scientific achievements that had so startled the world a hundred years earlier. To his chagrin Miss Terry only gazed at him blankly and shook her head. * * * * * "No," she murmured. Then tears formed in her eyes and she tried to move on. Staghorn stopped her. "Forgive me," he said. "I'm aware of your recent loss. Your pupil, Paul." Her tears dropped more freely. "Sooner or later I knew they'd get him. The only child in town. And now I have nothing to do. Nothing at all!" "They? Just who are they--the Atavars?" Miss Terry turned pale. "Don't say it," she pleaded. "In time I'll forget." "But where have they taken Paul? And what will they do with him?" "He'll die, of course." She spoke these words almost indifferently, then wept copiously as she added, "But I'll live on with nothing to do!" "Then why didn't someone stop them?" He gestured angrily at the handsome young males wandering through the park. "All these men--why don't they rescue Paul?" This suggestion so shocked Miss Terry that she stopped weeping. "That's impossible! There'd be violence. Someone might get killed!" "They think of _that_ with a boy's life at stake?" Staghorn felt his rage rising. He was an irascible man by nature and had controlled himself so far only because he knew he was part of an illusion. The sense of illusion was fading rapidly, however. The guiding principles of morals and ethics were themselves abstractions and therefore operated just as powerfully in an abstract universe. He grasped Miss Terry by the arm. "I'll go after him myself. Where do I find him?" "You can't find him! If you follow they'll capture you too!" "I'll chance that! Where have they gone?" "I can't tell you! They might punish me!" Staghorn shook her heartily, ignoring the fact that she was over fifty. "Tell me! It so happens that besides Paul, they've captured Dr. Clarence Peccary, and I'm responsible for his life!" At this statement Miss Terry let out a cry of horror. "They've caught Dr. Peccary? No! No!" "They most certainly have. So hurry up and tell me--" "We'll all die!" wailed Miss Terry. "We'll all die!" "In that case it can't hurt you to tell me." "The mountains!" cried Miss Terry. "High Canyon!" It was with great difficulty that Staghorn forced directions from her. The news of Peccary's capture had unsettled her entirely. But despite the roughness with which he was forced to use her, no one came to her rescue. Several young men and women gathered at a safe distance to watch, but they did nothing to interfere. * * * * * Staghorn finally elicited the information that High Canyon was several miles north of town and could be reached by following a dirt road. To his inquiry as to where he could rent a car, Miss Terry went blank again. There were no cars. They had been abolished before Miss Terry was born. She thought there might be one in the museum. Staghorn glanced at his watch. He'd already been in the transmitter thirty minutes. He had only two and a half hours to get to High Canyon, rescue Dr. Peccary and Paul and return to the square. He dared not cut it too fine. He'd have to be back with a few minutes to spare. So, after learning the location of the museum, he took off at a run. It was evident that at some period in the past the town had gone through a surge of prosperity, for there were several quite majestic buildings whose cornerstones bore dates of the late twentieth century. But it was also clear that during the last fifty years not only had few new enterprises been started but the old ones had been allowed to languish. The museum even lacked an attendant at the door--unless one gave this title to the bust of Dr. Peccary which stood on a pedestal just inside the entrance. The plaque beneath the bust noted that Dr. Peccary had given the museum to the city in 1985 "to preserve for our immortal posterity a true picture of the world of mortals." In the seven and a half decades since, however, this true picture had suffered badly. In the absence of curtains and draperies, and in the nudeness of the mannekins whose purpose could only have been to display twentieth century costumes, Staghorn gained a hint as to where the populace got at least a part of the rags they wore. He didn't pause to examine details, however. A wall directory with a faded map of the building had given him the location of the wing of twentieth century machines. He headed there at once, passing by displays of tractors, bulldozers, jackhammers and other commonplaces before reaching the automobiles. There was an excellent selection of standard and sports models, all a uniform gray under their coats of dust--and all of them out of gas. After so long a time it was doubtful if any would have run anyway. He had simply hoped that one lone attendant might have kept one in working condition. In the next room, however, he found the reward for his effort. Bicycles. He chose a racing model. A few minutes later he was pedaling rapidly northward on the dirt road that led to High Canyon. IV Dr. Peccary could feel fingers probing at his sore head. A bit of damp cloth or cotton was pressed against his upper lip. The sharp odor that stabbed his nostrils made him jerk his head away and suck in his breath. "Good. He's coming around." Dr. Peccary opened his eyes. For a few seconds faces and objects swung around him giddily, but finally the environment achieved stability. He saw that he was in a log cabin, on a bunk. Seated in a chair beside him was a man whose manner could belong only to a doctor. Standing behind the doctor was the bearded man. "He'll be all right," the doctor said, packing bottles and probes into his little black bag. Dr. Peccary sat up and touched the back of his head gingerly. It was very, very sore. He'd never had an illusion quite like this before. Besides, the illusion had persisted too long. How long had he been out? Hours? Days? Good lord, had Staghorn deserted him? The bearded man ushered the doctor out, locked the door and came back to observe Peccary. He put a booted foot on the chair and leaned an elbow on his knee. "I hardly need tell you, Dr. Peccary," he said, "that this is the happiest day of my life." "But not of mine," Peccary responded sourly. "I doubt if you can make it a bit worse by telling me what this is all about and what you plan to do with me." The bearded man showed surprise. "You don't know?" "No! I don't know!" Peccary was losing his detachment. The bearded man considered him thoughtfully. "I shouldn't have let the doctor go so soon. Apparently you were hit harder than we thought. On the other hand it's just possible, living as you have these last seventy years locked up in your palace and isolated from the rest of the world, that you've lost touch with what is going on." "I've lost touch with a great many things. Obviously I'm a prisoner. How long is this going to last?" "Only until my demolition squad is ready. Then we take you to your production plant where you produce the Y Hormone. There will be a gun at your back, of course. You know the combination to get us safely past the automatic guards. Ah, I've waited all my life for this! Once we're in the plant, my men will do the rest." "You're going to blow it up?" "Absolutely!" * * * * * "And what do you gain by that? The formula for the Y Hormone still exists!" The bearded man laughed. "Yes, I can see you've been out of touch with the world. It's been thirty years since the country produced anyone capable of working with that formula. That's when the last university closed down--thirty years ago." "That's shocking," said Dr. Peccary. "But my experiments showed conclusively that the Y Hormone has no deleterious effect upon intelligence. I took every precaution!" "Nothing wrong with anyone's intelligence," said the bearded man, "except that no one's under pressure to use it. When the future stretches on indefinitely, it gets easier and easier to put things off until tomorrow--even education--until finally it's put off forever. There's only one man living who understands that formula." "And who is that?" The bearded man looked down at him hatefully. "Yourself, Dr. Peccary! That's why we're so delighted to capture you--because now you'll never use it again!" Peccary stared at him aghast. "I understand now! You mean to steal it. You mean to force it out of me and start producing the Y Hormone yourself!" This accusation resulted in a violent reaction from the bearded man. He grasped Peccary by the lapels of his jacket and hauled him to his feet. Peccary could feel the man's powerful hands trembling with rage. "You fool! You utter imbecile! Don't you even yet know who we are?" Peccary was so throttled by the man's clutch that he could only waggle his head in the negative. The bearded man's face came close to his. "We're mortals!" He flung Peccary back on the bunk contemptuously. "We accept our allotted span of years and call it quits. But during that time we live! We have to. It's all the time we have!" He glared at Peccary a moment before resuming in a milder tone. "After we destroy your production plant, Dr. Peccary, we're going to kill you. You might as well know. It's the only way to make certain that the formula for the Y Hormone will never be used again." Then he smiled. "But take consolation. With the plant destroyed you'd gradually get old and die anyway. For the brief period before we execute you, you might even regain an appreciation for life." He bent suddenly, gripped Peccary's wrist and hauled him to his feet again. "In fact, you might have forgotten what life is. I'll refresh your memory. Come along!" He dragged Peccary to the door, opened it and led him outside. Peccary looked around. He found himself on the level floor of a canyon whose vertical walls rose high on either side. He recognized the place at once. Often when he was a boy he'd come here to camp overnight. It had been a delightful wilderness with a year-round stream. * * * * * The canyon had changed. Some forty cabins like the one he'd been in were built in the shade of the southern cliff, and the canyon floor was covered with green crops and pasture. He heard singing, laughter. People were at work in the fields, children were building rock castles at the base of the cliff. On a cabin porch two elderly men sat playing checkers. "The last of the mortals," said the bearded man. "If there are any other colonies we don't know of them. But when you're gone, Dr. Peccary, they'll be the first of a new race! You asked earlier what we intended to do with the boy we kidnaped. There he is." And he pointed toward the canyon wall. Peccary looked and saw Paul climbing upward along crevices and ledges. The bearded man cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted. "Paul! How is it?" The boy straightened on a rocky pinnacle and looked back. His face was ecstatic. "I'm climbing!" he crowed. "I've never been so high! I'm climbing all the way to the top!" He waved and clambered on. "Once in a great while a child is born to one of the immortals," the bearded man said. "If we find him in time we can save him." Peccary watched the boy move upward along the cliff. "Then why was he so terrified when you captured him?" "Because he'd had it pounded into him that if the Atavars got him he'd die. He will, too, eventually. Like any other mortal. But in the meanwhile--" He broke off and turned on Peccary savagely. "You see, there's one thing you didn't consider at all! The Y Hormone stops aging and keeps people healthy, but it can't protect them from accidents. The immortals can still die if they get hit by a train or fall overboard in the middle of the ocean. A mortal can accept the possibility of accidental death because he knows he's going to die anyway sooner or later, but can't you see the psychological shock to the immortals when one of them dies? A man who had the potential of living forever, suddenly wiped out! It's like the end of the world. And so they started eliminating hazards. Automobiles went first. Then planes and trains. They weren't needed anyway, because people stopped traveling. To travel is to court accident. But one precaution breeds another, and before long people were avoiding all dangerous occupations. With immortality at stake, even the smallest risk was too much. Planing mills, machine shops, mines, smelters--bah! Name me an occupation that doesn't occasionally entail some hazard. Even motherhood!" * * * * * "But I anticipated the need for birth control! I had the plans all set up." "There was birth control all right, but not the way you planned it. Ten years after your hormone went on the market the world had an extra five billion people. For a few years they produced a surge of energy until the older immortals started eliminating the hazards. After that, starvation set in. Three-fourths of the population died. Your hormone can't keep people from starving, either, and it was a shock from which those who survived never recovered. Every new mouth to feed was a threat. Childbirth practically stopped. But that left the remaining immortals in a very soft position. For years now they've been existing on the leftovers from civilization, finding shelter in the old houses, ransacking the attics and closets of the dead for scraps of clothing, daring to plant a few crops in areas where they'll grow with little care. And after that--boredom." He thrust an accusing finger at Peccary. "And you dared to use the slogan, 'Time to achieve perfection!' I tell you, Dr. Peccary, the source of man's courage and energy is the knowledge of death! Man was meant to be mortal. We strive because we know the time is short. We climb mountains, make love, descend to the depths of the sea and reach for the stars because the certainty of death urges us on. It's the only certainty the world had--and you would destroy it!" Peccary quailed before the bearded man's ferocity. He was relieved when his captor's attention was diverted by a party of horsemen who rode up in neat order and stopped before their leader. Several horses were loaded with explosives. "We're ready, Sir," their spokesman said. "Good," said the bearded man. "I see no reason to delay an instant." An extra horse had been provided for Dr. Peccary. He was on the point of being forcibly hoisted into the saddle when he was given a reprieve by a diversion of another kind. Approaching on the path through the center of the canyon, pedaling his bicycle frantically, came--Staghorn! * * * * * He rode up to the group and leapt from his seat, his face blue from exertion. He'd been climbing all the way from town. He stood gasping for breath while he dragged his big gold watch from his pocket and consulted the time. He managed a groan. "Only thirty minutes left. Miles to go! But it's down hill all the way; we can make it!" He shoved his bicycle forward. "On the handlebars, Dr. Peccary, quick!" Peccary would have liked nothing better. But his movement toward Staghorn was stopped instantly by the men who were trying to put him on his horse. "They're going to kill me!" he cried. "They're going to blow up my factory and kill me!" "No, no!" said Staghorn. "That can't be. The consequences would be disastrous." He turned to the bearded leader. "Look, Sir, I have no time to explain, and I'm sure you wouldn't believe me even if I did. All of you are illusions! This entire situation is nothing but a mathematical probability. And so I insist that you release my friend, Dr. Peccary, at once!" The bearded man was so amazed by this request that he forgot to take offense. He gaped at Staghorn. "Who are you? I can't imagine an immortal risking himself on a bicycle!" "At this moment I'm desperately mortal, and so is Dr. Peccary!" "Nonsense. Dr. Peccary is a hundred and forty-two years old!" "I've told you this situation has no existence in reality!" The bearded man stomped the ground. "I've been living on this planet fifty-five years. I know reality when I see it! And what's more, I'm beginning to think you _are_ one of the immortals. Even an immortal might show some courage when he knows he's going to be deprived of the Y Hormone." "If you must know, I'm Dr. Roger Staghorn! I can see that there's industry and education in this canyon and so it's possible you've heard of me. I have quite a record of scientific achievements back in the twentieth century." * * * * * At this announcement the bearded man goggled at him, then threw back his head and laughed uproariously. "You couldn't have picked a worse masquerade. Dr. Roger Staghorn died in 1994!" "I can't help that I'm Staghorn!" The bearded man stopped laughing and thrust his face forward threateningly. "You're a fraud! Because it so happens that _I'm_ Staghorn!" "You? Staghorn?" "I'm Henry Staghorn, great-grandson of the real Dr. Roger Staghorn!" "Impossible. I have no intention of ever getting married!" "Dr. Roger Staghorn married when he founded the Atavars, ninety years ago! He saw the need of leaving mortal offspring and sacrificed himself to that end. And he's buried in the cliff over there. Furthermore, he became Dr. Peccary's most bitter enemy. If he were alive today, he'd be tying the knot for Peccary's neck instead of trying to rescue him." The bearded man drew a revolver from inside his jacket. "I think I'll execute you here and now!" Peccary all but fainted. If Staghorn were killed all hope was gone. But Staghorn threw up a commanding hand. "Stop, Henry! What you say may be perfectly true from your peculiar viewpoint. But I'm still Roger Staghorn! Are you going to shoot your own great-grandfather?" Staghorn's tone, rather than his words, made the bearded man pause. He turned to a companion. And in that instant Staghorn moved. After all, he was slightly younger and more agile than his great-grandson. He leapt onto his bicycle, shouting at Peccary, "Turn around!" Peccary whirled and sprang in the air as Staghorn aimed the bicycle between his legs. He landed neatly on the handlebars, and with simultaneous kicks sent the men on either side sprawling. Then he and Staghorn were off down the canyon. Behind them they could hear the thundering hoofs as the horsemen started in pursuit. "Go, Staghorn, go!" Peccary shouted. The race would have been lost at once except for the downhill grade. But because of it, Peccary's added weight was a help instead of a hindrance. Shots rang out; bullets bounced from the rocks on either side. They made it out of the canyon's mouth and the grade increased on the long straightaway toward town. Staghorn's feet spun as they darted downward, maintaining their lead in front of the pursuing horsemen. The town loomed ahead of them, closer and closer until at last they sped into a street where the buildings gave them protection from bullets. The bicycle slowed. They were on level ground again. Staghorn skidded around a corner and stopped so suddenly that Dr. Peccary was propelled forward and landed on his feet at the mouth of an alley. Abandoning the bicycle, both men charged into it. "The square!" Staghorn gasped. "I'm focused on the square!" He hauled out his watch as he ran. Only seven minutes remained. * * * * * The deep-throated alarm whistle was sounding over the town. Its inhabitants must have sighted the approach of the Atavars for they were scurrying into buildings and basements, leaving the way clear for Peccary and Staghorn. They emerged from the alley and turned left for a block, then doubled back as they were sighted by the searching horsemen. The hue and cry was on again, but Peccary's familiarity with his home town served them well until they came within sight of the square. Then they stopped in dismay and ducked into a doorway. Across the street in the center of the little park, as though divining that it must be their destination, was Staghorn's great-grandson and three of his men. Their position enabled them to watch all four approaches to the square at the same time. Staghorn tugged out his watch again. Two minutes. They had to be in focus! A second late and they'd be locked forever. He watched the second hand creep around the dial. "We have to chance it," he said. "When I start running, run with me!" The second hand crept on. A minute left. Staghorn judged the distance from their hiding place to the grassy plot where the bearded man was standing. About seventy-five yards. Could he do seventy-five yards in ten seconds? Could Peccary? Thirty seconds left ... twenty-five ... twenty. He'd never gone through such a painful count-down ... fifteen seconds. "Ready, Dr. Peccary. It's now or never." Thirteen ... twelve ... eleven ... "Go!" Staghorn burst from his hiding place with Peccary at his heels. They dashed for the square. They were over the curb and into the street before the men in the park saw their approach and let out cries of triumph. "Dip and weave, Dr. Peccary! Dip and weave!" They dipped and wove, while bullets ripped at their clothing. They were running right into the fire, making better targets at every stride. Staghorn ran with his watch in his hand, and never had time and distance diminished so slowly. Seven seconds, six, five, and they were still alive and across the street. Four seconds, three, two. They were over the park and onto the grass. A bullet crashed into Staghorn's leg and he fell, diving forward. "Got him!" cried his great-grandson. "Now get Peccary!" * * * * * Three shots rang out as one. But at some point in the bullets' flight toward Peccary and Staghorn, the square and everything in it vanished. Staghorn found himself sitting in Humanac's transmitter unit. The time clock had functioned. He was disengaged. He lifted the helmet from his head and stumbled from the cell, drawing a trouser leg up to examine his leg. It seemed that he could detect a scar. Then he turned and helped Dr. Peccary from the other transmitter. Both men stepped toward the console to look at Humanac's screen. It was still focused on the little park. The bearded man and his companions were now exchanging glances of consternation. After a moment the bearded man wet his lips. "Maybe he was right," he said in awed tones. "No one but my great-grandfather could ever do a trick like that. And maybe what he said is true. It's all illusion. We're nothing but mathematical probabilities!" At this point Staghorn hauled down the master switch. The screen went dead as Humanac's power was shut off. Some twenty minutes later he had finished draining Dr. Peccary's sample of the Y Hormone from Humanac's analyzer and had thoroughly cleansed the computer of any last traces of it. He handed the little bottle of the hormone back to Dr. Peccary. "There," he said. "As far as Humanac is concerned, it's as though it never was. Do as you wish." Dr. Peccary looked at the bottle sadly. It was worth millions. Billions. Then slowly he moved to a laboratory sink and poured the contents of the bottle down the drain. "I can't help wondering," mused Staghorn, "of whose computer we're a part right now--slight factors in the chain of causation that started God knows when and will end...." "When someone pulls the switch," said Dr. Peccary. 
61794	----	BUCCANEER OF THE STAR SEAS By Ed EARL REPP "... and thou shalt be immortal!" Such was the curse of that 13th Century sorcerer. Now Carlyle roamed the uncharted star-seas, seeking Death as he sought the richly-laden derelicts in that sargossa of long-vanished space-galleons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1940. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] An unpleasant shudder went through Thaddeus Carlyle as the great iron door thundered behind him. Reading Gaol's raw, damp atmosphere seemed to settle into his bones. Hobbling on rheumatic legs, the aged turnkey preceded him down the vaulted stone corridor. "'Tis the first time my key has disturbed Friar Bacon's lock these six months," his grumbling voice came to Carlyle's ears. "Plagued few they are that visit the roguish priest. Not even the canon comes now, to exhort him to renounce his black magic." Thaddeus Carlyle's dark eyes flamed with quick interest. "Then he practices still these works of the devil?" he queried softly. The turnkey stopped, his narrowed eyes mirroring fearful thoughts. With his crooked forefinger he tapped the young nobleman's gold-cloth tabard. "Only last month he asked for brimstone, charcoal and niter. We gave him the stuff, seeing no harm. A week ago, as I am passing his cell, there was a great flash and roar. The devil's powders had exploded as steam bursts a tight-lidded vessel! He carries still the marks of a burn." "No!" Carlyle's smooth features were blank. "Fire--from such stuff as that?" "That's not all, my Lord. Friar Bacon tells me that if we would give him enough of the stuff and a long tube, he could throw an iron ball across the Thames!" Turning away with a crafty nod and a meaningful blink, the turnkey led on to the mean little cell in which Roger Bacon had now spent nine years. The visitor was openly affected by the jailer's incredulous story. He had heard strange and terrible things of the Gray Friar. The church, in incarcerating him, had accused him of consorting with the devil. Some whispered that he had learned the secret of immortality. That was the rumor which had brought Thaddeus Carlyle, the second Lord Monfort, into the gloomy confines of Reading Gaol. The lock scraped shrilly as the jailer turned it. Throwing the heavy door open, he grinned: "Lucky for him you came, my Lord! In another month this lock should have been rusted past turning. Then Friar Bacon would have been forever without hope!" "Have I, indeed, such hope now?" a soft and gloomy voice inquired. The turnkey merely winked at the nobleman and hobbled off. Carlyle was suddenly seized by panic. Now that he was so close to the notorious philosopher, fear smote him and he was on the point of turning back. Yet, ridden by an even greater fear, he stiffened his purpose and advanced. Closing the door, he stared at the white-bearded man seated before a great calfskin-bound book on a ponderous table. "What hast thou with me, young man?" demanded Roger Bacon, peering shrewdly from under ragged brows. "Only the admiration of an ignorant man for a very learned one," said Thaddeus Carlyle simply. Bacon's eyes misted. Precious years of his waning life had he spent in prison because there was no man to say such a thing before. "You--you do not believe what they say of me, that I consort with Satan?" he queried. "That my science and my secrets are Lucifer's?" "Well--as to that," said Carlyle, his confidence returning, "I am again the ignorant one. Where you get your knowledge I neither know nor care. I only know that your learning is great ... and that that learning can help me!" * * * * * The Gray Friar wagged his head wonderingly. His eyes went over Thaddeus. He saw a strapping young man over six feet in height, with a muscular development such as came only from constant participation in the strenuous contests popular among the nobility. His skin was brown as leather, burned, Bacon reckoned, by hot Oriental suns during the last Crusade. He saw a man whose rich clothing spoke of a fat purse. And he was asked to help him--he, who could not help himself! "Who are you, young man?" he asked, at last. "Thaddeus Carlyle, the second Lord Monfort," was the reply. "A noble--!" Bacon murmured. "But you--you jest with me!" "Not so!" Carlyle threw a leg across the corner of the table and peered earnestly into the monk's face. "You are old and wise, Friar Bacon. Perhaps you do not know the fear of death. I do! Always it is with me, haunting my pleasures, disturbing my sleep--Fear of growing old and toothless, of losing my strength--of dying as helpless as the day I was born!" "But how can I help you?" frowned Bacon. "All men must face that fear." "But not as I know it! I, who have so much to make life worth the living." Thaddeus rubbed his sweaty palms on his velvet-clad thighs, his brown young face set. Abruptly, he blurted: "They say you possess the secret of immortality, Friar. Is that true?" "They say many things of me," muttered the philosopher. Carlyle leaned toward him. "That doesn't answer my question," he snapped. "I have heard that you added twenty years to your own life by magic!" Bacon stared strangely at him. "You believe that I could save you from death?" "Implicitly!" Carlyle replied. "If you wished to!" * * * * * For the first time, Bacon stirred from the chair. His eyes flashed briefly to a brass-bound chest, near his pallet of straw. Then he stopped with his back to the wall, staring at the young nobleman. "But even if I could do this--!" he frowned. "You do not know what immortality means. Perhaps it would be worse than death!" "If so, I could easily put an end to my immortality," retorted the other. Roger Bacon did not speak for long seconds. Then: "They speak true of me. I do possess this secret. But to release it would mean one more atom of misery thrown upon the world." With his first words, Thaddeus had hunched forward, teeth shining behind drawn lips, eyes glittering. "Has the world been good to you?" he shot at him. "Do you owe it any consideration?" "None," the Gray Friar muttered. "Tell me; what month is this?" "November, Friar," the younger man replied frowningly. "November!" In Bacon's mournful syllables lay all the bitter coldness of the winter itself. "November, Anno Domini twelve hundred and eighty-seven. Nine years since I was thrown into this place of stone and despair. The world has little loved me, my friend, and I hold no love for the world. _Inopem me copia fecit_--abundance made me poor. Abundance of foresight and inventiveness that might have made the world over." The monk had paced to the window through which he got his only small view of the world. Now he swung back. "Yes, my Lord Monfort. I will do what you ask!" Carlyle lurched forward to grasp his arm. "Friar," he breathed. "I only dared hope. But if you do what you promise, I will see that you are freed within the year!" "_Dominus vobiscum!_" Bacon said, tiny lights shining in his eyes. He crossed to the massive chest and opened it. Digging around for a moment among hundreds of curious objects the like of which Carlyle had never seen, he at last returned to the table with two shining articles in his hand. "I told you this would bring a certain amount of grief to the world," he said, when Carlyle was seated beside him on a stool. "I say it again. For each lifetime you add to your own, another must die. And always it shall be a woman ... a woman whose love you have won." Carlyle stared at the philosopher with a mixture of hope and horror in his face. "You must understand," said the Gray Friar, "that the life-spirit, as I call it, is not so deeply rooted in a woman as a man. You hear often of a woman dying of a broken heart, yet never of a man. This is because the woman simply wills her spirit to leave her. It will be your task to cause a woman to give you her life-spirit because she loves you sufficiently." "Yes, Friar," Thaddeus whispered, his heart hammering against his ribs. Bacon placed in his palm a tiny crystal heart dependent from a silver chain. It was crudely carved, yet alight with unholy brilliance. "You will give this to the woman to wear. You yourself will wear this plain silver band I now give you. The process may take days or weeks. When you are with her, cause your own ring to be always touching the crystal heart. Gradually she will grow weaker, while your own strength increases boundlessly. When she dies ... you will have earned perhaps seventy years more of life." "Must it be this way?" Thaddeus groaned, staring horrified at the baubles. "It is the only way," Bacon murmured. "If at any time you decide that you prefer death to immortality, destroy either the heart or the ring and you will not long survive it. Old age will come swiftly." Thaddeus got to his feet, his stomach a lump of ice in him. He suddenly felt a necessity to get into the open air, where he could think. Hastily he muttered: "I will do as you say, Friar Bacon. Thank you for what you have done. I will see that you are freed as soon as possible." Wise old Roger Bacon knew the struggle that was going on within the young lord, and he made no attempt to prolong the visit. "_Pax vobiscum_," he nodded soberly. "The Lord guide you in this." "Th-thank you, Friar!" Thaddeus faltered, and hastily fumbled at the door and left. * * * * * For a month the crystal heart and the ring lay untouched in a small chest in his treasure-room. Then his old fears and nightmares drove him to take them out. He had become accustomed to the grisly demands and they no longer loomed so blackly in his mind. Pictures of himself as an ancient ruin with the skin hanging loosely from all his bones helped in this. For a long time Thaddeus had known that the young daughter of Lord Cartwright secretly loved him. Tremblingly, one night, he bestowed on her the gift of death ... in the form of a tiny crystal pendant. Within a month the girl was dead. And Thaddeus Carlyle ... in his body surged and leaped such strength as he had never dreamed of. He felt he must live forever. His friends began to change, growing wrinkled and less virile, but never he. Soon he saw he must change his abode, lest men suspect him. It was ninety years before the need came upon him to renew the life-spirit in his body. He found a dark-eyed girl in Seville on one of his journeys whom he nominated for his second victim. It was easier, this time. Before she was laid away that old feeling of boundless youth was his again. And so Thaddeus Carlyle saw kings change and nations dissolve, saw a German named Gutenberg print the first book and an Englishman named William Shakespeare write the most perfect prose ever devised. Saw wars and tragedy and comedy, and grew sick with the seeing. Gladly would he have given it up, had he the courage. Down the corridors of time he passed, seeking death as many seek wealth. In peace and war, he was ever in the most dangerous occupations. When aviation came in, he was one of the first and most reckless pilots. Then space travel merged from dreams into reality.... Carlyle became a test pilot, taking on million-mile journeys any craft with a rocket tube and a steering device. To his disgust, he always came back. He had not the courage to shatter the crystal heart and grow old swiftly. He who had condemned so many beautiful women to death was now chained to something worse--eternal life. II "Mr. Carlyle! _Mr. Carlyle._ Are you all right?" Thaddeus Carlyle came out of his revery with a start, to hear the shrill rasping of the _televis_ on his desk. His hand snapped the instrument on. "Sorry, Mrs. Loomis," he muttered. "I must have been napping." The face of his middle-aged secretary looked relieved. "Captain Wolfe is here," she told him. "About the new secretary, you know." "Send them in," Carlyle grunted. He swore softly to himself. Too often lately he had dozed off at the wrong times. He was due for another replenishment, and he cursed his luck that it had to come now. Tomorrow he was leaving in his giant salvage ship, the _Friar Bacon_, for the newly-discovered sargasso off the orbit of Pluto. Nor could the trip be postponed. But the renewal of his life-spirit could not wait either. He was a little too tired at night, a little too slow to react. But the certainty was in him that he would not survive the trip to the new salvage fields, with its attendant rigors. Captain Wolfe, chief officer of the _Friar_, entered with a small, dark-haired young person at his side. "You're in luck, Chief!" he grinned. "I told you I'd find an A-1 secretary for you, and I think I've got her. Miss Holland, meet Thaddeus Carlyle--and don't say you haven't heard of him. Mr. Carlyle, this is Ann Holland." The two exchanged acknowledgments, and Carlyle drew up chairs. "We'll have to be brief," he said. "I've got a thousand things to attend to before night. Now--you have the report from the company doctor?" Ann Holland took a folded slip from her purse and tendered it to the owner of Salvage Lines, Incorporated. Carlyle took the opportunity to appraise her swiftly. He hardly need to scan the physician's report to know her health was boundless. It glowed in the soft rose color of her cheeks, the sparkle of her dark eyes. Her brown hair was carefully combed back from a smooth forehead. The report bore out his supposition. Carlyle questioned her briefly about her qualifications as a stenographer and secretary. Everything was satisfactory, and the references she had to show were excellent. Carlyle handed back the papers. "I think I'm lucky to get so well-spoken of a secretary on such short notice," he smiled. "I know darned well you are, Chief!" Larry Wolfe laughed. "I had to fight every officer in Ann's company to make them let her go." Ann Holland laid a hand on his arm. "I think I had a little to do with my quitting, too," she reproved. "I can't tell you how I've been fascinated by the stories of your salvage trips, Mr. Carlyle. And, of course, hearing Larry talk of his work with you--" Thaddeus's dark eyes opened wider. "Oh--Then you have known each other previously?" he queried. Blond Larry Wolfe held up the girl's left hand, showing the sparkling diamond on the third finger. "Three years previously," he laughed. "We're going to be married after this trip." Against the flash of resentment and disappointment that struck him, Thaddeus Carlyle brought a smile to his lips. "That's fine," he said. "Congratulations, both of you." * * * * * What he didn't voice was the strain of remorse coursing through his mind: "Fine, hell! It's bad enough preying on unattached girls. But the fiancee of your chief officer--" Nevertheless, it was too late to change. Mrs. Loomis couldn't go because she was married. Besides, she was old. There wasn't much life to be stolen from her. "Of course, you'll be wanting to know the type of work you're to do," he got out. "Frankly, it will be more tedious than adventuresome. I've been considering doing a book on the navigation conditions obtaining in the sargassos. You'll take dictation from me most of the time we're in the salvage field. I'll want the notes neatly typed up when we return. That's about all, except that the pay will be seventy-five dollars a week. Satisfactory?" "Perfectly!" Ann breathed, and put her hand out to retrieve the papers from the desk. As she did so, Carlyle's brown, strong fingers picked up the references and tendered them. For an instant their fingers met.... Ann's eyes went suddenly wide, and they flashed up to lock with Carlyle's. She started, as if from a chill. It seemed as if a strong current flowed from his body into hers ... and yet, had she but known, the phenomenon was exactly an opposite one. By now, Carlyle's parasitical work was second nature to him, hardly requiring the jewel and ring. It struck the girl that his eyes were the strangest ones she had ever gazed into. They were so clear she seemed to look through them and far past him. Clear--but yet somehow they were filled with wisdom. It was as though she was looking into vast, forgotten depths of time. Abruptly, she recalled herself. Her hand drew swiftly away from his. "Thank you so much," she murmured. "We're leaving at six, I think you said? I'll be ready." When they were in the outer office, Larry Wolfe took her arm. He was more than happy at the prospect of having the girl along on the long trip. "Drive you home?" he suggested. A frown scored Ann's brow. "No, thanks, Larry," she murmured. "I've got some things to buy uptown. Then I want to go home and rest. I feel a little tired." * * * * * Thaddeus Carlyle stood at his window and watched the last bit of loading being done out on the field. The _Friar Bacon_, with her six tiny salvage ships in their bulging hangars growing out of the mother ship's shell, like pilot fish clinging to the body of a shark, was nearly ready for the trip. Carlyle sighed and wished again that he had time to linger a few weeks before leaving. But it was out of the question. Even a man who possesses immortality must earn his living, and salvaging treasure ships from space was Carlyle's way of doing it. Right now that living was threatened by the savage competition of Brand Haggard, owner of another salvage outfit. Haggard cared little for the ethics of the business. He'd double-cross, steal, murder, lie, to gain his ends. It was such tactics that had put Carlyle in his present hole. Coming in on his last expedition, he had found the sargasso off Pluto and duly registered it with the Universal Salvage Commission, applying at the same time for exclusive salvage rights. But Haggard had used his crooked political affiliations to get in on the pie. Carlyle had had to share the rights with him. Now it was a bitter fight to be the first in the field, for the first ship there gutted the most treasure from the wrecked space vessels. A delay of three weeks or a month would mean the _Friar Bacon_ returned with empty holds. And that might mean ruin for Carlyle. Lately, salvage pickings were getting smaller and smaller. He intended to get into another business for his next lifetime. The question of the girl still lay like a bitter pellet in his mind, but with an effort he shelved his remorse. He decided to return to his packing. There were two more things to be stowed away in his private lockers. One was a plain silver ring, and the other was a little crystal heart. * * * * * At six o'clock the next morning the _Friar Bacon_ rested in its deep starting-tube in the center of the field. At seven o'clock it had proceeded so far on its journey that Earth was but a silver quarter hanging in the sky behind it. Larry Wolfe was on the bridge. His engineer's eyes sparkled as he regarded the instruments. Fuel--brimming over; speed--one-quarter; retarding gravity quotient--three percent. Ideal conditions, and an ideal ship. He had faith in the _Friar Bacon_, and in its owner. He knew about Brand Haggard, but it didn't worry him particularly, with the best of materials and men to work with. Larry was on the point of inching the speed up a trifle when a bell began to tinkle. Swiftly he twisted in his seat. Immediately he saw what had aroused the alarm. A ship was coming up fast, behind them. Haggard already! he thought. He stabbed at the buzzer to Carlyle's quarters. The hard, brown features of the ship's owner snapped into view on the _televis_. "Yes?" was the metallic query. "Ship approaching, sir!" Larry clipped. "I think it's Haggard's _Martian_. Shall I give her the gun?" "No, let him come up with us. No use racing yet. We'd just strain the seams before they've heated properly." "But if he beats us to the fields, sir!" Thaddeus Carlyle's eyes crinkled. "He won't, Wolfe. I registered a false location with the Commission! He'll either go hell-for-leather out toward Uranus or he'll pace us. Either way, I'm not worrying." "Very good, sir." Larry Wolfe turned from the instrument to his controls. "Hard as nails!" he chuckled to himself. "He wouldn't hurry for the devil himself. You'd think he'd lived five hundred years, the way he thinks of all the angles and beats hell out of every other ship in the fleet. He's too smart for one man." That very night, trouble boarded the _Friar Bacon_. In a way, it was Larry Wolfe's fault. Coming off duty eight hours after they left, he hurried to Ann Holland's stateroom near Carlyle's suite, eager to hear how she had enjoyed her first day aboard a space-liner. He found her tired and curiously subdued. "Excitement get you?" he asked her. Ann's eyes flashed as she thought of the thousand new things she had seen. "A little, I guess," she admitted. "But, Larry, it's wonderful! Such a feeling of freedom, so many strange things to be seen. Here we are darting through space like a liner plowing the Atlantic!" "You'll get over that pretty soon," Larry grinned. "Then you'll be like the rest of us space-sailors, cursing our luck that man can't push his darned ships along at the speed of light." "I don't think I ever will," the girl mused. "They build these ships just like Swiss watches, don't they? Every beam and girder machined by hand, every nut and bolt a masterpiece. I went over the whole ship with Thad. I feel like an authority already!" She laid her head against the cushioned back of the chair, glancing through drowsy eyes out the port-hole. With her face turned away from Larry's, she did not see the swift bolt of jealousy that shot through him. "Thad?" he echoed. "That's funny, Ann. I've never been allowed to get that familiar with him myself. It's always 'Chief' or 'sir' to us crew members." The girl's eyes widened a little; then she shrugged her slim shoulders. "I don't know how I happened to call him that. He seems to be a person so very likeable you can't be formal with him." "I hadn't noticed it," Larry Wolfe snapped. Ann sat up wearily, brushed stray hair back from her ear. "Oh, now, Larry," she reproved him. "Are you going to start acting like a high-school boy the minute we start?" The young ship officer's jaw had set like cement. "What'd you do all day? Talk, I suppose?" "Yes, we talked! For eight hours! I don't know where the time went, but I do know I've never had a better time in my life!" She said it defiantly, and in the wake of the angry words grew a high wall of pride between them. Ann made one final effort at conciliation. "Larry, do you have to be like this?" she pleaded. "I'm wearing your ring, isn't that enough?" Larry stood up. "That's exactly it," he snapped. "You're wearing my ring and the men are going to be watching pretty damn closely when they see you hobnobbing constantly with Carlyle. Oh, don't get me wrong; he's a fine fellow and I think the world of him. But I'm going to ask you not to be with him any more than your work requires!" Ann's fingers tugged at the diamond ring, and suddenly she was handing it to him. "Then here's something for you to mull over, Mr. Larry Wolfe," she said frigidly. "While we're on the trip you can just pretend that you've never met me before. I won't have your jealousy preventing me from doing a good job." Larry let the tiny platinum band drop into his broad palm. His eyes showed the pain that twisted through him, but all he said was: "All right, Ann. But when you want the ring back, you'll have to ask for it." III Brand Haggard's sleek, black _Martian_ did not try to pass them, as Carlyle had prophesied. For three weeks the ship was back there on the starboard quarter, matching them move for move. It was on Larry Wolfe's mind constantly while he stood on the bridge, doing little to ease the tension of his nerves. Strange, unpredictable currents suddenly developed about the ship, and Larry knew that they were only a day or so from the sargasso. Staring through the finder, he made out the diaphonous cloud he had been searching for so long--the sargasso in which they hoped to find millions of dollars in salvage prizes. Magnetic currents, as yet unidentified by scientists, drew space wreckage here from all over the solar system. Ruined space liners, flotsam and jetsam of fifty years of interplanetary traffic, here collected bit by bit. For the salvage crews who made lucky finds, there was wealth; for those who made the tiniest of errors in their dangerous work, there was death. Larry Wolfe's thoughts were on the long-missing Astral as he stood his watch that last night. The _Astral_, lost gold transport from Mars to Earth, had been the dream of salvage men for twenty-five years. Somewhere in the solar system it still drifted about. The chances were good that it had been sucked into one of the many sargasso fields; still better, that this newest field, largest of all, had caught it. In Thaddeus Carlyle's rooms, Ann had been hearing the same story that Larry was dreaming over even now. Carlyle's quiet, powerful words painted romantic highlights over it. The girl found her heart beating faster in anticipation of the days ahead. "But in all this trackless wilderness of--of ether," she frowned, "how can you hope to find anything at all? Let alone the _Astral_--" Carlyle smiled, glanced out the port at the vague gray shadow into which they were heading. "If we worked with just the one ship, we wouldn't find much," he admitted. "Actually, we use six. We drop the smaller salvage ships here and there as we enter the sargasso. The three men in each craft cruise about within a one-hundred-thousand-mile radius. After we've dropped all the ships, we circle back to the spot where we left the first one and wait for the flare signal from it. There's no radio transmission out here, you know. The scout ships are pretty much on their own. When they've located a prize, they tie up to it and go to work dismantling the craft. If they haven't located anything after the first scouting trip, we move them along to the front of the line. It's something like playing leap-frog." "I suppose your ships and Haggard's honor each other's finds?" "Supposed to," said Carlyle grimly. His dark eyes flashed to the slim, shark-like hull haunting their wake. His big, sturdy body seemed to tighten. "Haggard's got the reputation of being a pirate. I'm not looking for trouble, but if there is any--well, we can take care of ourselves. I know a few tricks more than Brand Haggard, I think." Looking at him, Ann knew a thrill of admiration. His attraction for her had been growing with every hour they spent together. "You seem so confident about it," she murmured. "After twenty years of this sort of work you get your lines pretty well in mind," Carlyle chuckled. "Twenty years!" Ann's brow arched. "But you don't seem to be over thirty--!" "I'm a little older than that," the laughing answer came. "I began as a galley-boy." Silence fell for a moment, while Ann tried to figure his age from what he had said. Then suddenly Thaddeus Carlyle was saying softly: "You aren't wearing Captain Wolfe's ring any more. I couldn't help noticing. Anything wrong between you two?" "We--we decided it was best, during the trip, to forget our engagement," the girl faltered, the color rising into her cheeks. She knew he saw through her evasive answer. His eyes, so piercing and yet gentle, seemed to know everything she thought. * * * * * Abruptly, Carlyle's fingers slipped about her hand. "Ann, if you and Larry ever do break it off," he pleaded, "will you remember that I--could love you very much?" Ann was startled. Still more startled to feel the almost irresistible link between them, drawing them together. "I'll remember, Thad," she murmured. Carlyle slipped something from his pocket. "And just to make sure you don't forget," he said sternly, "you're going to wear this as a reminder. I found it in a wrecked ship, a long time ago. Like it?" He leaned forward to slip the thin silver chain about her neck. Ann's eyes widened as she accepted the necklace. She held the tiny crystal heart in her fingers as Carlyle snapped the tiny lock. "I've never seen anything like it!" she breathed. "So crudely cut, and yet every line so perfect. Thad, look! The color of it! There seems to be just a suggestion of pink in the very heart of it--" Thaddeus Carlyle let the gem fall into his palm, so that the crystal contacted his silver ring. Ann gasped. The suggestion of pink was now a glowing atom of scarlet, as though the heart held one drop of blood. It throbbed and pulsed with life of its own. The heart grew warm against Carlyle's palm-- Suddenly the girl fell back against the chair. "I--I'm so tired, all of a sudden," she whispered. "Almost too tired--to breathe. Take me--to my cabin--Thad. I think I want--to lie down." Carlyle swore under his breath. "Fool!" he muttered. "I've been wearing you out with work, and excitement piled on that. You're going to bed, young lady. The ship's surgeon is going to have a look at you, too." "No, I'm all right," Ann murmured. "Just--tired." But Thaddeus Carlyle's strong arms were under her, now, and even as he carried her from the cabin she fell asleep. Looking down on her placid features, so like death, he felt a stab of remorse. Why did it have to be like this? he groaned. A life for a life--Carlyle knew within himself that he was willing to die right now. He'd seen enough of life and its disappointments. But always there was that strain of cowardice in his soul--fear of growing old, of dying. He'd courted death so long, hoping for a quick end on some battlefield, in some remote part of interstellar space. But never did it come. Friar Bacon had indeed cursed him with eternal life. * * * * * Six hours later, just as his shift was ending, Larry Wolfe spotted the first loose cluster of drifted wreckage. This meant they had entered the actual salvage field. He rang for Carlyle and the ship owner responded immediately, ducking to enter the bridge. Larry's clipped voice masked the jealousy he felt toward Carlyle. "Flotsam off the starboard bow sir," he said mechanically. Through powerful glasses, the other examined the wreckage. He lowered the glasses hurriedly. Apparently it was merely the torn, gutted shell of a barge, but-- "Rest of it may be near," he grunted. "We'll drop off Murphy, Stoller and Cass. Seen anything of Haggard lately? Anything to worry about, I mean?" "Yes, sir. He's drawn closer ... much too close considering we should be splitting apart now." Carlyle pivoted and shot a glance back at the darkly looming _Martian_. His brows drew into a solid bar across his angry eyes. "Half speed astern, Captain," he clipped. Larry glanced back at him. "You mean that?" "Exactly. Pull in beside the devil. I'm going to speak him." The _Friar Bacon_ rolled and wallowed as the message was flashed to the engine room. Larry braced himself against the forward lurch of his body. The ship owner stood with legs spread wide, fists on hips, watching the _Martian_ shoot ahead, seemingly, until it was nearly even with them. Its stern jets, firing pale columns of flame, did not slacken. "Send up a flare," ordered Carlyle. "I'm going to the air-lock. And by the way, tell Murphy to cut his ship loose right now." "Yes, sir." The bridge door clanged shut and Larry sprang to his round of duties, sending up a purple flare--"we wish to speak you" signal--relaying the message to Murphy to drop away in the scout ship with his two-man crew, swinging the ship over until the _Martian_ was so close they could see the faces at the ports. The purple answering flare went up, and Larry moved to maneuver the ship alongside, so that air-lock was to air-lock. The other pilot was an expert, handling his ship like a toy in the hands of a giant. The shock was almost imperceptible. Larry left the bridge just after he saw Murphy, Stoller, and Cass silently pull away, keeping the tiny scout in the umbra of the _Friar Bacon_, hidden from Brand Haggard's eyes. He found Carlyle waiting for him. Together they closed themselves into the tube. The outer end was now locked firmly against the glass door of the _Martian's_ air-lock. Forms shifted eerily behind the double-thickness glass. At a tap on the glass, Carlyle swung his own window back. The other ship's master did the same. Then, suddenly, they were standing face to face, Haggard and Thaddeus Carlyle, Larry and the captain of the other craft. Carlyle was not one to spar for openings. "Let's have an understanding right now, Haggard," he snapped. "You've cut yourself in on this deal but you'll play it according to the rules. Make one misstep and it's war to the last man. Is that clear?" Haggard chuckled. "I think I get it," he said. "Well, it's okay by me, mister. I'll work this section and you work the other side of the field." "You will like hell," barked Carlyle. "I've got a ship in the field already. That, according to the Universal Salvage Code, gives me prior rights. Find yourself another playground." Larry watched the other ship-man's eyes dwindle to steely pin-points, but still he kept a grin on his wide mouth. Haggard was a powerfully built Swede, one of those laughing, blond-headed men who seem a throwback to the days when giants fought with seventy-pound broadswords and wore chain mail. His savagery belonged to another era, too. Men who had shipped with him never did so again, and thanked their stars they were still alive and more or less sane. "All right, Carlyle," he chuckled, at last. "Round one is yours. You keep your boys toeing the mark and I'll try to do the same." His eyes dropped to Larry's face. "Got your course mapped out?" Larry handed his captain the chart he had brought with him, and the man glanced at it with shrewd, faded blue eyes. He was a hard-case old-timer, leathery of skin, short coupled, and tough as oak. But he knew his business, and handed the sheet back directly. "Fair enough," he gruffed. "That gives us room enough to turn around in." "I guess we're agreed, then," Thaddeus Carlyle said curtly, extending a broad palm to Haggard. "Good luck." They shook hands, and once more the glass ports were rolled back in place, the locks opened, and the ships drew apart. "The damned liar," Carlyle said darkly, watching the _Martian_ arch itself high above them and surge away. "We'll have trouble with him before two watches are down on the log." IV It was not until just before he himself quitted the mother ship that Larry Wolfe learned of Ann's illness. Climbing above his pride, he had gone to her cabin to say good-bye. Doctor Van Doren, ship's surgeon, met him at the door. "You must not excite her," he said, in a low tone. "Say good-bye if you like, but--" "_Doctor!_" Larry seized his arm. "I--I hadn't heard Ann was sick. What is it?" "I don't know. Just a complete physical collapse. She's too tired to eat, even. Ever since last night." Larry was pushing past him into the cabin. He went down on his knees beside the girl's bed and his hand closed on her cold fingers. "Ann!" he choked. "They didn't tell me...." Ann wouldn't meet his eyes. "I asked them not to. I'm all right, Larry. Just tired." A cold blade stabbed at Larry's heart. "Why wouldn't you let me know?" he asked. Ann's eyes seemed fixed on a rivet in the ceiling. "Because I didn't want to worry you. And--I didn't want to fight with you again." "As if I'd so much as raise my voice, with you sick," Larry groaned. Then his eyes fastened on a ruby-colored heart lying on the girl's breast. "What's that?" he asked, half in alarm. "I've never seen it before; it looks--like it's alive, Ann!" The girl's fingers toyed with it. "It was a gift," she murmured absently. "Carlyle!" Larry could not restrain the angry syllables. "I don't like it, Ann! It's like a serpent's eye, or something. It looks so alive--" Ann's eyes at last met his, and they were cold as space. "We won't argue about it," she said wearily. Larry got up, striving against the hot resentment searing his heart. "You know I'm leaving now?" "Yes. Good luck, Larry." "Thanks!" Larry snorted, and strode from the room. * * * * * Larry's was the last scout to be dropped from the _Friar Bacon_. The mother ship was now piloted by Carlyle, who swung it back to the first salvage ship they had dropped. For hours it was a matter of cruising this way and that, searching the sky for traces of wreckage. Bits of flotsam were everywhere, but large fragments were scarce indeed. Larry's heart was leaden, but he buried himself in the work and succeeded in half-forgetting his worries. Lanky Jeff Adams was at the controls of the cramped little vessel when the first dark splinter was sighted in the void. Braced against the lurch and roll of the ship, Larry scrutinized the wrecked ship as they neared it. So unbelievable was the sight he saw that for an instant after he lowered the glasses it did not penetrate his reflexes. His fingers were tracing the vessel's name into the log when suddenly he stared at what he had written: "11:46 A. M. sighted derelict _Astral_. Good condition...." Larry Wolfe dropped the glasses and let out a yell. Jeff leaped as though he had been stung, his magnificent red beak of a nose growing redder with the excitement. Abe Miller, stocky, beetle-browed helper, stared at the officer. "What's amatter, Chief?" he jerked. Dumbly, Larry pointed. "That's--the _Astral_!" he gasped. "Two hundred million dollars--in gold--!" Abe and Jeff were stunned; then they crowded the port to stare at the ancient craft dead ahead. The scout had drawn near enough now that the name of the transport was plainly visible in letters running from stem half-way to stern. Weakly, Jeff let himself back into his seat and muttered: "Two--hundred--million ... in Martian gold! And we get ten percent for findin' 'er. Ten percent of two hundred million, divided three ways--" Larry laughed and poked playfully at his big nose. "Don't count your shekels before you hear them jingle," he counseled. "The _Astral_ may have been gutted by pirates. Give her the gun, mister; we're finding out!" The little space-craft slewed and rocked to a stop beside the giant transport. Shock struck the three men dumb with their first glimpse close up. Faces crowded the ports, staring out at them. Larry fancied he saw movement among the watchers on the bridge. To all appearances the _Astral_ might have been a vessel in mid-flight. They cruised slowly up the side, not ten feet from the ghostly faces that watched them with staring eyes. Foot by foot they proceeded. Rounding the front of the craft, they could see into the bridge. Two men were working over charts and a man in blue-and-gray uniform was at the controls. Another, a pencil over his ear, stood reading a gauge high on the wall. Then the meaning of it all came home to them. The port side of the ship was ripped open from stem to stern. Something--no doubt a jagged meteor fragment--had sliced and torn its way through the shell of the speeding transport. The occupants of the open side had exploded like deep-sea fish drawn to the surface. These in the space-tight, unharmed cabins opposite had been frozen instantly by the outrush of pent-up air. And there they had stood in the attitudes in which Death had found them, staring out as they forged through the meteor-swarm, hoping they would not be hit. In the silence they tied up to the derelict, their magnet-plates clinging like suction cups. Donning space suits and carrying kits of tools, they leaped through the rent into the dead ship. A vague twilight dwelt in the interior. Larry led the way to the bridge. The frozen lock was cut out by means of a torch. With set jaws he went inside. "Better load 'em out quick, boys. If the sunlight starts to thaw 'em there'll be a hell of a mess. Throw 'em clear of the ship. It's tough--but it's a sky-man's end, and we may all meet the same some day." While Abe and Jeff carried the corpses away, he found the log and traced back to the vessel's start. There he located the cargo list. Two hundred million was correct, as the refining company had stated when the ship was lost. Their next job was to cut into the hold. The sight of two hundred million dollars in gold bullion took their breath away. Jeff sat down and began laying the ponderous bars into three piles, muttering: "One for me, one for you, and one for Abe. One for--" Larry laughed, "Get to work, you half-baked lout. We've got to lug all these out to where they'll make quick loading. _Friar Bacon_ should loom up in about four hours. I'll set the flares--" And then they all went stiff, hands reaching for energy-pistols. Through the ship's floor came the thud-thud-thud of walking men! * * * * * Larry sprang into the hall. Three whirled at his advance. He snapped on his transmitter, the instrument operating through the metal floor like a telegraph. "Get the hell out of here!" he barked. "You're fifty thousand miles out of your territory. Is this how Haggard keeps a bargain?" The foremost pirate said not a word, but suddenly the pistol in his hand flared redly. Larry flung himself aside, blasted away with his own weapon. The wall of the corridor dissolved beneath his shoulder. A scream rang through his helmet, chopped off clean as the pirate's space suit was blown open. Jeff and Abe were yelling for Larry to get out of their way and give them a clear shot. Larry's answer was to duck into the hole blasted in the wall by the energy bolt. He got the second pirate in his sights and saw him crumple under a wave of atom-dissolving force. A mere fringe of the charge scored the helmet of the last man. Screaming shrilly, air rushed from his suit. His body blew up like a balloon in a decompression-bell, until he filled the bulging suit. Then there was a ghastly moment of seeing blood spurt through the hole in the helmet. And after that he was only a sickening smatter of glass and blood and powdered bone. The swiftness with which it was all over left the three salvage men weak. Larry forced himself down the hall. There might be more of them. But a glance outside showed only one _Martian_ scout tied up. As a precaution, he turned his force weapon on the little ship until the hammering and searing energy shocks melted its magnet plates and hurled it away. Hastily, then, he turned to Jeff and Abe. "Pile aboard," he cracked out. "We're dropping this until we contact Carlyle. Haggard will be back looking for his scout. We want more than hand guns to use when he returns. This is war!" V They sighted the _Friar Bacon_ well toward the front of the line of scouts. Only one ship lay in its carrier. The mother ship hove to while the tiny craft nuzzled into the waiting pocket. Carlyle was waiting at the air-lock when they sprang out. Larry's words crackled with tension. "We've raised the _Astral_, sir! Afraid Haggard's going to know about it in a few hours, too. One of his scouts jumped us and we killed the men. Better let us go back with Murphy's ship while you round up the rest of the fleet. This is going to mean trouble!" Carlyle's eyes glowed, and his features seemed to shine with inner energy. "Great work!" he breathed. "I'll drop off Murphy directly. Mark the way out there with flares. We'll get the rest of the boys and be there in three hours. If we're lucky we can unload the _Astral_ and be out of the territory without crossing his path." Larry Wolfe saluted and turned back to the scout. He tried to summon the fierce dislike he had for the salvage boss when he was away from him, but it would not rise. Carlyle's personality was a strong one. Men instinctively took orders from him and liked it, and women--Well, Ann had certainly changed. Yet there was a shading of something sinister under the man's smooth, forceful exterior. Larry could not isolate the things about him he distrusted. Once more they dropped away from the _Friar_. Murphy, Stoller and Cass came booming along after them, jets belching and the whole, tiny craft leaping like a released whippet in the effort to pace Larry. It was an hour and a half before they saw the _Astral_ in their glasses once more. In their path they had dropped red fluctuating flares to guide the mother ship to the derelict. The scout sidled in beside the space-barge. Magnets sent out invisible tentacles and hauled them against the vessel with a stiff shock. Murphy's red head bobbed into view as his own craft made landing. Larry Wolfe snapped orders. Stoller and Cass tackled the job of cutting away the ragged metal to provide more room for the loading of the salvage ship. Jeff, Abe, and Murphy joined Larry in the back-breaking toil of moving the gold. And all the time they were conscious of the precious weapon that was slipping from their fingers ... _time_! Minutes, seconds, fleeing from them, while they wondered which ship would be first to return, the _Friar Bacon_ with its glittering silver hull, or the black tiger-shark of the void--the _Martian_. Without warning there was a terrific crash against the side of the derelict. The six sweating workmen were flung to their faces on the floor. One of the scout ships was torn lose and went rolling away. Larry ripped out his gun and crawled to the opening in the vessel's shell. What he saw caused him to sigh with new relief. "Meteor shower," he called to the others. "We took the biggest part of it right then. You can hear the dust pattering against us now. Nothing to worry about." _Nothing to worry about--!_ But right then another impact came that up-tilted the barge and hurled them from their feet, stunned. A shadow fell over the sunlight splashed room and a long, black shape glided past, a mile or two away. The _Martian_ was back and ready for war. * * * * * There was a second shot that sprawled them around. In the bow of the attacking cruiser winked a malevolent green eye. At Larry's signal, every man jammed the range setting on his pistol up to full. Even with the guns taxed to their utmost, they would be pitiful answer to the cannon aboard the other craft. "Murphy!" Larry yelled. "Take your men up to the bridge where you can keep your eye on 'em. Keep firing. Don't let 'em rest." But there was no slowing down Brand Haggard. With the cunning of a tiger, he swooped and curvetted about the _Astral_, never stopping long enough to let one of those pistol shots burn deep. There was not an instant when the derelict was still; constantly it rolled in a sea of searing, churning ether, burned fiercely by force-charges. From time to time a great hole was gashed through the barge. Then there came a blasting concussion that piled Larry, Jeff, and Abe in a corner like three rats in a box. Blood filtered down Larry's neck where his space suit had gashed him. Light spilled into the ship through the fore parts. With his heart hammering, he ran forward to the bridge. He found the hole where the bridge had been, but Murphy, Stoller and Cass were gone. A hundred yards away the _Martian_ was maneuvering for another shot. Larry ran back to the others. "They're gone," he bit out. "And we're slated for the same if we hold out any longer. Let's grab the scout and head for the _Friar_. Maybe we can get back here before Haggard guts this barge." All three men seemed to sense the cessation of the _Astral's_ rolling at the same instant. They glanced dumbly at each other. _What had caused the pirate to stop its barrage?_ All at once, Jeff was pointing, yelling like a madman. Cheers broke from the others' throats. With the swift grace of a bullet, the _Friar Bacon_ was shooting across the sky in pursuit of Haggard's ship! For a few minutes it was like watching a pair of clever fencers feint and lunge. The speed of the ships went for little now. It was the daring and skill of the man at the controls that spelled victory or defeat. But in the end it was the _Martian_ that drew off. A shot ripped away most of a scout carrier and showed Brand Haggard, temporarily, at least, that he was bucking a tougher, smarter man. Carlyle did not chase him. Such a pursuit, zig-zagging on full throttles through space, could easily last a week. He brought the big cruiser alongside the wrecked _Astral_ and the survivors sprang aboard. VI Larry, Jeff, and Abe were pounded on the back by their companions, while eager hands dropped to the derelict to begin the transfer of cargo. "You three better hie yourselves down to the galley and get some grub," Carlyle grinned. Jeff and Abe took him at his word; but Larry, lingering, asked Carlyle pointedly: "How's Ann? She was pretty sick when I left her." He would have taken oath that the salvage boss' dark eyes flinched. Those piercing eyes searched his face for an instant before Carlyle replied. Finally: "Not so good, Captain," he said. "Why don't you look at her? Might do a lot for her, you know." "I'm afraid I don't know, sir," Larry Wolfe ground out. "I seemed to be so much excess cargo last time." He turned stiffly and passed him. But, drawn by something more powerful than his wounded pride, he went straight to Ann's room and knocked softly. A voice so weak he scarcely recognized it answered him. Larry went in. Ann was lying back against the pillows. The deathly pallor of her face caused him to start. "Ann!" he groaned. "What is it? What's happening to you?" The girl's bloodless features did not warm at sight of him. But a strain of fear coursed through her throaty tones. "I don't know," she whispered. Her fingers went to toying with the little heart lying against her throat. Suddenly Larry was striding forward, to stand looking down at the jewel with blazing eyes. "Damn that thing!" he gritted. "You're going to turn it over to me right now. I don't know what it is, but I'll swear it's alive with some deadly force of its own. It's glowing like a piece of red radium!" Ann's waxen fingers closed over it. "You're talking like an insane man, Larry!" she panted. "You may as well understand right now that I'm not taking orders from you like a stevedore. If I want to wear a simple piece of jewelry, no amount of your ranting will prevent me!" Larry's cheeks grew scarlet, his fists knotting up hard. "Maybe it won't," he retorted, "but by Heaven, Carlyle knows the secret of that stone and I'm going to wring it out of him right now!" "Larry!" The girl's voice followed him, laden with sharp fear. Larry Wolfe ignored her cry and strode to the loading deck. What he contemplated was mutiny, perhaps, but it was Ann's life at stake. Carlyle was not on the loading deck, nor did Larry locate him on the bridge. As a final resort he strode to the ship owner's room. The door was unlocked, and he barged in without knocking. Staring angrily about him, he saw no sign of his quarry. Then a sort of madness laid hold of him. He began to ransack Carlyle's belongings, searching--what he sought, he couldn't have said. But he was seeking proof that Thaddeus Carlyle was something more than he represented himself to be. There was nothing he wouldn't have expected to find there. Nothing but one small article: an oval-shaped brooch of yellowed ivory, a tiny painting of a man's head on it. He had examined similar ones in museums. Carrying it over to the light, Larry was shocked to note the resemblance of the man's face to Carlyle. Then he found the minute, hair-line script below it: "Thaddeus Carlyle, Lord Mon--" The last word had been obliterated by time. Larry's breath rattled in his throat as a queer panic gripped him. Feverishly he shoved stiff fingers through his hair. _Lord Monfort--!_ They hadn't made miniatures like this one for hundreds of years. Larry turned the brooch over and discovered on the back the words: "From Helene. Nov. 1346." The brooch struck the floor with a clink. The sound seemed to pour new life into Larry. He shouted, "Ann!" and sprang into the hall and swiftly toward the girl's room. * * * * * Voices stopped him just before he touched the knob. Carlyle's voice, softer than he had dreamed it could be, murmuring: "If only there weren't Larry--if I weren't afraid he might steal your love back. You say he means nothing to you, and yet--" "You _know_ he means nothing to me!" For all its animation, Ann's voice held the monotonous cadence of one who is half-asleep. "You do love me, Ann--more than life itself?" "More--than life--Thad!" "Ann, I'm going to ask you something--wait, dear! I know you're tired; but you must keep your eyes open a moment longer...." The door crashed inward. Larry Wolfe was through it and upon Carlyle before the latter could get to his feet. He had been sitting on the edge of Ann's bunk. With steel fingers Larry hauled him to his feet. "You damned parasite!" he shouted. "You thought you'd prey upon Ann the same way you did the others, did you?" His fist struck out, but the salvage boss caught his wrist and held it. "Are you insane?" he roared. Larry's mood was not one of arguing. Again he struck, and this time the blow chopped into Carlyle's mouth and brought blood. Ordinarily the bigger man could have cut Larry down with a few man-killing punches, but the madness in Larry Wolfe knew neither pain nor weakness. He took savage blows to the face and ribs, but stayed on his feet. A lucky uppercut jarred Carlyle's teeth in his head, and for an instant he was sagging against the wall. Larry seized that split-second to spring to the bedside of the terrified girl and tear the necklace from her throat. He threw it at Carlyle with all his force. The gem missed, shivered into tiny, glittering crystals on the floor, like shining drops of blood. Thaddeus Carlyle's face paled under its deep tan. He glanced down at the wreck of the crystal heart. He was on the point of drawing his pistol when the alarm began to ring. "Mr. Carlyle! Captain Wolfe!" the voice boomed through the ship. "_Martian_ returning. All hands at their posts!" On the tail of the warning came a shock that tore the _Friar Bacon_ from the side of the derelict. Larry had a glimpse through the port, of men in space suits left hanging in the void between the two ships, of gold ingots floating grotesquely around them. The battle was forgotten, as fighters toppling over a cliff forget their differences and scramble for safety. Larry followed the ship owner up the corridor, climbed the ladder to the top deck, sprang to the firing lever of the big energy gun stationed in the nose. The other men darted from the control room to their posts. The _Friar_ was stationary for a second, while Carlyle located the other ship. With a surge of swift power that took the passengers' breath, the craft shot after it. * * * * * Haggard's strategy had been to get in line with the sun and keep in line with it while he rushed down on the unsuspecting salvage ship. Reports were crackling in from all parts of the ship regarding the damage done. Nothing had been touched, it seemed, except one of the forward scout carriers, which was blasted loose. Larry was tensely vigilant as he crouched over the firing lever. He did not glance at Carlyle. The salvage boss' face seemed to have set into grimmer lines than ever. Up ahead the _Martian_ was fighting to keep out of line. Haggard's poor shot had put them in the disadvantage. Carlyle piloted like a demon, straining the ship until the bulkheads chattered in their steps. Haggard's slightest error meant the gap between them closed that much more. Suddenly something seemed to go wrong. The _Martian_ faltered for a tenth of a second. In the next moment Thaddeus Carlyle swerved until the pirate's rocket tubes were straight before them. "Fire!" he clipped. Larry pulled swiftly at the lever. There was no response. Harder, he tugged. "I said _fire_!" Carlyle shouted at him. "I can't hold this point any longer. They're under way again." Sweat started from Larry's pores. "The thing's jammed, Chief!" he groaned. "They got our gun with that first shot." Carlyle seemed to wilt a little. What it meant was that they were up against a fast, armed vessel with no means of defending themselves. As if Brand Haggard sensed the trouble, too, he put the _Martian_ about and came booming down the line at them, head-on. Carlyle's response was slow. The ship heaved violently as a rear stabilizer melted under Haggard's shot. Only the fact that the shock threw them away from the pirate's line of fire saved them. Now it was the _Friar Bacon_ that dodged and ran. The air boiled all about them. Larry could envision Haggard's grinning, savage countenance hovering over the firing lever, ceaselessly yanking at it. And there was something wrong with the staggering _Friar_. Larry thought for a while that their stabilizers were not functioning. Always they were a fraction of a second late in diving out of range. It was when Haggard was not over a few hundred yards in the rear that Larry glanced over at Carlyle. In a flash he was on his feet.... He saw sunken, shrivelled cheeks and glazing eyes. Gray hair straggling from under the jaunty officer's cap. A scrawny neck going down into a collar many sizes too large. Larry was cold all over. He took Carlyle by the shoulders and hauled him out of the chair, surprised at the lightness of his body. The bony fingers clawed at the controls and then gave them up. Larry let him sag to the floor and grabbed the controls. Haggard was diving again, with throttles wide open. A few miles ahead lay the wreckage of the _Astral_. Larry suddenly saw his chance. He had no gun, nothing to fight back with; but here was where courage and skill might count heavily. With the _Martian_ a hundred yards in the rear, dead on the stern, Larry fired both bow rockets and the port stern rocket. Braces screamed and loose objects toppled, as the _Friar Bacon_ slowed and went into a tight pin-wheel. The _Martian_ roared up alongside. Larry blasted out with the other stern rocket and the two craft jarred together. At the same instant he turned on the boarding magnets, so that the ships were held together as though welded. Brand Haggard's blond head bobbed into view only fifteen feet away. He stood up from the firing lever and stared through the bridge port at Larry. This was the first time Larry had ever seen him when he was not grinning that arrogant wicked grin of his. * * * * * Haggard was shaking his fist and yelling. His gun was useless now. And he knew only too well what lay in Larry's mind: To carry him dead into the _Astral_ and pile the _Martian_ up like a racing car striking a brick wall! The captain of the black vessel tried every strategy he knew. But Larry held it down to the course he had set. The two ships flashed on toward destruction. Haggard's face showed in the glass, threatening, cajoling, pleading. At the last moment he held up two fist-fulls of paper money, trying to buy another chance. Larry laughed and dropped his hand on the magnet lever. Screams of terror built up within the _Friar Bacon_ as the crew discovered the derelict dead ahead. They were drowned under the roar of rockets as Larry cut the pirate loose and moved to avoid the _Astral_. He had a horrible moment of watching a fin on the wrecked vessel reach out to rake the belly of the slewing salvage ship. Then all dissolved in a shower of wreckage, the fin crumpling away and flames shooting up where it had been. The _Martian_ had crumpled up like an accordion. Bodies flew past the windows, to explode as the pressureless atmosphere inflated them. Gold ingots mingled with them. Everywhere there was death, and the horror that can come only from a wreck of two such space-giants as the _Martian_ and the long-dead _Astral_. The _Friar_ toppled end over end, a chip caught in a maelstrom. Miles away from the carnage, Larry Wolfe managed to right it. He stood up from the controls to find Ann Holland standing white and silent above Carlyle's body. Larry shuddered. Carlyle's face was that of a mummy. His hands were crooked brown hooks like the dried talons of a buzzard. His uniform draped his shrivelled body like a gunny sack over a skeleton. Ann pressed against Larry's side, seemingly unconscious that there had ever been anything wrong between them. "What was he, Larry?" she whispered. "I don't know," he admitted. "But he was old--Lord knows how old. That crystal heart he gave you ... there was something queer about it. I think that when I destroyed it, I killed him, too." The girl suddenly buried her face against his chest. "Oh, Larry!" she sobbed. "It's so horrible. Let's go back ... now!" "Just as soon as we comb a few gold bars out of the sky," he told her softly. "Then we're going back and carry on with those plans we had before you gave me back my ring. But--I'd like to find out some time--just how old he was, and _what_ he was." * * * * * Sooner than they had expected, they were to find at least the answer to Thaddeus Carlyle's age. Larry and Ann were married the day they docked in New York. For their honeymoon they sailed to England. It occurred to Larry while they were there to look for the Monfort tomb in Westminster Abbey. They found it, an ancient stone crypt with the names of thirteen Lord Monforts inscribed, hidden in the shadows of the building's oldest wing. Birth and death dates followed each name. But after Thaddeus Carlyle's name were engraved only the numerals: "1262--" "Wish I had the courage of my convictions," muttered Larry. "I'd get them to finish it for the poor devil: '--died, 1970.'" 
59498	----	What Shall It Profit? BY POUL ANDERSON _"If you would build a tower, sit down first and count the cost, to see if you have enough to finish it." ... The price may be much too high._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, June 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "The chickens got out of the coop and flew away three hundred years ago," said Barwell. "Now they're coming home to roost." He hiccoughed. His finger wobbled to the dial and clicked off another whisky. The machine pondered the matter and flashed an apologetic sign: _Please deposit your money_. "Oh, damn," said Barwell. "I'm broke." Radek shrugged and gave the slot a two-credit piece. It slid the whisky out on a tray with his change. He stuck the coins in his pouch and took another careful sip of beer. Barwell grabbed the whisky glass like a drowning man. He _would_ drown, thought Radek, if he sloshed much more into his stomach. There was an Asian whine to the music drifting past the curtains into the booth. Radek could hear the talk and laughter well enough to catch their raucous overtones. Somebody swore as dice rattled wrong for him. Somebody else shouted coarse good wishes as his friend took a hostess upstairs. He wondered why vice was always so cheerless when you went into a place and paid for it. "I am going to get drunk tonight," announced Barwell. "I am going to get so high in the stony sky you'll need radar to find me. Then I shall raise the red flag of revolution." "And tomorrow?" asked Radek quietly. Barwell grimaced. "Don't ask me about tomorrow. Tomorrow I will be among the great leisure class--to hell with euphemisms--the unemployed. Nothing I can do that some goddam machine can't do quicker and better. So a benevolent state will feed me and clothe me and house me and give me a little spending money to have fun on. This is known as citizen's credit. They used to call it a dole. Tomorrow I shall have to be more systematic about the revolution--join the League or something." "The trouble with you," Radek needled him, "is that you can't adapt. Technology has made the labor of most people, except the first-rank creative genius, unnecessary. This leaves the majority with a void of years to fill somehow--a sense of uprootedness and lost self-respect--which is rather horrible. And in any case, they don't like to think in scientific terms ... it doesn't come natural to the average man." Barwell gave him a bleary stare out of a flushed, sagging face. "I s'pose you're one of the geniuses," he said. "You got work." "I'm adaptable," said Radek. He was a slim youngish man with dark hair and sharp features. "I'm not greatly gifted, but I found a niche for myself. Newsman. I do legwork for a major commentator. Between times, I'm writing a book--my own analysis of contemporary historical trends. It won't be anything startling, but it may help a few people think more clearly and adjust themselves." "And so you _like_ this rotten Solar Union?" Barwell's tone became aggressive. "Not everything about it no. So there is a wave of antiscientific reaction, all over Earth. Science is being made the scapegoat for all our troubles. But like it or not, you fellows will have to accept the fact that there are too many people and too few resources for us to survive without technology." "Some technology, sure," admitted Barwell. He took a ferocious swig from his glass. "Not this hell-born stuff we've been monkeying around with. I tell you, the chickens have finally come home to roost." Radek was intrigued by the archaic expression. Barwell was no moron: he'd been a correlative clerk at the Institute for several years, not a position for fools. He had read, actually read books, and thought about them. And today he had been fired. Radek chanced across him drinking out a vast resentment and attached himself like a reverse lamprey--buying most of the liquor. There might be a story in it, somewhere. There might be a lead to what the Institute was doing. Radek was not antiscientific, but neither did he make gods out of people with technical degrees. The Institute _must_ be up to something unpleasant ... otherwise, why all the mystery? If the facts weren't uncovered in time, if whatever they were brewing came to a head, it could touch off the final convulsion of lynch law. Barwell leaned forward, his finger wagged. "Three hundred years now. I think it's three hundred years since X-rays came in. Damn scientists, fooling around with X-rays, atomic energy, radioactives ... sure, safe levels, established tolerances, but what about the long-range effects? What about cumulative genetic effects? Those chickens are coming home at last." "No use blaming our ancestors," said Radek. "Be rather pointless to go dance on their graves, wouldn't it?" Barwell moved closer to Radek. His breath was powerful with whisky. "But are they in those graves?" he whispered. "Huh?" "Look. Been known for a long time, ever since first atomic energy work ... heavy but nonlethal doses of radiation shorten lifespan. You grow old faster if you get a strong dose. Why d'you think with all our medicines we're not two, three hundred years old? Background count's gone up, that's why! Radioactives in the air, in the sea, buried under the ground. Gamma rays, not _entirely_ absorbed by shielding. Sure, sure, they tell us the level is still harmless. But it's more than the level in nature by a good big factor--two or three." Radek sipped his beer. He'd been drinking slowly, and the beer had gotten warmer than he liked, but he needed a clear head. "That's common knowledge," he stated. "The lifespan hasn't been shortened any, either." "Because of more medicines ... more ways to help cells patch up radiation damage. All but worst radiation sickness been curable for a long time." Barwell waved his hand expansively. "They knew, even back then," he mumbled. "If radiation shortens life, radiation sickness cures ought to prolong it. Huh? Reas'nable? Only the goddam scientists ... population problem ... social stasis if ever'body lived for centuries ... kept it secret. Easy t' do. Change y'r name and face ever' ten, twen'y years--keep to y'rself, don't make friends among the short-lived, you might see 'em grow old and die, might start feelin' sorry for 'em an' that would never do, would it--?" Coldness tingled along Radek's spine. He lifted his mug and pretended to drink. Over the rim, his eyes stayed on Barwell. "Tha's why they fired me. I know. I know. I got ears. I overheard things. I read ... notes not inten'ed for me. They fired me. 'S a wonder they didn' murder me." Barwell shuddered and peered at the curtains, as if trying to look through them. "Or d'y' think--maybe--" "No," said Radek. "I don't. Let's stick to the facts. I take it you found mention of work on--shall we say--increasing the lifespan. Perhaps a mention of successes with rats and guinea pigs. Right? So what's wrong with that? They wouldn't want to announce anything till they were sure, or the hysteria--" Barwell smiled with an irritating air of omniscience. "More'n that, friend. More'n that. Lots more." "Well, what?" Barwell peered about him with exaggerated caution. "One thing I found in files ... plans of whole buildin's an' groun's--great, great big room, lotsa rooms, way way underground. Secret. Only th' kitchen was makin' food an' sendin' it down there--human food. Food for people I never saw, people who never came up--" Barwell buried his face in his hands. "Don' feel so good. Whirlin'--" Radek eased his head to the table. Out like a spent credit. The newsman left the booth and addressed a bouncer. "Chap in there has had it." "Uh-huh. Want me to help you get him to your boat?" "No. I hardly know him." A bill exchanged hands. "Put him in your dossroom to sleep it off, and give him breakfast with my compliments. I'm going out for some fresh air." * * * * * The rec house stood on a Minnesota bluff, overlooking the Mississippi River. Beyond its racket and multi-colored glare, there was darkness and wooded silence. Here and there the lights of a few isolated houses gleamed. The river slid by, talking, ruffled with moonlight. Luna was nearly full; squinting into her cold ashen face, Radek could just see the tiny spark of a city. Stars were strewn carelessly over heaven, he recognized the ember that was Mars. Perhaps he ought to emigrate. Mars, Venus, even Luna ... there was more hope on them than Earth had. No mechanical packaged cheer: people had work to do, and in their spare time made their own pleasures. No civilization cracking at the seams because it could not assimilate the technology it must have; out in space, men knew very well that science had carried them to their homes and made those homes fit to dwell on. Radek strolled across the parking lot and found his airboat. He paused by its iridescent teardrop to start a cigaret. Suppose the Institute of Human Biology was more than it claimed to be, more than a set of homes and laboratories where congenial minds could live and do research. It published discoveries of value--but how much did it not publish? Its personnel kept pretty aloof from the rest of the world, not unnatural in this day of growing estrangement between science and public ... but did they have a deeper reason than that? Suppose they did keep immortals in those underground rooms. A scientist was not ordinarily a good political technician. But he might think he could be. He might react emotionally against a public beginning to throw stones at his house and consider taking the reins ... for the people's own good, of course. A lot of misery had been caused the human race for its own alleged good. Or if the scientist knew how to live forever, he might not think Joe Smith or Carlos Ibáñez or Wang Yuan or Johannes Umfanduma good enough to share immortality with him. Radek took a long breath. The night air felt fresh and alive in his lungs after the tavern staleness. He was not currently married, but there was a girl with whom he was thinking seriously of making a permanent contract. He had friends, not lucent razor minds but decent, unassuming, kindly people, brave with man's old quiet bravery in the face of death and ruin and the petty tragedies of everyday. He liked beer and steaks, fishing and tennis, good music and a good book and the exhilarating strain of his work. He liked to live. Maybe a system for becoming immortal, or at least living many centuries, was not desirable for the race. But only the whole race had authority to make that decision. Radek smiled at himself, twistedly, and threw the cigaret away and got into the boat. Its engine murmured, sucking 'cast power; the riding lights snapped on automatically and he lifted into the sky. It was not much of a lead he had, but it was as good as he was ever likely to get. He set the autopilot for southwest Colorado and opened the jets wide. The night whistled darkly around his cabin. Against wan stars, he made out the lamps of other boats, flitting across the world and somehow intensifying the loneliness. Work to do. He called the main office in Dallas Unit and taped a statement of what he knew and what he planned. Then he dialed the nearest library and asked the robot for information on the Institute of Human Biology. There wasn't a great deal of value to him. It had been in existence for about 250 years, more or less concurrently with the Psychotechnic Institute and for quite a while affiliated with that organization. During the Humanist troubles, when the Psychotechs were booted out of government on Earth and their files ransacked, it had dissociated itself from them and carried on unobtrusively. (How much of their secret records had it taken along?) Since the Restoration, it had grown, drawing in many prominent researchers and making discoveries of high value to medicine and bio-engineering. The current director was Dr. Marcus Lang, formerly of New Harvard, the University of Luna, and--No matter. He'd been running the show for eight years, after his predecessor's death. Or had Tokogama really died? He couldn't be identical with Lang--he had been a short Japanese and Lang was a tall Negro, too big a jump for any surgeon. Not to mention their simultaneous careers. But how far back could you trace Lang before he became fakeable records of birth and schooling? What young fellow named Yamatsu or Hideki was now polishing glass in the labs and slated to become the next director? How fantastic could you get on how little evidence? Radek let the text fade from the screen and sat puffing another cigaret. It was a while before he demanded references on the biology of the aging process. That was tough sledding. He couldn't follow the mathematics or the chemistry very far. No good popularizations were available. But a newsman got an ability to winnow what he learned. Radek didn't have to take notes, he'd been through a mind-training course; after an hour or so, he sat back and reviewed what he had gotten. The living organism was a small island of low entropy in a universe tending constantly toward gigantic disorder. It maintained itself through an intricate set of hemostatic mechanisms. The serious disruption of any of these brought the life-processes to a halt. Shock, disease, the bullet in the lungs or the ax in the brain--death. But hundreds of thousands of autopsies had never given an honest verdict of "death from old age." It was always something else, cancer, heart failure, sickness, stroke ... age was at most a contributing cause, decreasing resistance to injury and power to recover from it. One by one, the individual causes had been licked. Bacteria and protozoa and viruses were slaughtered in the body. Cancers were selectively poisoned. Cholesterol was dissolved out of the arteries. Surgery patched up damaged organs, and the new regeneration techniques replaced what had been lost ... even nervous tissue. Offhand, there was no more reason to die, unless you met murder or an accident. But people still grew old. The process wasn't as hideous as it had been. You needn't shuffle in arthritic feebleness. Your mind was clear, your skin wrinkled slowly. Centenarians were not uncommon these days. But very few reached 150. Nobody reached 200. Imperceptibly, the fires burned low ... vitality was diminished, strength faded, hair whitened, eyes dimmed. The body responded less and less well to regenerative treatment. Finally it did not respond at all. You got so weak that some small thing you and your doctor could have laughed at in your youth, took you away. You still grew old. And because you grew old, you still died. The unicellular organism did not age. But "age" was a meaningless word in that particular case. A man could be immortal via his germ cells. The micro-organism could too, but it gave the only cell it had. Personal immortality was denied to both man and microbe. Could sheer mechanical wear and tear be the reason for the decline known as old age? Probably not. The natural regenerative powers of life were better than that. And observations made in free fall, where strain was minimized, indicated that while null-gravity had an alleviating effect, it was no key to living forever. Something in the chemistry and physics of the cells themselves, then. They did tend to accumulate heavy water--that had been known for a long time. Hard to see how that could kill you ... the percentage increase in a lifetime was so small. It might be a partial answer. You might grow old more slowly if you drank only water made of pure isotopes. But you wouldn't be immortal. Radek shrugged. He was getting near the end of his trip. Let the Institute people answer his questions. * * * * * The Four Corners country is so named because four of the old American states met there, back when they were still significant political units. For a while, in the 20th century, it was overrun with uranium hunters, who made small impression on its tilted emptiness. It was still a favorite vacation area, and the resorts were lost in that great huddle of mountains and desert. You could have a lot of privacy here. Gliding down over the moon-ghostly Pueblo ruins of Mesa Verde, Radek peered through the windscreen. There, ahead. Lights glowed around the walls, spread across half a mesa. Inside them was a parkscape of trees, lawns, gardens, arbors, cottage units ... the Institute housed its people well. There were four large buildings at the center, and Radek noted gratefully that several windows were still shining in them. Not that he had any compunctions about getting the great Dr. Lang out of bed, but-- He ignored the public landing field outside the walls and set his boat down in the paved courtyard. As he climbed out, half a dozen guards came running. They were husky men in blue uniforms, armed with stunners, and the dim light showed faces hinting they wouldn't be sorry to feed him a beam. Radek dropped to the ground, folded his arms, and waited. The breath from his nose was frosty under the moon. "What the hell do you want?" The nearest guard pulled up in front of him and laid a hand on his shock gun. "Who the devil are you? Don't you know this is private property? What's the big idea, anyway?" "Take it easy," advised Radek. "I have to see Dr. Lang at once. Emergency." "You didn't call for an appointment, did you?" "No, I didn't." "All right, then--" "I didn't think he'd care to have me give my reasons over a radio. This is confidential and urgent." The men hesitated, uncertain before such an outrageous violation of all civilized canons. "I dunno, friend ... he's busy ... if you want to see Dr. McCormick--" "Dr. Lang. Ask him if I may. Tell him I have news about his longevity process." "His what?" Radek spelled it out and watched the man go. Another one made some ungracious remark and frisked him with needless ostentation. A third was more urbane: "Sorry to do this, but you understand we've got important work going on. Can't have just anybody busting in." "Sure, that's all right." Radek shivered in the thin chill air and pulled his cloak tighter about him. "Viruses and stuff around. If any of that got loose--You understand." Well, it wasn't a bad cover-up. None of these fellows looked very bright. IQ treatments could do only so much, thereafter you got down to the limitations of basic and unalterable brain microstructure. And even among the more intellectual workers ... how many Barwells were there, handling semi-routine tasks but not permitted to know what really went on under their feet? Radek had a brief irrational wish that he'd worn boots instead of sandals. The first guard returned. "He'll see you," he grunted. "And you better make it good, because he's one mad doctor." Radek nodded and followed two of the men. The nearest of the large square buildings seemed given over to offices. He was led inside, down a short length of glow-lit corridor, and halted while the scanner on a door marked, LANG, DIRECTOR observed him. "He's clean, boss," said one of the escort. "All right," said the annunciator. "Let him in. But you two stay just outside." It was a spacious office, but austerely furnished. A telewindow reflected green larches and a sun-spattered waterfall, somewhere on the other side of the planet. Lang sat alone behind the desk, his hands engaged with some papers that looked like technical reports. He was a big, heavy-shouldered man, his hair gray, his chocolate face middle-aged and tired. He did not rise. "Well?" he snapped. "My name is Arnold Radek. I'm a news service operator ... here's my card, if you wish to see it." "Pharaoh had it easy," said Lang in a chill voice. "Moses only called the seven plagues down on him. I have to deal with your sort." Radek placed his fingertips on the desk and leaned forward. He found it unexpectedly hard not to be stared down by the other. "I know very well I've laid myself open to a lawsuit by coming in as I did," he stated. "Possibly, when I'm through, I'll be open to murder." "Are you feeling well?" There was more contempt than concern in the deep tone. "Let me say first off, I believe I have information about a certain project of yours. One you badly want to keep a secret. I've taped a record at my office of what I know and where I'm going. If I don't get back before 1000 hours, Central Time, and wipe that tape, it'll be heard by the secretary." Lang took an exasperated breath. His fingernails whitened on the sheets he still held. "Do you honestly think we would be so ... I won't say unscrupulous ... so _stupid_ as to use violence?" "No," said Radek. "Of course not. All I want is a few straight answers. I know you're quite able to lead me up the garden path, feed me some line of pap and hustle me out again--but I won't stand for that. I mentioned my tape only to convince you that I'm in earnest." "You're not drunk," murmured Lang. "But there are a lot of people running loose who ought to be in a mental hospital." "I know." Radek sat down without waiting for an invitation. "Anti-scientific fanatics. I'm not one of them. You know Darrell Burkhardt's news commentaries? I supply a lot of his data and interpretations. He's one of the leading friends of genuine science, one of the few you have left." Radek gestured at the card on the desk. "Read it, right there." Lang picked the card up and glanced at the lettering and tossed it back. "Very well. That's still no excuse for breaking in like this. You--" "It can't wait," interrupted Radek. "There are a lot of lives at stake. Every minute we sit here, there are perhaps a million people dying, perhaps more; I haven't the figures. And everyone else is dying all the time, millimeter by millimeter, we're all born dying. Every minute you hold back the cure for old age, you murder a million human beings." "This is the most fantastic--" "Let me finish! I get around. And I'm trained to look a little bit more closely at the facts everybody knows, the ordinary commonplace facts we take for granted and never think to inquire about because they are so ordinary. I've wondered about the Institute for a long time. Tonight I talked at great length with a fellow named Barwell ... remember him? A clerk here. You fired him this morning for being too nosy. He had a lot to say." "Hm." Lang sat quiet for a while. He didn't rattle easily--he couldn't be snowed under by fast, aggressive talk. While Radek spat out what clues he had, Lang calmly reached into a drawer and got out an old-fashioned briar pipe, stuffed it and lit it. "So what do you want?" he asked when Radek paused for breath. "The truth, damn it!" "There are privacy laws. It was established long ago that a citizen is entitled to privacy if he does nothing against the common weal--" "And you are! You're like a man who stands on a river bank and has a lifebelt and won't throw it to a man drowning in the river." Lang sighed. "I won't deny we're working on longevity," he answered. "Obviously we are. The problem interests biologists throughout the Solar System. But we aren't publicizing our findings as yet for a very good reason. You know how people jump to conclusions. Can you imagine the hysteria that would arise in this already unstable culture if there seemed to be even a prospect of immortality? You yourself are a prime case ... on the most tenuous basis of rumor and hypothesis, you've decided that we have found a vaccine against old age and are hoarding it. You come bursting in here in the middle of the night, demanding to be made immortal immediately if not sooner. And you're comparatively civilized ... there are enough lunatics who'd come here with guns and start shooting up the place." Radek smiled bleakly. "Of course. I know that. And you ought to know the outfit I work for is reputable. If you have a good lead on the problem, but haven't solved it yet, you can trust us not to make that fact public." "All right." Lang mustered an answering smile, oddly warm and charming. "I don't mind telling you, then, that we do have some promising preliminary results--but, and this is the catch, we estimate it will take at least a century to get anywhere. Biochemistry is an inconceivably complex subject." "What sort of results are they?" "It's highly technical. Has to do with enzymes. You may know that enzymes are the major device through which the genes govern the organism all through life. At a certain point, for instance, the genes order the body to go through the changes involved in puberty. At another point, they order that gradual breakdown we know as aging." "In other words," said Radek slowly, "the body has a built-in suicide mechanism?" "Well ... if you want to put it that way--" "I don't believe a word of it. It makes a lot more sense to imagine that there's something which causes the breakdown--a virus, maybe--and the body fights it off as long as possible but at last it gets the upper hand. The whole key to evolution is the need to survive. I can't see life evolving its own anti-survival factor." "But nature doesn't care about the individual, friend Radek. Only about the species. And the species with a rapid turnover of individuals can evolve faster, become more effective--" "Then why does man, the fastest-evolving metazoan of all, have one of the longest lifespans? He does, you know ... among mammals, at any rate. Seems to me our bodies must be all-around better than average, better able to fight off the death virus. Fish live a longer time, sure--and maybe in the water they aren't so exposed to the disease. May flies are short-lived; have they simply adapted their life cycle to the existence of the virus?" Lang frowned. "You appear to have studied this subject enough to have some mistaken ideas about it. I can't argue with a man who insists on protecting his cherished irrationalities with fancy verbalisms." "And you appear to think fast on your feet, Dr. Lang." Radek laughed. "Maybe not fast enough. But I'm not being paranoid about this. You can convince me." "How?" "Show me. Take me into those underground rooms and show me what you actually have." "I'm afraid that's impos--" "All right." Radek stood up. "I hate to do this, but a man must either earn a living or go on the public freeloading roll ... which I don't want to do. The facts and conjectures I already have will make an interesting story." Lang rose too, his eyes widening. "You can't prove anything!" "Of course I can't. You're sitting on all the proof." "But the public reaction! God in Heaven, man, those people can't _think_!" "No ... they can't, can they?" He moved toward the door. "Goodnight." Radek's muscles were taut. In spite of everything that had been said, a person hounded to desperation could still do murder. There was a great quietness as he neared the door. Then Lang spoke. The voice was defeated, and when Radek looked back it was an old man who stood behind the desk. "You win. Come along with me." * * * * * They went down an empty hall, after dismissing the guards, and took an elevator below ground. Neither of them said anything. Somehow, the sag of Lang's shoulders was a gnawing in Radek's conscience. When they emerged, it was to transfer past a sentry, where Lang gave a password and okayed his companion, to another elevator which purred them still deeper. "I--" The newsman cleared his throat, awkwardly. "I repeat what I implied earlier. I'm here mostly as a citizen interested in the public welfare ... which includes my own, of course, and my family's if I ever have one. If you can show me valid reasons for not breaking this story, I won't. I'll even let you hypnocondition me against doing it, voluntarily or otherwise." "Thanks," said the director. His mouth curved upward, but it was a shaken smile. "That's decent of you, and we'll accept ... I think you'll agree with our policy. What worries me is the rest of the world. If you could find out as much as you did--" Radek's heart jumped between his ribs. "Then you do have immortality!" "Yes. But I'm not immortal. None of our personnel are, except--Here we are." There was a hidden susurrus of machinery as they stepped out into a small bare entryroom. Another guard sat there, beside a desk. Past him was a small door of immense solidity, the door of a vault. "You'll have to leave everything metallic here," said Lang. "A steel object could jump so fiercely as to injure you. Your watch would be ruined. Even coins could get uncomfortably hot ... eddy currents, you know. We're about to go through the strongest magnetic field ever generated." Silently, dry-mouthed, Radek piled his things on the desk. Lang operated a combination lock on the door. "There are nervous effects too," he said. "The field is actually strong enough to influence the electric discharges of your synapses. Be prepared for a few nasty seconds. Follow me and walk fast." The door opened on a low, narrow corridor several meters long. Radek felt his heart bump crazily, his vision blurred, there was panic screaming in his brain and a sweating tingle in his skin. Stumbling through nightmare, he made it to the end. The horror faded. They were in another room, with storage facilities and what resembled a spaceship's airlock in the opposite wall. Lang grinned shakily. "No fun, is it?" "What's it for?" gasped Radek. "To keep charged particles out of here. And the whole set of chambers is 500 meters underground, sheathed in ten meters of lead brick and surrounded by tanks of heavy water. This is the only place in the Solar System, I imagine, where cosmic rays never come." "You mean--" Lang knocked out his pipe and left it in a gobboon. He opened the lockers to reveal a set of airsuits, complete with helmets and oxygen tanks. "We put these on before going any further," he said. "Infection on the other side?" "We're the infected ones. Come on, I'll help you." As they scrambled into the equipment, Lang added conversationally: "This place has to have all its own stuff, of course ... its own electric generators and so on. The ultimate power source is isotopically pure carbon burned in oxygen. We use a nuclear reactor to create the magnetic field itself, but no atomic energy is allowed inside it." He led the way into the airlock, closed it, and started the pumps. "We have to flush out all the normal air and substitute that from the inner chambers." "How about food? Barwell said food was prepared in the kitchens and brought here." "Synthesized out of elements recovered from waste products. We do cook it topside, taking precautions. A few radioactive atoms get in, but not enough to matter as long as we're careful. We're so cramped for space down here we have to make some compromises." "I think--" Radek fell silent. As the lock was evacuated, his unjointed airsuit spreadeagled and held him prisoner, but he hardly noticed. There was too much else to think about, too much to grasp at once. Not till the cycle was over and they had gone through the lock did he speak again. Then it came harsh and jerky: "I begin to understand. How long has this gone on?" "It started about 200 years ago ... an early Institute project." Lang's voice was somehow tinny over the helmet phone. "At that time, it wasn't possible to make really pure isotopes in quantity, so there were only limited results, but it was enough to justify further research. This particular set of chambers and chemical elements is 150 years old. A spectacular success, a brilliant confirmation, from the very beginning ... and the Institute has never dared reveal it. Maybe they should have, back then--maybe people could have taken the news--but not now. These days the knowledge would whip men into a murderous rage of frustration; they wouldn't believe the truth, they wouldn't dare believe, and God alone knows what they'd do." Looking around, Radek saw a large, plastic-lined room, filled with cages. As the lights went on, white rats and guinea pigs stirred sleepily. One of the rats came up to nibble at the wires and regard the humans from beady pink eyes. Lang bent over and studied the label. "This fellow is, um, 66 years old. Still fat and sassy, in perfect condition, as you can see. Our oldest mammalian inmate is a guinea pig: a hundred and forty-five years. This one here." Lang stared at the immortal beast for a while. It didn't look unusual ... only healthy. "How about monkeys?" he asked. "We tried them. Finally gave it up. A monkey is an active animal--it was too cruel to keep them penned up forever. They even went insane, some of them." Footfalls were hollow as Lang led the way toward the inner door. "Do you get the idea?" "Yes ... I think I do. If heavy radiation speeds up aging--then natural radioactivity is responsible for normal aging." "Quite. A matter of cells being slowly deranged, through decades in the case of man--the genes which govern them being mutilated, chromosomes ripped up, nucleoplasm and cytoplasm irreversibly damaged. And, of course, a mutated cell often puts out the wrong combination of enzymes, and if it regenerates at all it replaces itself by one of the same kind. The effect is cumulative, more and more defective cells every hour. A steady bombardment, all your life ... here on Earth, seven cosmic rays per second ripping through you, and you yourself are radioactive, you include radiocarbon and radiopotassium and radiophosphorus ... Earth and the planets, the atmosphere, everything radiates. Is it any wonder that at last our organic mechanism starts breaking down? The marvel is that we live as long as we do." The dry voice was somehow steadying. Radek asked: "And this place is insulated?" "Yes. The original plant and animal life in here was grown exogenetically from single-cell zygotes, supplied with air and nourishment built from pure stable isotopes. The Institute had to start with low forms, naturally; at that time, it wasn't possible to synthesize proteins to order. But soon our workers had enough of an ecology to introduce higher species, eventually mammals. Even the first generation was only negligibly radioactive. Succeeding generations have been kept almost absolutely clean. The lamps supply ultraviolet, the air is recycled ... well, in principle it's no different from an ecological-unit spaceship." Radek shook his head. He could scarcely get the words out: "People? Humans?" "For the past 120 years. Wasn't hard to get germ plasm and grow it. The first generation reproduced normally, the second could if lack of space didn't force us to load their food with chemical contraceptive." Behind his faceplate, Lang grimaced. "I'd never have allowed it if I'd been director at the time, but now I'm stuck with the situation. The legality is very doubtful. How badly do you violate a man's civil rights when you keep him a prisoner but give him immortality?" He opened the door, an archaic manual type. "We can't do better for them than this," he said. "The volume of space we can enclose in a magnetic field of the necessary strength is already at an absolute maximum." Light sprang automatically from the ceiling. Radek looked in at a dormitory. It was well-kept, the furniture ornamental. Beyond it he could see other rooms ... recreation, he supposed vaguely. The score of hulks in the beds hardly moved. Only one woke up. He blinked, yawned, and shuffled toward the visitors, quite nude, his long hair tangled across the low forehead, a loose grin on the mouth. "Hello, Bill," said Lang. "Uh ... got sumpin? Got sumpin for Bill?" A hand reached out, begging. Radek thought of a trained ape he had once seen. "This is Bill." Lang spoke softly, as if afraid his voice would snap. "Our oldest inhabitant. One hundred and nineteen years old, and he has the physique of a man of 20. They mature, you know, reach their peak and never fall below it again." "Got sumpin, doc, huh?" "I'm sorry, Bill," said Lang. "I'll bring you some candy next time." The moron gave an animal sigh and shambled back. On the way, he passed a sleeping woman, and edged toward her with a grunt. Lang closed the door. There was another stillness. "Well," said Lang, "now you've seen it." "You mean ... you don't mean immortality makes you like that?" "Oh, no. Not at all. But my predecessors chose low-grade stock on purpose. Remember those monkeys. How long do you think a normal human could remain sane, cooped up in a little cave like this and never daring to leave it? That's the only way to be immortal, you know. And how much of the race could be given such elaborate care, even if they could stand it? Only a small percentage. Nor would they live forever--they're already contaminated, they were born radioactive. And whatever happens, who's going to remain outside and keep the apparatus in order?" Radek nodded. His neck felt stiff, and within the airsuit he stank with sweat. "I've got the idea." "And yet--if the facts were known--if my questions had to be answered--how long do you think a society like ours would survive?" Radek tried to speak, but his tongue was too dry. Lang smiled grimly. "Apparently I've convinced you. Good. Fine." Suddenly his gloved hand shot out and gripped Radek's shoulder. Even through the heavy fabric, the newsman could feel the bruising fury of that clasp. "But you're only one man," whispered Lang. "An unusually reasonable man for these days. There'll be others. "What are we going to _do_?" 
704	----	The Mansion By Henry van Dyke There was an air of calm and reserved opulence about the Weightman mansion that spoke not of money squandered, but of wealth prudently applied. Standing on a corner of the Avenue no longer fashionable for residence, it looked upon the swelling tide of business with an expression of complacency and half-disdain. The house was not beautiful. There was nothing in its straight front of chocolate-colored stone, its heavy cornices, its broad, staring windows of plate glass, its carved and bronze-bedecked mahogany doors at the top of the wide stoop, to charm the eye or fascinate the imagination. But it was eminently respectable, and in its way imposing. It seemed to say that the glittering shops of the jewelers, the milliners, the confectioners, the florists, the picture-dealers, the furriers, the makers of rare and costly antiquities, retail traders in luxuries of life, were beneath the notice of a house that had its foundations in the high finance, and was built literally and figuratively in the shadow of St. Petronius' Church. At the same time there was something self-pleased and congratulatory in the way in which the mansion held its own amid the changing neighborhood. It almost seemed to be lifted up a little, among the tall buildings near at hand, as if it felt the rising value of the land on which it stood. John Weightman was like the house into which he had built himself thirty years ago, and in which his ideals and ambitions were incrusted. He was a self-made man. But in making himself he had chosen a highly esteemed pattern and worked according to the approved rules. There was nothing irregular, questionable, flamboyant about him. He was solid, correct, and justly successful. His minor tastes, of course, had been carefully kept up to date. At the proper time, pictures of the Barbizon masters, old English plate and portraits, bronzes by Barye and marbles by Rodin, Persian carpets and Chinese porcelains, had been introduced to the mansion. It contained a Louis Quinze reception-room, an Empire drawing-room, a Jacobean dining-room, and various apartments dimly reminiscent of the styles of furniture affected by deceased monarchs. That the hallways were too short for the historic perspective did not make much difference. American decorative art is capable de tout, it absorbs all periods. Of each period Mr. Weightman wished to have something of the best. He understood its value, present as a certificate, and prospective as an investment. It was only in the architecture of his town house that he remained conservative, immovable, one might almost say Early-Victorian-Christian. His country house at Dulwich-on-the-Sound was a palace of the Italian Renaissance. But in town he adhered to an architecture which had moral associations, the Nineteenth-Century-Brownstone epoch. It was a symbol of his social position, his religious doctrine, and even, in a way, of his business creed. "A man of fixed principles," he would say, "should express them in the looks of his house. New York changes its domestic architecture too rapidly. It is like divorce. It is not dignified. I don't like it. Extravagance and fickleness are advertised in most of these new houses. I wish to be known for different qualities. Dignity and prudence are the things that people trust. Every one knows that I can afford to live in the house that suits me. It is a guarantee to the public. It inspires confidence. It helps my influence. There is a text in the Bible about 'a house that hath foundations.' That is the proper kind of a mansion for a solid man." Harold Weightman had often listened to his father discoursing in this fashion on the fundamental principles of life, and always with a divided mind. He admired immensely his father's talents and the single-minded energy with which he improved them. But in the paternal philosophy there was something that disquieted and oppressed the young man, and made him gasp inwardly for fresh air and free action. At times, during his college course and his years at the law school, he had yielded to this impulse and broken away--now toward extravagance and dissipation, and then, when the reaction came, toward a romantic devotion to work among the poor. He had felt his father's disapproval for both of these forms of imprudence; but is was never expressed in a harsh or violent way, always with a certain tolerant patience, such as one might show for the mistakes and vagaries of the very young. John Weightman was not hasty, impulsive, inconsiderate, even toward his own children. With them, as with the rest of the world, he felt that he had a reputation to maintain, a theory to vindicate. He could afford to give them time to see that he was absolutely right. One of his favorite Scripture quotations was, "Wait on the Lord." He had applied it to real estate and to people, with profitable results. But to human persons the sensation of being waited for is not always agreeable. Sometimes, especially with the young, it produces a vague restlessness, a dumb resentment, which is increased by the fact that one can hardly explain or justify it. Of this John Weightman was not conscious. It lay beyond his horizon. He did not take it into account in the plan of life which he made for himself and for his family as the sharers and inheritors of his success. "Father plays us," said Harold, in a moment of irritation, to his mother, "like pieces in a game of chess. "My dear," said that lady, whose faith in her husband was religious, "you ought not to speak so impatiently. At least he wins the game. He is one of the most respected men in New York. And he is very generous, too." "I wish he would be more generous in letting us be ourselves," said the young man. "He always has something in view for us and expects to move us up to it." "But isn't it always for our benefit?" replied his mother. "Look what a position we have. No one can say there is any taint on our money. There are no rumors about your father. He has kept the laws of God and of man. He has never made any mistakes." Harold got up from his chair and poked the fire. Then he came back to the ample, well-gowned, firm-looking lady, and sat beside her on the sofa. He took her hand gently and looked at the two rings--a thin band of yellow gold, and a small solitaire diamond--which kept their place on her third finger in modest dignity, as if not shamed, but rather justified, by the splendor of the emerald which glittered beside them. "Mother," he said, "you have a wonderful hand. And father made no mistake when he won you. But are you sure he has always been so inerrant?" "Harold," she exclaimed, a little stiffly, "what do you mean? His life is an open book." "Oh," he answered, "I don't mean anything bad, mother dear. I know the governor's life is an open book--a ledger, if you like, kept in the best bookkeeping hand, and always ready for inspection--every page correct, and showing a handsome balance. But isn't it a mistake not to allow us to make our own mistakes, to learn for ourselves, to live our own lives? Must we be always working for 'the balance,' in one thing or another? I want to be myself--to get outside of this everlasting, profitable 'plan'--to let myself go, and lose myself for a while at least--to do the things that I want to do, just because I want to do them." "My boy," said his mother, anxiously, "you are not going to do anything wrong or foolish? You know the falsehood of that old proverb about wild oats." He threw back his head and laughed. "Yes, mother," he answered, "I know it well enough. But in California, you know, the wild oats are one of the most valuable crops. They grow all over the hillsides and keep the cattle and the horses alive. But that wasn't what I meant--to sow wild oats. Say to pick wild flowers, if you like, or even to chase wild geese--to do something that seems good to me just for its own sake, not for the sake of wages of one kind or another. I feel like a hired man, in the service of this magnificent mansion--say in training for father's place as majordomo. I'd like to get out some way, to feel free--perhaps to do something for others." The young man's voice hesitated a little. "Yes, it sounds like cant, I know, but sometimes I feel as if I'd like to do some good in the world, if father only wouldn't insist upon God's putting it into the ledger." His mother moved uneasily, and a slight look of bewilderment came into her face. "Isn't that almost irreverent?" she asked. "Surely the righteous must have their reward. And your father is good. See how much he gives to all the established charities, how many things he has founded. He's always thinking of others, and planning for them. And surely, for us, he does everything. How well he has planned this trip to Europe for me and the girls--the court-presentation at Berlin, the season on the Riviera, the visits in England with the Plumptons and the Halverstones. He says Lord Halverstone has the finest old house in Sussex, pure Elizabethan, and all the old customs are kept up, too--family prayers every morning for all the domestics. By-the-way, you know his son Bertie, I believe." Harold smiled a little to himself as he answered: "Yes, I fished at Catalina Island last June with the Honorable Ethelbert; he's rather a decent chap, in spite of his ingrowing mind. But you?--mother, you are simply magnificent! You are father's masterpiece." The young man leaned over to kiss her, and went up to the Riding Club for his afternoon canter in the Park. So it came to pass, early in December, that Mrs. Weightman and her two daughters sailed for Europe, on their serious pleasure trip, even as it had been written in the book of Providence; and John Weightman, who had made the entry, was left to pass the rest of the winter with his son and heir in the brownstone mansion. They were comfortable enough. The machinery of the massive establishment ran as smoothly as a great electric dynamo. They were busy enough, too. John Weightman's plans and enterprises were complicated, though his principle of action was always simple--to get good value for every expenditure and effort. The banking-house of which he was the chief, the brain, the will, the absolutely controlling hand, was so admirably organized that the details of its direction took but little time. But the scores of other interests that radiated from it and were dependent upon it--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, that contributed to its solidity and success--the many investments, industrial, political, benevolent, reformatory, ecclesiastical, that had made the name of Weightman well known and potent in city, church, and state, demanded much attention and careful steering, in order that each might produce the desired result. There were board meetings of corporations and hospitals, conferences in Wall Street and at Albany, consultations and committee meetings in the brownstone mansion. For a share in all this business and its adjuncts John Weightman had his son in training in one of the famous law firms of the city; for he held that banking itself is a simple affair, the only real difficulties of finance are on its legal side. Meantime he wished the young man to meet and know the men with whom he would have to deal when he became a partner in the house. So a couple of dinners were given in the mansion during December, after which the father called the son's attention to the fact that over a hundred million dollars had sat around the board. But on Christmas Eve father and son were dining together without guests, and their talk across the broad table, glittering with silver and cut glass, and softly lit by shaded candles, was intimate, though a little slow at times. The elder man was in rather a rare mood, more expansive and confidential than usual; and, when the coffee was brought in and they were left alone, he talked more freely of his personal plans and hopes than he had ever done before. "I feel very grateful to-night," said he, at last; "it must be something in the air of Christmas that gives me this feeling of thankfulness for the many divine mercies that have been bestowed upon me. All the principles by which I have tried to guide my life have been justified. I have never made the value of this salted almond by anything that the courts would not uphold, at least in the long run, and yet--or wouldn't it be truer to say and therefore?--my affairs have been wonderfully prospered. There's a great deal in that text 'Honesty is the best'--but no, that's not from the Bible, after all, is it? Wait a moment; there is something of that kind, I know." "May I light a cigar, father," said Harold, turning away to hide a smile, "while you are remembering the text?" "Yes, certainly," answered the elder man, rather shortly; "you know I don't dislike the smell. But it is a wasteful, useless habit, and therefore I have never practised it. Nothing useless is worth while, that's my motto--nothing that does not bring the reward. Oh, now I recall the text, 'Verily I say unto you they have their reward.' I shall ask Doctor Snodgrass to preach a sermon on that verse some day." "Using you as an illustration?" "Well, not exactly that; but I could give him some good materials from my own experience to prove the truth of Scripture. I can honestly say that there is not one of my charities that has not brought me in a good return, either in the increase of influence, the building up of credit, or the association with substantial people. Of course you have to be careful how you give, in order to secure the best results--no indiscriminate giving--no pennies in beggars' hats! It has been one of my principles always to use the same kind of judgment in charities that I use in my other affairs, and they have not disappointed me." "Even the check that you put in the plate when you take the offertory up the aisle on Sunday morning?" "Certainly; though there the influence is less direct; and I must confess that I have my doubts in regard to the collection for Foreign Missions. That always seems to me romantic and wasteful. You never hear from it in any definite way. They say the missionaries have done a good deal to open the way for trade; perhaps--but they have also gotten us into commercial and political difficulties. Yet I give to them--a little--it is a matter of conscience with me to identify myself with all the enterprises of the Church; it is the mainstay of social order and a prosperous civilization. But the best forms of benevolence are the well-established, organized ones here at home, where people can see them and know what they are doing." "You mean the ones that have a local habitation and a name." "Yes; they offer by far the safest return, though of course there is something gained by contributing to general funds. A public man can't afford to be without public spirit. But on the whole I prefer a building, or an endowment. There is a mutual advantage to a good name and a good institution in their connection in the public mind. It helps them both. Remember that, my boy. Of course at the beginning you will have to practise it in a small way; later, you will have larger opportunities. But try to put your gifts where they can be identified and do good all around. You'll see the wisdom of it in the long run." "I can see it already, sir, and the way you describe it looks amazingly wise and prudent. In other words, we must cast our bread on the waters in large loaves, carried by sound ships marked with the owner's name, so that the return freight will be sure to come back to us." The father laughed, but his eyes were frowning a little as if he suspected something irreverent under the respectful reply. "You put it humorously, but there's sense in what you say. Why not? God rules the sea; but He expects us to follow the laws of navigation and commerce. Why not take good care of your bread, even when you give it away?" "It's not for me to say why not--and yet I can think of cases--" The young man hesitated for a moment. His half-finished cigar had gone out. He rose and tossed it into the fire, in front of which he remained standing--a slender, eager, restless young figure, with a touch of hunger in the fine face, strangely like and unlike the father, at whom he looked with half-wistful curiosity. "The fact is, sir," he continued, "there is such a case in my mind now, and it is a good deal on my heart, too. So I thought of speaking to you about it to-night. You remember Tom Rollins, the Junior who was so good to me when I entered college?" The father nodded. He remembered very well indeed the annoying incidents of his son's first escapade, and how Rollins had stood by him and helped to avoid a public disgrace, and how a close friendship had grown between the two boys, so different in their fortunes. "Yes," he said, "I remember him. He was a promising young man. Has he succeeded?" "Not exactly--that is not yet. His business has been going rather badly. He has a wife and little baby, you know. And now he has broken down,--something wrong with his lungs. The doctor says his only chance is a year or eighteen months in Colorado. I wish we could help him." "How much would it cost?" "Three or four thousand, perhaps, as a loan." "Does the doctor say he will get well?" "A fighting chance--the doctor says." The face of the older man changed subtly. Not a line was altered, but it seemed to have a different substance, as if it were carved out of some firm, imperishable stuff. "A fighting chance," he said, "may do for a speculation, but it is not a good investment. You owe something to young Rollins. Your grateful feeling does you credit. But don't overwork it. Send him three or four hundred, if you like. You'll never hear from it again, except in the letter of thanks. But for Heaven's sake don't be sentimental. Religion is not a matter of sentiment; it's a matter of principle." The face of the younger man changed now. But instead of becoming fixed and graven, it seemed to melt into life by the heat of an inward fire. His nostrils quivered with quick breath, his lips were curled. "Principle!" he said. "You mean principal--and interest too. Well, sir, you know best whether that is religion or not. But if it is, count me out, please. Tom saved me from going to the devil, six years ago; and I'll be damned if I don't help him to the best of my ability now." John Weightman looked at his son steadily. "Harold," he said at last, "you know I dislike violent language, and it never has any influence with me. If I could honestly approve of this proposition of yours, I'd let you have the money; but I can't; it's extravagant and useless. But you have your Christmas check for a thousand dollars coming to you to-morrow. You can use it as you please. I never interfere with your private affairs." "Thank you," said Harold. "Thank you very much! But there's another private affair. I want to get away from this life, this town, this house. It stifles me. You refused last summer when I asked you to let me go up to Grenfell's Mission on the Labrador. I could go now, at least as far as the Newfoundland Station. Have you changed your mind?" "Not at all. I think it is an exceedingly foolish enterprise. It would interrupt the career that I have marked out for you." "Well, then, here's a cheaper proposition. Algy Vanderhoof wants me to join him on his yacht with--well, with a little party--to cruise in the West Indies. Would you prefer that?" "Certainly not! The Vanderhoof set is wild and godless--I do not wish to see you keeping company with fools who walk in the broad and easy way that leads to perdition." "It is rather a hard choice," said the young man, with a short laugh, turning toward the door. "According to you there's very little difference--a fool's paradise or a fool's hell! Well, it's one or the other for me, and I'll toss up for it to-night: heads, I lose; tails, the devil wins. Anyway, I'm sick of this, and I'm out of it." "Harold," said the older man (and there was a slight tremor in his voice), "don't let us quarrel on Christmas Eve. All I want is to persuade you to think seriously of the duties and responsibilities to which God has called you--don't speak lightly of heaven and hell--remember, there is another life." The young man came back and laid his hand upon his father's shoulder. "Father," he said, "I want to remember it. I try to believe in it. But somehow or other, in this house, it all seems unreal to me. No doubt all you say is perfectly right and wise. I don't venture to argue against it, but I can't feel it--that's all. If I'm to have a soul, either to lose or to save, I must really live. Just now neither the present nor the future means anything to me. But surely we won't quarrel. I'm very grateful to you, and we'll part friends. Good-night, sir." The father held out his hand in silence. The heavy portiere dropped noiselessly behind the son, and he went up the wide, curving stairway to his own room. Meantime John Weightman sat in his carved chair in the Jacobean dining-room. He felt strangely old and dull. The portraits of beautiful women by Lawrence and Reynolds and Raeburn, which had often seemed like real company to him, looked remote and uninteresting. He fancied something cold and almost unfriendly in their expression, as if they were staring through him or beyond him. They cared nothing for his principles, his hopes, his disappointments, his successes; they belonged to another world, in which he had no place. At this he felt a vague resentment, a sense of discomfort that he could not have defined or explained. He was used to being considered, respected, appreciated at his full value in every region, even in that of his own dreams. Presently he rang for the butler, telling him to close the house and not to sit up, and walked with lagging steps into the long library, where the shaded lamps were burning. His eye fell upon the low shelves full of costly books, but he had no desire to open them. Even the carefully chosen pictures that hung above them seemed to have lost their attraction. He paused for a moment before an idyll of Corot--a dance of nymphs around some forgotten altar in a vaporous glade--and looked at it curiously. There was something rapturous and serene about the picture, a breath of spring-time in the misty trees, a harmony of joy in the dancing figures, that wakened in him a feeling of half-pleasure and half-envy. It represented something that he had never known in his calculated, orderly life. He was dimly mistrustful of it. "It is certainly very beautiful," he thought, "but it is distinctly pagan; that altar is built to some heathen god. It does not fit into the scheme of a Christian life. I doubt whether it is consistent with the tone of my house. I will sell it this winter. It will bring three or four times what I paid for it. That was a good purchase, a very good bargain." He dropped into the revolving chair before his big library table. It was covered with pamphlets and reports of the various enterprises in which he was interested. There was a pile of newspaper clippings in which his name was mentioned with praise for his sustaining power as a pillar of finance, for his judicious benevolence, for his support of wise and prudent reform movements, for his discretion in making permanent public gifts--"the Weightman Charities," one very complaisant editor called them, as if they deserved classification as a distinct species. He turned the papers over listlessly. There was a description and a picture of the "Weightman Wing of the Hospital for Cripples," of which he was president; and an article on the new professor in the "Weightman Chair of Political Jurisprudence" in Jackson University, of which he was a trustee; and an illustrated account of the opening of the "Weightman Grammar-School" at Dulwich-on-the-Sound, where he had his legal residence for purposes of taxation. This last was perhaps the most carefully planned of all the Weightman Charities. He desired to win the confidence and support of his rural neighbors. It had pleased him much when the local newspaper had spoken of him as an ideal citizen and the logical candidate for the Governorship of the State; but upon the whole it seemed to him wiser to keep out of active politics. It would be easier and better to put Harold into the running, to have him sent to the Legislature from the Dulwich district, then to the national House, then to the Senate. Why not? The Weightman interests were large enough to need a direct representative and guardian at Washington. But to-night all these plans came back to him with dust upon them. They were dry and crumbling like forsaken habitations. The son upon whom his complacent ambition had rested had turned his back upon the mansion of his father's hopes. The break might not be final; and in any event there would be much to live for; the fortunes of the family would be secure. But the zest of it all would be gone if John Weightman had to give up the assurance of perpetuating his name and his principles in his son. It was a bitter disappointment, and he felt that he had not deserved it. He rose from the chair and paced the room with leaden feet. For the first time in his life his age was visibly upon him. His head was heavy and hot, and the thoughts that rolled in it were confused and depressing. Could it be that he had made a mistake in the principles of his existence? There was no argument in what Harold had said--it was almost childish--and yet it had shaken the elder man more deeply than he cared to show. It held a silent attack which touched him more than open criticism. Suppose the end of his life were nearer than he thought--the end must come some time--what if it were now? Had he not founded his house upon a rock? Had he not kept the Commandments? Was he not, "touching the law, blameless"? And beyond this, even if there were some faults in his character--and all men are sinners--yet he surely believed in the saving doctrines of religion--the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, the life everlasting. Yes, that was the true source of comfort, after all. He would read a bit in the Bible, as he did every night, and go to bed and to sleep. He went back to his chair at the library table. A strange weight of weariness rested upon him, but he opened the book at a familiar place, and his eyes fell upon the verse at the bottom of the page. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth." That had been the text of the sermon a few weeks before. Sleepily, heavily, he tried to fix his mind upon it and recall it. What was it that Doctor Snodgrass had said? Ah, yes--that it was a mistake to pause here in reading the verse. We must read on without a pause--Lay not up treasures upon earth where moth and rust do corrupt and where thieves break through and steal--that was the true doctrine. We may have treasures upon earth, but they must not be put into unsafe places, but into safe places. A most comforting doctrine! He had always followed it. Moths and rust and thieves had done no harm to his investments. John Weightman's drooping eyes turned to the next verse, at the top of the second column. "But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven." Now what had the Doctor said about that? How was it to be understood--in what sense--treasures--in heaven? The book seemed to float away from him. The light vanished. He wondered dimly if this could be Death, coming so suddenly, so quietly, so irresistibly. He struggled for a moment to hold himself up, and then sank slowly forward upon the table. His head rested upon his folded hands. He slipped into the unknown. How long afterward conscious life returned to him he did not know. The blank might have been an hour or a century. He knew only that something had happened in the interval. What is was he could not tell. He found great difficulty in catching the thread of his identity again. He felt that he was himself; but the trouble was to make his connections, to verify and place himself, to know who and where he was. At last it grew clear. John Weightman was sitting on a stone, not far from a road in a strange land. The road was not a formal highway, fenced and graded. It was more like a great travel-trace, worn by thousands of feet passing across the open country in the same direction. Down in the valley, into which he could look, the road seemed to form itself gradually out of many minor paths; little footways coming across the meadows, winding tracks following along beside the streams, faintly marked trails emerging from the woodlands. But on the hillside the threads were more firmly woven into one clear band of travel, though there were still a few dim paths joining it here and there, as if persons had been climbing up the hill by other ways and had turned at last to seek the road. From the edge of the hill, where John Weightman sat, he could see the travelers, in little groups or larger companies, gathering from time to time by the different paths, and making the ascent. They were all clothed in white, and the form of their garments was strange to him; it was like some old picture. They passed him, group after group, talking quietly together or singing; not moving in haste, but with a certain air of eagerness and joy as if they were glad to be on their way to an appointed place. They did not stay to speak to him, but they looked at him often and spoke to one another as they looked; and now and then one of them would smile and beckon him a friendly greeting, so that he felt they would like him to be with them. There was quite an interval between the groups; and he followed each of them with his eyes after it had passed, blanching the long ribbon of the road for a little transient space, rising and receding across the wide, billowy upland, among the rounded hillocks of aerial green and gold and lilac, until it came to the high horizon, and stood outlined for a moment, a tiny cloud of whiteness against the tender blue, before it vanished over the hill. For a long time he sat there watching and wondering. It was a very different world from that in which his mansion on the Avenue was built; and it looked strange to him, but most real--as real as anything he had ever seen. Presently he felt a strong desire to know what country it was and where the people were going. He had a faint premonition of what it must be, but he wished to be sure. So he rose from the stone where he was sitting, and came down through the short grass and the lavender flowers, toward a passing group of people. One of them turned to meet him, and held out his hand. It was an old man, under whose white beard and brows John Weightman thought he saw a suggestion of the face of the village doctor who had cared for him years ago, when he was a boy in the country. "Welcome," said the old man. "Will you come with us?" "Where are you going?" "To the heavenly city, to see our mansions there." "And who are these with you?" "Strangers to me, until a little while ago; I know them better now. But you I have known for a long time, John Weightman. Don't you remember your old doctor?" "Yes," he cried--"yes; your voice has not changed at all. I'm glad indeed to see you, Doctor McLean, especially now. All this seems very strange to me, almost oppressive. I wonder if--but may I go with you, do you suppose?" "Surely," answered the doctor, with his familiar smile; "it will do you good. And you also must have a mansion in the city waiting for you--a fine one, too--are you not looking forward to it?" "Yes," replied the other, hesitating a moment; "yes--I believe it must be so, although I had not expected to see it so soon. But I will go with you, and we can talk by the way." The two men quickly caught up with the other people, and all went forward together along the road. The doctor had little to tell of his experience, for it had been a plain, hard life, uneventfully spent for others, and the story of the village was very simple. John Weightman's adventures and triumphs would have made a far richer, more imposing history, full of contacts with the great events and personages of the time. But somehow or other he did not care to speak much about it, walking on that wide heavenly moorland, under that tranquil, sunless arch of blue, in that free air of perfect peace, where the light was diffused without a shadow, as if the spirit of life in all things were luminous. There was only one person besides the doctor in that little company whom John Weightman had known before--an old bookkeeper who had spent his life over a desk, carefully keeping accounts--a rusty, dull little man, patient and narrow, whose wife had been in the insane asylum for twenty years and whose only child was a crippled daughter, for whose comfort and happiness he had toiled and sacrificed himself without stint. It was a surprise to find him here, as care-free and joyful as the rest. The lives of others in the company were revealed in brief glimpses as they talked together--a mother, early widowed, who had kept her little flock of children together and labored through hard and heavy years to bring them up in purity and knowledge--a Sister of Charity who had devoted herself to the nursing of poor folk who were being eaten to death by cancer--a schoolmaster whose heart and life had been poured into his quiet work of training boys for a clean and thoughtful manhood--a medical missionary who had given up a brilliant career in science to take the charge of a hospital in darkest Africa--a beautiful woman with silver hair who had resigned her dreams of love and marriage to care for an invalid father, and after his death had made her life a long, steady search for ways of doing kindnesses to others--a poet who had walked among the crowded tenements of the great city, bringing cheer and comfort not only by his songs, but by his wise and patient works of practical aid--a paralyzed woman who had lain for thirty years upon her bed, helpless but not hopeless, succeeding by a miracle of courage in her single aim, never to complain, but always to impart a bit of joy and peace to every one who came near her. All these, and other persons like them, people of little consideration in the world, but now seemingly all full of great contentment and an inward gladness that made their steps light, were in the company that passed along the road, talking together of things past and things to come, and singing now and then with clear voices from which the veil of age and sorrow was lifted. John Weightman joined in some of the songs--which were familiar to him from their use in the church--at first with a touch of hesitation, and then more confidently. For as they went on his sense of strangeness and fear at his new experience diminished, and his thoughts began to take on their habitual assurance and complacency. Were not these people going to the Celestial City? And was not he in his right place among them? He had always looked forward to this journey. If they were sure, each one, of finding a mansion there, could not he be far more sure? His life had been more fruitful than theirs. He had been a leader, a founder of new enterprises, a pillar of Church and State, a prince of the House of Israel. Ten talents had been given him, and he had made them twenty. His reward would be proportionate. He was glad that his companions were going to find fit dwellings prepared for them; but he thought also with a certain pleasure of the surprise that some of them would feel when they saw his appointed mansion. So they came to the summit of the moorland and looked over into the world beyond. It was a vast, green plain, softly rounded like a shallow vase, and circled with hills of amethyst. A broad, shining river flowed through it, and many silver threads of water were woven across the green; and there were borders of tall trees on the banks of the river, and orchards full of roses abloom along the little streams, and in the midst of all stood the city, white and wonderful and radiant. When the travelers saw it they were filled with awe and joy. They passed over the little streams and among the orchards quickly and silently, as if they feared to speak lest the city should vanish. The wall of the city was very low, a child could see over it, for it was made only of precious stones, which are never large. The gate of the city was not like a gate a all, for it was not barred with iron or wood, but only a single pearl, softly gleaming, marked the place where the wall ended and the entrance lay open. A person stood there whose face was bright and grave, and whose robe was like the flower of the lily, not a woven fabric, but a living texture. "Come in," he said to the company of travelers; "you are at your journey's end, and your mansions are ready for you." John Weightman hesitated, for he was troubled by a doubt. Suppose that he was not really, like his companions, at his journey's end, but only transported for a little while out of the regular course of his life into this mysterious experience? Suppose that, after all, he had not really passed through the door of death, like these others, but only through the door of dreams, and was walking in a vision, a living man among the blessed dead. Would it be right for him to go with them into the heavenly city? Would it not be a deception, a desecration, a deep and unforgivable offense? The strange, confusing question had no reason in it, as he very well knew; for if he was dreaming, then it was all a dream; but if his companions were real, then he also was with them in reality, and if they had died then he must have died too. Yet he could not rid his mind of the sense that there was a difference between them and him, and it made him afraid to go on. But, as he paused and turned, the Keeper of the Gate looked straight and deep into his eyes, and beckoned to him. Then he knew that it was not only right but necessary that he should enter. They passed from street to street among fair and spacious dwellings, set in amaranthine gardens, and adorned with an infinitely varied beauty of divine simplicity. The mansions differed in size, in shape, in charm: each one seemed to have its own personal look of loveliness; yet all were alike in fitness to their place, in harmony with one another, in the addition which each made to the singular and tranquil splendor of the city. As the little company came, one by one, to the mansions which were prepared for them, and their Guide beckoned to the happy inhabitant to enter in and take possession, there was a soft murmur of joy, half wonder and half recognition; as if the new and immortal dwelling were crowned with the beauty of surprise, lovelier and nobler than all the dreams of it had been; and yet also as if it were touched with the beauty of the familiar, the remembered, the long-loved. One after another the travelers were led to their own mansions, and went in gladly; and from within, through the open doorways came sweet voices of welcome, and low laughter, and song. At last there was no one left with the Guide but the two old friends, Doctor McLean and John Weightman. They were standing in front of one of the largest and fairest of the houses, whose garden glowed softly with radiant flowers. The Guide laid his hand upon the doctor's shoulder. "This is for you," he said. "Go in; there is no more pain here, no more death, nor sorrow, nor tears; for your old enemies are all conquered. But all the good that you have done for others, all the help that you have given, all the comfort that you have brought, all the strength and love that you have bestowed upon the suffering, are here; for we have built them all into this mansion for you." The good man's face was lighted with a still joy. He clasped his old friend's hand closely, and whispered: "How wonderful it is! Go on, you will come to your mansion next, it is not far away, and we shall see each other again soon, very soon." So he went through the garden, and into the music within. The Keeper of the Gate turned to John Weightman with level, quiet, searching eyes. Then he asked, gravely: "Where do you wish me to lead you now?" "To see my own mansion," answered the man, with half-concealed excitement. "Is there not one here for me? You may not let me enter it yet, perhaps, for I must confess to you that I am only--" "I know," said the Keeper of the Gate--"I know it all. You are John Weightman." "Yes," said the man, more firmly than he had spoken at first, for it gratified him that his name was known. "Yes, I am John Weightman, Senior Warden of St. Petronius' Church. I wish very much to see my mansion here, if only for a moment. I believe that you have one for me. Will you take me to it?" The Keeper of the Gate drew a little book from the breast of his robe and turned over the pages. "Certainly," he said, with a curious look at the man, "your name is here; and you shall see your mansion if you will follow me." It seemed as if they must have walked miles and miles, through the vast city, passing street after street of houses larger and smaller, of gardens richer and poorer, but all full of beauty and delight. They came into a kind of suburb, where there were many small cottages, with plots of flowers, very lowly, but bright and fragrant. Finally they reached an open field, bare and lonely-looking. There were two or three little bushes in it, without flowers, and the grass was sparse and thin. In the center of the field was a tiny hut, hardly big enough for a shepherd's shelter. It looked as if it had been built of discarded things, scraps and fragments of other buildings, put together with care and pains, by some one who had tried to make the most of cast-off material. There was something pitiful and shamefaced about the hut. It shrank and drooped and faded in its barren field, and seemed to cling only by sufferance to the edge of the splendid city. "This," said the Keeper of the Gate, standing still and speaking with a low, distinct voice--"this is your mansion, John Weightman." An almost intolerable shock of grieved wonder and indignation choked the man for a moment so that he could not say a word. Then he turned his face away from the poor little hut and began to remonstrate eagerly with his companion. "Surely, sir," he stammered, "you must be in error about this. There is something wrong--some other John Weightman--a confusion of names--the book must be mistaken." "There is no mistake," said the Keeper of the Gate, very calmly; "here is your name, the record of your title and your possessions in this place." "But how could such a house be prepared for me," cried the man, with a resentful tremor in his voice--"for me, after my long and faithful service? Is this a suitable mansion for one so well known and devoted? Why is it so pitifully small and mean? Why have you not built it large and fair, like the others?" "That is all the material you sent us." "What!" "We have used all the material that you sent us," repeated the Keeper of the Gate. "Now I know that you are mistaken," cried the man, with growing earnestness, "for all my life long I have been doing things that must have supplied you with material. Have you not heard that I have built a school-house; the wing of a hospital; two--yes, three--small churches, and the greater part of a large one, the spire of St. Petro--" The Keeper of the Gate lifted his hand. "Wait," he said; "we know all these things. They were not ill done. But they were all marked and used as foundation for the name and mansion of John Weightman in the world. Did you not plan them for that?" "Yes," answered the man, confused and taken aback, "I confess that I thought often of them in that way. Perhaps my heart was set upon that too much. But there are other things--my endowment for the college--my steady and liberal contributions to all the established charities--my support of every respectable--" "Wait," said the Keeper of the Gate again. "Were not all these carefully recorded on earth where they would add to your credit? They were not foolishly done. Verily, you have had your reward for them. Would you be paid twice?" "No," cried the man, with deepening dismay, "I dare not claim that. I acknowledge that I considered my own interest too much. But surely not altogether. You have said that these things were not foolishly done. They accomplished some good in the world. Does not that count for something?" "Yes," answered he Keeper of the Gate, "it counts in the world--where you counted it. But it does not belong to you here. We have saved and used everything that you sent us. This is the mansion prepared for you." As he spoke, his look grew deeper and more searching, like a flame of fire. John Weightman could not endure it. It seemed to strip him naked and wither him. He sank to the ground under a crushing weight of shame, covering his eyes with his hands and cowering face downward upon the stones. Dimly through the trouble of his mind he felt their hardness and coldness. "Tell me, then," he cried, brokenly, "since my life has been so little worth, how came I here at all?" "Through the mercy of the King"--the answer was like the soft tolling of a bell. "And how have I earned it?" he murmured. "It is never earned; it is only given," came the clear, low reply. "But how have I failed so wretchedly," he asked, "in all the purpose of my life? What could I have done better? What is it that counts here?" "Only that which is truly given," answered the bell-like voice. "Only that good which is done for the love of doing it. Only those plans in which the welfare of others is the master thought. Only those labors in which the sacrifice is greater than the reward. Only those gifts in which the giver forgets himself." The man lay silent. A great weakness, an unspeakable despondency and humiliation were upon him. But the face of the Keeper of the Gate was infinitely tender as he bent over him. "Think again, John Weightman. Has there been nothing like that in your life?" "Nothing," he sighed. "If there ever were such things, it must have been long ago--they were all crowded out--I have forgotten them." There was an ineffable smile on the face of the Keeper of the Gate, and his hand made the sign of the cross over the bowed head as he spoke gently: "These are the things that the King never forgets; and because there were a few of them in your life, you have a little place here." The sense of coldness and hardness under John Weightman's hands grew sharper and more distinct. The feeling of bodily weariness and lassitude weighed upon him, but there was a calm, almost a lightness, in his heart as he listened to the fading vibrations of the silvery bell-tones. The chimney clock on the mantel had just ended the last stroke of seven as he lifted his head from the table. Thin, pale strips of the city morning were falling into the room through the narrow partings of the heavy curtains. What was it that had happened to him? Had he been ill? Had he died and come to life again? Or had he only slept, and had his soul gone visiting in dreams? He sat for some time, motionless, not lost, but finding himself in thought. Then he took a narrow book from the table drawer, wrote a check, and tore it out. He went slowly up the stairs, knocked very softly at his son's door, and, hearing no answer, entered without noise. Harold was asleep, his bare arm thrown above his head, and his eager face relaxed in peace. His father looked at him a moment with strangely shining eyes, and then tiptoed quietly to the writing-desk, found a pencil and a sheet of paper, and wrote rapidly: "My dear boy, here is what you asked me for; do what you like with it, and ask for more if you need it. If you are still thinking of that work with Grenfell, we'll talk it over to-day after church. I want to know your heart better; and if I have made mistakes--" A slight noise made him turn his head. Harold was sitting up in bed with wide-open eyes. "Father!" he cried, "is that you?" "Yes, my son," answered John Weightman; "I've come back--I mean I've come up--no, I mean come in--well, here I am, and God give us a good Christmas together." 
59285	----	until life do us part BY WINSTON MARKS _It's a long life, when you're immortal. To retain sanity you've got to be unemotional. To be unemotional, you can't fall in love...._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, June 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It was a deathless world, but a woman was dying. Anne Tabor lay limp and pale, her long, slender limbs making only shallow depressions on the mercury bath which supported her. Webb Fellow stood over her awaiting the effects of the sedative to relieve her pain. His title was _Doctor_, but almost everyone in this age had an M. D. certificate with several specialties to his credit. Webb Fellow was simply one who continued to find interest and diversion in the field of physiological maintenance. He stood tall and strong above her, lean-bellied, smooth-faced and calm appearing, yet he didn't feel especially calm. As the agony eased from Anne's face he spoke softly. "I'm glad you came to me, Anne." She moistened her lips and spoke without opening her eyes. "It was you or Clifford--and Cliff hasn't practiced for a century or more. It's--it's quite important to me, Webb. I really want to live. Not because I'm afraid of dying, but...." "I know, Anne. I know." Everyone in Chicago knew. Anne Tabor was the first female of that city to be chosen for motherhood in almost a decade. And in the three days since the news had flashed from Washington, Anne Tabor had generated within the blood-stream of her lovely, near-perfect body, a mutated cancerous cell that threatened to destroy her. Mutant leukemia! "Just relax, dear. We have the whole city of Chicago to draw on for blood while we work this thing out." He touched a cool hand to her fevered forehead, and the slight motion stirred the golden halo that her hair made on the silvery surface of the mercury. The word, "dear", echoed strangely in his ears once he had said it. Her eyes had opened at the expression of sentiment, and now they were wide and blue as they examined him. A tiny smile curved her pale lips. "Did I hear correctly?" "Yes, dear." He repeated the word deliberately, and for the first time since his student days he felt the web of his emotions tighten and twist into a knot of unreason. She mustn't die ... not now! Her smile widened with her look of mild amazement. "Why Webb, I do believe you mean it!" "You have always been high in my affections, Anne." "Yes, but--_it's a long life_. Such a long life!" _That damned phrase again!_ The essence of sanity, they called it. The cliche of cliches that under-scored this whole business of immortality. _Be not concerned for the frustrations of the moment. All obstacles are transient--all obstacles and all emotions. The price of immortality is caution, patience, temperance. Deep personal attachments lead to love, love leads to jealousy, jealousy to un-saneness, insanity to violence_, violence to-- All he had said was that she was high in his affections, but no one spoke of such things any more. When one did, it was considered that more than conventional promiscuity was involved in his intentions. He turned away abruptly and studied the dials that registered her blood-pressure, pulse and metabolism. Incredible how even women three hundred years old remained sensitive to the slightest sign of infantile passion in their men. And more fantastic yet, that he, Webb Fellow, of the original generation of immortals some seven hundred years old, should find the destructive spark of possessiveness still alive in his semantically adjusted nervous system. Mechanically he noted the systole and diastole lines on the revolving chart and ordered an attendant to administer whole blood. Before he left her he turned back for a moment. "It shouldn't be more than 24 hours, Anne, and I promise you there won't be any impairment of your maternal capacity." He was startled to note that tears welled into her eyes. "Thank you, Webb. Clifford was worried that I might be disqualified." "Nonsense! Clifford hasn't kept up on things." He strode away without further comment, but as he stepped from surgery into pathology he was troubled. Why was Clifford so worried about her? Did Clifford think that Anne would choose _him_ to father her child? The thought struck like a snake. Before he could block it the fangs were deep, and the venom of adolescent jealousy raced from brain to endocrines to blood-stream, poisoning his whole nervous system. _It's a long life!_ He resorted to the old antidote himself, despising his weakness as he breathed the words. They came out as a sigh. He discovered that he was searching his memory to determine whether he or Clifford could lay claim to Anne by seniority. Seniority? What damned nonsense was that? Anne had traded back and forth between Clifford and him for at least 250 years--with uncounted, trivial alliances with how many other men? But the others didn't count. It was he and Clifford whom Anne preferred, just as he and Clifford had discussed on countless occasions Anne's perpetual attraction to them both. Anne _was_ Clifford's favorite, and he'd made no secret of it. "Over here, Webb. We have it!" It was Porter, the head staff pathologist holding out a small vial of crimson-clear liquid. "This ferric-protein salt should cure our famous lady quite quickly. It played sudden hell in the culture." "Oh, yes? Fine. Thank you, Porter. Thank you very much!" The narrow-shouldered pathologist gave him a second look. "Certainly. Don't mention it." He paused then asked bluntly, "Did she name you for paternity?" Webb managed to hold the vial steady to the light, but his voice was a shade too taut and high. "Not yet--that is, we haven't discussed it. It's a possibility, I suppose." "I suppose," Porter mocked gently. "You with the highest genetic-desirability rating in the State, give or take a couple of counties." Yes, there were a couple other males in Illinois with as high a genetic rating as Webb Fellow, and one of them was Clifford Ainsley. The obvious question thrust itself upon Webb for the first time. Was that why Anne Tabor had seemed to concentrate her favors upon him and Clifford? Had she actually anticipated the eventuality of being chosen for motherhood, and had her criterion for male companionship been simply a high genetic rating? _It's a long life._ Even with such unlikely odds against the contingency, he supposed any qualified female secretly nurtured the hope that someday-- With the inexplicable tension mounting in him he passed the vial along to an assistant with instructions for administering it. Anne would be in no condition to discuss the matter for another day or two. But he must know. He must know whether she had already chosen Clifford. He slipped into a light street-jacket, caught an express to top-side and engaged a taxi. His finger was poised over the destination dial before he realized with a start that he had forgotten the five-digit number for Clifford's address. It had been that long since he had called on his old friend. Friend? The concept seemed suddenly strange. How long since their friendship had actually dissolved into an unacknowledged rivalry? Nonsense. He and Clifford had both been uncommonly busy with their respective professions. And since Clifford had branched from medicine into robotics, their paths and interests had simply diverged. Alternating almost weekly between the two men, Anne Tabor had kept each more or less informed of the other's activities, but somehow he and Clifford had ceased looking each other up. The directory gave him Clifford's number, and he dialed it. The small vehicle lifted quickly, slipped into the invisible traffic pattern and began applying the dialed code-address to the electronic grid that cross-hatched Chicago like a mammoth waffle. As traffic cluttered ahead on one particular striation, the taxi banked smoothly and right-angled to the next parallel course and proceeded. Neat, safe, fool-proof. Perfect transportation within proscribed geometrical limits, Webb thought. An infinite number of routes from one point to another--like the course of a human life--but all within certain proscribed limits. _It's a long life._ The course of a man's life could be considered a passage with infinite possibilities only if he were allowed to backtrack occasionally. Was that what he was doing? Had life grown so dull that he was seeking the diversion of immaturity again? Immortality. Was it really so important? Once there had been a time when love, open, unashamed love had been accepted as one of life's strongest motivations. And it wasn't just a feeling of jealous possessiveness. There was a feeling of mutuality in it, a tenderness, an unselfishness and closeness of communion between man and woman. How had this exalted condition become debased into the casual association that now existed between the sexes? Debased? That was a loaded term. What was the matter with him? Anne Tabor was a lovely, desirable creature, but no more lovely, no more desirable than a hundred other females he knew. An odd, almost unique feeling of shame swept over him as his cab sank to the landing strip on Clifford's apartment building. He must conceal his state of mind from Clifford or be judged a complete imbecile. * * * * * "Well, Webb! This is a surprise." Cliff's face was entirely without emotion. "Anne! It's about Anne, isn't it?" "Anne will be fine." "Good, good! You startled me, standing there in the door like a messenger of doom. I thought for a moment--well, things wouldn't be the same without little Annie, would they?" They had moved into Cliff's apartment, and Webb shrugged out of his jacket. The spacious quarters and expensive appointments reminded Webb of Clifford's wealth. "The robot business must be thriving," Webb remarked. "Anne didn't mention such luxury over here." "The girl is tactful, my friend. Tactful, sweet, intelligent." Webb looked up quickly. He had seated himself, and Clifford stood before him in a stiff, almost challenging pose. "Am I welcome here?" the physician asked bluntly. "Certainly, certainly. We'll always welcome you here. Nothing need be changed just because Anne is to have a child. Nothing, that is, except the customary observance of monogamous convention until the child is born and raised." A pound of lead sagged in Webb's stomach. "Then--Anne has named you for paternity?" Clifford's slender, well-made body lost itself in the precise center of an over-size chair, he looked at Webb thoughtfully. "Well, practically. We were discussing it the other night when she had the first symptoms of this attack." He rubbed his hairless chin. "Why? Did you especially aspire to the noble station of parenthood?" The lazy sarcasm was salt in the wound. With difficulty, Webb kept his face expressionless. "When I heard the news, naturally I gave the possibility some consideration. That's why I came over here." "I see. Anne didn't tell you." "She was in considerable distress when they brought her in. I--I didn't ask her." In spite of the raven-black hair and youthful face, there was something about Clifford that Webb didn't like, a hardness, a lack-luster indifference verging on boorishness. The thought of losing Anne completely for more than eighteen years to this man was more painful even than Webb had anticipated. Impulsively he said, "For old time's sake, Cliff, will you do me a big favor?" The engineer stared at him and waited. "Take a vacation. Disappear for a few months." The dark eyebrows remained in a straight line. "And run out on Anne? You aren't serious." "I am." Clifford laughed without smiling. "You'd better head for hormone harbor and take _yourself_ a vacation, old man. You're becoming senile." "Then you won't withdraw?" "Of course not. You're asking more than a favor. You're asking me to offend Anne. These things are important to females." "It's important to me, too, Cliff." "Well, I'll be--" The smaller man rolled to his feet and put his hands on his hips. "I never thought to see the day when honored Elder Webb Fellow would come muling around like a sub-century freshman. Of all the anachronistic drivel!" "You see?" Webb said eagerly, "It isn't important to you at all. Why can't you do this for me, Cliff? I--I just can't stand the thought of being without Anne all those years." "Relax, Webb. _It's a long life._ Anne will be back in circulation before you know it." He paced to a low desk and extracted a small address book from a drawer. "If you're short of female acquaintances at the moment you can have these. I won't be needing them for awhile." He flipped the book at Webb. By chance the cover opened, caught the air and slanted the book up in its course so it struck the physician's cheek with a slap. The faint sting was the detonator that exploded all the careful restraint of seven centuries. Webb arose to his feet slowly and moved toward Clifford. "So medicine was too elementary for you? Human physiology and behaviour has no unsolved problems in it, you said once. So you went into robotics--positronic brains--infinite variety of response, with built in neuroses and psychoses. Human behaviour was too stereo-typed for you, Clifford. Everyone was predictable to seven decimal places. You were bored." "You have it about right," the engineer said insolently. He let his arms drop to his sides, relaxed, unconcerned at the tension in the physician's voice. "You build fine chess-playing machines, I hear," Webb said softly, gradually closing the distance between them. "Your mechanical geniuses have outstripped our finest playwrights and novelists for creativity and originality. You've probed every conceivable aberrated twist of human nature with your psychological-probabilities computers. You've reduced sociology and human relations to a cipher--" Clifford shrugged. "Merely an extension of early work in general semantics--the same work that gave us mental stability to go with physical immortality. Certainly you don't disparage--" "I'm disparaging nothing," Webb broke in. "I'm merely pointing out your blind spot, your fatal blind spot." "Fatal?" "Yes, Clifford, fatal. I'm going to kill you." The words seemed to have no effect. Not until Webb's powerful surgeon's hands closed about his neck did Clifford go rigid and begin his futile struggle. Webb did not crush the larynx immediately. He squeezed down with slow, breath-robbing pressure, feeling for the windpipe under his thumbs. Clifford gasped, "_'Sa long life, Webb_ ... don't ... commit suicide." "It's a long life, but not for you, my stupid friend. Sure, they'll execute me. But you won't have her. Never again, do you hear?" Clifford's eyes were closed now, and Webb knew that the roaring in his victim's ears would be blotting out all external sound. The knowledge infuriated him, and he screamed, "You fool, I pleaded with you. I took your insults and gave you every clue you needed--didn't you recognize my condition? You fool! You brilliant, blind fool!" Clifford collapsed to his knees, and Webb let him go with one final, irrevocable wrench that certified his death. Clifford's death and his own. The penalty for murder was still capital punishment, and in his own case Webb acknowledged the logic and necessity of such harsh consequences. If there was one activity that immortal, 28th Century Man could no longer afford, it was the luxury of falling in love.... * * * * * Webb stood back and looked down at his crumpled victim. The heavy pressure was subsiding from his temples, and the gray film of irrational hate faded from his vision. "Cliff--I--" Then full horror closed in on him and he choked off. His hands felt slick and slippery, but it was his own sweat, not blood. The tactile memory of his fingers squeezing, crushing Clifford's throat, fed details of touch, texture and temperature to his tortured but clear brain. His surgeon's fingers were twitching, trying to tell him what they had discovered moments ago, but a more over-whelming thought blocked the message. _I've taken a man's life ... and my own. And ruined Anne's happiness. I've brought her tragedy instead of happiness._ No, not tragedy. Inconvenience. It would still be a long life for Anne. She would find a suitable mate, then her child would quickly erase the memory of this day. Still, he had committed murder, the first deliberate murder the world had known in centuries. "Damn you!" he screamed down at the body. "Why didn't you protect yourself?" "Oh, I did, Webb, I did!" Webb spun to face the direction of the voice behind him. His eyes must be playing tricks--an after-image, perhaps. "Who are you?" Webb demanded. "Clifford Ainsley. The prototype, that is, in the flesh and not a roboid." He nodded at the body on the floor. "Ainsley the Second. Strictly a lab job." "Cliff? Oh, my God!" Webb fell into a chair and sobbed with relief. Clifford Ainsley came to him and put a hand to his shoulder. "I'm truly sorry, Webb, but it was better this way. We can be thankful that I anticipated your actions." Webb looked up. "You--expected me to murder you?" "The p c--probability computation--was remarkably high. You see, I ran your genetic pattern into the computer, added the double stress factor of Anne's serious illness _and_ her forthcoming motherhood, and the subtotal spelled out a four letter word." Webb nodded slowly. "Love." "Right. And you know the corollary to that. When I punched in the details of your relationship with Anne _and_ me, well, the next subtotal read--homicide." The expression of relief in Webb's face changed to show the hurt he felt. "But if you knew all this, why did you have to play out this scene, even with a remote control robot?" "To discharge the murder impulse, my friend. I had to play it straight, reacting just as I would to your demands, had I not known of your condition. Otherwise the computations would have been based on false inter-reaction premises. And until you made the attempt on my life, you were a real danger to me--and yourself. Now the shock of your murder attempt and the relief at your failure have dissipated that danger." It was true, Webb admitted to himself. No longer did he feel the least malice toward Cliff. But bitterness was still rank on his tongue. "So how does the story end? Does boy get girl or not?" "Of course. Boy always gets girl, if he wants her. _It's a long life._ At this phase she wants me." "Is that your own opinion or just another subtotal of the computer?" "Both." "But--how does it really end. What happens when you punch the _total_ key?" "You ask that, Webb? You, one of the very first to embrace the rigors of physical immortality? My dear friend, _there is no total key_." 
51037	----	Second Childhood By CLIFFORD D. SIMAK Illustrated by DON HUNTER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction February 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Achieving immortality is only half of the problem. The other half is knowing how to live with it once it's been made possible--and inescapable! You did not die. There was no normal way to die. You lived as carelessly and as recklessly as you could and you hoped that you would be lucky and be accidentally killed. You kept on living and you got tired of living. "God, how tired a man can get of living!" Andrew Young said. John Riggs, chairman of the immortality commission, cleared his throat. "You realize," he said to Andrew Young, "that this petition is a highly irregular procedure to bring to our attention." He picked up the sheaf of papers off the table and ruffled through them rapidly. "There is no precedent," he added. "I had hoped," said Andrew Young, "to establish precedent." Commissioner Stanford said, "I must admit that you have made a good case, Ancestor Young. Yet you must realize that this commission has no possible jurisdiction over the life of any person, except to see that everyone is assured of all the benefits of immortality and to work out any kinks that may show up." "I am well aware of that," answered Young, "and it seems to me that my case is one of the kinks you mention." He stood silently, watching the faces of the members of the board. They are afraid, he thought. Every one of them. Afraid of the day they will face the thing I am facing now. They have sought an answer and there is no answer yet except the pitifully basic answer, the brutally fundamental answer that I have given them. "My request is simple," he told them, calmly. "I have asked for permission to discontinue life. And since suicide has been made psychologically impossible, I have asked that this commission appoint a panel of next-friends to make the necessary and somewhat distasteful arrangements to bring about the discontinuance of my life." "If we did," said Riggs, "we would destroy everything we have. There is no virtue in a life of only five thousand years. No more than in a life of only a hundred years. If Man is to be immortal, he must be genuinely immortal. He cannot compromise." "And yet," said Young, "my friends are gone." * * * * * He gestured at the papers Riggs held in his hands. "I have them listed there," he said. "Their names and when and where and how they died. Take a look at them. More than two hundred names. People of my own generation and of the generations closely following mine. Their names and the photo-copies of their death certificates." He put both of his hands upon the table, palms flat against the table, and leaned his weight upon his arms. "Take a look at how they died," he said. "Every one involves accidental violence. Some of them drove their vehicles too fast and, more than likely, very recklessly. One fell off a cliff when he reached down to pick a flower that was growing on its edge. A case of deliberately poor judgment, to my mind. One got stinking drunk and took a bath and passed out in the tub. He drowned...." "Ancestor Young," Riggs said sharply, "you are surely not implying these folks were suicides." "No," Andrew Young said bitterly. "We abolished suicide three thousand years ago, cleared it clean out of human minds. How could they have killed themselves?" Stanford said, peering up at Young, "I believe, sir, you sat on the board that resolved that problem." Andrew Young nodded. "It was after the first wave of suicides. I remember it quite well. It took years of work. We had to change human perspective, shift certain facets of human nature. We had to condition human reasoning by education and propaganda and instill a new set of moral values. I think we did a good job of it. Perhaps too good a job. Today a man can no more think of deliberately committing suicide than he could think of overthrowing our government. The very idea, the very word is repulsive, instinctively repulsive. You can come a long way, gentlemen, in three thousand years." He leaned across the table and tapped the sheaf of papers with a lean, tense finger. "They didn't kill themselves," he said. "They did not commit suicide. They just didn't give a damn. They were tired of living ... as I am tired of living. So they lived recklessly in every way. Perhaps there always was a secret hope that they would drown while drunk or their car would hit a tree or...." * * * * * He straightened up and faced them. "Gentlemen," he said. "I am 5,786 years of age. I was born at Lancaster, Maine, on the planet Earth on September 21, 1968. I have served humankind well in those fifty-seven centuries. My record is there for you to see. Boards, commissions, legislative posts, diplomatic missions. No one can say that I have shirked my duty. I submit that I have paid any debt I owe humanity ... even the well-intentioned debt for a chance at immortality." "We wish," said Riggs, "that you would reconsider." "I am a lonely man," replied Young. "A lonely man and tired. I have no friends. There is nothing any longer that holds my interest. It is my hope that I can make you see the desirability of assuming jurisdiction in cases such as mine. Someday you may find a solution to the problem, but until that time arrives, I ask you, in the name of mercy, to give us relief from life." "The problem, as we see it," said Riggs, "is to find some way to wipe out mental perspective. When a man lives as you have, sir, for fifty centuries, he has too long a memory. The memories add up to the disadvantage of present realities and prospects for the future." "I know," said Young. "I remember we used to talk about that in the early days. It was one of the problems which was recognized when immortality first became practical. But we always thought that memory would erase itself, that the brain could accommodate only so many memories, that when it got full up it would dump the old ones. It hasn't worked that way." He made a savage gesture. "Gentlemen, I can recall my childhood much more vividly than I recall anything that happened yesterday." "Memories are buried," said Riggs, "and in the old days, when men lived no longer than a hundred years at most, it was thought those buried memories were forgotten. Life, Man told himself, is a process of forgetting. So Man wasn't too worried over memories when he became immortal. He thought he would forget them." "He should have known," argued Young. "I can remember my father, and I remember him much more intimately than I will remember you gentlemen once I leave this room.... I can remember my father telling me that, in his later years, he could recall things which happened in his childhood that had been forgotten all his younger years. And that, alone, should have tipped us off. The brain buries only the newer memories deeply ... they are not available; they do not rise to bother one, because they are not sorted or oriented or correlated or whatever it is that the brain may do with them. But once they are all nicely docketed and filed, they pop up in an instant." * * * * * Riggs nodded agreement. "There's a lag of a good many years in the brain's bookkeeping. We will overcome it in time." "We have tried," said Stanford. "We tried conditioning, the same solution that worked with suicides. But in this, it didn't work. For a man's life is built upon his memories. There are certain basic memories that must remain intact. With conditioning, you could not be selective. You could not keep the structural memories and winnow out the trash. It didn't work that way." "There was one machine that worked," Riggs put in. "It got rid of memories. I don't understand exactly how it worked, but it did the job all right. It did too good a job. It swept the mind as clean as an empty room. It didn't leave a thing. It took all memories and it left no capacity to build a new set. A man went in a human being and came out a vegetable." "Suspended animation," said Stanford, "would be a solution. If we had suspended animation. Simply stack a man away until we found the answer, then revive and recondition him." "Be that as it may," Young told them, "I should like your most earnest consideration of my petition. I do not feel quite equal to waiting until you have the answer solved." Riggs said, harshly, "You are asking us to legalize death." Young nodded. "If you wish to phrase it that way. I'm asking it in the name of common decency." Commissioner Stanford said, "We can ill afford to lose you, Ancestor." Young sighed. "There is that damned attitude again. Immortality pays all debts. When a man is made immortal, he has received full compensation for everything that he may endure. I have lived longer than any man could be expected to live and still I am denied the dignity of old age. A man's desires are few, and quickly sated, and yet he is expected to continue living with desires burned up and blown away to ash. He gets to a point where nothing has a value ... even to a point where his own personal values are no more than shadows. Gentlemen, there was a time when I could not have committed murder ... literally could not have forced myself to kill another man ... but today I could, without a second thought. Disillusion and cynicism have crept in upon me and I have no conscience." * * * * * "There are compensations," Riggs said. "Your family...." "They get in my hair," said Young disgustedly. "Thousands upon thousands of young squirts calling me Grandsire and Ancestor and coming to me for advice they practically never follow. I don't know even a fraction of them and I listen to them carefully explain a relationship so tangled and trivial that it makes me yawn in their faces. It's all new to them and so old, so damned and damnably old to me." "Ancestor Young," said Stanford, "you have seen Man spread out from Earth to distant stellar systems. You have seen the human race expand from one planet to several thousand planets. You have had a part in this. Is there not some satisfaction...." "You're talking in abstracts," Young cut in. "What I am concerned about is myself ... a certain specific mass of protoplasm shaped in biped form and tagged by the designation, ironic as it may seem, of Andrew Young. I have been unselfish all my life. I've asked little for myself. Now I am being utterly and entirely selfish and I ask that this matter be regarded as a personal problem rather than as a racial abstraction." "Whether you'll admit it or not," said Stanford, "it is more than a personal problem. It is a problem which some day must be solved for the salvation of the race." "That is what I am trying to impress upon you," Young snapped. "It is a problem that you must face. Some day you will solve it, but until you do, you must make provisions for those who face the unsolved problem." "Wait a while," counseled Chairman Riggs. "Who knows? Today, tomorrow." "Or a million years from now," Young told him bitterly and left, a tall, vigorous-looking man whose step was swift in anger where normally it was slow with weariness and despair. * * * * * There was yet a chance, of course. But there was little hope. How can a man go back almost six thousand years and snare a thing he never understood? And yet Andrew Young remembered it. Remembered it as clearly as if it had been a thing that had happened in the morning of this very day. It was a shining thing, a bright thing, a happiness that was brand-new and fresh as a bluebird's wing of an April morning or a shy woods flower after sudden rain. He had been a boy and he had seen the bluebird and he had no words to say the thing he felt, but he had held up his tiny fingers and pointed and shaped his lips to coo. Once, he thought, I had it in my very fingers and I did not have the experience to know what it was, nor the value of it. And now I know the value, but it has escaped me--it escaped me on the day that I began to think like a human being. The first adult thought pushed it just a little and the next one pushed it farther and finally it was gone entirely and I didn't even know that it had gone. He sat in the chair on the flagstone patio and felt the Sun upon him, filtering through the branches of trees misty with the breaking leaves of Spring. Something else, thought Andrew Young. Something that was not human--yet. A tiny animal that had many ways to choose, many roads to walk. And, of course, I chose the wrong way. I chose the human way. But there was another way. I know there must have been. A fairy way--or a brownie way, or maybe even pixie. That sounds foolish and childish now, but it wasn't always. I chose the human way because I was guided into it. I was pushed and shoved, like a herded sheep. I grew up and I lost the thing I held. He sat and made his mind go hard and tried to analyze what it was he sought and there was no name for it. Except happiness. And happiness was a state of being, not a thing to regain and grasp. * * * * * But he could remember how it felt. With his eyes open in the present, he could remember the brightness of the day of the past, the clean-washed goodness of it, the wonder of the colors that were more brilliant than he ever since had seen--as if it were the first second after Creation and the world was still shiningly new. It was that new, of course. It would be that new to a child. But that didn't explain it all. It didn't explain the bottomless capacity for seeing and knowing and believing in the beauty and the goodness of a clean new world. It didn't explain the almost non-human elation of knowing that there were colors to see and scents to smell and soft green grass to touch. I'm insane, Andrew Young said to himself. Insane, or going insane. But if insanity will take me back to an understanding of the strange perception I had when I was a child, and lost, I'll take insanity. He leaned back in his chair and let his eyes go shut and his mind drift back. He was crouching in a corner of a garden and the leaves were drifting down from the walnut trees like a rain of saffron gold. He lifted one of the leaves and it slipped from his fingers, for his hands were chubby still and not too sure in grasping. But he tried again and he clutched it by the stem in one stubby fist and he saw that it was not just a blob of yellowness, but delicate, with many little veins. When he held it so that the Sun struck it, he imagined that he could almost see through it, the gold was spun so fine. He crouched with the leaf clutched tightly in his hand and for a moment there was a silence that held him motionless. Then he heard the frost-loosened leaves pattering all around him, pattering as they fell, talking in little whispers as they sailed down through the air and found themselves a bed with their golden fellows. In that moment he knew that he was one with the leaves and the whispers that they made, one with the gold and the autumn sunshine and the far blue mist upon the hill above the apple orchard. A foot crunched stone behind him and his eyes came open and the golden leaves were gone. "I am sorry if I disturbed you, Ancestor," said the man. "I had an appointment for this hour, but I would not have disturbed you if I had known." Young stared at him reproachfully without answering. "I am kin," the man told him. "I wouldn't doubt it," said Andrew Young. "The Galaxy is cluttered up with descendants of mine." The man was very humble. "Of course, you must resent us sometimes. But we are proud of you, sir. I might almost say that we revere you. No other family--" "I know," interrupted Andrew Young. "No other family has any fossil quite so old as I am." "Nor as wise," said the man. Andrew Young snorted. "Cut out that nonsense. Let's hear what you have to say and get it over with." * * * * * The technician was harassed and worried and very frankly puzzled. But he stayed respectful, for one always was respectful to an ancestor, whoever he might be. Today there were mighty few left who had been born into a mortal world. Not that Andrew Young looked old. He looked like all adults, a fine figure of a person in the early twenties. The technician shifted uneasily. "But, sir, this ... this...." "Teddy bear," said Young. "Yes, of course. An extinct terrestrial subspecies of animal?" "It's a toy," Young told him. "A very ancient toy. All children used to have them five thousand years ago. They took them to bed." * * * * * The technician shuddered. "A deplorable custom. Primitive." "Depends on the viewpoint," said Young. "I've slept with them many a time. There's a world of comfort in one, I can personally assure you." The technician saw that it was no use to argue. He might as well fabricate the thing and get it over with. "I can build you a fine model, sir," he said, trying to work up some enthusiasm. "I'll build in a response mechanism so that it can give simple answers to certain keyed questions and, of course, I'll fix it so it'll walk, either on two legs or four...." "No," said Andrew Young. The technician looked surprised and hurt. "No?" "No," repeated Andrew Young. "I don't want it fancied up. I want it a simple lump of make-believe. No wonder the children of today have no imagination. Modern toys entertain them with a bag of tricks that leave the young'uns no room for imagination. They couldn't possibly think up, on their own, all the screwy things these new toys do. Built-in responses and implied consciousness and all such mechanical trivia...." "You just want a stuffed fabric," said the technician, sadly, "with jointed arms and legs." "Precisely," agreed Young. "You're sure you want fabric, sir? I could do a neater job in plastics." "Fabric," Young insisted firmly, "and it must be scratchy." "Scratchy, sir?" "Sure. You know. Bristly. So it scratches when you rub your face against it." "But no one in his right mind would want to rub his face...." "I would," said Andrew Young. "I fully intend to do so." "As you wish, sir," the technician answered, beaten now. "When you get it done," said Young, "I have some other things in mind." "Other things?" The technician looked wildly about, as if seeking some escape. "A high chair," said Young. "And a crib. And a woolly dog. And buttons." "Buttons?" asked the technician. "What are buttons?" "I'll explain it all to you," Young told him airily. "It all is very simple." * * * * * It seemed, when Andrew Young came into the room, that Riggs and Stanford had been expecting him, had known that he was coming and had been waiting for him. He wasted no time on preliminaries or formalities. They know, he told himself. They know, or they have guessed. They would be watching me. Ever since I brought in my petition, they have been watching me, wondering what I would be thinking, trying to puzzle out what I might do next. They know every move I've made, they know about the toys and the furniture and all the other things. And I don't need to tell them what I plan to do. "I need some help," he said, and they nodded soberly, as if they had guessed he needed help. "I want to build a house," he explained. "A big house. Much larger than the usual house." Riggs said, "We'll draw the plans for you. Do anything else that you--" "A house," Young went on, "about four or five times as big as the ordinary house. Four or five times normal scale, I mean. Doors twenty-five to thirty feet high and everything else in proportion." "Neighbors or privacy?" asked Stanford. "Privacy," said Young. "We'll take care of it," promised Riggs. "Leave the matter of the house to us." Young stood for a long moment, looking at the two of them. Then he said, "I thank you, gentlemen. I thank you for your helpfulness and your understanding. But most of all I thank you for not asking any questions." He turned slowly and walked out of the room and they sat in silence for minutes after he was gone. Finally, Stanford offered a deduction: "It will have to be a place that a boy would like. Woods to run in and a little stream to fish in and a field where he can fly his kites. What else could it be?" "He's been out ordering children's furniture and toys," Riggs agreed. "Stuff from five thousand years ago. The kind of things he used when he was a child. But scaled to adult size." "Now," said Stanford, "he wants a house built to the same proportions. A house that will make him think or help him believe that he is a child. But will it work, Riggs? His body will not change. He cannot make it change. It will only be in his mind." "Illusion," declared Riggs. "The illusion of bigness in relation to himself. To a child, creeping on the floor, a door is twenty-five to thirty feet high, relatively. Of course the child doesn't know that. But Andrew Young does. I don't see how he'll overcome that." "At first," suggested Stanford, "he will know that it's illusion, but after a time, isn't there a possibility that it will become reality so far as he's concerned? That's why he needs our help. So that the house will not be firmly planted in his memory as a thing that's merely out of proportion ... so that it will slide from illusion into reality without too great a strain." "We must keep our mouths shut." Riggs nodded soberly. "There must be no interference. It's a thing he must do himself ... entirely by himself. Our help with the house must be the help of an unseen, silent agency. Like brownies, I think the term was that he used, we must help and be never seen. Intrusion by anyone would introduce a jarring note and would destroy illusion and that is all he has to work on. Illusion pure and simple." "Others have tried," objected Stanford, pessimistic again. "Many others. With gadgets and machines...." "None has tried it," said Riggs, "with the power of mind alone. With the sheer determination to wipe out five thousand years of memory." "That will be his stumbling block," said Stanford. "The old, dead memories are the things he has to beat. He has to get rid of them ... not just bury them, but get rid of them for good and all, forever." "He must do more than that," said Riggs. "He must replace his memories with the outlook he had when he was a child. His mind must be washed out, refreshed, wiped clean and shining and made new again ... ready to live another five thousand years." The two men sat and looked at one another and in each other's eyes they saw a single thought--the day would come when they, too, each of them alone, would face the problem Andrew Young faced. "We must help," said Riggs, "in every way we can and we must keep watch and we must be ready ... but Andrew Young cannot know that we are helping or that we are watching him. We must anticipate the materials and tools and the aids that he may need." * * * * * Stanford started to speak, then hesitated, as if seeking in his mind for the proper words. "Yes," said Riggs. "What is it?" "Later on," Stanford managed to say, "much later on, toward the very end, there is a certain factor that we must supply. The one thing that he will need the most and the one thing that he cannot think about, even in advance. All the rest can be stage setting and he can still go on toward the time when it becomes reality. All the rest may be make-believe, but one thing must come as genuine or the entire effort will collapse in failure." Riggs nodded. "Of course. That's something we'll have to work out carefully." "If we can," Stanford said. * * * * * The yellow button over here and the red one over there and the green one doesn't fit, so I'll throw it on the floor and just for the fun of it, I'll put the pink one in my mouth and someone will find me with it and they'll raise a ruckus because they will be afraid that I will swallow it. And there's nothing, absolutely nothing, that I love better than a full-blown ruckus. Especially if it is over me. "Ug," said Andrew Young, and he swallowed the button. He sat stiff and straight in the towering high chair and then, in a fury, swept the oversized muffin tin and its freight of buttons crashing to the floor. For a second he felt like weeping in utter frustration and then a sense of shame crept in on him. Big baby, he said to himself. Crazy to be sitting in an overgrown high chair, playing with buttons and mouthing baby talk and trying to force a mind conditioned by five thousand years of life into the channels of an infant's thoughts. Carefully he disengaged the tray and slid it out, cautiously shinnied down the twelve-foot-high chair. The room engulfed him, the ceiling towering far above him. The neighbors, he told himself, no doubt thought him crazy, although none of them had said so. Come to think of it, he had not seen any of his neighbors for a long spell now. A suspicion came into his mind. Maybe they knew what he was doing, maybe they were deliberately keeping out of his way in order not to embarrass him. That, of course, would be what they would do if they had realized what he was about. But he had expected ... he had expected ... that fellow, what's his name? ... at the commission, what's the name of that commission, anyhow? Well, anyway, he'd expected a fellow whose name he couldn't remember from a commission the name of which he could not recall to come snooping around, wondering what he might be up to, offering to help, spoiling the whole setup, everything he'd planned. I can't remember, he complained to himself. I can't remember the name of a man whose name I knew so short a time ago as yesterday. Nor the name of a commission that I knew as well as I know my name. I'm getting forgetful. I'm getting downright childish. Childish? Childish! Childish and forgetful. Good Lord, thought Andrew Young, that's just the way I want it. On hands and knees he scrabbled about and picked up the buttons, put them in his pocket. Then, with the muffin tin underneath his arm, he shinnied up the high chair and, seating himself comfortably, sorted out the buttons in the pan. The green one over here in this compartment and the yellow one ... oops, there she goes onto the floor. And the red one in with the blue one and this one ... this one ... what's the color of this one? Color? What's that? What is what? What-- * * * * * "It's almost time," said Stanford, "and we are ready, as ready as we'll ever be. We'll move in when the time is right, but we can't move in too soon. Better to be a little late than a little early. We have all the things we need. Special size diapers and--" "Good Lord," exclaimed Riggs, "it won't go that far, will it?" "It should," said Stanford. "It should go even further to work right. He got lost yesterday. One of our men found him and led him home. He didn't have the slightest idea where he was and he was getting pretty scared and he cried a little. He chattered about birds and flowers and he insisted that our man stay and play with him." Riggs chuckled softly. "Did he?" "Oh, certainly. He came back worn to a frazzle." "Food?" I asked Riggs. "How is he feeding himself?" "We see there's a supply of stuff, cookies and such-wise, left on a low shelf, where he can get at them. One of the robots cooks up some more substantial stuff on a regular schedule and leaves it where he can find it. We have to be careful. We can't mess around too much. We can't intrude on him. I have a feeling he's almost reached an actual turning point. We can't afford to upset things now that he's come this far." "The android's ready?" "Just about," said Stanford. "And the playmates?" "Ready. They were less of a problem." "There's nothing more that we can do?" "Nothing," Stanford said. "Just wait, that's all. Young has carried himself this far by the sheer force of will alone. That will is gone now. He can't consciously force himself any further back. He is more child than adult now. He's built up a regressive momentum and the only question is whether that momentum is sufficient to carry him all the way back to actual babyhood." "It has to go back to that?" Riggs looked unhappy, obviously thinking of his own future. "You're only guessing, aren't you?" "All the way or it simply is no good," Stanford said dogmatically. "He has to get an absolutely fresh start. All the way or nothing." "And if he gets stuck halfway between? Half child, half man, what then?" "That's something I don't want to think about," Stanford said. * * * * * He had lost his favorite teddy bear and gone to hunt it in the dusk that was filled with elusive fireflies and the hush of a world quieting down for the time of sleep. The grass was drenched with dew and he felt the cold wetness of it soaking through his shoes as he went from bush to hedge to flowerbed, looking for the missing toy. It was necessary, he told himself, that he find the nice little bear, for it was the one that slept with him and if he did not find it, he knew that it would spend a lonely and comfortless night. But at no time did he admit, even to his innermost thought, that it was he who needed the bear and not the bear who needed him. A soaring bat swooped low and for a horrified moment, catching sight of the zooming terror, a blob of darkness in the gathering dusk, he squatted low against the ground, huddling against the sudden fear that came out of the night. Sounds of fright bubbled in his throat and now he saw the great dark garden as an unknown place, filled with lurking shadows that lay in wait for him. He stayed cowering against the ground and tried to fight off the alien fear that growled from behind each bush and snarled in every darkened corner. But even as the fear washed over him, there was one hidden corner of his mind that knew there was no need of fear. It was as if that one area of his brain still fought against the rest of him, as if that small section of cells might know that the bat was no more than a flying bat, that the shadows in the garden were no more than absence of light. There was a reason, he knew, why he should not be afraid--a good reason born of a certain knowledge he no longer had. And that he should have such knowledge seemed unbelievable, for he was scarcely two years old. * * * * * He tried to say it--two years old. There was something wrong with his tongue, something the matter with the way he had to use his mouth, with the way his lips refused to shape the words he meant to say. He tried to define the words, tried to tell himself what he meant by two years old and one moment it seemed that he knew the meaning of it and then it escaped him. The bat came again and he huddled close against the ground, shivering as he crouched. He lifted his eyes fearfully, darting glances here and there, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the looming house and it was a place he knew as refuge. "House," he said, and the word was wrong, not the word itself, but the way he said it. He ran on trembling, unsure feet and the great door loomed before him, with the latch too high to reach. But there was another way, a small swinging door built into the big door, the sort of door that is built for cats and dogs and sometimes little children. He darted through it and felt the sureness and the comfort of the house about him. The sureness and the comfort--and the loneliness. He found his second-best teddy bear, and, picking it up, clutched it to his breast, sobbing into its scratchy back in pure relief from terror. There is something wrong, he thought. Something dreadfully wrong. Something is as it should not be. It is not the garden or the darkened bushes or the swooping winged shape that came out of the night. It is something else, something missing, something that should be here and isn't. Clutching the teddy bear, he sat rigid and tried desperately to drive his mind back along the way that would tell him what was wrong. There was an answer, he was sure of that. There was an answer somewhere; at one time he had known it. At one time he had recognized the need he felt and there had been no way to supply it--and now he couldn't even know the need, could feel it, but he could not know it. He clutched the bear closer and huddled in the darkness, watching the moonbeam that came through a window, high above his head, and etched a square of floor in brightness. Fascinated, he watched the moonbeam and all at once the terror faded. He dropped the bear and crawled on hands and knees, stalking the moonbeam. It did not try to get away and he reached its edge and thrust his hands into it and laughed with glee when his hands were painted by the light coming through the window. He lifted his face and stared up at the blackness and saw the white globe of the Moon, looking at him, watching him. The Moon seemed to wink at him and he chortled joyfully. Behind him a door creaked open and he turned clumsily around. Someone stood in the doorway, almost filling it--a beautiful person who smiled at him. Even in the darkness he could sense the sweetness of the smile, the glory of her golden hair. "Time to eat, Andy," said the woman. "Eat and get a bath and then to bed." Andrew Young hopped joyfully on both feet, arms held out--happy and excited and contented. "Mummy!" he cried. "Mummy ... Moon!" He swung about with a pointing finger and the woman came swiftly across the floor, knelt and put her arms around him, held him close against her. His cheek against hers, he stared up at the Moon and it was a wondrous thing, a bright and golden thing, a wonder that was shining new and fresh. * * * * * On the street outside, Stanford and Riggs stood looking up at the huge house that towered above the trees. "She's in there now," said Stanford. "Everything's quiet so it must be all right." Riggs said, "He was crying in the garden. He ran in terror for the house. He stopped crying about the time she must have come in." Stanford nodded. "I was afraid we were putting it off too long, but I don't see now how we could have done it sooner. Any outside interference would have shattered the thing he tried to do. He had to really need her. Well, it's all right now. The timing was just about perfect." "You're sure, Stanford?" "Sure? Certainly I am sure. We created the android and we trained her. We instilled a deep maternal sense into her personality. She knows what to do. She is almost human. She is as close as we could come to a human mother eighteen feet tall. We don't know what Young's mother looked like, but chances are he doesn't either. Over the years his memory has idealized her. That's what we did. We made an ideal mother." "If it only works," said Riggs. "It will work," said Stanford, confidently. "Despite the shortcomings we may discover by trial and error, it will work. He's been fighting himself all this time. Now he can quit fighting and shift responsibility. It's enough to get him over the final hump, to place him safely and securely in the second childhood that he had to have. Now he can curl up, contented. There is someone to look after him and think for him and take care of him. He'll probably go back just a little further ... a little closer to the cradle. And that is good, for the further he goes, the more memories are erased." "And then?" asked Riggs worriedly. "Then he can proceed to grow up again." They stood watching, silently. In the enormous house, lights came on in the kitchen and the windows gleamed with a homey brightness. I, too, Stanford was thinking. Some day, I, too. Young has pointed the way, he has blazed the path. He had shown us, all the other billions of us, here on Earth and all over the Galaxy, the way it can be done. There will be others and for them there will be more help. We'll know then how to do it better. Now we have something to work on. Another thousand years or so, he thought, and I will go back, too. Back to the cradle and the dreams of childhood and the safe security of a mother's arms. It didn't frighten him in the least. 
30876	----	Eternal Life By Professor Henry Drummond Philadelphia Henry Altemus Copyright 1896 by Henry Altemus. ETERNAL LIFE. "This is Life Eternal--that they might know Thee, the True God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent."--_Jesus Christ_. "Perfect correspondence would be perfect life. Were there no changes in the environment but such as the organism had adapted changes to meet, and were it never to fail in the efficiency with which it met them, there would be eternal existence and eternal knowledge."--_Herbert Spencer_. ONE of the most startling achievements of recent science is a definition of Eternal Life. To the religious mind this is a contribution of immense moment. For eighteen hundred years only one definition of Life Eternal was before the world. Now there are two. Through all these centuries revealed religion had this doctrine to itself. Ethics had a voice, as well as Christianity, on the question of the _summum bonum_; Philosophy ventured to speculate on the Being of a God. But no source outside Christianity contributed anything to the doctrine of Eternal Life. Apart from Revelation, this great truth was unguaranteed. It was the one thing in the Christian system that most needed verification from without, yet none was forthcoming. And never has any further light been thrown upon the question why in its very nature the Christian Life should be Eternal. Christianity itself even upon this point has been obscure. Its decision upon the bare fact is authoritative and specific. But as to what there is in the Spiritual Life necessarily endowing it with the element of Eternity, the maturest theology is all but silent. It has been reserved for modern biology at once to defend and illuminate this central truth of the Christian faith. And hence in the interests of religion, practical and evidential, this second and scientific definition of Eternal Life is to be hailed as an announcement of commanding interest. Why it should not yet have received the recognition of religious thinkers--for already it has lain some years unnoticed--is not difficult to understand. The belief in Science as an aid to faith is not yet ripe enough to warrant men in searching there for witnesses to the highest Christian truths. The inspiration of Nature, it is thought, extends to the humbler doctrines alone. And yet the reverent inquirer who guides his steps in the right direction may find even now in the still dim twilight of the scientific world much that will illuminate and intensify his sublimest faith. Here, at least, comes, and comes unbidden, the opportunity of testing the most vital point of the Christian system. Hitherto the Christian philosopher has remained content with the scientific evidence against Annihilation. Or, with Butler, he has reasoned from the Metamorphoses of Insects to a future life. Or again, with the authors of "The Unseen Universe," the apologist has constructed elaborate, and certainly impressive, arguments upon the Law of Continuity. But now we may draw nearer. For the first time Science touches Christianity _positively_ on the doctrine of Immortality. It confronts us with an actual definition of an Eternal Life, based on a full and rigidly accurate examination of the necessary conditions. Science does not pretend that it can fulfil these conditions. Its votaries make no claim to possess the Eternal Life. It simply postulates the requisite conditions without concerning itself whether any organism should ever appear, or does now exist, which might fulfil them. The claim of religion, on the other hand, is that there are organisms which possess Eternal Life. And the problem for us to solve is this: Do those who profess to possess Eternal Life fulfil the conditions required by Science, or are they different conditions? In a word, Is the Christian conception of Eternal Life scientific? It may be unnecessary to notice at the outset that the definition of Eternal Life drawn up by Science was framed without reference to religion. It must indeed have been the last thought with the thinker to whom we chiefly owe it, that in unfolding the conception of a Life in its very nature necessarily eternal, he was contributing to Theology. Mr. Herbert Spencer--for it is to him we owe it--would be the first to admit the impartiality of his definition; and from the connection in which it occurs in his writings, it is obvious that religion was not even present to his mind. He is analyzing with minute care the relations between Environment and Life. He unfolds the principle according to which Life is high or low, long or short. He shows why organisms live and why they die. And finally he defines a condition of things in which an organism would never die--in which it would enjoy a perpetual and perfect Life. This to him is, of course, but a speculation. Life Eternal is a biological conceit. The conditions necessary to an Eternal Life do not exist in the natural world. So that the definition is altogether impartial and independent. A Perfect Life, to Science, is simply a thing which is theoretically possible--like a Perfect Vacuum. Before giving, in so many words, the definition of Mr. Herbert Spencer, it will render it fully intelligible if we gradually lead up to it by a brief rehearsal of the few and simple biological facts on which it is based. In considering the subject of Death, we have formerly seen that there are degrees of Life. By this is meant that some lives have more and fuller correspondence with Environment than others. The amount of correspondence, again, is determined by the greater or less complexity of the organism. Thus a simple organism like the Amoeba is possessed of very few correspondences. It is a mere sac of transparent structureless jelly for which organization has done almost nothing, and hence it can only communicate with the smallest possible area of Environment. An insect, in virtue of its more complex structure, corresponds with a wider area. Nature has endowed it with special faculties for reaching out to the Environment on many sides; it has more life than the Amoeba. In other words, it is a higher animal. Man again, whose body is still further differentiated, or broken up into different correspondences, finds himself _en rapport_ with his surroundings to a further extent. And therefore he is higher still, more living still. And this law, that the degree of Life varies with the degree of correspondence, holds to the minutest detail throughout the entire range of living things. Life becomes fuller and fuller, richer and richer, more and more sensitive and responsive to an ever-widening Environment as we rise in the chain of being. Now it will speedily appear that a distinct relation exists, and must exist, between complexity and longevity. Death being brought about by the failure of an organism to adjust itself to some change in the Environment, it follows that those organisms which are able to adjust themselves most readily and successfully will live the longest. They will continue time after time to effect the appropriate adjustment, and their power of doing so will be exactly proportionate to their complexity--that is, to the amount of Environment they can control with their correspondences. There are, for example, in the Environment of every animal certain things which are directly or indirectly dangerous to Life. If its equipment of correspondences is not complete enough to enable it to avoid these dangers in all possible circumstances, it must sooner or later succumb. The organism then with the most perfect set of correspondences, that is, the highest and most complex organism, has an obvious advantage over less complex forms. It can adjust itself more perfectly and frequently. But this is just the biological way of saying that it can live the longest. And hence the relation between complexity and longevity may be expressed thus--the most complex organisms are the longest lived. To state and illustrate the proposition conversely may make the point still further clear. The less highly organized an animal is, the less will be its chance of remaining in lengthened correspondence with its Environment. At some time or other in its career circumstances are sure to occur to which the comparatively immobile organism finds itself structurally unable to respond. Thus a _Medusa_ tossed ashore by a wave, finds itself so out of correspondence with its new surroundings that its life must pay the forfeit. Had it been able by internal change to adapt itself to external change--to correspond sufficiently with the new environment, as for example to crawl, as an eel would have done, back into that environment with which it had completer correspondence--its life might have been spared. But had this happened it would continue to live henceforth only so long as it could continue in correspondence with all the circumstances in which it might find itself. Even if, however, it became complex enough to resist the ordinary and direct dangers of its environment, it might still be out of correspondence with others. A naturalist for instance, might take advantage of its want of correspondence with particular sights and sounds to capture it for his cabinet, or the sudden dropping of a yacht's anchor or the turn of a screw might cause its untimely death. Again, in the case of a bird in virtue of its more complex organization, there is command over a much larger area of environment. It can take precautions such as the _Medusa_ could not; it has increased facilities for securing food; its adjustments all round are more complex; and therefore it ought to be able to maintain its Life for a longer period. There is still a large area, however, over which it has no control. Its power of internal change is not complete enough to afford it perfect correspondence with all external changes, and its tenure of Life is to that extent insecure. Its correspondence, moreover, is limited even with regard to those external conditions with which it has been partially established. Thus a bird in ordinary circumstances has no difficulty in adapting itself to changes of temperature, but if these are varied beyond the point at which its capacity of adjustment begins to fail--for example, during an extreme winter--the organism being unable to meet the condition must perish. The human organism, on the other hand, can respond to this external condition, as well as to countless other vicissitudes under which lower forms would inevitably succumb. Man's adjustments are to the largest known area of Environment, and hence he ought to be able furthest to prolong his Life. It becomes evident, then, that as we ascend in the scale of Life we rise also in the scale of longevity. The lowest organisms are, as a rule, shortlived, and the rate of mortality diminishes more or less regularly as we ascend in the animal scale. So extraordinary indeed is the mortality among lowly-organized forms that in most cases a compensation is actually provided, nature endowing them with a marvellously increased fertility in order to guard against absolute extinction. Almost all lower forms are furnished not only with great reproductive powers, but with different methods of propagation, by which, in various circumstances, and in an incredibly short time, the species can be indefinitely multiplied. Ehrenberg found that by the repeated subdivisions of a single _Paramecium_, no fewer than 268,000,000 similar organisms might be produced in one month. This power steadily decreases as we rise higher in the scale, until forms are reached in which one, two, or at most three, come into being at a birth. It decreases, however because it is no longer needed. These forms have a much longer lease of Life. And it may be taken as a rule, although it has exceptions, that complexity in animal organisms is always associated with longevity. It may be objected that these illustrations are taken merely from morbid conditions. But whether the Life be cut short by accident or by disease the principle is the same. All dissolution is brought about practically in the same way. A certain condition in the Environment fails to be met by a corresponding condition in the organism, and this is death. And conversely the more an organism in virtue of its complexity can adapt itself to all the parts of its Environment, the longer it will live. "It is manifest _a priori_," says Mr. Herbert Spencer, "that since changes in the physical state of the environment, as also those mechanical actions and those variations of available food which occur in it, are liable to stop the processes going on in the organism; and since the adaptive changes in the organism have the effects of directly or indirectly counterbalancing these changes in the environment, it follows that the life of the organism will be short or long, low or high, according to the extent to which changes in the environment are met by corresponding changes in the organism. Allowing a margin for perturbations, the life will continue only while the correspondence continues; the completeness of the life will be proportionate to the completeness of the correspondence; and the life will be perfect only when the correspondence is perfect." [1] [1] "Principles of Biology," p. 82. We are now all but in sight of our scientific definition of Eternal Life. The desideratum is an organism with a correspondence of a very exceptional kind. It must lie beyond the reach of those "mechanical actions" and those "variations of available food," which are "liable to stop the processes going on in the organism." Before we reach an Eternal Life we must pass beyond that point at which all ordinary correspondences inevitably cease. We must find an organism so high and complex, that at some point in its development it shall have added a correspondence which organic death is powerless to arrest. We must, in short, pass beyond that finite region where the correspondences depend on evanescent and material media, and enter a further region where the Environment corresponded with is itself Eternal. Such an Environment exists. The Environment of the Spiritual world is outside the influence of these "mechanical actions," which sooner or later interrupt the processes going on in all finite organisms. If then we can find an organism which has established a correspondence with the spiritual world, that correspondence will possess the elements of eternity-- provided only one other condition be fulfilled. That condition is that the Environment be perfect. If it is not perfect, if it is not the highest, if it is endowed with the finite quality of change, there can be no guarantee that the Life of its correspondents will be eternal. Some change might occur in it which the correspondents had no adaptive changes to meet, and Life would cease. But grant a spiritual organism in perfect correspondence with a perfect spiritual Environment, and the conditions necessary to Eternal Life are satisfied. The exact terms of Mr. Herbert Spencer's definition of Eternal Life may now be given. And it will be seen that they include essentially the conditions here laid down. "Perfect correspondence would be perfect life. Were there no changes in the environment but such as the organism had adapted changes to meet, and were it never to fail in the efficiency with which it met them, there would be eternal existence and eternal knowledge." [1] Reserving the question as to the possible fulfilment of these conditions, let us turn for a moment to the definition of Eternal Life laid down by Christ. Let us place it alongside the definition of Science, and mark the points of contact. Uninterrupted correspondence with a perfect Environment is Eternal Life according to Science. "This is Life Eternal," said Christ, "that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent." [2] Life Eternal is to know God. To know God is to "correspond" with God. To correspond with God is to correspond with a Perfect Environment. And the organism which attains to this, in the nature of things must live for ever. Here is "eternal existence and eternal knowledge." [1] "Principles of Biology," p. 88. [2] John xvii. The main point of agreement between the scientific and the religious definition is that Life consists in a peculiar and personal relation defined as a "correspondence." This conception, that Life consists in correspondences, has been so abundantly illustrated already that it is now unnecessary to discuss it further. All Life indeed consists essentially in correspondences with various Environments. The artist's life is a correspondence with art; the musician's with music. To cut them off from these Environments is in that relation to cut off their Life. To be cut off from all Environment is death. To find a new Environment again and cultivate relation with it is to find a new Life. To live is to correspond, and to correspond is to live. So much is true in Science. But it is also true in Religion. And it is of great importance to observe that to Religion also the conception of Life is a correspondence. No truth of Christianity has been more ignorantly or wilfully travestied than the doctrine of Immortality. The popular idea, in spite of a hundred protests, is that Eternal Life is to live forever. A single glance at the _locus classicus_, might have made this error impossible. There we are told that Life Eternal is not to live. This is Life Eternal--_to know_. And yet--and it is a notorious instance of the fact that men who are opposed to Religion will take their conceptions of its profoundest truths from mere vuglar perversions--this view still represents to many cultivated men the Scriptural doctrine of Eternal Life. From time to time the taunt is thrown at Religion, not unseldom from lips which Science ought to have taught more caution, that the Future Life of Christianity is simply a prolonged existence, an eternal monotony, a blind and indefinite continuance of being. The Bible never could commit itself to any such empty platitude; nor could Christianity ever offer to the world a hope so colorless. Not that Eternal Life has nothing to do with everlastingness. That is part of the conception. And it is this aspect of the question that first arrests us in the field of Science. But even Science has more in its definition than longevity. It has a correspondence and an Environment; and although it cannot fill up these terms for Religion, it can indicate at least the nature of the relation, the kind of thing that is meant by Life. Science speaks to us indeed of much more than numbers of years. It defines degrees of Life. It explains a widening Environment. It unfolds the relation between a widening Environment and increasing complexity in organisms. And if it has no absolute contribution to the content of Religion, its analogies are not limited to a point. It yields to Immortality, and this is the most that Science can do in any case, the broad framework for a doctrine. The further definition, moreover, of this correspondence as _knowing_ is in the highest degree significant. Is not this the precise quality in an Eternal correspondence which the analogies of Science would prepare us to look for? Longevity is associated with complexity. And complexity in organisms is manifested by the successive addition of correspondences, each richer and larger than those which have gone before. The differentiation, therefore, of the spiritual organism ought to be signalized by the addition of the highest possible correspondence. It is not essential to the idea that the correspondence should be altogether novel; it is necessary rather that it should not. An altogether new correspondence appearing suddenly without shadow or prophecy would be a violation of continuity. What we should expect would be something new, and yet something that we were already prepared for. We should look for a further development in harmony with current developments; the extension of the last and highest correspondence in a new and higher direction. And this is exactly what we have. In the world with which biology deals, Evolution culminates in Knowledge. At whatever point in the zoological scale this correspondence, or set of correspondences, begins, it is certain there is nothing higher. In its stunted infancy merely, when we meet with its rudest beginnings in animal intelligence, it is a thing so wonderful, as to strike every thoughtful and reverent observer with awe. Even among the invertebrates so marvellously are these or kindred powers displayed, that naturalists do not hesitate now, on the ground of intelligence at least, to classify some of the humblest creatures next to man himself. [1] Nothing in nature, indeed, is so unlike the rest of nature, so prophetic of what is beyond it, so supernatural. And as manifested in Man who crowns creation with his all-embracing consciousness, there is but one word to describe his knowledge; it is Divine. If then from this point there is to be any further Evolution, this surely must be the correspondence in which it shall take place? This correspondence is great enough to demand development; and yet it is little enough to need it. The magnificence of what it has achieved relatively, is the pledge of the possibility of more; the insignificance of its conquest absolutely involves the probability of still richer triumphs. If anything, in short, in humanity is to go on it must be this. Other correspondences may continue likewise; others, again, we can well afford to leave behind. But this cannot cease. This correspondence--or this set of correspondences, for it is very complex--is it not that to which men with one consent would attach Eternal Life? Is there anything else to which they would attach it? Is anything better conceivable, anything worthier, fuller, nobler, anything which would represent a higher form of Evolution or offer a more perfect ideal for an Eternal Life? [1] _Vide_ Sir John Lubbock's "Ants, Bees, and Wasps," pp. 1, 181. But these are questions of quality; and the moment we pass from quantity to quality we leave Science behind. In the vocabulary of Science, Eternity is only the fraction of a word. It means mere everlastingness. To Religion, on the other hand, Eternity has little to do with time. To correspond with the God of Science, the Eternal Unknowable, would be everlasting existence; to correspond with "the true God and Jesus Christ," is Eternal Life. The quality of the Eternal Life alone makes the heaven; mere everlastingness might be no boon. Even the brief span of the temporal life is too long for those who spend its years in sorrow. Time itself, let alone Eternity, is all but excruciating to Doubt. And many besides Schopenhauer have secretly regarded consciousness as the hideous mistake and malady of Nature. Therefore we must not only have quantity of years, to speak in the language of the present, but quality of correspondence. When we leave Science behind, this correspondence also receives a higher name. It becomes communion. Other names there are for it, religious and theological. It may be included in a general expression, Faith; or we may call it by a personal and specific term, Love. For the knowing of a Whole so great involves the co-operation of many parts. Communion with God--can it be demonstrated in terms of Science that this is a correspondence which will never break? We do not appeal to Science for such a testimony. We have asked for its conception of an Eternal Life; and we have received for answer that Eternal Life would consist in a correspondence which should never cease, with an Environment which should never pass away. And yet what would Science demand of a perfect correspondence that is not met by this, _the knowing of God?_ There is no other correspondence which could satisfy one at least of the conditions. Not one could be named which would not bear on the face of it the mark and pledge of its mortality. But this, to know God, stands alone. To know God, to be linked with God, to be linked with Eternity-- if this is not the "eternal existence" of biology, what can more nearly approach it? And yet we are still a great way off--to establish a communication with the Eternal is not to secure Eternal Life. It must be assumed that the communication could be sustained. And to assume this would be to beg the question. So that we have still to prove Eternal Life. But let it be again repeated, we are not here seeking proofs. We are seeking light. We are merely reconnoitering from the furthest promontory of Science if so be that through the haze we may discern the outline of a distant coast and come to some conclusion as to the possibility of landing. But, it may be replied, it is not open to any one handling the question of Immortality from the side of Science to remain neutral as to the question of fact. It is not enough to announce that he has no addition to make to the positive argument. This may be permitted with reference to other points of contact between Science and Religion, but not with this. We are told this question is settled--that there is no positive side. Science meets the entire conception of Immortality with a direct negative. In the face of a powerful consensus against even the possibility of a Future Life, to content oneself with saying that Science pretended to no argument in favor of it would be at once impertinent and dishonest. We must therefore devote ourselves for a moment to the question of possibility. The problem is, with a material body and a mental organization inseparably connected with it, to bridge the grave. Emotion, volition, thought itself, are functions of the brain. When the brain is impaired, they are impaired. When the brain is not, they are not. Everything ceases with the dissolution of the material fabric; muscular activity and mental activity perish alike. With the pronounced positive statements on this point from many departments of modern Science we are all familiar. The fatal verdict is recorded by a hundred hands and with scarcely a shadow of qualification. "Unprejudiced philosophy is compelled to reject the idea of an individual immortality and of a personal continuance after death. With the decay and dissolution of its material substratum, through which alone it has acquired a conscious existence and become a person, and upon which it was dependent, the spirit must cease to exist." [l] To the same effect, Vogt: "Physiology decides definitely and categorically against individual immortality, as against any special existence of the soul. The soul does not enter the foetus like the evil spirit into persons possessed, but is a product of the development of the brain, just as muscular activity is a product of muscular development, and secretion a product of glandular development." After a careful review of the position of recent Science with regard to the whole doctrine, Mr. Graham sums up thus: "Such is the argument of Science, seemingly decisive against a future Life. As we listen to her array of syllogisms, our hearts die within us. The hopes of men, placed in one scale to be weighed, seem to fly up against the massive weight of her evidence, placed in the other. It seems as if all our arguments were vain and unsubstantial, as if our future expectations were the foolish dreams of children, as if there could not be any other possible verdict arrived at upon the evidence brought forward." [2] [1] Büchner: "Force and Matter," 3d ed., p. 232. [2] "The Creed of Science," p. 169. Can we go on in the teeth of so real an obstruction? Has not our own weapon turned against us, Science abolishing with authoritative hand the very truth we are asking it to define? What the philosopher has to throw into the other scale can be easily indicated. Generally speaking, he demurs to the dogmatism of the conclusion. That mind and brain react, that the mental and the physiological processes are related, and very intimately related, is beyond controversy. But how they are related, he submits, is still altogether unknown. The correlation of mind and brain do not involve their identity. And not a few authorities accordingly have consistently hesitated to draw any conclusion at all. Even Büchner's statement turns out, on close examination, to be tentative in the extreme. In prefacing his chapter on Personal Continuance, after a single sentence on the dependence of the soul and its manifestations upon a material substratum, he remarks, "Though we are unable to form a definite idea as to the _how_ of this connection, we are still by these facts justified in asserting, that the mode of this connection renders it _apparently_ impossible that they should continue to exist separately." [1] There is, therefore, a flaw at this point in the argument for materialism. It may not help the spiritualist in the least degree positively. He may be as far as ever from a theory of how consciousness could continue without the material tissue. But his contention secures for him the right of speculation. The path beyond may lie in hopeless gloom; but it is not barred. He may bring forward his theory if he will. And this is something. For a permission to go on is often the most that Science can grant to Religion. [1] "Force and Matter," p. 231. Men have taken advantage of this loophole in various ways. And though it cannot be said that these speculations offer us more than a probability, this is still enough to combine with the deep-seated expectation in the bosom of mankind and give fresh lustre to the hope of a future life. Whether we find relief in the theory of a simple dualism; whether with Ulrici we further define the soul as an invisible enswathement of the body, material yet non-atomic; whether, with the "Unseen Universe," we are helped by the spectacle of known forms of matter shading off into an evergrowing subtilty, mobility, and immateriality; or whether, with Wundt, we regard the soul as "the ordered unity of many elements," it is certain that shapes can be given to the conception of a correspondence which shall bridge the grave such as to satisfy minds too much accustomed to weigh evidence to put themselves off with fancies. But whether the possibilities of physiology or the theories of philosophy do or do not substantially assist us in realizing Immortality, is to Religion, to Religion at least regarded from the present point of view, of inferior moment. The fact of Immortality rests for us on a different basis. Probably, indeed, after all the Christian philosopher never engaged himself in a more superfluous task than in seeking along physiological lines to find room for a soul. The theory of Christianity has only to be fairly stated to make manifest its thorough independence of all the usual speculations on immortality. The theory is not that thought, volition, or emotion, as such are to survive the grave. The difficulty of holding a doctrine is this form, in spite of what has been advanced to the contrary, in spite of the hopes and wishes of mankind, in spite of all the scientific and philosophical attempts to make it tenable, is still profound. No secular theory of personal continuance, as even Butler acknowledged, does not equally demand the eternity of the brute. No secular theory defines the point in the chain of Evolution at which organisms become endowed with Immortality. No secular theory explains the condition of the endowment, nor indicates its goal. And if we have nothing more to fan hope than the unexplored mystery of the whole region, or the unknown remainders among the potencies of Life, then, as those who have "hope only in this world," we are "of all men the most miserable." When we turn, on the other hand, to the doctrine as it came from the lips of Christ, we find ourselves in an entirely different region. He makes no attempt to project the material into the immaterial. The old elements, however refined and subtle as to their matter, are not in themselves to inherit the Kingdom of God. That which is flesh is flesh. Instead of attaching Immortality to the natural organism, He introduces a new and original factor which none of the secular, and few even of the theological theories, seem to take sufficiently into account. To Christanity, "he that hath the Son of God hath Life, and he that hath not the Son hath not Life." This, as we take it, defines the correspondence which is to bridge the grave. This is the clue to the nature of the Life that lies at the back of the spiritual organism. And this is the true solution of the mystery of Eternal Life. There lies a something at the back of the correspondences of the spiritual organism--just as there lies a something at the back of the natural correspondence. To say that Life is a correspondence is only to express the partial truth. There is something behind. Life manifests itself in correspondences. But what determines them? The organism exhibits a variety of correspondences. What organizes them? As in the natural, so in the spiritual, there is a Principle of Life. We cannot get rid of that term. However clumsy, however provisional, however much a mere cloak for ignorance, Science as yet is unable to dispense with the idea of a Principle of Life. We must work with the word till we get a better. Now that which determines the correspondence of the spiritual organism is a Principle of Spiritual Life. It is a new and Divine Possession. He that hath the Son hath Life; conversely, he that hath Life hath the Son. And this indicates at once the quality and the quantity of the correspondence which is to bridge the grave. He that hath Life hath _the Son_. He possesses the Spirit of the Son. That Spirit is, so to speak, organized within him by the Son. It is the manifestation of the new nature--of which more anon. The fact to note at present is that this is not an organic correspondence, but a spiritual correspondence. It comes not from generation, but from regeneration. The relation between the spiritual man and his Environment is, in theological language, a filial relation. With the new Spirit, the filial correspondence, he knows the Father and this is Life Eternal. This is not only the real relation, but the only possible relation: "Neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him." And this on purely natural grounds. It takes the Divine to know the Divine--but in no more mysterious sense than it takes the human to understand the human. The analogy, indeed, for the whole field here has been finely expressed already by Paul: "What man," he asks, "knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God." [1] [1] 1 Cor. ii. 11, 12. It were idle, such being the quality of the new relation, to add that this also contains the guarantee of its eternity. Here at last is a correspondence which will never cease. Its powers in bridging the grave have been tried. The correspondence of the spiritual man possesses the supernatural virtues of the Resurrection and the Life. It is known by former experiment to have survived the "changes in the physical state of the environment," and those "mechanical actions" and "variations of available food," which Mr. Herbert Spencer tells us are "liable to stop the processes going on in the organism." In short, this is a correspondence which at once satisfies the demands of Science and Religion. In mere quantity it is different from every other correspondence known. Setting aside everything else in Religion, everything adventitious, local, and provisional; dissecting into the bone and marrow we find this--a correspondence which can never break with an Environment which can never change. Here is a relation established with Eternity. The passing years lay no limiting hand on it. Corruption injures it not. It survives Death. It, and it only, will stretch beyond the grave and be found inviolate-- "When the moon is old, And the stars are cold, And the books of the Judgment-day unfold." The misgiving which will creep sometimes over the brightest faith has already received its expression and its rebuke: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" Shall these "changes in the physical state of the environment" which threaten death to the natural man destroy the spiritual? Shall death, or life, or angels, or principalities, or powers, arrest or tamper with his eternal correspondences? "Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." [1] [1] Rom. viii. 35-39. It may seem an objection to some that the "perfect correspondence" should come to man in so extraordinary a way. The earlier stages in the doctrine are promising enough ; they are entirely in line with Nature. And if Nature had also furnished the "perfect correspondence" demanded for an Eternal Life the position might be unassailable. But this sudden reference to a something outside the natural Environment destroys the continuity, and discovers a permanent weakness in the whole theory? To which there is a twofold reply. In the first place, to go outside what we call Nature is not to go outside Environment. Nature, the natural Environment, is only a part of Environment. There is another large part which, though some profess to have no correspondence with it, is not on that account unreal, or even unnatural. The mental and moral world is unknown to the plant. But it is real. It cannot be affirmed either that it is unnatural to the plant; although it might be said that from the point of view of the Vegetable Kingdom it was _supernatural_. Things are natural or supernatural simply according to where one stands. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man. When a mineral is seized upon by the living plant and elevated to the organic kingdom, no tresspass against Nature is committed. It merely enters a larger Environment, which before was supernatural to it, but which now is entirely natural. When the heart of a man, again, is seized upon by the quickening Spirit of God, no further violence is done to natural law. It is another case of the inorganic, so to speak, passing into the organic. But, in the second place, it is complained as if it were an enormity in itself that the spiritual correspondence should be furnished from the spiritual world. And to this the answer lies in the same direction. Correspondence in any case is the gift of Environment. The natural Environment gives men their natural faculties; the spiritual affords them their spiritual faculties. It is natural for the spiritual Environment to supply the spiritual faculties; it would be quite unnatural for the natural Environment to do it. The natural law of Biogenesis forbids it; the moral fact that the finite cannot comprehend the Infinite is against it; the spiritual principle that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God renders it absurd. Not, however, that the spiritual faculties are, as it were, manufactured in the spiritual world and supplied ready-made to the spiritual organism--forced upon it as an external equipment. This certainly is not involved in saying that the spiritual faculties are furnished by the spiritual world. Organisms are not added to by accretion, as in the case of minerals, but by growth. And the spiritual faculties are organized in the spiritual protoplasm of the soul, just as other faculties are organized in the protoplasm of the body. The plant is made of materials which have once been inorganic. An organizing principle not belonging to their kingdom lays hold of them and elaborates them until they have correspondences with the kingdom to which the organizing principle belonged. Their original organizing principle, if it can be called by this name, was Crystallization; so that we have now a distinctly foreign power organizing in totally new and higher directions. In the spiritual world, similarly, we find an organizing principle at work among the materials of the organic kingdom, per forming a further miracle, but not a different kind of miracle, producing organizations of a novel kind, but not by a novel method. The second process, in fact, is simply what an enlightened evolutionist would have expected from the first. It marks the natural and legitimate progress of the development. And this in the line of the true Evolution--not the _linear_ Evolution, which would look for the development of the natural man through powers already inherent, as if one were to look to Crystallization to accomplish the development of the mineral into the plant,--but that larger form of Evolution which includes among its factors the double Law of Biogenesis and the immense further truth that this involves. What is further included in this complex correspondence we shall have opportunity to illustrate afterwards. [1] Meantime let it be noted on what the Christian argument for Immortality really rests. It stands upon the pedestal on which the theologian rests the whole of historical Christianity--the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. [1] _Vide_ "Conformity to Type," page 287. It ought to be placed in the forefront of all Christian teaching that Christ's mission on earth was to give men Life. "I am come," He said, "that ye might have Life, and that ye might have it more abundantly." And that He meant literal Life, literal spiritual and Eternal Life, is clear from the whole course of His teaching and acting. To impose a metaphorical meaning on the commonest word of the New Testament is to violate every canon of interpretation, and at the same time to charge the greatest of teachers with persistently mystifying His hearers by an unusual use of so exact a vehicle for expressing definite thought as the Greek language, and that on the most momentous subject of which He ever spoke to men. It is a canon of interpretation, according to Alford, that "a figurative sense of words is never admissible except when required by the context." The context, in most cases, is not only directly unfavorable to a figurative meaning, but in innumerable instances in Christ's teaching Life is broadly contrasted with Death. In the teaching of the apostles, again, we find that, without exception, they accepted the term in its simple literal sense. Reuss defines the apostolic belief with his usual impartiality when--and the quotation is doubly pertinent here--he discovers in the apostle's conception of Life, first, "the idea of a real existence, an existence such as is proper to God and to the Word; an imperishable existence--that is to say, not subject to the vicissitudes and imperfections of the finite world. This primary idea is repeatedly expressed, at least in a negative form; it leads to a doctrine of immortality, or, to speak more correctly, of life, far surpassing any that had been expressed in the formulas of the current philosophy or theology, and resting upon premises and conceptions altogether different. In fact, it can dispense both with the philosophical thesis of the immateriality or indestructibility of the human soul, and with the theologicial thesis of a miraculous corporeal reconstruction of our person; theses, the first of which is altogether foreign to the religion of the Bible, and the second absolutely opposed to reason." Second, "the idea of life, as it is conceived in this system, implies the idea of a power, an operation, a communication, since this life no longer remains, so to speak, latent or passive in God and in the Word, but through them reaches the believer. It is not a mental somnolent thing; it is not a plant without fruit; it is a germ which is to find fullest development." [1] [1] "History of Christian Theology in the Apostolic Age," vol. ii. p. 496. If we are asked to define more clearly what is meant by this mysterious endowment of Life, we again hand over the difficulty to Science. When Science can define the Natural Life and the Physical Force we may hope for further clearness on the nature and action of the Spiritual Powers. The effort to detect the living Spirit must be at least as idle as the attempt to subject protoplasm to microscopic examination in the hope of discovering Life. We are warned, also, not to expect too much. "Thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth." This being its quality, when the Spiritual Life is discovered in the laboratory it will possibly be time to give it up altogether. It may say, as Socrates of his soul, "You may bury me--if you can catch me." Science never corroborates a spiritual truth without illuminating it. The threshold of Eternity is a place where many shadows meet. And the light of Science here, where everything is so dark, is welcome a thousand times. Many men would be religious if they knew where to begin; many would be more religious if they were sure where it would end. It is not indifference that keeps some men from God, but ignorance. "Good Master, what must I do to inherit Eternal Life?" is still the deepest question of the age. What is Religion? What am I to believe? What seek with all my heart and soul and mind?--this is the imperious question sent up to consciousness from the depths of being in all earnest hours; sent down again, alas, with many of us, time after time, unanswered. Into all our thought and work and reading this question pursues us. But the theories are rejected one by one; the great books are returned sadly to their shelves, the years pass, and the problem remains unsolved. The confusion of tongues here is terrible. Every day a new authority announces himself. Poets, philosophers, preachers, try their hand on us in turn. New prophets arise, and beseech us for our soul's sake to give ear to them--at last in an hour of inspiration they have discovered the final truth. Yet the doctrine of yesterday is challenged by a fresh philosophy to-day; and the creed of to-day will fall in turn before the criticism of to-morrow. Increase of knowledge increaseth sorrow. And at length the conflicting truths, like the beams of light in the laboratory experiment, combine in the mind to make total darkness. But here are two outstanding authorities agreed--not men, not philosophers, not creeds. Here is the voice of God and the voice of Nature. I cannot be wrong if I listen to them. Sometimes when uncertain of a voice from its very loudness, we catch the missing syllable in the echo. In God and Nature we have Voice and Echo. When I hear both, I am assured. My sense of hearing does not betray me twice. I recognize the Voice in the Echo, the Echo makes me certain of the Voice; I listen and I know. The question of a Future Life is a biological question. Nature may be silent on other problems of Religion; but here she has a right to speak. The whole confusion around the doctrine of Eternal Life has arisen from making it a question of Philosophy. We shall do ill to refuse a hearing to any speculation of Philosophy; the ethical relations here especially are intimate and real. But in the first instance Eternal Life, as a question of _Life_, is a problem for Biology. The soul is a living organism. And for any question as to the soul's Life we must appeal to Life-science. And what does the Life-science teach? That if I am to inherit Eternal Life, I must cultivate a correspondence with the Eternal. This is a simple proposition, for Nature is always simple. I take this proposition, and, leaving Nature, proceed to fill it in. I search everywhere for a clue to the Eternal. I ransack literature for a definition of a correspondence between man and God. Obviously that can only come from one source. And the analogies of Science permit us to apply to it. All knowledge lies in Environment. When I want to know about minerals I go to minerals. When I want to know about flowers I go to flowers. And they tell me. In their own way they speak to me, each in its own way, and each for itself--not the mineral for the flower, which is impossible, nor the flower for the mineral, which is also impossible. So if I want to know about Man, I go to his part of the Environment. And he tells me about himself, not as the plant or the mineral, for he is neither, but in his own way. And if I want to know about God, I go to His part of the Environment. And he tells me about Himself, not as a Man, for He is not Man, but in His own way. And just as naturally as the flower and the mineral and the Man, each in their own way, tell me about themselves, He tells me about Himself. He very strangely condescends indeed in making things plain to me, actually assuming for a time the Form of a Man that I at my poor level may better see Him. This is my opportunity to know Him. This incarnation is God making Himself accessible to human thought--God opening to man the possibility of correspondence through Jesus Christ. And this correspondence and this Environment are those I seek. He Himself assures me, "This is Life Eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent." Do I not now discern the deeper meaning in "_Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent?_" Do I not better understand with what vision and rapture the profoundest of the disciples exclaims, "The Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding that we might know Him that is True?" [1] [1] 1 John v. 20. Having opened correspondence with the Eternal Environment, the subsequent stages are in the line of all other normal development. We have but to continue, to deepen, to extend, and to enrich the correspondence that has been begun. And we shall soon find to our surprise that this is accompanied by another and parallel process. The action is not all upon our side. The Environment also will be found to correspond. The influence of Environment is one of the greatest and most substantial of modern biological doctrines. Of the power of Environment to form or transform organisms, of its ability to develop or suppress function, of its potency in determining growth, and generally of its immense influence in Evolution, there is no need now to speak. But Environment is now acknowledged to be one of the most potent factors in the Evolution of Life. The influence of Environment, too, seems to increase rather than diminish as we approach the higher forms of being. The highest forms are the most mobile; their capacity of change is the greatest; they are, in short, most easily acted on by Environment. And not only are the highest organisms the most mobile, but the highest parts of the highest organisms are more mobile than the lower. Environment can do little, comparatively, in the direction of inducing variation in the body of a child; but how plastic is its mind! How infinitely sensitive is its soul! How infallibly can it be tuned to music or to dissonance by the moral harmony or discord of its outward lot! How decisively indeed are we not all formed and moulded, made or unmade, by external circumstance! Might we not all confess with Ulysses,-- "I am a part of all that I have met?" Much more, then, shall we look for the influence of Environment on the spiritual nature of him who has opened correspondence with God. Reaching out his eager and quickened faculties to the spiritual world around him, shall he not become spiritual? In vital contact with Holiness, shall he not become holy? Breathing now an atmosphere of ineffable Purity, shall he miss becoming pure? Walking with God from day to day, shall he fail to be taught of God? Growth in grace is sometimes described as a strange, mystical, and unintelligible process. It is mystical, but neither strange nor unintelligible. It proceeds according to Natural Law, and the leading factor in sanctification is Influence of Environment. The possibility of it depends upon the mobility of the organism; the result, on the extent and frequency of certain correspondences. These facts insensibly lead on to further suggestion. Is it not possible that these biological truths may carry with them the clue to a still profounder philosophy--even that of Regeneration? Evolutionists tell us that by the influence of environment certain aquatic animals have become adapted to a terrestrial mode of life. Breathing normally by gills, as the result and reward of a continued effort carried on from generation to generation to inspire the air of heaven direct, they have slowly acquired the lung-function. In the young organism, true to the ancestral type, the gill still persists--as in the tadpole of the common frog. But as maturity approaches, the true lung appears; the gill gradually transfers its task to the higher organ. It then becomes atrophied and disappears, and finally respiration in the adult is conducted by lungs alone. [1] We may be far, in the meantime, from saying that this is proved. It is for those who accept it to deny the justice of the spiritual analogy. Is religion to them unscientific in its doctrine of Regeneration? Will the evolutionist who admits the regeneration of the frog under the modifying influence of a continued correspondence with a new environment, care to question the possibility of the soul acquiring such a faculty as that of Prayer, the marvellous breathing-function of the new creature, when in contact with the atmosphere of a besetting God? Is the change from the earthly to the heavenly more mysterious than the change from the aquatic to the terrestrial mode of life? Is Evolution to stop with the organic? If it be objected that it has taken ages to perfect the function in the batrachian, the reply is, that it will take ages to perfect the function in the Christian. For every thousand years the natural evolution will allow for the development of its organism, the Higher Biology will grant its product millions. We have indeed spoken of the spiritual correspondence as already perfect--but it is perfect only as the bud is perfect. "It doth not yet appear what it shall be," any more than it appeared a million years ago what the evolving batrachian would be. [1] _Vide_ also the remarkable experiments of Fräulein v. Chauvin on the Transformation of the Mexican Axoloti into Amblystoma.--Weismann's "Studies in the Theory of Descent," vol. ii. pt. iii. But to return. We have been dealing with the scientific aspects of communion with God. Insensibly, from quantity we have been led to speak of quality. And enough has now been advanced to indicate generally the nature of that correspondence with which is necessarily associated Eternal Life. There remain but one or two details to which we must lastly, and very briefly, address ourselves. The quality of everlastingness belongs, as we have seen, to a single correspondence, or rather to a single set of correspondences. But it is apparent that before this correspondence can take full and final effect a further process is necessary. By some means it must be separated from all the other correspondences of the organism which do not share its peculiar quality. In this life it is restrained by these other correspondences. They may contribute to it, or hinder it; but they are essentially of a different order. They belong not to Eternity but to Time, and to this present world; and, unless some provision is made for dealing with them, they will detain the aspiring organism in this present world till Time is ended. Of course, in a sense, all that belongs to Time belongs also to Eternity; but these lower correspondences are in their nature unfitted for an Eternal Life. Even if they were perfect in their relation to their Environment, they would still not be Eternal. However opposed, apparently, to the scientific definition of Eternal Life, it is yet true that perfect correspondence with Environment is not Eternal Life. A very important word in the complete definition is, in this sentence, omitted. On that word it has not been necessary hitherto, and for obvious reasons, to place any emphasis, but when we come to deal with false pretenders to Immortality we must return to it. Were the definition complete as it stands, it might, with the permission of the psycho-physiologist, guarantee the Immortality of every living thing. In the dog, for instance, the material framework giving way at death might leave the released canine spirit still free to inhabit the old Environment. And so with every creature which had ever established a conscious relation with surrounding things. Now the difficulty in framing a theory of Eternal Life has been to construct one which will exclude the brute creation, drawing the line rigidly at man, or at least somewhere within the human race. Not that we need object to the Immortality of the dog, or of the whole inferior creation. Nor that we need refuse a place to any intelligible speculation which would people the earth to-day with the invisible forms of all things that have ever lived. Only we still insist that this is not Eternal Life. And why? Because their Environment is not Eternal. Their correspondence, however firmly established, is established with that which shall pass away. An Eternal Life demands an Eternal Environment. The demand for a perfect Environment as well as for a perfect correspondence is less clear in Mr. Herbert Spencer's definition than it might be. But it is an essential factor. An organism might remain true to its Environment, but what if the Environment played it false? If the organism possessed the power to change, it could adapt itself to successive changes in the Environment. And if this were guaranteed we should also have the conditions for Eternal Life fulfilled. But what if the Environment passed away altogether? What if the earth swept suddenly into the sun? This is a change of Environment against which there could be no precaution and for which there could be as little provision. With a changing Environment even, there must always remain the dread and possibility of a falling out of correspondence. At the best, Life would be uncertain. But with a changeless Environment--such as that possessed by the spiritual organism--the perpetuity of the correspondence, so far as the external relation is concerned, is guaranteed. This quality of permanence in the Environment distinguishes the religious relation from every other. Why should not the musician's life be an Eternal Life? Because, for one thing, the musical world, the Environment with which he corresponds, is not eternal. Even if his correspondence in itself could last eternally, the environing material things with which he corresponds must pass away. His soul might last forever--but not his violin. So the man of the world might last forever--but not the world. His Environment is not eternal; nor are even his correspondences--the world passeth away _and the lust thereof_. We find, then, that man, or the spiritual man, is equipped with two sets of correspondences. One set possesses the quality of everlastingness, the other is temporal. But unless these are separated by some means the temporal will continue to impair and hinder the eternal. The final preparation, therefore, for the inheriting of Eternal Life must consist in the abandonment of the non-eternal elements. These must be unloosed and dissociated from the higher elements. And this is effected by a closing catastrophe--Death. Death ensues because certain relations in the organism are not adjusted to certain relations in the Environment. There will come a time in each history when the imperfect correspondences of the organism will betray themselves by a failure to compass some necessary adjustment. This is why Death is associated with Imperfection. Death is the necessary result of Imperfection, and the necessary end of it. Imperfect correspondence gives imperfect and uncertain Life. "Perfect correspondence," on the other hand, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, would be "perfect Life." To abolish Death, therefore, all that would be necessary would be to abolish Imperfection. But it is the claim of Christianity that it can abolish Death. And it is significant to notice that it does so by meeting this very demand of Science--it abolishes Imperfection. The part of the organism which begins to get out of correspondence with the Organic Environment is the only part which is in vital correspondence with it. Though a fatal disadvantage to the natural man to be thrown out of correspondence with this Environment, it is of inestimable importance to the spiritual man. For so long as it is maintained the way is barred for a further Evolution. And hence the condition necessary for the further Evolution is that the spiritual be released from the natural. That is to say, the condition of the further Evolution is Death. _Mora janua Vitæ_, therefore, becomes a scientific formula. Death, being the final sifting of all the correspondences, is the indispensable factor of the higher Life. In the language of Science, not less than of Scripture, "To die is gain." The sifting of the correspondences is done by Nature. This is its last and greatest contribution to mankind. Over the mouth of the grave the perfect and the imperfect submit to their final separation. Each goes to its own--earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Spirit to Spirit. The dust shall return to the earth as it was; and the Spirit shall return unto God who gave it" Altemus' Illustrated Holly-Tree Series --- ALTEMUS' ILLUSTRATED HOLLY-TREE SERIES --- A series of good, clean books for young people, by authors whose fame for delightful stories is world-wide. They are well printed on fine paper, handsomely illustrated, have colored frontispieces, and are bound in cloth decorated in gold and colors. 50 cents. .. 1 THE HOLLY-TREE. _By Charles Dickens._ .. 2 THEN MARCHED THE BRAVE. _By Harriet T. Comstock._ .. 3 A MODERN CINDERELLA. _By Louisa M. Alcott._ .. 4 THE LITTLE MISSIONARY. _By Amanda M. Douglas._ .. 5 THE RULE OF THREE. _By Susan Coolidge._ .. 6 CHUGGINS. _By H. Irving Hancock._ .. 7 WHEN THE BRITISH CAME. _By Harriet T. Comstock._ .. 8 LITTLE FOXES. _By Rose Terry Cooke._ .. 9 AN UNRECORDED MIRACLE. _By Florence Morse Kingsley._ .. 10 THE STORY WITHOUT AN END. _By Sarah Austin._ .. 11 CLOVER'S PRINCESS. _By Amanda M. Douglas._ .. 12 THE SWEET STORY OF OLD. _By L. Haskeli._ Altemus' Illustrated One-Syllable Series --- ALTEMUS' ILLUSTRATED ONE-SYLLABLE SERIES FOR YOUNG READERS --- Embracing popular works arranged for the young folks in words of one syllable. Printed from extra-large, clear type on fine paper, and fully illustrated by the best artists. The handsomest line of books for young children before the public. Handsomely bound in cloth and gold, with illuminated sides, 50 cents. .. 1 �sop's FABLES. 62 illustrations. .. 2 A CHILD'S LIFE OF CHRIST. 49 illustrations. .. 4 THE ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE. 70 illustrations. .. 5 BUNYAN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 46 illustrations. .. 6 SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON. 50 illustrations. .. 7 GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. 50 illustrations. .. 9 A CHILD'S STORY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 33 illustrations. .. 10 A CHILD'S STORY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 40 illustrations. .. 11 BIBLE STORIES FOR LITTLE CHILDREN. 41 illustrations. .. 12 THE STORY OF JESUS. 40 illustrations [Transcriber's note: misspellings have been left as they are in the source material.] 
62996	----	THE JEWEL OF BAS A WEIRD NOVEL OF FASCINATING POWER by LEIGH BRACKETT There was a boy-God, sleeping through eternity. And there were his "Stone of Life" and the androids he had created of matter and energy. And there was a world that was to die from the machinations of the androids' diabolic minds. There were Mouse and Ciaran to stem the death-flood--two mortals fighting the immortals' plans for conquest. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Mouse stirred the stew in the small iron pot. There wasn't much of it. She sniffed and said: "You could have stolen a bigger joint. We'll go hungry before the next town." "Uh huh," Ciaran grunted lazily. Anger began to curl in Mouse's eyes. "I suppose it's all right with you if we run out of food," she said sullenly. Ciaran leaned back comfortably against a moss-grown boulder and watched her with lazy grey eyes. He liked watching Mouse. She was a head shorter than he, which made her very short indeed, and as thin as a young girl. Her hair was black and wild, as though only wind ever combed it. Her eyes were black, too, and very bright. There was a small red thief's brand between them. She wore a ragged crimson tunic, and her bare arms and legs were as brown as his own. Ciaran grinned. His lip was scarred, and there was a tooth missing behind it. He said, "It's just as well. I don't want you getting fat and lazy." Mouse, who was sensitive about her thinness, said something pungent and threw the wooden plate at him. Ciaran drew his shaggy head aside enough to let it by and then relaxed, stroking the harp on his bare brown knees. It began to purr softly. Ciaran felt good. The heat of the sunballs that floated always, lazy in a reddish sky, made him pleasantly sleepy. And after the clamor and crush of the market squares in the border towns, the huge high silence of the place was wonderful. He and Mouse were camped on a tongue of land that licked out from the Phrygian hills down into the coastal plains of Atlantea. A short cut, but only gypsies like themselves ever took it. To Ciaran's left, far below, the sea spread sullen and burning, cloaked in a reddish fog. To his right, also far below, were the Forbidden Plains. Flat, desolate, and barren, reaching away and away to the up-curving rim of the world, where Ciaran's sharp eyes could just make out a glint of gold; a mammoth peak reaching for the sky. Mouse said suddenly, "Is that it, Kiri? Ben Beatha, the Mountain of Life." Ciaran struck a shivering chord from the harp. "That's it." "Let's eat," said Mouse. "Scared?" "Maybe you want me to go back! Maybe you think a branded thief isn't good enough for you! Well I can't help where I was born or what my parents were--and you'd have a brand on your ugly face too, if you hadn't just been lucky!" She threw the ladle. This time her aim was better and Ciaran didn't duck quite in time. It clipped his ear. He sprang up, looking murderous, and started to heave it back at her. And then, suddenly, Mouse was crying, stamping up and down and blinking tears out of her eyes. "All right, I'm scared! I've never been out of a city before, and besides...." She looked out over the silent plain, to the distant glint of Ben Beatha. "Besides," she whispered, "I keep thinking of the stories they used to tell--about Bas the Immortal, and his androids, and the grey beasts that served them. And about the Stone of Destiny." * * * * * Ciaran made a contemptuous mouth. "Legends. Old wive's tales. Songs to give babies a pleasant shiver." A small glint of avarice came into his grey eyes. "But the Stone of Destiny--it's a nice story, that one. A jewel of such power that owning it gives a man rule over the whole world...." He squinted out across the barren plain. "Some day," he said, softly, "maybe I'll see if that one's true." "Oh, Kiri." Mouse came and caught his wrists in her small strong hands. "You wouldn't. It's forbidden--and no one that's gone into the Forbidden Plains has ever come back." "There's always a first time." He grinned. "But I'm not going now, Mousie. I'm too hungry." She picked up the plate silently and ladled stew into it and set it down. Ciaran laid his harp down and stretched--a tough, wiry little man with legs slightly bandy and a good-natured hard face. He wore a yellow tunic even more ragged than Mouse's. They sat down. Ciaran ate noisily with his fingers. Mouse fished out a hunk of meat and nibbled it moodily. A breeze came up, pushing the sunballs around a little and bringing tatters of red fog in off the sea. After a while Mouse said: "Did you hear any of the talk in the market squares, Kiri?" He shrugged. "They gabble. I don't waste my time with it." "All along the border countries they were saying the same thing. People who live or work along the edge of the Forbidden Plains have disappeared. Whole towns of them, sometimes." "One man falls into a beast-pit," said Ciaran impatiently, "and in two weeks of gossip the whole country has vanished. Forget it." "But it's happened before, Kiri. A long time ago...." "A long time ago some wild tribe living on the Plains came in and got tough, and that's that!" Ciaran wiped his hands on the grass and said angrily, "If you're going to nag all the time about being scared...." He caught the plate out of her hands just in time. She was breathing hard, glaring at him. She looked like her name, and cute as hell. Ciaran laughed. "Come here, you." She came, sulkily. He pulled her down beside him and kissed her and took the harp on his knees. Mouse put her head on his shoulder. Ciaran was suddenly very happy. * * * * * He began to draw music out of the harp. There was a lot of distance around him, and he tried to fill it up with music, a fine free spate of it out of the thrumming strings. Then he sang. He had a beautiful voice, clear and true as a new blade, but soft. It was a simple tune, about two people in love. Ciaran liked it. After a while Mouse reached up and drew his head around, stroking the scar on his lip so he had to stop singing. She wasn't glaring any longer. Ciaran bent his head. His eyes were closed. But he felt her body stiffen against him, and her lips broke away from his with a little gasping cry. "Kiri--Kiri, look!" He jerked his head back, angry and startled. Then the anger faded. There was a different quality to the light. The warm, friendly, reddish sunlight that never dimmed or faded. There was a shadow spreading out in the sky over Ben Beatha. It grew and widened, and the sunballs went out, one by one, and darkness came toward them over the Forbidden Plains. They crouched, clinging together, not speaking, not breathing. An uneasy breeze sighed over them, moving out. Then, after a long time, the sunballs sparked and burned again, and the shadow was gone. Ciaran dragged down an unsteady breath. He was sweating, but where his hands and Mouse's touched, locked together, they were cold as death. "What was it, Kiri?" "I don't know." He got up, slinging the harp across his back without thinking about it. He felt naked suddenly, up there on the high ridge. Stripped and unsafe. He pulled Mouse to her feet. Neither of them spoke again. Their eyes had a queer stunned look. This time it was Ciaran that stopped, with the stewpot in his hands, looking at something behind Mouse. He dropped it and jumped in front of her, pulling the wicked knife he carried from his girdle. The last thing he heard was her wild scream. But he had time enough to see. To see the creatures climbing up over the crest of the ridge beside them, fast and silent and grinning, to ring them in with wands tipped at the point with opals like tiny sunballs. They were no taller than Mouse, but thick and muscular, built like men. Grey animal fur grew on them like the body-hair of a hairy man, lengthening into a coarse mane over the skull. Where the skin showed it was grey and wrinkled and tough. Their faces were flat, with black animal nose-buttons. They had sharp teeth, grey with a bright, healthy greyness. Their eyes were blood-pink, without whites or visible pupils. The eyes were the worst. Ciaran yelled and slashed out with his knife. One of the grey brutes danced in on lithe, quick feet and touched him on the neck with its jeweled wand. Fire exploded in Ciaran's head, and then there was darkness, pierced by Mouse's scream. As he slid down into it he thought: "They're Kalds. The beasts of legend that served Bas the Immortal and his androids. Kalds, that guarded the Forbidden Plains from man!" Ciaran came to, on his feet and walking. From the way he felt he'd been walking a long time, but his memory was vague and confused. He had been relieved of his knife, but his harp was still with him. Mouse walked beside him. Her black hair hung over her face and her eyes looked out from behind it, sullen and defiant. The grey beasts walked in a rough circle around them, holding their wands ready. From the way they grinned, Ciaran had an idea they hoped they'd have an excuse for using them. With a definitely uneasy shock, Ciaran realized that they were far out in the barren waste of the Forbidden Plains. He got a little closer to Mouse. "Hello." She looked at him. "You and your short cuts! So all that talk in the border towns was just gabble, huh?" "So it's my fault! If that isn't just like a woman...." Ciaran made an impatient gesture. "All right, all right! That doesn't matter now. What does matter is where are we going and why?" "How should I--Wait a minute. We're stopping." The Kalds warned them with their wands to stand. One of the grey brutes seemed to be listening to something that Ciaran couldn't hear. Presently it gestured and the party started off again in a slightly different direction. After a minute or two a gully appeared out of nowhere at their feet. From up on the ridge the Forbidden Plains had looked perfectly flat, but the gully was fairly wide and cut in clean like a sword gash, hidden by a slight roll of the land. They scrambled down the steep bank and went along the bottom. Again with an uneasy qualm, Ciaran realized they were headed in the general direction of Ben Beatha. The old legends had been gradually lost in the stream of time, except to people who cared for such things, or made a living from singing about them, like Ciaran. But in spite of that Ben Beatha was tabu. The chief reason was physical. The Plains, still called Forbidden, ringed the mountain like a protective wall, and it was an indisputable fact whether you liked it or not that people who went out onto them didn't come back. Hunger, thirst, wild beasts, or devils--they didn't come back. That discouraged a lot of traveling. Besides, the only reason for attempting to reach Ben Beatha was the legend of the Stone of Destiny, and people had long ago lost faith in that. Nobody had seen it. Nobody had seen Bas the Immortal who was its god and guardian, nor the androids that were his servants, nor the Kalds that were slaves to both of them. Long, long ago people were supposed to have seen them. In the beginning, according to the legends, Bas the Immortal had lived in a distant place--a green world where there was only one huge sunball that rose and set regularly, where the sky was sometimes blue and sometimes black and silver, and where the horizon curved down. The manifest idiocy of all that still tickled people so they liked to hear songs about it. Somewhere on that green world, somehow, Bas had acquired the flaming stone that gave him the power of life and death and destiny. There were a lot of conflicting and confused stories about trouble between Bas and the inhabitants of the funny world with the sky that changed like a woman's fancy. Eventually he was supposed to have gathered up a lot of these inhabitants through the power of the stone and transported them somehow across a great distance to the world where they now lived. * * * * * Ciaran had found that children loved these yarns particularly. Their imaginations were still elastic enough not to see the ridiculous side. He always gave the Distance Cycle a lot of schmaltz. So after Bas the Immortal and his Stone of Destiny had got all these people settled in a new world, Bas created his androids, Khafre and Steud, and brought the Kalds from somewhere out in that vague Distance; another world, perhaps. And there were wars and revolts and raiding parties, and bitter struggles between Bas and the androids and the humans for power, with Bas always winning because of the Stone. There was a bottomless well of material there for ballads. Ciaran used it frequently. But the one legend that had always maintained its original shape under the battering of generations was the one about Ben Beatha, the Mountain of Life, being the dwelling place of Bas the Immortal and his androids and the Kalds. And somewhere under Ben Beatha was the Stone, whose possession could give a man life eternal and the powers of whatever god you chose to believe in. Ciaran had toyed with that one in spite of his skepticism. Now it looked as though he was going to see for himself. He looked at the Kalds, the creatures who didn't exist, and found his skepticism shaken. Shaken so hard he felt sick with it, like a man waking up to find a nightmare beside him in the flesh, booting his guts in. If the Kalds were real, the androids were real. From the androids you went to Bas, and from Bas to the Stone of Destiny. Ciaran began to sweat with sheer excitement. Mouse jerked her head up suddenly. "Kiri--listen!" From somewhere up ahead and to the right there began to come a rhythmic, swinging clank of metal. Underneath it Ciaran made out the shuffle of bare or sandalled feet. The Kalds urged them on faster with the jewel-tipped wands. The hot opalescence of the tips struck Ciaran all at once. A jewel-fire that could shock a man to unconsciousness like the blow of a fist, just by touching. The power of the Stone, perhaps. The Stone of Destiny, sleeping under Ben Beatha. The shuffle and clank got louder. Quite suddenly they came to a place where the gully met another one almost at right angles, and stopped. The ears of the Kalds twitched nervously. Mouse shrank in closer against Ciaran. She was looking off down the new cut. Ciaran looked, too. There were Kalds coming toward them. About forty of them, with wands. Walking between their watchful lines were some ninety or a hundred humans, men and women, shackled together by chains run through loops in iron collars. They were so close together they had to lock-step, and any attempt at attacking their guards would have meant the whole column falling flat. Mouse said, with vicious clarity, "One man falls into a beast pit, and in three weeks of gossip a whole town is gone. Hah!" Ciaran's scarred mouth got ugly. "Keep going, Mousie. Just keep it up." He scowled at the slave gang and added, "But what the hell is it all about? What do they want us for?" "You'll find out," said Mouse. "You and your short cuts." Ciaran raised his hand. Mouse ducked and started to swing on him. A couple of Kalds moved in and touched them apart, very delicately, with the wands. They didn't want knockouts this time. Just local numbness. Ciaran was feeling murderous enough to start something anyway, but a second flick of the wand on the back of his neck took the starch out of him. By that time the slave party had come up and stopped. Ciaran stumbled over into line and let the Kalds lock the collar around his neck. The man in front of him was huge, with a mane of red hair and cords of muscle on his back the size of Ciaran's arm. He hadn't a stitch on but a leather G-string. His freckled, red-haired skin was slippery with sweat. Ciaran, pressed up against him, shut his mouth tight and began to breathe very hard with his face turned as far away as he could get it. They shackled Mouse right in back of him. She put her arms around his waist, tighter than she really had to. Ciaran squeezed her hands. II The Kalds started the line moving again, using the wands like ox-goads. They shuffled off down the gully, going deeper and deeper into the Forbidden Plains. Very softly, so that nobody but Ciaran could hear her, Mouse whispered, "These locks are nothing. I can pick them any time." Ciaran squeezed her hand again. It occurred to him that Mouse was a handy girl to have around. After a while she said, "Kiri--that shadow. We did see it?" "We did." He shivered in spite of himself. "What was it?" "How should I know? And you better save your breath. Looks like a long walk ahead of us." It was. They threaded their way through a growing maze of cracks in the plain, cracks that got deeper and deeper, so you had to look straight up to see the red sky and the little floating suns. Ciaran found himself watching furtively to make sure they were still shining. He wished Mousie hadn't reminded him of the shadow. He'd never been closer to cold, clawing panic than in those moments on the ridge. The rest of the slave gang had obviously come a long way already. They were tired. But the Kalds goaded them on, and it wasn't until about a third of the line was being held up bodily by those in front or behind that a halt was called. They came to a fairly-wide place where three of the gullies came together. The Kalds formed the line into a circle, squeezed in on itself so they were practically sitting in each other's laps, and then stood by watchfully, lolling pink tongues over their bright grey teeth and letting the wands flash in the dimmed light. Ciaran let his head and shoulders roll over onto Mousie. For some time he had felt her hands working around her own collar, covered by her hair and the harp slung across his back. She wore a rather remarkable metal pin that had other functions than holding her tunic on, and she knew how to use it. Her collar was still in place, but he knew she could slide out of it now any time she wanted. She bent forward over him as though she was exhausted. Her black hair fell over his face and neck. Under it her small quick hands got busy. The lock snapped quietly, and the huge red-haired man collapsed slowly on top of Ciaran. His voice whispered, but there was nothing weak about it. He said, "Now me." Ciaran squirmed and cursed. The vast weight crushed him to silence. "I'm a hunter. I can hear a rabbit breathing in its warren. I heard the woman speak. Free me or I'll make trouble." Ciaran sighed resignedly, and Mouse went to work. * * * * * Ciaran looked around the circle of exhausted humans. Charcoal burners, trappers, hoop-shavers--the lean, tough, hard-bitten riff-raff of the border wilderness. Even the women were tough. Ciaran began to get ideas. There was a man crushed up against them on the other side--the man who had hitherto been at the head of the column. He was tall and stringy like a hungry cat, and just as mean looking, hunched over his knees with his face buried in his forearms and a shag of iron-grey hair falling over his shoulders. Ciaran nudged him. "You--don't make any sign. Game to take a chance?" The shaggy head turned slightly, just enough to unveil an eye. Ciaran wished suddenly he'd kept his mouth shut. The eye was pale, almost white, with a queer unhuman look as though it saw only gods or devils, and nothing in between. Ciaran had met hermits before in his wanderings. He knew the signs. Normally he rather liked hermits, but this one gave him unpleasant qualms in the stomach. The man dragged a rusty voice up from somewhere. "We are enslaved by devils. Only the pure can overcome devils. Are you pure?" Ciaran managed not to choke. "As a bird in its nest," he said. "A newly-fledged bird. In fact, a bird still in the shell." The cold, pale eye looked at him without blinking. Ciaran resisted an impulse to punch it and said, "We have a means of freeing ourselves. If enough could be freed, when the time came we might rush the Kalds." "Only the pure can prevail against devils." Ciaran gave him a smile of beatific innocence. The scar and the missing tooth rather spoiled the effect, but his eyes made up for it in bland sweetness. "You shall lead us, Father," he cooed. "With such purity as yours, we can't fail." The hermit thought about that for a moment and then said, "I will pass the word. Give me the feke." Ciaran's jaw dropped. His eyes got glassy. "The feke," said the hermit patiently. "The jiggler." Ciaran closed his eyes. "Mouse," he said weakly, "give the gentleman the picklock." Mouse slid it to him, a distance of about two inches. The red-haired giant took some of his weight off Ciaran. Mouse was looking slightly dazed herself. "Hadn't I better do it for you?" she asked, rather pompously. The hermit gave her a cold glance. He bent his head and brought his hands up between his knees. His collar mate on the other side never noticed a thing, and the hermit beat Mouse's time by a good third. Ciaran laughed. He lay in Mouse's lap and had mild hysterics. Mouse cuffed him furiously across the back of his neck, and even that didn't stop him. He pulled himself up, looked through streaming eyes at Mouse's murderous small face, and bit his knuckles to keep from screaming. The hermit was already quietly at work on the man next him. Ciaran unslung his harp. The grey Kalds hadn't noticed anything yet. Both Mouse and the hermit were very smooth workers. Ciaran plucked out a few sonorous minor chords, and the Kalds flicked their blood-pink eyes at him, but didn't seem to think the harp called for any action. Ciaran relaxed and played louder. Under cover of the music he explained his plan to the big red hunter, who nodded and began whispering to his other collar-mate. Ciaran began to sing. He gave them a lament, one of the wild dark things the Cimmerians sing at the bier of a chief and very appropriate to the occasion. The Kalds lounged, enjoying the rest. They weren't watching for it, so they didn't see, as Ciaran did, the breathing of the word of hope around the circle. * * * * * Civilized people would have given the show away. But these were bordermen, as wary and self-contained as animals. It was only in their eyes that you could see anything. They got busy, under cover of their huddled bodies and long-haired, bowed-over heads, with every buckle and pin they could muster. Mouse and the hermit passed instructions along the line, and since they were people who were used to using their hands with skill, it seemed as though a fair number of locks might get picked. The collars were left carefully in place. Ciaran finished his lament and was half way through another when the Kalds decided it was time to go. They moved in to goad the line back into position. Ciaran's harp crashed out suddenly in angry challenge, and the close-packed circle split into a furious confusion. Ciaran slung his harp over his shoulder and sprang up, shaking off the collar. All around him was the clash of chain metal on rock, the scuffle of feet, the yells and heavy breathing of angry men. The Kalds came leaping in, their wands flashing. Somebody screamed. Ciaran got a fistful of Mouse's tunic in his left hand and started to butt through the mêlée. He had lost track of the hermit and the hunter. Then, quite suddenly, it was dark. Silence closed down oh the gully. A black, frozen silence, with not even a sound of breathing in it. Ciaran stood still, looking up at the dark sky. He didn't even tremble. He was beyond that. Black darkness, in a land of eternal light. Somewhere then, a woman screamed with a terrible mad strength, and hell broke loose. Ciaran ran. He didn't think about where he was going, only that he had to get away. He was still gripping Mouse. Bodies thrashed and blundered and shrieked in the darkness. Twice he and Mouse were knocked kicking. It didn't stop them. They broke through finally into a clear space. There began to be light again, pale and feeble at first but flickering back toward normal. They were in a broad gully kicked smooth on the bottom by the passing of many feet. They ran down it. After a while Mouse fell and Ciaran dropped beside her. He lay there, fighting for breath, twitching and jerking like an animal with sheer panic. He was crying a little because it was light again. Mouse clung to him, pressing tight as though she wanted to merge her body with his and hide it. She had begun to shake. "Kiri," she whispered, over and over again. "Kiri, what was it?" Ciaran held her head against his shoulder and stroked it. "I don't know, honey. But it's all right now. It's gone." Gone. But it could come back. It had once. Maybe next time it would stay. Darkness, and the sudden cold. The legends began crawling through Ciaran's mind. If Bas the Immortal was true, and the Stone of Destiny was true, and the Stone gave Bas power over the life and death of a world ... then...? Maybe Bas was getting tired of the world and wanted to throw it away. The rational stubbornness in man that says a thing is not because it's never been before helped Ciaran steady down. But he couldn't kid himself that there hadn't been darkness where no darkness had even been dreamed of before. He shook his head and started to pull Mouse to her feet, and then his quick ears caught the sound of someone coming toward them, running. Several someones. There was no place to hide. Ciaran got Mouse behind him and waited, half crouching. It was the hunter, with the hermit loping like a stringy cat at his heels and a third man behind them both. They all looked a little crazy, and they didn't seem to be going to stop. Ciaran said, "Hey!" * * * * * They slowed down looking at him with queer, blank eyes. Ciaran blew up, because he had to relax somehow. "It's all over now. What are you scared of? It's gone." He cursed them, with more feeling than fairness. "What about the Kalds? What happened back there?" The hunter wiped a huge hand across his red-bearded face. "Everybody went crazy," he said thickly. "Some got killed or hurt. Some got away, like us. The rest were caught again." He jerked his head back. "They're coming this way. They're hunting us. They hunt by scent, the grey beasts do." "Then we've got to get going." Ciaran turned around. "Mouse. You, Mousie! Snap out of it, honey. It's all right now." She shivered and choked over her breath, and the hermit fixed them both with pale, mad eyes. "It was a warning," he said. "A portent of judgment, when only the pure shall be saved." He pointed a bony finger at Ciaran. "I told you that evil could not prevail against devils!" That got through to Mouse. Sense came back into her black eyes. She took a step toward the hermit and let go. "Don't you call him evil--or me either! We've never hurt anybody yet, beyond lifting a little food or a trinket. And besides, who the hell are you to talk! Anybody as handy with a picklock as you are has had plenty of practice...." Mouse paused for breath, and Ciaran got a look at the hermit's face. His stomach quivered. He tried to shut Mouse up, but she was feeling better and beginning to enjoy herself. She plunged into a detailed analysis of the hermit's physique and heredity. She had a vivid and inventive mind. Ciaran finally got his hand over her mouth, taking care not to get bitten. "Nice going," he said, "but we've got to get out of here. You can finish later." She started to heel his shins, and then quite suddenly she stopped and stiffened up under his hands. She was looking at the hermit. Ciaran looked, too. His insides knotted, froze, and began to do tricks. The hermit said quietly, "You are finished now." His pale eyes held them, and there was nothing human about his gaze, or the cold calm of his voice. "You are evil. You are thieves--and I know, for I was a thief myself. You have the filth of the world on you, and no wish to clean it off." He moved toward them. It was hardly a step, hardly more than an inclination of the body, but Ciaran gave back before it. "I killed a man. I took a life in sin and anger, and now I have made my peace. You have not. You will not. And if need comes, I can kill again--without remorse." He could, too. There was nothing ludicrous about him now. He was stating simple fact, and the dignity of him was awesome. Ciaran scowled down at the dust. "Hell," he said, "we're sorry, Father. Mouse has a quick tongue, and we've both had a bad scare. She didn't mean it. We respect any man's conscience." There was a cold, hard silence, and then the third man cried out with a sort of subdued fury: "Let's go! Do you want to get caught again?" He was a gnarled, knotty, powerful little man, beginning to grizzle but not to slow down. He wore a kilt of skins. His hide was dark and tough as leather, his hazel eyes set in nests of wrinkles. The hunter, who had been hearing nothing but noises going back and forth over his head, turned and led off down the gully. The others followed, still not speaking. Ciaran was thinking, He's crazy. He's clear off his head--and of all the things we didn't need, a crazy hermit heads the list! There was a cold spot between his shoulders that wouldn't go away even when he started sweating with exertion. * * * * * The gully was evidently a main trail to Somewhere. There were many signs of recent passage by a lot of people, including an occasional body kicked off to the side and left to dry. The little knotty man, who was a trapper named Ram, examined the bodies with a terrible stony look in his eyes. "My wife and my first son," he said briefly. "The grey beasts took them while I was gone." He turned grimly away. Ciaran was glad when the bodies proved to be the wrong ones. Ram and the big red hunter took turns scaling the cleft walls for a look. Mouse said something about taking to the face of the Plain where they wouldn't be hemmed in. They looked at her grimly. "The grey beasts are up there," they said. "Flanking us. If we go up, they'll only take us and chain us again." Ciaran's heart took a big, staggering jump. "In other words, they're herding us. We're going the way they want us to, so they don't bother to round us up." The hunter nodded professionally. "Is a good plan." "Oh, fine!" snarled Ciaran. "What I want to know is, is there any way out?" The hunter shrugged. "I'm going on anyway," said Ram. "My wife and son...." Ciaran thought about the Stone of Destiny, and was rather glad there was no decision to make. They went on, at an easy jog trot. By bits and pieces Ciaran built up the picture--raiding gangs of Kalds coming quietly onto isolated border villages, combing the brush and the forest for stragglers. Where they took the humans, or why, nobody could guess.[1] froze to a dead stop. The others crouched behind him, instinctively holding their breath. The hunter whispered, "People. Many of them." His flat palm made an emphatic move for quiet. Small cold prickles flared across Ciaran's skin. He found Mouse's hand in his and squeezed it. Suddenly, with no more voice than the sigh of a breeze through bracken, the hermit laughed. "Judgment," he whispered. "Great things moving." His pale eyes were fey. "Doom and destruction, a shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying." He looked at them one by one, and threw his head back, laughing without sound, the stringy cords working in his throat. "And of all of you, I _alone_ have no fear!" They went on, slowly, moving without sound in small shapeless puddles of shadow thrown by the floating sunballs. Ciaran found himself almost in the lead, beside the hunter. They edged around a jog in the cleft wall. About ten feet ahead of them the cleft floor plunged underground, through a low opening shored with heavy timbers. There were two Kalds lounging in front of it, watching their wands flash in the light. The five humans stopped. The Kalds came toward them, almost lazily, running rough grey tongues over their shiny teeth. Their blood-pink eyes were bright with pleasure. Ciaran groaned. "This is it. Shall we be brave, or just smart?" The hunter cocked his huge fists. And then Ram let go a queer animal moan. He shoved past Ciaran and went to his knees beside something Ciaran hadn't noticed before. A woman lay awkwardly against the base of the cliff. She was brown and stringy and not very young, with a plain, good face. A squat, thick-shouldered boy sprawled almost on top of her. There was a livid burn on the back of his neck. They were both dead. Ciaran thought probably the woman had dropped from exhaustion, and the kid had died fighting to save her. He felt sick. Ram put a hand on each of their faces. His own was stony and quite blank. After the first cry he didn't make a sound. He got up and went for the Kald nearest to him. III He did it like an animal, quick and without thinking. The Kald was quick, too. It jabbed the wand at Ram, but the little brown man was coming so fast that it didn't stop him. He must have died in mid-leap, but his body knocked the Kald over and bore him down. Ciaran followed him in a swift cat leap. He heard the hunter grunting and snarling somewhere behind him, and the thudding of bare feet being very busy. He lost sight of the other Kald. He lost sight of everything but a muscular grey arm that was trying to pull a jewel-tipped wand from under Ram's corpse. There was a terrible stink of burned flesh. Ciaran grabbed the grey wrist. He didn't bother with it, or the arm. He slid his grip up to the fingers, got his other hand beside it, and started wrenching. Bone cracked and split. Ciaran worked desperately, from the thumb and the little finger. Flesh tore. Splinters of grey bone came through. Ciaran's hands slipped in the blood. The grey beast opened its mouth, but no sound came. Ciaran decided then the things were dumb. It was human enough to sweat. Ciaran grabbed the wand. A grey paw, the other one, came clawing for his throat around the bulk of Ram's shoulders. He flicked it with the wand. It went away, and Ciaran speared the jewel tip down hard against the Kald's throat. After a while Mouse's voice came to him from somewhere. "It's done, Kiri. No use overcooking it." It smelled done, all right. Ciaran got up. He looked at the wand in his hand, holding it away off. He whistled. Mouse said, "Stop admiring yourself and get going. The hunter says he can hear chains." Ciaran looked around. The other Kald lay on the ground. Its neck seemed to be broken. The body of the squat, dark boy lay on top of it. The hunter said: "He didn't feel the wand. I think he'd be glad to be a club for killing one of them, if he knew it." Ciaran said, "Yeah." He looked at Mouse. She seemed perfectly healthy. "Aren't women supposed to faint at things like this?" She snorted. "I was born in the Thieves' Quarter. We used to roll skulls instead of pennies. They weren't so scarce." "I think," said Ciaran, "the next time I get married I'll ask more questions. Let's go." They went down the ramp leading under the Forbidden Plains. The hunter led, like a wary beast. Ciaran brought up the rear. They both carried the stolen wands. The hermit hadn't spoken a word, or moved a hand to help. It was fairly dark there underground, but not cold. In fact, it was hotter than outside, and got worse as they went down. Ciaran could hear a sound like a hundred armorers beating on shields. Only louder. There was a feeling of a lot of people moving around but not talking much, and an occasional crash or metallic screaming that Ciaran didn't have any explanation for. He found himself not liking it. They went a fairish way on an easy down-slope, and then the light got brighter. The hunter whispered, "Careful!" and slowed down. They drifted like four ghosts through an archway into a glow of clear bluish light. * * * * * They stood on a narrow ledge. Just here it was hand-smoothed, but on both sides it ran in nature-eroded roughness into a jumble of stalactites and wind-galleries. Above the ledge, in near darkness, was the high roof arch, and straight ahead, there was just space. Eventually, a long way off, Ciaran made out a wall of rock. Below there was a pit. It was roughly barrel-shaped. It was deep. It was so deep that Ciaran had to crane over the edge to see bottom. Brilliant blue-white flares made it brighter than daylight about two-thirds of the way up the barrel. There were human beings laboring in the glare. They were tiny things no bigger than ants from this height. They wore no chains, and Ciaran couldn't see any guards. But after the first look he quit worrying about any of that. The Thing growing up in the pit took all his attention. It was built of metal. It rose and spread in intricate swooping curves of shining whiteness, filling the whole lower part of the cavern. Ciaran stared at it with a curious numb feeling of awe. The thing wasn't finished. He had not the faintest idea what it was for. But he was suddenly terrified of it. It was more than just the sheer crushing size of it, or the unfamiliar metallic construction that was like nothing he had seen or even dreamed of before. It was the thing itself. It was Power. It was Strength. It was a Titan growing there in the belly of the world, getting ready to reach out and grip it and play with it, like Mouse gambling with an empty skull. He knew, looking at it, that no human brain in his own scale and time of existence had conceived that shining monster, nor shaped of itself one smallest part of it. The red hunter said simply, "I'm scared. And this smells like a trap." Ciaran swallowed something that might have been his heart. "We're in it, pal, like it or don't. And we'd better get out of sight before that chain-gang runs into us." Off to the side, along the rough part of the ledge where there were shadows and holes and pillars of rock, seemed the best bet. There was a way down to the cavern floor--a dizzy zig-zag of ledges, ladders, and steps. But once on it you were stuck, and no cover. They edged off, going as fast as they dared. Mouse was breathing rather heavily and her face was white enough to make the brand show like a blood-drop between her brows. The hermit seemed to be moving in a private world of his own. The sight of the shining giant had brought a queer blaze to his eyes, something Ciaran couldn't read and didn't like. Otherwise, he might as well have been dead. He hadn't spoken since he cursed them, back in the gully. They crouched down out of sight among a forest of stalactites. Ciaran watched the ledge. He whispered, "They hunt by scent?" The hunter nodded. "I think the other humans will cover us. Too many scents in this place. But how did they have those two waiting for us at the cave mouth?" Ciaran shrugged. "Telepathy. Thought transference. Lots of the backwater people have it. Why not the Kalds?" "You don't," said the hunter, "think of them as having human minds." "Don't kid yourself. They think, all right. They're not human, but they're not true animals either." "Did they think _that_?" The hunter pointed at the pit. "No," said Ciaran slowly. "They didn't." "Then who--" He broke off. "Quiet! Here they come." Ciaran held his breath, peering one-eyed around a stalactite. The slave-gang, with the grey guards, began to file out of the tunnel and down the steep descent to the bottom. There was no trouble. There was no trouble left in any of those people. There were several empty collars. There were also fewer Kalds. Some had stayed outside to track down the four murderous fugitives, which meant no escape at that end. Ciaran got an idea. When the last of the line and the guards were safely over the edge he whispered, "Come on. We'll go down right on their tails." Mouse gave him a startled look. He said impatiently, "They won't be looking back and up--I hope. And there won't be anybody else coming up while they're going down. You've got a better idea about getting down off this bloody perch, spill it!" She didn't have, and the hunter nodded. "Is good. Let's go." * * * * * They went, like the very devil. Since all were professionals in their own line they didn't make any more fuss than so many leaves falling. The hermit followed silently. His pale eyes went to the shining monster in the pit at every opportunity. He was fermenting some idea in his shaggy head. Ciaran had a hunch the safest thing would be to quietly trip him off into space. He resisted it, simply because knifing a man in a brawl was one thing and murdering an unsuspecting elderly man in cold blood was another. Later, he swore a solemn oath to drop humanitarianism, but hard. Nobody saw them. The Kalds and the people below were all too busy not breaking their necks to have eyes for anything else. Nobody came down behind them--a risk they had had to run. They were careful to keep a whole section of the descent between them and the slave gang. It was a hell of a long way down. The metal monster grew and grew and slid up beside them, and then above them, towering against the vault. It was beautiful. Ciaran loved its beauty even while he hated and feared its strength. Then he realized there were people working on it, clinging like flies to its white beams and arches. Some worked with wands not very different from the one he carried, fusing metal joints in a sparkle of hot light. Others guided the huge metal pieces into place, bringing them up from the floor of the cavern on long ropes and fitting them delicately. With a peculiar dizzy sensation, Ciaran realized there was no more weight to the metal than if it were feathers. He prayed they could get past those workers without being seen, or at least without having an alarm spread. The four of them crawled down past two or three groups of them safely, and then one man, working fairly close to the cliff, raised his head and stared straight at them. Ciaran began to make frantic signs. The man paid no attention to them. Ciaran got a good look at his eyes. He let his hands drop. "He doesn't see us," whispered Mouse slowly. "Is he blind?" The man turned back to his work. It was an intricate fitting of small parts into a pierced frame. Work that in all his wanderings Ciaran had never seen done anywhere, in any fashion. He shivered. "No. He just--doesn't see us." The big hunter licked his lips nervously, like a beast in a deadfall. His eyes glittered. The hermit laughed without any sound. They went on. It was the same all the way down. Men and women looked at them, but didn't see. In one place they paused to let the slave-gang get farther ahead. There was a woman working not far out. She looked like a starved cat, gaunt ribs showing through torn rags. Her face was twisted with the sheer effort of breathing, but there was no expression in her eyes. Quite suddenly, in the middle of an unfinished gesture, she collapsed like wet leather and fell. Ciaran knew she was dead before her feet cleared the beam she was sitting on. That happened twice more on the way down. Nobody paid any attention. Mouse wiped moisture off her forehead and glared at Ciaran. "A fine place to spend a honeymoon. You and your lousy shortcuts!" For once Ciaran had no impulse to cuff her. * * * * * The last portion of the descent was covered by the backs of metal lean-tos full of heat and clamor. The four slipped away into dense shadow between two of them, crouched behind a mound of scrap. They had a good view of what happened to the slave gang. The Kalds guided it out between massive pillars of white metal that held up the giant web overhead. Fires flared around the cliff foot. A hot blue-white glare beat down, partly from some unfamiliar light-sources fastened in the girders, partly from the mouths of furnaces hot beyond any heat Ciaran had ever dreamed of. Men and women toiled sweating in the smoke and glare, and never looked at the newcomers in their chains. There were no guards. The Kalds stopped the line in a clear space beyond the shacks and waited. They were all facing the same way, expectant, showing their bright grey teeth and rolling their blood-pink eyes. Ciaran's gaze followed theirs. He got rigid suddenly, and the sweat on him turned cold as dew on a toad's back. He thought at first it was a man, walking down between the pillars. It was man-shaped, tall and slender and strong, and sheathed from crown to heels in white mesh metal that shimmered like bright water. But when it came closer he knew he was wrong. Some animal instinct in him knew even before his mind did. He wanted to snarl and put up his hackles, and tuck his tail and run. * * * * * The creature was sexless. The flesh of its hands and face had a strange unreal texture, and a dusky yellow tinge that never came in living flesh. Its face was human enough in shape--thin, with light angular bones. Only it was regular and perfect like something done carefully in marble, with no human softness or irregularity. The lips were bloodless. There was no hair, not even any eyelashes. The eyes in that face were what set Ciaran's guts to knotting like a nest of cold snakes. They were not even remotely human. They were like pools of oil under the lashless lids--black, deep, impenetrable, without heart or soul or warmth. But wise. Wise with a knowledge beyond humanity, and strong with a cold, terrible strength. And old. There were none of the usual signs of age. It was more than that. It was a psychic, unhuman feel of antiquity; a time that ran back and back and still back to an origin as unnatural as the body it spawned. Ciaran knew what it was. He had made songs about the creature and sung them in crowded market-places and smoky wine-shops. He'd scared children with it, and made grown people shiver while they laughed. He wasn't singing now. He wasn't laughing. He was looking at one of the androids of Bas the Immortal--a creature born of the mysterious power of the Stone, with no faintest link to humanity in its body or its brain. Ciaran knew then whose mind had created the shining monster towering above them. And he knew more than ever that it was evil. The android walked out onto a platform facing the slave-gang, so that it was above them, where they could all see. In its right hand it carried a staff of white metal with a round ball on top. The staff and the mesh-metal sheath it wore blazed bright silver in the glare. The chained humans raised their heads. Ciaran saw the white scared glint of their eyeballs, heard the hard suck of breath and the uneasy clashing of link metal. The Kalds made warning gestures with their wands, but they were watching the android. It raised the staff suddenly, high over its head. The gesture put the ball top out of Ciaran's sight behind a girder. And then the lights dimmed and went out. For a moment there was total darkness, except for the dull marginal glow of the forges and furnaces. Then, from behind the girder that hid the top of the staff a glorious opaline light burst out, filling the space between the giant pillars, reaching out and up into the dim air with banners of shimmering flame. The Kalds crouched down in attitudes of worship, their blood-pink eyes like sentient coals. A trembling ran through the line of slaves, as though a wind had passed across them and shaken them like wheat. A few cried out, but the sounds were muffled quickly to silence. They stood still, staring up at the light. The android neither moved nor spoke, standing like a silver lance. Ciaran got up. He didn't know that he did it. He was distantly aware of Mouse beside him, breathing hard through an open mouth and catching opaline sparks in her black eyes. There was other movement, but he paid no attention. He wanted to get closer to the light. He wanted to see what made it. He wanted to bathe in it. He could feel it pulsing in him, sparkling in his blood. He also wanted to run away, but the desire was stronger than the fear. It even made the fear rather pleasurable. He was starting to climb over the pile of scrap when the android spoke. Its voice was light, clear, and carrying. There was nothing menacing about it. But it stopped Ciaran like a blow in the face, penetrating even through his semi-drugged yearning for the light. He knew sound. He knew mood. He was sensitive to them as his own harp in the way he made his living. He felt what was in that voice; or rather, what wasn't in it. And he stopped, dead still. It was a voice speaking out of a place where no emotion, as humanity knew the word, had ever existed. It came from a brain as alien and incomprehensible as darkness in a world of eternal light; a brain no human could ever touch or understand, except to feel the cold weight of its strength and cower as a beast cowers before the terrible mystery of fire. "Sleep," said the android. "Sleep, and listen to my voice. Open your minds, and listen." IV Through a swimming rainbow haze Ciaran saw the relaxed, dull faces of the slaves. "You are nothing. You are no one. You exist only to serve; to work; to obey. Do you hear and understand?" The line of humans swayed and made a small moaning sigh. It held nothing but amazement and desire. They repeated the litany through thick animal mouths. "Your minds are open to mine. You will hear my thoughts. Once told, you will not forget. You will feel hunger and thirst, but not weariness. You will have no need to stop and rest, or sleep." Again the litany. Ciaran passed a hand over his face. He was sweating. In spite of himself the light and the soulless, mesmeric voice were getting him. He hit his own jaw with his knuckles, thanking whatever gods there were that the source of the light had been hidden from him. He knew he could never have bucked it. More, perhaps, of the power of the Stone of Destiny? A sudden sharp rattle of fragments brought his attention to the scrap heap. The hermit was already half way over it. And Mouse was right at his heels. Ciaran went after her. The rubble slipped and slid, and she was already out of reach. He called her name in desperation. She didn't hear him. She was hungry for the light. Ciaran flung himself bodily over the rubbish. Out on the floor, the nearest Kalds were shaking off their daze of worship. The hermit was scrambling on all fours, like a huge grey cat. Mouse's crimson tunic stayed just out of reach. Ciaran threw a handful of metal fragments at her back. She turned her head and snarled at him. She didn't see him. Almost as an automatic reflex she hurled some stuff at his face, but she didn't even slow down. The hermit cried out, a high, eerie scream. A huge hand closed on Ciaran's ankle and hauled him back. He fought it, jabbing with the wand he still carried. A second remorseless hand prisoned his wrist. The red hunter said dispassionately, "They come. We go." "Mouse! Let me go, damn you! _Mouse!_" "You can't help her. We go, quick." Ciaran went on kicking and thrashing. The hunter banged him over the ear with exquisite judgment, took the wand out of his limp hand and tossed him over one vast shoulder. The light hadn't affected the hunter much. He'd been in deeper shadow than the others, and his half-animal nerves had warned him quicker even than Ciaran's. Being a wise wild thing, he had shut his eyes at once. He doubled behind the metal sheds and began to run in dense shadow. Ciaran heard and felt things from a great misty distance. He heard the hermit yell again, a crazy votive cry of worship. He felt the painful jarring of his body and smelled the animal rankness of the hunter. He heard Mouse scream, just once. He tried to move; to get up and do something. The hunter slammed him hard across the kidneys. Ciaran was aware briefly that the lights were coming on again. After that it got very dark and very quiet. The hunter breathed in his ear, "Quiet! Don't move." There wasn't much chance of Ciaran doing anything. The hunter lay on top of him with one freckled paw covering most of his face. Ciaran gasped and rolled his eyes. They lay in a troughed niche of rough stone. There was black shadow on them from an overhang, but the blue glare burned beyond it. Even as he watched it dimmed and flickered and then steadied again. High up over his head the shining metal monster reached for the roof of the cavern. It had grown. It had grown enormously, and a mechanism was taking shape inside it; a maze of delicate rods and crystal prisms, of wheels and balances and things Ciaran hadn't any name for. Then he remembered about Mouse, and nothing else mattered. The hunter lay on him, crushing him to silence. Ciaran's blue eyes blazed. He'd have killed the hunter then, if there had been any way to do it. There wasn't. Presently he stopped fighting. Again the red giant breathed in his ear: "Look over the edge." He took his hand away. Very, very quietly, Ciaran raised his head a few inches and looked over. Their niche was some fifteen feet above the floor of the pit. Below and to the right was the mouth of a square tunnel. The crowded, sweating confusion of the forges and workshops spread out before them, with people swarming like ants after a rain. Standing at the tunnel mouth were two creatures in shining metal sheathes--the androids of Bas the Immortal. * * * * * Their clear, light voices rose up to where Ciaran and the hunter lay. "Did you find out?" "Failing--as we judged. Otherwise, no change." "No change." One of the slim unhumans turned and looked with its depthless black eyes at the soaring metal giant. "If we can only finish it in time!" The other said, "We can, Khafre. We must." Khafre made a quick, impatient gesture. "We need more slaves! These human cattle are frail. You drive them, and they die." "The Kalds...." "Are doing what they can. Two more chains have just come. But it's still not enough to be safe! I've told the beasts to raid farther in, even to the border cities if they have to." "It won't help if the humans attack us before we're done." Khafre laughed. There was nothing pleasant or remotely humorous about it. "_If_ they could track the Kalds this far, we could handle them easily. After we're finished, of course, they'll be subjugated anyway." The other nodded. Faintly uneasy, it said, "If we finish in time. If we don't...." "If we don't," said Khafre, "none of it matters, to them or us or the Immortal Bas." Something that might have been a shudder passed over its shining body. Then it threw back its head and laughed again, high and clear. "But we will finish it, Steud! We're unique in the universe, and nothing can stop us. This means the end of boredom, of servitude and imprisonment. With this world in our hands, nothing can stop us!" Steud whispered, "Nothing!" Then they moved away, disappearing into the seething clamor of the floor. The red hunter said, "What were they talking about?" Ciaran shook his head. His eyes were hard and curiously remote. "I don't know." "I don't like the smell of it, little man. It's bad." "Yeah." Ciaran's voice was very steady. "What happened to Mouse?" "She was taken with the others. Believe me, little man--I had to do what I did or they'd have taken you, too. There was nothing you could do to help her." "She--followed the light." "I think so. But I had to run fast." There was a mist over Ciaran's sight. His heart was slugging him. Not because he particularly cared, he asked, "How did we get away? I thought I saw the big lights come on ...". "They did. And then they went off again, all of a sudden. They weren't expecting it. I had a head start. The grey beasts hunt by scent, but in that stewpot there are too many scents. They lost us, and when the lights came on again I saw this niche and managed to climb to it without being seen." He looked out over the floor, scratching his red beard. "I think they're too busy to bother about two people. No, three." He chuckled. "The hermit got away, too. He ran past me in the dark, screaming like an ape about revelations and The Light. Maybe they've got him again by now." * * * * * Ciaran wasn't worrying about the hermit. "Subjugation," he said slowly. "With this world in their hands, nothing can stop them." He looked out across the floor of the pit. No guards. You didn't need any guards when you had a weapon like that light. Frail human cattle driven till they died, and not knowing about it nor caring. The world in their hands. An empty shell for them to play with, to use as they wanted. No more market places, no more taverns, no more songs. No more little people living their little lives the way they wanted to. Just slaves with blank faces, herded by grey beasts with shining wands and held by the android's light. He didn't know why the androids wanted the world or what they were going to do with it. He only knew that the whole thing made him sick--sick all through, in a way he'd never felt before. The fact that what he was going to do was hopeless and crazy never occurred to him. Nothing occurred to him, except that somewhere in that seething slave-pen Mouse was laboring, with eyes that didn't see and a brain that was only an open channel for orders. Pretty soon, like the woman up on the girder, she was going to hit her limit and die. Ciaran said abruptly, "If you want to kill a snake, what do you do?" "Cut off its head, of course." Ciaran got his feet under him. "The Stone of Destiny," he whispered. "The power of life and death. Do you believe in legends?" The hunter shrugged. "I believe in my hands. They're all I know." "I'm going to need your hands, to help me break one legend and build another!" "They're yours, little man. Where do we go?" "Down that tunnel. Because, if I'm not clear off, that leads to Ben Beatha, and Bas the Immortal--and the Stone." Almost as though it were a signal, the blue glare dimmed and flickered. In the semi-darkness Ciaran and the hunter dropped down from the niche and went into the tunnel. It was dark, with only a tiny spot of blue radiance at wide intervals along the walls. They had gone quite a distance before these strengthened to their normal brightness, and even then it was fairly dark. It seemed to be deserted. The hunter kept stopping to listen. When Ciaran asked irritably what was wrong, he said: "I think there's someone behind us. I'm not sure." "Well, give him a jab with the wand if he gets too close. Hurry up!" The tunnel led straight toward Ben Beatha, judging from its position in the pit. Ciaran was almost running when the hunter caught his shoulder urgently. "Wait! There's movement up ahead...." He motioned Ciaran down. On their hands and knees they crawled forward, holding their wands ready. A slight bend in the tunnel revealed a fork. One arm ran straight ahead. The other bent sharply upward, toward the surface. There were four Kalds crouched on the rock between them, playing some obscure game with human finger bones. Ciaran got his weight over his toes and moved fast. The hunter went beside him. Neither of them made a sound. The Kalds were intent on their game and not expecting trouble. The two men might have got away with it, only that suddenly from behind them, someone screamed like an angry cat. * * * * * Ciaran's head jerked around, just long enough to let him see the hermit standing in the tunnel, with his stringy arms lifted and his grey hair flying, and a light of pure insanity blazing in his pale eyes. "Evil!" he shrieked. "You are evil to defy The Light, and the servants of The Light!" He seemed to have forgotten all about calling the Kalds demons a little while before. The grey beasts leaped up, moving quickly in with their wands ready. Ciaran yelled with sheer fury. He went for them, the rags of his yellow tunic streaming. He wasn't quite clear about what happened after that. There was a lot of motion, grey bodies leaping and twisting and jewel-tips flashing. Something flicked him stunningly across the temple. He fought in a sort of detached fog where everything was blurred and distant. The hermit went on screaming about Evil and The Light. The hunter bellowed a couple of times, things thudded and crashed, and once Ciaran poked his wand straight into a blood-pink eye. Sometime right after that there was a confused rush of running feet back in the tunnel. The hunter was down. And Ciaran found himself running up the incline, because the other way was suddenly choked with Kalds. He got away. He was never sure how. Probably instinct warned him to go in time so that, in the confusion he was out of sight before the reinforcements saw him. Three of the original four Kalds were down and the fourth was busy with the hermit. Anyway, for the moment, he made it. When he staggered finally from the mouth of the ramp, drenched with sweat and gasping, he was back on the Forbidden Plain, and Ben Beatha towered above him--a great golden Titan reaching for the red sky. The tumbled yellow rock of its steep slopes was barren of any growing thing. There were no signs of buildings, or anything built by hands, human or otherwise. High up, almost in the apex of the triangular peak, was a square, balconied opening that might have been only a wind-eroded niche in the cliff-face. Ciaran stood on widespread legs, studying the mountain with sullen stubborn eyes. He believed in legend, now. It was all he believed in. Somewhere under the golden peak was the Stone of Destiny and the demigod who was its master. Behind him were the creatures of that demigod, and the monster they were building--and a little black-haired Mouse who was going to die unless something was done about it. A lot of other people, too. A whole sane comfortable world. But Mouse was about all he could handle, just then. He wasn't Ciaran the bard any longer. He wasn't a human, attached to a normal human world. He moved in a strange land of gods and demons, where everything was as mad as a drunkard's nightmare, and Mouse was the only thing that held him at all to the memory of a life wherein men and women fought and laughed and loved. His scarred mouth twitched and tightened. He started off across the rolling, barren rise to Ben Beatha--a tough, bandy-legged little man in yellow rags, with a brown, expressionless face and a forgotten harp slung between his shoulders, moving at a steady gypsy lope. A wind sighed over the Forbidden Plain, rolling the sunballs in the red sky. And then, from the crest of Ben Beatha, the darkness came. This time Ciaran didn't stop to be afraid. There was nothing left inside him to be afraid with. He remembered the hermit's words: _Judgment. Great things moving. Doom and destruction, a shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying._ Something of the same feeling came to him, but he wasn't human any longer. He was beyond fear. Fate moved, and he was part of it. Stones and shale tricked his feet in the darkness. All across the Forbidden Plains there was night and a wailing wind and a sharp chill of cold. Far, far away there was a faint red glow on the sky where the sea burned with its own fire. Ciaran went on. Overhead, then, the sunballs began to flicker. Little striving ripples of light went out across them, lighting the barrens with an eerie witch-glow. The flickering was worse than the darkness. It was like the last struggling pulse of a dying man's heart. Ciaran was aware of a coldness in him beyond the chill of the wind. _A shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying...._ He began to climb Ben Beatha. V The stone was rough and fairly broken, and Ciaran had climbed mountains before. He crawled upward, through the sick light and the cold wind that screamed and fought him harder the higher he got. He retained no very clear memory of the climb. Only after a long, long time he fell inward over the wall of a balcony and lay still. He was bleeding from rock-tears and his heart kicked him like the heel of a vicious horse. But he didn't care. The balcony was man-made, the passage back of it led somewhere--and the light had come back in the sky. It wasn't quite the same, though. It was weaker, and less warm. When he could stand up he went in along the passage, square-hewn in the living rock of Ben Beatha, the Mountain of Life. It led straight in, lighted by a soft opaline glow from hidden light-sources. Presently it turned at right angles and became a spiral ramp, leading down. Corridors led back from it at various levels, but Ciaran didn't bother about them. They were dark, and the dust of ages lay unmarked on their floors. Down and down, a long, long way. Silence. The deep uncaring silence of death and the eternal rock--dark titans who watched the small furious ant-scurryings of man and never, never, for one moment, gave a damn. And then the ramp flattened into a broad high passage cut deep in the belly of the mountain. And the passage led to a door of gold, twelve feet high and intricately graved and pierced, set with symbols that Ciaran had heard of only in legend: the _Hun-Lahun-Mehen_, the Snake, the Circle, and the Cross, blazing in hot jewel-fires. But above them, crushing and dominant on both valves of the great door, was the _crux ansata_, the symbol of eternal life, cut from some lustreless stone so black it was like a pattern of blindness on the eyeball. Ciaran shivered and drew a deep, unsteady breath. One brief moment of human terror came to him. Then he set his two hands on the door and pushed it open. He came into a small room hung with tapestries and lighted dimly by the same opaline glow as the hallway. The half-seen pictures showed men and beasts and battles against a background at once tantalizingly familiar and frighteningly alien. There was a rug on the floor. It was made from the head and hide of a creature Ciaran had never even dreamed of before--a thing like a huge tawny cat with a dark mane and great, shining fangs. Ciaran padded softly across it and pushed aside the heavy curtains at the other end. * * * * * At first there was only darkness. It seemed to fill a large space; Ciaran had an instinctive feeling of size. He went out into it, very cautiously, and then his eyes found a pale glow ahead in the blackness, as though someone had crushed a pearl with his thumb and smeared it across the dark. He was a thief and a gypsy. He made no more sound than a wisp of cloud, drifting toward it. His feet touched a broad, shallow step, and then another. He climbed, and the pearly glow grew stronger and became a curving wall of radiance. He stopped just short of touching it, on a level platform high above the floor. He squinted against its curdled, milky thickness, trying to see through. Wrapped in the light, cradled and protected by it like a bird in the heart of a shining cloud, a boy slept on a couch made soft with furs and colored silks. He was quite naked, his limbs flung out carelessly with the slim angular grace of his youth. His skin was white as milk, catching a pale warmth from the light. He slept deeply. He might almost have been dead, except for the slight rise and fall of his breathing. His head was rolled over so that he faced Ciaran, his cheek pillowed on his upflung arm. His hair, thick, curly, and black almost to blueness, had grown out long across his forearm, across the white fur beneath it, and down onto his wide slim shoulders. The nails of his lax hand, palm up above his head, stood up through the hair. They were inches long. His face was just a boy's face. A good face, even rather handsome, with strong bone just beginning to show under the roundness. His cheek was still soft as a girl's, the lashes of his closed lids dark and heavy. He looked peaceful, even happy. His mouth was curved in a vague smile, as though his dreams were pleasant. And yet there was something there.... A shadow. Something unseen and untouchable, something as fragile as the note of a shepherd's pipe brought from far off on a vagrant breeze. Something as indescribable as death--and as broodingly powerful. Ciaran sensed it, and his nerves throbbed suddenly like the strings of his own harp. He saw then that the couch the boy slept on was a huge _crux ansata_, cut from the dead-black stone, with the arms stretching from under his shoulders and the loop like a monstrous halo above his head. The legends whispered through Ciaran's head. The songs, the tales, the folklore. The symbolism, and the image-patterns. Bas the Immortal was always described as a giant, like the mountain he lived in, and old, because Immortal suggests age. Awe, fear, and unbelief spoke through those legends, and the child-desire to build tall. But there was an older legend.... Ciaran, because he was a gypsy and a thief and had music in him like a drunkard has wine, had heard it, deep in the black forests of Hyperborea where even gypsies seldom go. The oldest legend of all--the tale of the Shining Youth from Beyond, who walked in beauty and power, who never grew old, and who carried in his heart a bitter darkness that no man could understand. The Shining Youth from Beyond. A boy sleeping with a smile on his face, walled in living light. Ciaran stood still, staring. His face was loose and quite blank. His heartbeats shook him slightly, and his breath had a rusty sound in his open mouth. After a long time he started forward, into the light. It struck him, hurled him back numbed and dazed. Thinking of Mouse, he tried it twice more before he was convinced. Then he tried yelling. His voice crashed back at him from the unseen walls, but the sleeping boy never stirred, never altered even the rhythm of his breathing. After that Ciaran crouched in the awful laxness of impotency, and thought about Mouse, and cried. Then, quite suddenly, without any warning at all, the wall of light vanished. * * * * * He didn't believe it. But he put his his hand out again, and nothing stopped it, so he rushed forward in the pitch blackness until he hit the stone arm of the cross. And behind him, and all around him, the light began to glow again. Only now it was different. It flickered and dimmed and struggled, like something fighting not to die. Like something else.... Like the sunballs. Like the light in the sky that meant life to a world. Flickering and feeble like an old man's heart, the last frightened wing-beats of a dying bird.... A terror took Ciaran by the throat and stopped the breath in it, and turned his body colder than a corpse. He watched.... The light glowed and pulsed, and grew stronger. Presently he was walled in by it, but it seemed fainter than before. A terrible feeling of urgency came over Ciaran, a need for haste. The words of the androids came back to him: _Failing, as we judged. If we finish in time. If we don't, none of it matters._ A shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying. Mouse slaving with empty eyes to build a shining monster that would harness the world to the wills of non-human brains. It didn't make sense, but it meant something. Something deadly important. And the key to the whole mad jumble was here--a dark-haired boy dreaming on a stone cross. Ciaran moved closer. He saw then that the boy had stirred, very slightly, and that his face was troubled. It was as though the dimming of the light had disturbed him. Then he sighed and smiled again, nestling his head deeper into the bend of his arm. "Bas," said Ciaran. "Lord Bas!" His voice sounded hoarse and queer. The boy didn't hear him. He called again, louder. Then he put his hand on one slim white shoulder and shook it hesitantly at first, and then hard, and harder. The boy Bas didn't even flicker his eyelids. Ciaran beat his fists against the empty air and cursed without any voice. Then, almost instinctively, he crouched on the stone platform and took his harp in his hands. It wasn't because he expected to do anything with it. It was simply that harping was as natural to him as breathing, and what was inside him had to come out some way. He wasn't thinking about music. He was thinking about Mouse, and it just added up to the same thing. Random chords at first, rippling up against the wall of milky light. Then the agony in him began to run out through his finger-tips onto the strings, and he sent it thrumming strong across the still air. It sang wild and savage, but underneath it there was the sound of his own heart breaking, and the fall of tears. There was no time. There wasn't even any Ciaran. There was only the harp crying a dirge for a black-haired Mouse and the world she lived in. Nothing mattered but that. Nothing would ever matter. Then finally there wasn't anything left for the harp to cry about. The last quiver of the strings went throbbing off into a dull emptiness, and there was only an ugly little man in yellow rags crouched silent by a stone cross, hiding his face in his hands. Then, faint and distant, like the echo of words spoken in another world, another time: _Don't draw the veil. Marsali--don't...!_ Ciaran looked up, stiffening. The boy's lips moved. His face, the eyes still closed, was twisted in an agony of pleading. His hands were raised, reaching, trying to hold something that slipped through his fingers like mist. Dark mist. The mist of dreams. It was still in his eyes when he opened them. Grey eyes, clouded and veiled, and then with the dream-mist thickening into tears.... He cried out, "_Marsali!_" as though his heart was ripped out of him with the breath that said it. Then he lay still on the couch, his eyes, staring unfocused at the milky light, with the tears running out of them. Ciaran said softly, "Lord Bas...." "Awake," whispered the boy. "I'm awake again. Music--a harp crying out.... I didn't want to wake! Oh, God, I didn't want to!" He sat up suddenly. The rage, the sheer blind fury in his young face rocked Ciaran like the blow of a fist. "Who waked me? Who dared to wake me?" There was no place to run. The light held him. And there was Mouse. Ciaran said: "I did, Lord Bas. There was need to." The boy's grey eyes came slowly to focus on his face. Ciaran's heart kicked once and stopped beating. A great cold stillness breathed from somewhere beyond the world and walled him in, closer and tighter than the milky light. Close and tight, like the packed earth of a grave. A boy's face, round and smooth and soft. No shadow even of down on the cheeks, the lips still pink and girlish. Long dark lashes, and under them.... Grey eyes. Old with suffering, old with pain, old with an age beyond human understanding. Eyes that had seen birth and life and death in an endless stream, flowing by just out of reach, just beyond hearing. Eyes looking out between the bars of a private hell that was never built for any man before. One strong young hand reached down among the furs and silks and felt for something, and Ciaran knew the thing was death. Ciaran, suddenly, was furious himself. He struck a harsh, snarling chord on the harpstrings, thinking of Mouse. He poured his fury out in bitter, pungent words, the gypsy argot of the Quarters, and all the time Bas fumbled to get the hidden weapon in his hands. It was the long nails that saved Ciaran's life. They kept Bas from closing his fingers, and in the meantime some of Ciaran's vibrant rage had penetrated. Bas whispered: "You love a woman." "Yeah," said Ciaran. "Yeah." "So do I. A woman I created, and made to live in my dreams. Do you know what you did when you waked me?" "Maybe I saved the world. If the legends are right, you built it. You haven't any right to let it die so you can sleep." "I built another world, little man. Marsali's world. I don't want to leave it." He bent forward, toward Ciaran. "I was happy in that world. I built it to suit me. I belong in it. Do you know why? Because it's made from my own dreams, as I want it. Even the people. Even Marsali. Even myself. "They drove me away from one world. I built another, but it was no different. I'm not human. I don't belong with humans, nor in any world they live in. So I learned to sleep, and dream." He lay back on the couch. He looked pitifully young, with the long lashes hiding his eyes. "Go away. Let your little world crumble. It's doomed anyway. What difference do a few life-spans make in eternity? Let me sleep." * * * * * Ciaran struck the harp again. "_No!_ Listen...." He told Bas about the slave-gangs, the androids, the shining monster in the pit--and the darkness that swept over the world. It was the last that caught the boy's attention. He sat up slowly. "Darkness? You! How did you get to me, past the light?" Ciaran told him. "The Stone of Destiny," whispered the Immortal. Suddenly he laughed. He laughed to fill the whole dark space beyond the light; terrible laughter, full of hate and a queer perverted triumph. He stopped, as suddenly as he had begun, and spread his hands flat on the colored silks, the long nails gleaming like knives. His eyes widened, grey windows into a deep hell, and his voice was no more than a breath. "Could that mean that I will die, too?" Ciaran's scarred mouth twitched. "The Stone of Destiny...." The boy leaped up from his couch. His hand swept over some hidden control in the arm of the stone cross, and the milky light died out. At the same time, an opaline glow suffused the darkness beyond. Bas the Immortal ran down the steps--a dark-haired, graceful boy running naked in the heart of an opal. Ciaran followed. They came to the hollow core of Ben Beatha--a vast pyramidal space cut in the yellow rock. Bas stopped, and Ciaran stopped behind him. The whole space was laced and twined and webbed with crystal. Rods of it, screens of it, meshes of it. A shining helix ran straight up overhead, into a shaft that seemed to go clear through to open air. In the crystal, pulsing along it like the life-blood in a man's veins, there was light. It was like no light Ciaran had ever seen before. It was no color, and every color. It seared the eye with heat, and yet it was cold and pure like still water. It throbbed and beat. It was alive. Ciaran followed the crystal maze down and down, to the base of it. There, in the very heart of it, lying at the hub of a shining web, lay _something_. Like a black hand slammed across the eyeballs, darkness fell. For a moment he was blind, and through the blindness came a soft whisper of movement. Then there was light again; a vague smeared spot of it on the pitch black. It glowed and faded and glowed again. The rusty gleam slid across the half-crouched body of Bas the Immortal, pressed close against the crystal web. It caught in his eyes, turning them hot and lambent like beast-eyes in the dark of a cave-mouth. Little sparks of hell-fire in a boy's face, staring at the Stone of Destiny. A stone no bigger than a man's heart, with power in it. Even dying, it had power. Power to build a world, or smash it. Power never born of Ciaran's planet, or any planet, but something naked and perfect--an egg from the womb of space itself. It fought to live, lying in its crystal web. It was like watching somebody's heart stripped clean and struggling to beat. The fire in it flickered and flared, sending pale witch-lights dancing up along the crystal maze. Outside, Ciaran knew, all across the world, the sunballs were pulsing and flickering to the dying beat of the Stone. Bas whispered, "It's over. Over and done." * * * * * Without knowing it, Ciaran touched the harpstrings and made them shudder. "The legends were right, then. The Stone of Destiny kept the world alive." "Alive. It gave light and warmth, and before that it powered the ship that brought me here across space, from the third planet of our sun to the tenth. It sealed the gaps in the planet's crust and drove the machinery that filled the hollow core inside with air. It was my strength. It built my world; _my_ world, where I would be loved and respected--all right, and worshipped!" He laughed, a small bitter sob. "A child I was. After all those centuries, still a child playing with a toy." His voice rang out louder across the flickering dimness. A boy's voice, clear and sweet. He wasn't talking to Ciaran. He wasn't even talking to himself. He was talking to Fate, and cursing it. "I took a walk one morning. That was all I did. I was just a fisherman's son walking on the green hills of Atlantis above the sea. That was all I wanted to be--a fisherman's son, someday to be a fisherman myself, with sons of my own. And then from nowhere, out of the sky, the meteorite fell. There was thunder, and a great light, and then darkness. And when I woke again I was a god. "I took the Stone of Destiny out of its broken shell. The light from it burned in me, and I was a god. And I was happy. _I didn't know._ "I was too young to be a god. A boy who never grew older. A boy who wanted to play with other boys, and couldn't. A boy who wanted to age, to grow a beard and a man's voice, and find a woman to love. It was hell, after the thrill wore off. It was worse, when my mind and heart grew up, and my body didn't. "And they said I was no god, but a blasphemy, a freak. "The priests of Dagon, of all the temples of Atlantis, spoke against me. I had to run away. I roamed the whole earth before the Flood, carrying the Stone. Sometimes I ruled for centuries, a god-king, but always the people tired of me and rose against me. They hated me, because I lived forever and never grew old. "A man they might have accepted. But a boy! A brain with all the wisdom it could borrow from time, grown so far from theirs that it was hard to talk to them--and a body too young even for the games of manhood!" Ciaran stood frozen, shrinking from the hell in the boy-God's agonized voice. "So I grew to hate them, and when they drove me out I turned on them, and used the power of the Stone to destroy. I know what happened to the cities of the Gobi, to Angkor, and the temples of Mayapan! So the people hated me more because they feared me more, and I was alone. No one has ever been alone as I was. "So I built my own world, here in the heart of a dead planet. And in the end it was the same, because the people were human and I was not. I created the androids, freaks like myself, to stand between me and my people--my own creatures, that I could trust. And I built a third world, in my dreams. "And now the Stone of Destiny has come to the end of its strength. Its atoms are eaten away by its own fire. The world it powered will die. And what will happen to me? I will go on living, even after my body is frozen in the cold dark?" Silence, then. The pulsing beat of light in the crystal rods. The heart of a world on its deathbed. Ciaran's harp crashed out. It made the crystal sing. His voice came with it: "Bas! The monster in the pit, that the androids are building--I know now what it is! They knew the Stone was dying. They're going to have power of their own, and take the world. You can't let them, Bas! You brought us here. We're your people. You can't let the androids have us!" The boy laughed, a low, bitter sound. "What do I care for your world or your people? I only want to sleep." He caught his breath in and turned around, as though he was going back to the place of the stone cross. VI Ciaran stroked the harpstrings. "Wait...." It was all humanity crying out of the harp. Little people, lost and frightened and pleading for help. No voice could have said what it said. It was Ciaran himself, a channel for the unthinking pain inside him. "Wait--You were human once. You were young. You laughed and quarrelled and ate and slept, and you were free. That's all we ask. Just those things. Remember Bas the fisherman's son, and help us!" Grey eyes looking at him. Grey eyes looking from a boy's face. "How could I help you even if I wanted to?" "There's some power left in the Stone. And the androids are your creatures. You made them. You can destroy them. If you could do it before they finish this thing--from the way they spoke, they mean to destroy you with it." Bas laughed. Ciaran's hand struck a terrible chord from the harp, and fell away. Bas said heavily, "They'll draw power from the gravitic force of the planet and broadcast it the same way. It will never stop as long as the planet spins. If they finish it in time, the world will live. If they don't...." He shrugged. "What difference does it make?" "So," whispered Ciaran, "we have a choice of a quick death, or a lingering one. We can die free, on our own feet, or we can die slaves." His voice rose to a full-throated shout. "_God! You're no god!_ You're a selfish brat sulking in a corner. All right, go back to your Marsali! And I'll play god for a minute." He raised the harp. "I'll play god, and give 'em the clean way out!" He drew his arm back to throw--to smash the crystal web. And then, with blinding suddenness, there was light again. They stood frozen, the two of them, blinking in the hot opalescence. Then their eyes were drawn to the crystal web. The Stone of Destiny still fluttered like a dying heart, and the crystal rods were dim. Ciaran whispered, "It's too late. They're finished." Silence again. They stood almost as though they were waiting for something, hardly breathing, with Ciaran still holding the silent harp in his hand. Very, very faintly, under his fingers, the strings began to thrum. Vibration. In a minute Ciaran could hear it in the crystal. It was like the buzz and strum of insects just out of earshot. He said: "What's that?" The boy's ears were duller than his. But presently he smiled and said, "So that's how they're going to do it. Vibration, that will shake Ben Beatha into a cloud of dust, and me with it. They must believe I'm still asleep." He shrugged. "What matter? It's death." Ciaran slung the harp across his back. There was a curious finality in the action. "There's a way from here into the pit. Where is it?" Bas pointed across the open space. Ciaran started walking. He didn't say anything. Bas said, "Where are you going?" "Back to Mouse," said Ciaran simply. "To die with her." The crystal maze bummed eerily. "I wish I could see Marsali again." * * * * * Ciaran stopped. He spoke over his shoulder, without expression. "The death of the Stone doesn't mean your death, does it?" "No. The first exposure to its light when it landed, blazing with the heat of friction, made permanent changes in the cell structure of my body. I'm independent of it--as the androids are of the culture vats they grew in." "And the new power source will take up where the Stone left off?" "Yes. Even the wall of rays that protected me and fed my body while I slept will go on. The power of the Stone was broadcast to it, and to the sunballs. There were no mechanical leads." Ciaran said softly, "And you love this Marsali? You're happy in this dream world you created? You could go back there?" "Yes," whispered Bas. "Yes. Yes!" Ciaran turned. "Then help us destroy the androids. Give us our world, and we'll give you yours. If we fail--well, we have nothing to lose." Silence. The crystal web hummed and sang--death whispering across the world. The Stone of Destiny throbbed like the breast of a dying bird. The boy's grey eyes were veiled and remote. It seemed almost that he was asleep. Then he smiled--the drowsy smile of pleasure he had worn when Ciaran found him, dreaming on the stone cross. "Marsali," he whispered. "Marsali." He moved forward then, reaching out across the crystal web. The long nails on his fingers scooped up the Stone of Destiny, cradled it, caged it in. Bas the Immortal said, "Let's go, little man." Ciaran didn't say anything. He looked at Bas. His eyes were wet. Then he got the harp in his hands again and struck it, and the thundering chords shook the crystal maze to answering music. It drowned the faint death-whisper. And then, caught between two vibrations, the shining rods split and fell, with a shiver of sound like the ringing of distant bells. Ciaran turned and went down the passage to the pit. Behind him came the dark-haired boy with the Stone of Destiny in his hands. They came along the lower arm of the fork where Ciaran and the hunter had fought the Kalds. There were four of the grey beasts still on guard. Ciaran had pulled the wand from his girdle. The Kalds started up, and Ciaran got ready to fight them. But Bas said, "Wait." He stepped forward. The Kalds watched him with their blood-pink eyes, yawning and whimpering with animal nervousness. The boy's dark gaze burned. The grey brutes cringed and shivered and then dropped flat, hiding their faces against the stone. "Telepaths," said Bas to Ciaran, "and obedient to the strongest mind. The androids know that. The Kalds weren't put there to stop me physically, but to send the androids warning if I came." Ciaran shivered. "So they'll be waiting." "Yes, little man. They'll be waiting." They went down the long tunnel and stepped out on the floor of the pit. * * * * * It was curiously silent. The fires had died in the forges. There was no sound of hammering, no motion. Only blazing lights and a great stillness, like someone holding his breath. There was no one in sight. The metal monster climbed up the pit. It was finished now. The intricate maze of grids and balances in its belly murmured with the strength that spun up through it from the core of the planet. It was like a vast spider, making an invisible thread of power to wrap around the world and hold it, to be sucked dry. An army of Kalds began to move on silent feet, out from the screening tangle of sheds and machinery. The androids weren't serious about that. It was just a skirmish, a test to see whether Bas had been weakened by his age-long sleep. He hadn't been. The Kalds looked at the Stone of Destiny and from there to Bas' grey eyes, cringed, whimpered, and lay flat. Bas whispered, "Their minds are closed to me, but I can feel--the androids are working, preparing some trap...." His eyes were closed now, his young face set with concentration. "They don't want me to see, but my mind is older than theirs, and better trained, and I have the power of the Stone. I can see a control panel. It directs the force of their machine...." He began to move, then, rapidly, out across the floor. His eyes were still closed. It seemed he didn't need them for seeing. People began to come out from behind the sheds and the cooling forges. Blank-faced people with empty eyes. Many of them, making a wall of themselves against Bas. Ciaran cried out, "_Mouse...!_" She was there. Her body was there, thin and erect in the crimson tunic. Her black hair was still wild around her small brown face. But Mouse, the Mouse that Ciaran knew, was dead behind her dull black eyes. Ciaran whispered, "_Mouse_...." The slaves flowed in and held the two of them, clogged in a mass of unresponsive bodies. "Can't you free them, Bas?" "Not yet. Not now. There isn't time." "Can't you do with them what you did with the Kalds?" "The androids control their minds through hypnosis. If I fought that control, the struggle would blast their minds to death or idiocy. And there isn't time...." There was sweat on his smooth young forehead. "I've got to get through. I don't want to kill them...." Ciaran looked at Mouse. "No," he said hoarsely. "But I may have to, unless.... Wait! I can channel the power of the Stone through my own brain, because there's an affinity between us. Vibration, cell to cell. The androids won't have made a definite command against music. Perhaps I can jar their minds open, just enough, so that you can call them with your harp, as you called me." A tremor almost of pain ran through the boy's body. "Lead them away, Ciaran. Lead them as far as you can. Otherwise many of them will die. And hurry!" Bas raised the Stone of Destiny in his clasped hands and pressed it to his forehead. And Ciaran took his harp. He was looking at Mouse when he set the strings to singing. That was why it wasn't hard to play as he did. It was something from him to Mouse. A prayer. A promise. His heart held out on a song. The music rippled out across the packed mass of humanity. At first they didn't hear it. Then there was a stirring and a sigh, a dumb, blind reaching. Somewhere the message was getting through the darkness clouding their minds. A message of hope. A memory of red sunlight on green hills, of laughter and home and love. Ciaran let the music die to a whisper under his fingers, and the people moved forward, toward him, wanting to hear. He began to walk away, slowly, trailing the harp-song over his shoulder--and they followed. Haltingly, in twos and threes, until the whole mass broke and flowed like water in his wake. Bas was gone, his slim young body slipping fast through the broken ranks of the crowd. Ciaran caught one more glimpse of Mouse before he lost her among the others. She was crying, without knowing or remembering why. If Bas died, if Bas was defeated, she would never know nor remember. * * * * * Ciaran led them as far as he could, clear to the wall of the pit. He stopped playing. They stopped, too, standing like cattle, looking at nothing, with eyes turned inward to their clouded dreams. Ciaran left them there, running out alone across the empty floor. He followed the direction Bas had taken. He ran, fast, but it was like a nightmare where you run and run and never get anywhere. The lights glared down and the metal monster sighed and churned high up over his head, and there was no other sound, no other movement but his own. Then, abruptly, the lights went out. He stumbled on, hitting brutally against unseen pillars, falling and scrambling in scrap heaps. And after an eternity he saw light again, up ahead. The Light he had seen before, here in the pit. The glorious opalescent light that drew a man's mind and held it fast to be chained. Ciaran crept in closer. There was a control panel on a stone dais--a meaningless jumbled mass of dials and wires. The androids stood before it. One of them was bent over, its yellowish hands working delicately with the controls. The other stood erect beside it, holding a staff. The metal ball at the top was open, spilling the opalescent blaze into the darkness. Ciaran crouched in the shelter of a pillar, shielding his eyes. Even now he wanted to walk into that light and be its slave. The android with the staff said harshly, "Can't you find the wave length? He should have been dead by now." The bending one tensed and then straightened, the burning light sparkling across its metal sheath. Its eyes were black and limitless, like evil itself, and no more human. "Yes," it said. "I have it." The light began to burst stronger from the staff, a swirling dangerous fury of it. Ciaran was hardly breathing. The light-source, whatever it was, was part of the power of the Stone of Destiny. Wave lengths meant nothing to him, but it seemed the danger was to the Stone--and Bas carried it. The android touched the staff. The light died, clipped off as the metal ball closed. "If there's any power left in the Stone," it whispered, "our power-wave will blast its subatomic reserve--and Bas the Immortal with it!" Silence. And then in the pitch darkness a coal began to glow. It came closer. It grew brighter, and a smudged reflection behind and above it became the head and shoulders of Bas the Immortal. The android whispered, "Stronger! _Hurry!_" A yellowish hand made a quick adjustment. The Stone of Destiny burned brighter. It burst with light. It was like a sunball, stabbing its hot fury into the darkness. The android whispered, "_More!_" The Stone filled all the pit with a deadly blaze of glory. Bas stopped, looking up at the dais. He grinned. A naked boy, beautiful with youth, his grey eyes veiled and sleepy under dark lashes. He threw the Stone of Destiny up on the dais. An idle boy tossing stones at a treetop. Light. An explosion of it, without sound, without physical force. Ciaran dropped flat on his face behind the pillar. After a long time he raised his head again. The overhead lights were on, and Bas stood on the dais beside two twisted, shining lumps of man-made soulless men. The android flesh had taken the radiation as leather takes heat, warping, twisting, turning black. "Poor freaks," said Bas softly. "They were like me, with no place in the universe that belonged to them. So they dreamed, too--only their dreams were evil." He stooped and picked up something--a dull, dark stone, a thing with no more life nor light than a waterworn pebble. He sighed and rolled it once between his palms, and let it drop. "If they had had time to learn their new machine a little better, I would never have lived to reach them in time." He glanced down at Ciaran, standing uncertainly below. "Thanks to you, little man, they didn't have quite time enough." He gestured to a staff. "Bring it, and I'll free your Mouse." VII A long time afterward Mouse and Ciaran and Bas the Immortal stood in the opal-tinted glow of the great room of the _crux ansata_. Outside the world was normal again, and safe. Bas had left full instructions about controlling and tending the centrifugal power plant. The slaves were freed, going home across the Forbidden Plains--forbidden no longer. The Kalds were sleeping, mercifully; the big sleep from which they would never wake. The world was free, for humanity to make or mar on its own responsibility. Mouse stood very close to Ciaran, her arm around his waist, his around her shoulders. Crimson rags mingling with yellow; fair shaggy hair mixing with black. Bas smiled at them. "Now," he said, "I can be happy, until the planet itself is dead." "You won't stay with us? Our gratitude, our love...." "Will be gone with the coming generations. No, little man. I built myself a world where I belong--the only world where I can ever belong. And I'll be happier in it than any of you, because it is my world--free of strife and ugliness and suffering. A beautiful world, for me and Marsali." There was a radiance about him that Ciaran would put into a song some day, only half understanding. "I don't envy you," whispered Bas, and smiled. Youth smiling in a spring dawn. "Think of us sometimes, and be jealous." He turned and walked away, going lightly over the wide stone floor and up the steps to the dais. Ciaran struck the harpstrings. He sent the music flooding up against the high vault, filling all the rocky space with a thrumming melody. He sang. The tune he had sung for Mouse, on the ridge above the burning sea. A simple tune, about two people in love. Bas lay down on the couch of furs and colored silks, soft on the shaft of the stone cross. He looked back at them once, smiling. One slim white arm raised in a brief salute and swept down across the black stone. The milky light rose on the platform. It wavered, curdled, and thickened to a wall of warm pearl. Through it, for a moment, they could see him, his dark head pillowed on his forearm, his body sprawled in careless, angular grace. Then there was only the warm, soft shell of light. Ciaran's harp whispered to silence. The tunnel into the pit was sealed. Mouse and Ciaran went out through the golden doors and closed them, very quietly--doors that would never be opened again as long as the world lived. Then they came into each other's arms, and kissed. Rough, tight arms on living flesh, lips that bruised and breaths that mingled, hot with life. Temper and passion, empty bellies, a harp that sang in crowded market squares, and no roof to fight under but the open sky. And Ciaran didn't envy the dark-haired boy, dreaming on the stone cross. * * * * * [Footnote 1: Transcriber's note: text missing from original: The red hunter froze to a dead stop. ] 
51475	----	East In the Morning By DAVID E. FISHER Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine February 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] <i>Natural laws are cliches--"what must be must be," for instance--and what must be in this case was, of all people, Dr. Talbot!</i> The first thirty years of Henry Talbot's life were the most promising. He was a bright student through high school, and in college his fellow students often used the word "brilliant" in discussing his mentality; occasionally even his instructors echoed them. Upon receiving his bachelor's degree, he went to graduate school and eventually received his Ph.D. as an experimental nuclear physicist. He applied for and got a research position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in the Electronuclear Research Division. Dr. Henry Talbot, brilliant young scientist, began his career enthusiastically, and ran into a brick wall. Rather, he crawled up to and against it, for it took several years for him to discover that his life's route lay not on an unobstructed downhill slide. Those years slithered past before he looked up and realized that he had not revolutionized the scientific world; he had discovered no principle of relativity, no quantum theory. He stopped working for a moment and looked around. All his colleagues were enthusiastic and brilliant young scientists. Where at school, where throughout his life, he had been outstanding, now he was one of the crowd. What had passed for brilliance before was now merely competence. Henry Talbot felt a vague need which he perceived liquor might fill. That afternoon he left work early for the first time since he had arrived at Oak Ridge. He had to buy the vodka from a bootlegger, Oak Ridge being in a dry county. But, as in most dry counties, that presented no problem. He stopped by Shorty's cab stand, across the street from the police department, and asked Shorty for a bottle. Shorty reached into the glove compartment and, for fifty cents over list price, the vodka changed hands. Henry didn't like to patronize the bootleggers, but he did feel the need for a quick one just this once. After drinking for several hours in his apartment, Henry Talbot took stock of himself and came to two conclusions: 1. He was satisfied with himself and his life. He had always taken for granted that he would one day be a famous figure in some scientific field, true, but this was actually not so important as, upon casual inspection, it might seem. He liked his work, otherwise he could never have been so wrapped up in it, and he saw no reason for discontinuing it or for becoming despondent over his lack of fame. After all, he reasoned, he had never been famous and yet had been always perfectly content. 2. He liked vodka. <tb> The next thirty years of Henry Talbot's life, now devoid of promise, were fulfilling and content. He worked steadily and drank as the mood fell upon him, publishing on the average one paper a year. These papers were thorough, the experiments well worked out, without contrived results or varnished sloppiness. The publications were accepted everywhere as solid research papers. Henry Talbot's name became familiar in the nuclear field. He did not find his face on the cover of <i>Time</i>, nor was he ever invited to participate as an "expert" on any television quiz programs, yet he was well known to nuclear researchers--at least those in his own country. He was honored with a banquet on his fiftieth birthday. <i>Person to Person</i> once tentatively proposed to visit him, but the idea was squelched, a visit to a more buxom personality being substituted. Sex never reared its ugly head. He had not had time for it when young, and so had never fallen into the habit. At the age of sixty-five he retired. He canceled his subscription to the <i>Physical Review</i>, bought a fishing rod, subscribed to the <i>New Yorker</i>, and tried Florida. He started at Tallahassee and fished his way down to Ocala. By the time he had reached St. Petersburg, he had decided to try California. In California he took up golf. He bought a hi-fi set and a dozen progressive jazz records, advertised as unbreakable. They proved not to be, although in fairness to the advertiser it must be said that Henry Talbot had to exert himself. He decided to try a world cruise. He left the scheduled tour in Japan and visited the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Tokyo, spending some time there just generally chewing the bilingual rag. When he returned to the United States, he renewed his subscription to the <i>Physical Review</i>, canceled his subscription to the <i>New Yorker</i>, and looked around for another position. He went to work for the Arnold Research Corporation on a part-time, semi-retired basis. But he had his own lab, his hours were his own, and in a few weeks he was working full time. No one was disturbed by this, he did not apply for more money or recognition, he kept to himself, and he began publishing his one paper each year. On the tenth year afterward his paper was missing, though not missed. He began to spend less time in his lab and more in the library and behind his desk, scribbling on scraps of paper or staring into space. He was forgotten by the Arnold Research Corporation. He was content with his books and his monthly check. In his seventy-fourth year, Henry Talbot published a paper in the <i>Philosophical Magazine</i> on what he called the "Warped Field Theory." The theory was entirely his own, from beginning to end, and constituted--in his opinion--the first real breakthrough in theoretical physics since Albert Einstein's little idea in 1905. The day the article came out he sat behind his desk all day, puffing on his pipe, not merely content but really happy for the first time in his life. <tb> Life continued undisturbed for three more months. Then Larry Arnold, Jr., came into his office, carrying a copy of the <i>Philosophical Magazine</i>. Larry Arnold, Jr., was not a scientist but, as he put it, he was scientifically minded and was general overseer, public relations man, and coordinator of coordinators of research. He humphed a few times, groaned as he sat down across the desk from Henry, wheezed twice, smiled once, and said, "Good morning, Dr. Talbot." "Good morning," Henry replied, folding his hands and trying to look humble yet brilliant. "I read your article," Arnold said, feebly waving the magazine around before him, "and I don't mind admitting I didn't understand a word of it. Well, I'm not a man to hide his lack of knowledge so I went right out and asked some of the men working here about it. They didn't understand it either. I called up a few people around the country. I--Dr. Talbot, I don't know how exactly to say this to you. I don't know what you intended with this article, but it's got people laughing at us and we can't have that." Henry kept the same humble look on his face; he fought to keep the same expression. He didn't know what his face might look like if he relaxed for a moment. "We didn't expect much research from you when we hired you. Well, we know we're not paying you much, and we don't mind if you don't put out much work. Hell, we don't care if you don't put out <i>any</i> work. We get our money's worth in good will when people know we've got an old pro like you on our payroll; the young kids can see we won't kick them out when they're all used up. But when you put out papers like this one--" and here he waved the magazine a bit more violently, getting warmed up--"when you do this, and it says Arnold Research Corporation right here under your name, people don't just laugh at you. They laugh at the whole organization. They think that this whole place is going around doing fantastic research like this--this warped field." He stopped when he saw the look slip a bit from Henry's face, and he saw what was there beneath it. He dropped his eyes and wheezed twice, then heaved his bulk out of the chair. "I didn't mean to slam into you that way, Dr. Talbot. You know it's an honor to have you associated with the firm. We were even thinking of giving you a testimonial banquet next week on your seventy-fifth birthday.... It is next week, isn't it? Well, what I mean to say is--I mean we all appreciate the good solid research you've been doing all these years. It's just that--well, you won't fool around like this any more, now will you? And we'll just forget all about it. No hard feelings." He left quickly, and the door closed behind him. For the first time in seventy-five years, or in the last sixty-nine at least, Henry Talbot cried. After he cried, he became angry. He wanted to shout, so he left the office early and hurried to his apartment where he could shout without disturbing anyone, which he did. He then took out the vodka, settled Bucephalus, his cat, on his lap and began to pour. Several hours later Henry Talbot sprawled in the armchair and took stock of himself. He came to two conclusions: 1. At his age, what did he care about fame? He knew his theory was sound, and if the people in his own country didn't appreciate it, what difference did it make? Now, free from rancor, he could understand how they must have received his paper. They all knew old Dr. Talbot--seventy-five and not dead yet. What a ridiculous age for a nuclear physicist! Now he's turning theoretical, they must have chuckled. So they started his paper. And when they came to the first unorthodox assumption, when they reached the first of the many mathematical complexities and indeed paradoxes, they must have closed the magazine and had a good laugh over a cup of coffee. Had the article been written by some unknown twenty-five-year-old, they would all hail him as a new genius. But coming from old Henry Talbot, the article was ludicrous. Well, he didn't care. Abroad, he was not so well known. Some countries would not have heard of him at all. They'd read the article seriously, one or two men would understand it. They'd run some experiments to confirm or deny the hypotheses and Henry was confident the experiments would prove him right. He had only to wait. Of course he hadn't much time left, but perhaps they would do it in a year or two, and perhaps he'd still be here to see it and have the last laugh. 2. He still liked vodka. <tb> It was nineteen years before two Finnish physicists, Arkadt and Findrun, ran the necessary experiments. Of the many who had read the article, some knew Talbot and thus laughed it off, some could not understand it and some understood it and waxed enthusiastic. Eventually the enthusiasm spread to the Finnish Institute for Applied Research where the essential equipment was available. The experiments were an unqualified success. As soon as the experiments were confirmed, Arkadt sent a telegram to Dr. Henry Talbot, in care of the address which had appeared with his original article, informing him of the happy developments. He and Findrun were still celebrating their spectacular success a week later, this time with Dr. Arrhenial, director of the institute, when Arkadt mentioned that he had sent such a telegram and had received as yet no answer. Arrhenial smiled into his vodka. "Didn't you know? Talbot was seventy-five years old when he wrote that article. I'm afraid you were a little too late for him." "I didn't know," Arkadt replied. "A shame," Findrun murmured. "It would have made him so happy." The telephone rang and Arkadt answered it. His wife was calling, with unusual news. He had just received a letter from America. Imagine that. From a Henry Talbot. <tb> Henry Talbot saw his face on the cover of <i>Time</i> magazine. He refused a request to appear on a television quiz program. (The contestant the network had had in mind to appear with Henry won his money nevertheless, in the category Theoretical Physics, by correctly naming the year in which Einstein first published his Theory of Relativity, the number of papers which comprised the entire theory, the language in which it was first published, the magazine in which it was first published, the year in which the magazine was first printed, the name of the first printer of the magazine, and the year in which he died.) Henry Talbot was termed "The Dean of American Men of Science" by the New York <i>Times</i>, which paper triumphantly reported that only thirteen people in the world understood his Warped Field Theory. When asked if there was now anything else for science to do, he replied, "Indubitably." When pressed for more details, he said that his housekeeper always removed his vodka from the refrigerator at three-thirty, and that if he did not immediately return home, it would become unbearably warm. On the occasion of his ninety-fifth birthday, he was given a gigantic testimonial banquet by the Arnold Research Corporation, "under whose auspices the entire research which culminated in the justly famous Warped Field Theory was conducted." The next week, when he requested the use of their massive cyclotron to run an experiment, he was told that the machine was in use at the time. A week later, his request was again shunted off. This happened twice more, and Henry went to see Larry Arnold, Jr. The coordinator was affable, and told Henry that he had checked himself, and that unfortunately the machine was in use and that of course since he, Talbot, was actually at the lab on only a part-time basis, he could not expect to usurp the machine from full-time research workers. Henry asked what kind of research was being done. Larry wheezed twice and told him it was investigating certain aspects of the Warped Field Theory. "I invented the goddam theory and I can't even get at the machine?" Henry shouted. "Please, Dr. Talbot. Let's be reasonable. You discovered that theory twenty years ago. I mean, after all. You're an older man now, and that's an expensive piece of machinery--" Henry slammed the door as he walked out, was not satisfied with the effect, came back and slammed it again, this time shattering the glass. He felt a little better, strode down the hall, and resigned the next day, quietly and undramaticly. He disappeared into retirement. Reports of his death were printed occasionally. They were never denied. They stopped after several years, were taken to be final, and his name was not often mentioned by the newspapers. One hundred and three years after his birth, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Henry Talbot for his Warped Field Theory. The committee decided not to look into the matter of discovering Dr. Talbot's heirs until after the ceremony, expecting that someone would turn up to claim the award in his name. Henry Talbot accepted the medallion and check himself from the hand of the King of Sweden, making his acceptance speech in hurriedly learned but understandable Swedish. The newspapers of the world devoured him and made big news of the fact that he had been practically fired nine years before. He was deluged with offers of employment, most of which sought him as a public-relations man. He accepted the offer of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His duties here were non-existent. He would be paid, cared for. He was to think, as much or as little as he pleased. The Institute was apologetic that they had not been aware of his unemployment previously. He was invited to stay with them for as long as he liked. Henry Talbot settled back finally, in comfort. The research upon which he now embarked was so deep, so complex, that he did not intend to come to any publishable conclusions in his lifetime. He desired no experimentation now; he wanted only to think, to think in purely mathematical terms of the universe as an entity. He withdrew into the sanctity of his study, thankful to Princeton for the peace and tranquility it offered. Several years later a notice of his death was published in the New York <i>Times</i>. Henry did not read the New York <i>Times</i>, but the treasurer at the Institute evidently did. His checks stopped coming. Henry did not complain. He had saved a lot of money and his tastes were simple. He did not have to pay a bootlegger's price in Princeton. In his hundred and eighty-first year, Henry first became seriously aware of the possibility that he might not die. <tb> One night during his two hundred and forty-fifth year--it began to seem to him purposeless, but he still kept accurate count--Henry pushed back from his desk and sighed. Outside the window, in the gently falling snow, the campus of Princeton looked exactly as it had when he had first come, but things were different. No one now at the Institute knew him; he had known no one there for seventy-five years now. Probably at no other place in the country than at the Institute for Advanced Study could he have kept his study for so long, could he have been left so alone. And it was good, but now he was lonely. Lonely, bored by his solitude, aware of his boredom and utter lack of friends. He had realized long ago the compensation demanded for eternity. When he had first begun to think of the possibility that he might not die, he had realized that it would mean leaving his friends, his family, and continuing alone. When he had first begun to speculate on his seeming immortality, how it had come about and why, he had known he would be lonely. /P This is the way to the �bermensch, This is the way to the �bermensch, This is the way to the �bermensch, Not in a crowd, but alone. P/ Nearly every great mind within the past hundred years had pointed out the difficulty of man's accomplishing anything in his brief hundred years of life, had pointed out the necessity of immortality to a great mind. And what is necessary will be. But this is the way of evolution: not in a crowd, but alone. One man in a million, then another, then another. It was statistically improbable that he was the first. So there must be others. But so far, in two hundred and forty-five years, he had not met any that he knew of. Then again, there was no way of knowing. Anyone passing him on the street would not know, and he meeting another would not know. A purring broke through into his reverie and, looking down, he became aware of Bucephalus, his cat, rubbing against his legs. He laughed, bent down and picked her up. Here was the exception, of course. Old Bucephalus. He laughed again, shaking his head in wonder. He had had Bucephalus for the past hundred and fifty years. "Now what justification does a cat have for living forever?" he wondered aloud, holding her at arm's length and smiling at her. She lifted one paw and dabbed at his face. He put her down and went to get her milk. "And how did we ever find each other?" Perhaps there was some subliminal way of knowing. Perhaps, without knowing, the immortals knew. While Bucephalus lapped at her milk, Henry Talbot walked out for a breath of air. He wandered off the campus, finally pausing in front of a candy-and-soda store. He felt a vague curiosity and went in to look at the newspapers. After reading through one, he stood back and sighed. The same old thing, always the same old thing. The new wave of immigrants--he looked again to see where they were from this time; he didn't recognize the name of the place, but it didn't matter--the new wave of immigrants was a disgrace to New York, was destroying real estate values, was a burden to society, to the <i>last</i> wave of immigrants who had by now made their place. The President said we would fight, if necessary, one last war to make the world safe for democracy. Statistics showed that juvenile delinquency was on the increase; it was traced to a lack of parental authority in the home. Always the same old thing. Only his work was new, always changing. But now, after nearly a hundred and fifty years of thought, he felt he was in over his head. It was getting too abstract. He needed some good solid experimental research, he felt. Something concrete, down-to-earth. He wanted to play with a hundred-channel analyzer, measure some cross sections, determine a beta-decay scheme. But he couldn't ask them here for a lab. He didn't dare tell them who he was. Too much commotion, notoriety. The newspapers again. Good God, no. He turned to go back to his study, and then stopped dead. He couldn't go back there. His brain was spinning without a clamp; he needed to fasten to something and orient himself in this vast universe. His fingers itched to get at some experiment. He couldn't go back to his study. He decided to take a vacation. He had never gotten as far as Miami Beach, he remembered. The sun would feel good, and he could do with a bit of a tan. He flew down that night. After he had checked in at the Sea Lion, and as he was following the bellboy across the high and wide lobby to the elevator, a woman crossed his path. In her late twenties, perhaps early thirties, she was simply stunning. Dark hair, light skin, blue eyes almost purple with a Eurasian slant to them, long firm legs and slim ankles. For the first time in many a year, Henry stopped to look at a woman. The bellboy realized that he had walked on alone and returned to Talbot. "That woman is beautiful." Henry gestured toward her back. The bellboy smirked. Henry followed him to his room. <tb> Henry lay in the sun for two weeks and grew younger day by day. His skin tanned, his muscles became hard with the exertion of lengthy swims, the creases in his face smoothed out. Still he felt vaguely dissatisfied, empty. He lay on the beach, gazing into the ocean, and knew that something was missing. The woman he had seen that first night crossed between him and the ocean and continued down the beach. Henry watched her out of sight. "That woman is beautiful," he thought. Sex, he thought. I wonder if that's what's missing. There was another aspect to be considered, of course. Two hundred and forty-five. And then a blonde young lady in a bikini wavered by him and he knew in that moment that he could. He stood up and walked after her. "I wonder if I might walk a bit with you," he said. She looked him over carefully and then shrugged her shoulder, not quite dislodging the upper portion of her suit. "Suitcha self." After a while she asked, "What business ya in?" "I'm sort of retired," he explained, finding her very charming and refreshing to talk to. "I had a modest income a while ago. I invested wisely, or prudently at least, and the interest has built up into quite a fortune by now." "Really," she said. They walked down the beach, hand in hand. <tb> Five nights later he got out of bed when she fell asleep. He dressed and walked despondently down to the lobby. This was not it, not it at all. God, but her conversation was absolutely impossible. He couldn't stay with her another minute. His problem was still unsolved. He wanted to get back to work, he wanted company, he wanted <i>life</i> again. As he came into the lobby, the woman of the first night passed by him again. She looked at him as she came, and smiled as she passed. That, he thought, is a lovely woman. He stared at her back. How old would you say she is? Late twenties, not a day over thirty. Yet with a serenity in the eyes, in the smile somehow, that gives the impression of lifetimes of living. Yet not a day over thirty, surely no older than that. That, he thought, is what I need. A woman like that to sleep with and, yes, to be with, even to talk with. She would not be like the one upstairs. But, he thought, one does not buy a woman like that. One marries her. Somehow, without knowing, he knew that. And why not? Why not, indeed? He returned to his own room, stripped and consulted the mirror. Dye his hair, that was really all he needed. He smiled into the mirror. Forty, he thought, even thirty-five. Certainly, with this tan and slim body and his hair dyed, thirty-five at the most. He went to bed, happily making plans. A new life opened up for him. He would take a new name; he would live again. There was nothing to stop him. That night, in the Sea Lion Hotel in Miami Beach, Henry Talbot died. <tb> Two months later Arnold Bottal, an experimental nuclear physicist of perhaps thirty-five, and his charming wife--with exquisite, nearly purple Eurasian eyes--joined the new country club in Lincoln Hills, New York, where Bottal had newly joined the Applied Physics Division of the Carbide Nuclear Company. This Arnold Bottal was not a brilliant physicist, but he was certainly competent in his job. The company was satisfied with him. He and his wife bought a bubble home in the suburbs of Lincoln Hills and, together with their cat Bucephalus, lived happily ever after. 
63645	----	The Last Monster By GARDNER F. FOX Irgi was the last of his monster race, guardian of a dead planet, master of the secret of immortality. It was he whom the four men from Earth had to conquer to gain that secret--a tentacled monstrosity whom Earthly weapons could not touch. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Irgi was the last of his race. There was no one else, now; there had been no others for hundreds and hundreds of years. Irgi had lost count of time dwelling alone amid the marble halls of the eon-ancient city, but he knew that much. There were no others. Only Irgi, alone. He moved now along the ebony flooring, past the white marble walls hung with golden drapes that never withered or shed their aurate luster in the opalescent mists that bathed the city in shimmering whiteness. They hung low, those wispy tendrils of mist, clasping everything in their clinging shelter, destroying dust and germs. Irgi had discovered the mist many years ago, when it was too late to save his kind. He had flung a vast globe of transparent metal above this greatest of the cities of the Urg and filled it with the mist, and in it he had stored the treasures of his people. From Bar Nomala, from Faryl, and from the far-off jungle city of Kreed had he brought the riches of the Urg and set them up. Irgi enjoyed beauty, and he enjoyed work. It was the combination of both that kept him sane. Toward a mighty bronze doorway he went, and as his body passed an invisible beam, the bronze portals slid apart, noiselessly, opening to reveal a vast circular chamber that hummed and throbbed, and was filled with a pale blue luminescence that glimmered upon metal rods and bars and ten tall cones of steelite. In the doorway, Irgi paused and ran his eyes about the chamber, sighing. This was his life work, this blue hum and throb. Those ten cones lifting their disced tips toward a circular roof bathed in, and drew their power from, a huge block of radiant white matter that hung suspended between the cones, in midair. All power did the cones and the block possess. There was nothing they could not do, if Irgi so willed. It was another discovery that came too late to save the Urg. Irgi moved across the room. He pressed glittering jewels inset in a control panel on the wall, one after another, in proper sequence. The blue opalescence deepened, grew dark and vivid. The hum broadened into a hoarse roar. And standing out, startlingly white against the blue, was the queer block of shining metal, shimmering and pulsing. Irgi drew himself upwards, slowly turning, laving in the quivering bands of cobalt that sped outward from the cones. He preened his body in their patterns of color, watching it splash and spread over his chest and torso. Where it touched, a faint tingle lingered; then spread outwards, all over his huge form. Irgi was immortal, and the blue light made him so. "There, it is done," he whispered to himself. "Now for another oval I can roam all Urg as I will, for the life spark in me has been cleansed and nourished." He touched the jeweled controls, shutting the power to a low murmur. He turned to the bronze doors, passed through and into the misty halls. "I must speak," Irgi said as he moved along the corridor. "I have not spoken for many weeks. I must exercise my voice, or lose it. That is the law of nature. It would atrophy, otherwise. "Yes, I will use my voice tonight, and I will go out under the dome and look up at the stars and the other planets that swing near Urg, and I will talk to them and tell them how lonely Irgi is." He turned and went along a hall that opened into a broad balcony which stood forth directly beneath a segment of the mighty dome. He stared upwards, craning all his eyes to see through the darkness pressing down upon him. "Stars," he whispered, "listen to me once again. I am lonely, stars, and the name and fame of Irgi means nothing to the walls of my city, nor to the Chamber of the Cones, nor even--at times--to Irgi himself." He paused and his eyes widened, staring upwards. "By the Block," he said to the silence about him. "There is something up there that is not a star, nor a planet, nor yet a meteor." It was a spaceship. * * * * * Emerson took his hands from the controls of the gigantic ship that hurtled through space, and wiped his sweaty palms on his thighs. His grey eyes bored like a steel awl downward at the mighty globe swinging in the void. "The last planet in our course," he breathed. "Maybe it has the radium!" "Yes," whispered the man beside him, wetting his lips with his tongue. "No use to think of failure. If it hasn't, we'll die ourselves, down there." Radium. And the Plague. It had come on Earth suddenly, had the Plague, back in the first days of space travel, after Quigg, the American research scientist at Cal Tech, discovered a way to lift a rocket ship off the Earth, and propel it to the Moon. They had been slow, lumbering vessels, those first spaceships; not at all like the sleek craft that plied the voids today. But it had been a beginning. And no one had thought anything of it when Quigg, who had made the first flight through space, died of cancer. As the years passed to a decade, and the ships of Earth rode to Mars and Venus, it began to be apparent that a lifetime of space travel meant a hideous death. Scientists attributed it to the cosmic rays, for out in space there was no blanketing layer of atmosphere to protect the fleshy tissues of man from their piercing power. It had long been a theory that cosmic rays were related to the birth of new life in the cosmos; perhaps they were, said some, the direct cause of life. Thus by causing the unorderly growth of new cells that man called cancer, the cosmic rays were destroying the life they had created. It meant death to travel in space, and only the stupendous fees paid to the young men who believed in a short life and a merry one, kept the ships plying between Mars and Earth and Venus. Lead kept out the cosmic rays, but lead would not stand the terrific speed required to lift a craft free of planetary gravity; and an inner coating of lead brought men into port raving with lead poisoning illusions. Cancer cases increased on Earth. It was learned that the virulent form of space cancer, as it was called, was in some peculiar manner, contagious to a certain extent. The alarm spread. Men who voyaged in space were segregated, but the damage had been done. The Plague spread, and ravaged the peoples of three planets. Hospitals were set up, and precious radium used for the fight. But the radium was hard to come by. There was just not enough for the job. A ship was built, the fastest vessel ever made by man. It was designed for speed. It made the swiftest interplanetary craft seem a lumbering barge by comparison. And mankind gave it to Valentine Emerson to take it out among the stars to find the precious radium in sufficient quantities to halt the Plague. It had not been easy to find a crew. The three worlds knew the men were going to their doom. It would be a miracle if ever they reached a single planet, if they did not perish of space cancer before their first goal. Carson Nichols, whose wife and children were dying of the Plague, begged him for a chance. A murderer convicted to the Martian salt mines, Karl Mussdorf, grudgingly agreed to go along on the promise that he won a pardon if he ever came back. With Mussdorf went a little, wry-faced man named Tilford Gunn, who knew radio, cookery, and the fine art of pocket-picking. The two seemed inseparable. Now Emerson was breathing softly, "Yes, it had better be there, or else we die." He ran quivering fingers over his forearm, felt the strange lumps that heralded cancer. Involuntarily, he shuddered. Steps clanged on the metal runway beneath them. Mussdorf pushed up through the trap and got to his feet. He was as big as Emerson, bulky where Emerson was lithe, granite where Emerson was chiseled steel. His hair was black, and his brows shaggy. A stubborn jaw shot out under thin, hard lips. "There it is, Karl," said Nichols. "Start hoping." Mussdorf scowled darkly, and spat. "A hell of a way to spend my last days," he growled. "I'm dying on my feet, and I've got to be a martyr to a billion people who don't know I'm alive." "You know a better way to die, of course," replied Emerson. "You bet I do. There's a sweet little redhead in New Mars. She'd make dying a pleasure. In fact," he chuckled softly, "that's just the way I'd let her kill me." * * * * * Emerson snorted, glancing down at the controls. Beneath his steady fingers, the ship sideslipped into the gravity tug of the looming orb, shuddered a moment, then eased downward. "Tell Gunn to come up," ordered Emerson. "No need for him to be below." Mussdorf dropped to the floor, lowered his shaggy head through the open trap, and bellowed. A hail from the depths of the ship answered him. A moment later, Gunn stood with the others: a little man with a wry smile twisting his features to a hard mask. "Think she's got the stuff, skipper?" he asked Emerson. "The spectroscope'll tell us. Break it out." "You bet." The ship rocked gently as Emerson set it down on a flat, rocky plain between two high, craggy mountains that rose abruptly from the tiny valley. It was just lighting as the faint rays of the suns that served this planet nosed their way above the peaks. Like a silver needle on a floor of black rock, the spacecraft bounced once, twice; then lay still. Within her gleaming walls, four men bent with hard faces over gleaming bands of color on a spectroscopic screen. With quivering fingers, Emerson twisted dials and switches. "Hell!" exploded Mussdorf. "I might have known it. Not a trace." Emerson touched his forearm gently, and shuddered. Nichols bit his lips, and thought of Marge and the kids; Gunn licked his lips with a dry tongue and kept looking at Emerson. With one sweep of his brawny arm, Mussdorf sent the apparatus flying against the far wall to shatter in shards. No one said a word. Something whispered in the ship. They jerked their heads up, stood listening. The faint susurration swept all about them, questioning, curious. It came again, imperative; suddenly demanding. "Gawd," whispered Gunn. "Wot is it, guv'nor?" Emerson shook his head, frowning, suddenly glad that the others had heard it, too. "Maybe somebody trying to speak to us," stated Nichols. The whispers grew louder and harsher. Angry. "Take it easy," yelled Mussdorf savagely. "We don't know what you're talking about. How can we answer you, you stupid lug?" Gunn giggled hysterically, "We can't even 'alf talk 'is bloomin' language." The rustle ceased. The silence hung eerily in the ship. The men looked at one another, curious; somehow, a little nervous. "What a radio _he_ must have," said Emerson softly. "The metal of our hull is his loudspeaker. That's why we heard him in all directions." Mussdorf nodded, shaggy brows knotted. "We'll see what his next move is," he muttered. "If he gets too fresh, we'll try a sun-blaster out on him." The ship began to glow softly, flushing a soft, delicate green. The light bathed the interior, turning the men a ghastly hue. Gunn shivered and looked at Emerson, who went to the port window; stood staring out, gasping. "Wot's happenin' now?" choked Gunn. "We're off the ground! Whatever it is, it's lifting us." The others crowded about him, looking out. Here the green was more vivid, intense. They could feel its surging power tingling on their skins. Beneath them, the jagged peak of the mountain almost grazed the hull. Spread out under their eyes was the panorama of a dead planet. Great rocks lay split and tumbled over one another in a black desolation. Sunlight glinting on their jagged edges, made harsh shadows. Far to the north a mountain range shrugged its snow-topped peaks to a sullen sky. To the south, beyond the rocks, lay a white waste of desert. To the west-- "A city," yelled Nichols, "the place is inhabited. Thank God, thank God--" Mussdorf erupted laughter. "For what? How do we know what they're like? An inhabited planet doesn't mean men. We found that out--several times." "We can hope," said Emerson sharply. "Maybe they have some radium, stored so that our spectroscope couldn't pick it up." The mighty globe that hung over the city glimmered in the morning suns. Beneath it, the white towers and spires of the city reared in alien loveliness above graceful buildings and rounded roofs. A faint mist seemed to hang in the city streets. "It's empty," said Nichols heavily. "Deserted." "Something's alive," protested Emerson. "Something that spoke to us, that is controlling this green beam." * * * * * A section of the globe slid back, and the spaceship moved through the opening. The globe slipped back and locked after it. "They have us now," grunted Mussdorf. He slid his fingers along the transparent window, pressing hard, the skin showing white as his knuckles lifted. He said swiftly, "You guys can stay here if you want, but I'm getting myself a sun-blaster. Two of them. I'm not going to be caught short when the time for action comes." He swung through the trap and out of sight. They heard him running below; heard the slam of opened doors, the withdrawal of the guns. They could imagine him belting them about his waist. "Bring us some," cried Emerson suddenly, and turned again to look out the window. The spaceship settled down on the white flagging of an immense square. The green beam was gone, suddenly. The uncanny silence of the place pressed in on them. "Think it's safe to go out?" asked Nichols. "Try the atmospheric recorder," said Emerson. "If the air's okay, I'd like to stretch my own legs." Nichols twisted chrome wheels, staring at a red line that wavered on a plastic screen, then straightened abruptly, rigid. "Hey," yelled Nichols excitedly. "It's pure. I mean actually pure. No germs. No dust. Just clean air!" Emerson leaped to his side, staring, frowning. "No germs. No dust. Why--that means there's no disease in this place! No disease." He began to laugh, then caught himself. "No disease," he whispered, "and every one of us is going to die of cancer." Mussdorf came up through the trap and passed out the sun-blasters. They buckled them around their waists while Mussdorf swung the bolts of the door. He threw it open, and clean air, and faint tendrils of whitish mist came swirling into the ship. Nichols took a deep breath and his boyish face split with a grin. "I feel like a kid again on a Spring day back on Earth. You know, with a ball and a glove under your arm, with the sun beating down on you, swinging a bat and whistling. You felt good. You were young. Young! I feel like that now." They grinned and went through the door, dropping to the street. They turned. It was coming across the square, flowing along on vast black tentacles towering over twenty feet high, with a great torso seemingly sculpted out of living black marble. A head that held ten staring eyes looked down at them. Six arms thrust out of the torso, moving like tentacles, fringed with cilia thick as fingers. "Lord," whispered Mussdorf. "What is it?" "Don't know," said Emerson. "Maybe it's friendly--" "Friendly?" queried Mussdorf harshly. "_That_ doesn't know the meaning of the word! I'm going to let it taste a blast--" His hand dove for the sun-blaster in his holster; yanked it free and upward, firing brilliant yellow jets as he jerked the trigger. "Look _out_!" yelled Emerson. The thing twisted sideways with an eerie grace, dodging the amber beams of solar power that sizzled past its bulbous head. As it moved, its tentacled arms and legs slithered out with unthinkable rapidity, fell and wrapped around Mussdorf. The big Earthman was lifted high into the air, squeezed until his lungs nearly collapsed. He hung limp in a gigantic tentacle as Emerson ran to one side, trying for a shot without hitting Mussdorf. But the thing was diabolically clever. It held Mussdorf aloft, between itself and Emerson, while its other arms stabbed out at Gunn and Nichols, catching them up and shaking them as a terrier shakes a rat. "Hold on," called Emerson, dodging and twisting, gun in hand, seeking a spot to fire at. The thing dropped the Earthmen suddenly; its legs gathered beneath it and launched it full at Emerson. Caught off guard, the Earthman lifted his sun-blaster--felt it ripped from his fingers, knew a hard blackness thrashing down at him. He went backwards, sickened.... * * * * * Irgi stared at the things that lay on the white flagging. Queer beings they were, unlike anything Irgi had ever conceived. Only two legs, only two arms. And such weak little limbs! Why, an Urgian cat would make short work of them if an Urgian cat existed any more, and Irgi had never rated cats very highly. He looked at the spaceship, ran exploring feelers over it. He cast a glance back at the creatures again, and shook his head. Strange beings they might be, but they had mastered interplanetary travel. Well, he'd always maintained that life would be different on other worlds. Life here on Urg took different patterns. Irgi bent to wrap long arms about the queer beings, lifting them. His eyes were caught suddenly by the lumps protruding from their arms and legs, from face and chest. The growth disease! That was bad, but Irgi knew a way to cure it. Irgi knew a way to cure anything. He slid swiftly across the square and onto a flat, glittering ramp that stretched upward toward an arched doorway set like a jewel of light in a long, low building next to the vast, round Chamber of the Cones. He carried these creatures easily, without trouble. The ease of his passage gave him time to think. He had been glad to find these creatures. They were someone to converse with after centuries of loneliness. But as he approached them there in the square, calling out gladly to them, they could not hear him. His voice was pitched eight vibrations to the second. He wondered idly if that was beyond the hearing range of these two-legged things. He ought to check that, to be sure. Still, they had heard him on their ship. He had caught a confused, angry murmur on the radiation recorder. Perhaps the metal of the hull had in some manner made his voice audible to them, speeded up the vibrations to twelve or fifteen a second. Then there was the matter of the growth disease. He could eliminate that easily enough, in the Chamber of the Cones. But first they would have to be prepared. And the preparation--hurt. Well, better a few moments of agony than a death through a worse. And if he could not speak to them, they could speak to him, through their minds. Once unconscious, he could tap their memories with an electrigraph screen. That should be absorbing. It made Irgi happy, reflecting upon it, and Irgi had not known happiness for a long time. From the passage he hurried into a large white room, fitted with glass vials and ovules and glittering metal instruments, so many in number that the room seemed a jungle of metal. Down on flat, smooth tables Irgi dropped his burdens. With quick tendrils he adjusted straps to them, bound them securely. From a small, wheeled vehicle he took a metal rod and touched it to their foreheads. As it met the flesh, it hummed once faintly. "It's short-circulated their nervous systems for a while, absorbed the electric charges all intelligent beings cast," Irgi said aloud, glad at this chance to exercise his voice. "They won't be able to feel for some time. When the worst pain will have passed, they will recover. And now to examine their minds--" He fitted metal clamps over their heads and screwed them tight. He wheeled forward a glassy screen; plugged in the cords that dangled from its frame to the metal clamps. "I wonder if they've perfected this," Irgi mused. "They must be aware that the brain gives off electrical waves. Perhaps they can chart those waves on graphs. But do they know that each curve and bend of those waves represents a picture? I can translate those waves into pictures--but can they?" He slouched a little on his tentacles, squatting, gazing at the screen as he flipped over a lever. A picture quivered on the screen; grew nebulous, then cleared. Irgi found himself staring at a city far vaster than Urg. Grim white towers peaked high into the air, and broad, flat ramps circled them, interwoven like ribbons in the sunlight. On the tallest and largest buildings were great fields of metal painted a dull luster, where queerly wrought flying ships landed and took off. The scene changed suddenly. He looked into a hospital room and watched a pretty young woman smiling up at him. She too, had the growth disease. Now he beheld the mighty salt mines where naked men swung huge picks at the crusted crystals, sweating and dying under a strange sun. Even these remnants of humanity festered with the growth. A tall, lean man in white looked out at him. His lips moved, and Irgi read their meaning. This man spoke to one named Emerson, commissioning him with a spaceship, reciting the need of radium, the dread of the plague. The thoughts of this Emerson were coming in clearer, as Irgi in sudden interest, flipped over different dials. The unspoken thoughts pouring into his brain through the screen continued. The words he did not understand, but the necessity for radium, and the danger of the growth disease he did. The pictures jumbled, grew chameleonesque-- Irgi stared upward at a colossal figure graven in lucent white marble. He made out the letters chiseled into the base: GEORGE WASHINGTON. He wondered idly what this Washington had done, to merit such undying fame. He must have created a nation, or saved it. He wished there were Urgians alive to build a statue to _him_. He rose suddenly, standing upright on his tentacles, swaying gently. Why, he had the power to make himself immortal! These creatures would gladly build statues to him! True, he could not create a nation--_but he could save it_! Irgi unfastened clamps, and rolled the screen aside. He reached to a series of black knobs inset in the wall, and turned them carefully. Turning, he saw the figures of the four men stiffen to rigidity as a red aura drifted upward from the tabletop, passing through them as if they were mist, rising upwards to dissipate in the air near the ceiling. "That will prepare their bodies for the Chamber of the Cones," he said. "When they realize that I am their friend, they will gladly hear my counsels!" Opening the laboratory door, Irgi passed out and closed it behind him. * * * * * It was the sweat of agony trickling down his forehead and over his eyes and cheeks that woke Emerson. He opened his eyes, then clamped them shut as his body writhed in pain. "Oh, Lord!" he whimpered, bloodying his mouth where his teeth sank into his lips. In every fibre of his body sharp lancets cut and dug. In arms and legs and chest and belly they twisted and tore. Into the tissues beneath his skin, all along the muscles and the bone, the fiery torment played. He could not stand it; he could not-- He flipped his head to right, to left; saw the others stretched out and strapped even as he. They were unconscious. What right had they to ignore this agony? Why didn't they share it with him? He opened his lips to shriek; then bit down again, hard. Nichols screamed suddenly, his body aching. It woke the others. They too, bellowed and screamed and sobbed, and their arms and legs writhed like wild things in a trap. "Got to get free," Emerson panted, straining against the wristbands. The hard muscles of his arms ridged with effort, but the straps held. He dropped back, sobbing. "That fiend," yelled Mussdorf. "That ten-eyed, octopus-legged, black-hearted spawn of a mismated monster did this to us. Damn him! Damn him! If I ever get loose I'll cut his heart out and make him eat it." "Maybe--maybe he's vivisecting us," moaned Nichols. "With rays or--or something--aagh! I can't stand it!" "Hang on, kid," gritted Emerson, fighting the straps. "I think it's lessening. Yeah, yeah--it is. It doesn't hurt so much now." Mussdorf grunted astonishment. "You're right. It is lessening. And--hey, one of my arm buckles is coming loose. It's torn a little. Maybe I can work it free." They turned their heads to watch, biting their lips, the sweat standing in colorless beads on their pale foreheads. Mussdorf's thick arm bulged its muscles as he wrenched and tugged, panting. A buckle swung outward, clanging against the tabletop as it ripped loose. Mussdorf held his arm aloft and laughed harsh triumph. "I'll have you all loose in a second," he grunted, ripping straps from his body. He leaped from the table and stretched. He grinned into their faces. "You know, it's funny--but I feel great. Huh, I must've sweated all the aches out of me. Here, Gunn--you first." "Thanks, Karl. We're still pals, aren't we?" When Gunn was free, Mussdorf came to stand over Emerson, looking down at him. His eyes narrowed suddenly. He grinned a little, twisting his lips. "Maybe you fellows ought to stay tied up," he said. "In case that--that thing comes back. He won't blame us all for the break we're making." "Not on your life," said Emerson. But Mussdorf shook his head, and his lips tightened. "No. No, I think it's better the way I say." "Don't be a fool, Mussdorf," snapped Emerson savagely. "It isn't your place to think, anyhow. That's mine. I'm commander of this force. What I say is an order." Mussdorf grinned dryly. Into his eyes came a glint of hot, sullen anger. "You were our commander--out there, in space. We're on a planet now. Things are different. I want to learn the secret of those mists, Emerson. Something tells me I'd get a fortune for it, on Earth." Emerson squirmed helplessly, cursing him, saying, "What's gotten into you?" "Nothing new. Remember me, Karl Mussdorf? I'm a convict, I am. A salt mine convict. I'd have done anything to get out of that boiling hell. I volunteered to go with you for the radium. Me and Gunn. Nichols doesn't count. He came on account of his wife and kids. We were the only two who'd come. Convicts, both of us." * * * * * Mussdorf drew air into his lungs until his ribs showed against the rips in his jacket. He went on slowly, "All along I've thought that if we ever did discover radium in any quantity to cure the folks of space out of it. I want to be that somebody, Emerson. With my pardon and that profit, I could be a boss on Mars. And you know what it's like to be a boss on Mars." Emerson writhed in his straps, wrenching and twisting until his muscles crackled, seeking freedom. His lips snarled oaths at the big criminal. "If I ever get out of this, I'll teach you who's boss--right here!" Mussdorf laughed his confidence, "Don't worry. You won't. Those straps are pretty secure. I'm lucky one of mine was ripped." The big man turned to Gunn; looked down at him, curiously. "You with me, Til?" Gunn looked at Emerson; looked up at Mussdorf, nodding. "I think we got a chance, guv'nor," he muttered softly. "Them mists that don't 'ave germs. They're worth lots. People will pay plenty for h'air without germs." The big man and the little man swung toward the door. They paused at the threshold and glanced back. "We'll give you a chance to think it over, Emerson," Mussdorf grated. "You can use a few billions, same as us. We aren't hogs. We're willing to share--" "Get out!" Emerson spat. Mussdorf shrugged and followed Gunn into the corridor, carefully closing the door behind him. He glanced both ways frowning. "We don't know this space," he said slowly. "Stick close to me, Til. We might meet some more of that beast's pals. He's too much for us physically, but damned if I don't believe we got more grey matter than him and his whole tribe, if we use it right!" They went along the black marble flooring for long minutes. The thick drapes along the walls muffled their footsteps, but they cast anxious glances behind them. The eerie silence that overhung the place scratched at their uneasy nerves. Mussdorf's hand vised on Gunn until the little man whimpered. Behind them there was the slow shuffle of a mighty body. "In here," snapped Mussdorf, drawing Gunn with him into a niche sculped in the marble wall. They pressed back, drawing the drapes about them. Biting on their tongues, they held their breaths. The huge black body trod past, stirring the drapes and uncovering the feet of the Earthmen. But he did not glance aside. Mussdorf and Gunn let their breath out slowly, silently. They did not know that Irgi was the last of his race, that he was used to loneliness, that he was not given to looking away from his objective. They peered out: saw the monster nearing two great bronze doors sculped with forms of alien beauty. Watching breathlessly, they saw the doors slide open untouched. "Light beam," whispered Mussdorf. They caught a glimpse of the Chamber of the Cones through the doorway; saw with awe the great block of glimmering white, pulsing with an inner fire. The ten glittering cones with their rings of shimmering light made them gape. They eased forward, and halted at the doors. The black thing was pressing levers, working them swiftly. The great cones began to hum softly, began to throb. They could feel that terrific power pulsating through the room, making them quiver in rhythm though they stood beyond its range. The faint azure haze darkened; grew deeper, a dark blue. In broad bands of light the blue leaped from the cones, poured outward over the room. Irgi too, they saw. He lifted himself to his full height, turning and pirouetting gracefully despite his bulk. He bathed in the light, and it sprayed over and covered him. "He's h'on h'a bat," croaked Gunn in hoarse excitement. "'E's getting drunk on that stuff, whatever it is. A bender, a rip-snorting tear 'e's 'avin' for himself. Look at him. Like it was champagne he was wallowin' in. Gawd--I could stand a snootful of that myself!" He leaped swiftly, before Mussdorf could stop him. Past the big man's outstretched arm he charged, full into the beating bands of blue. "Oh good Lord!" whispered Mussdorf. * * * * * Before his eyes little Gunn stiffened in intolerable agony, straight up, rigid. He hung that way for one long instant, immobile. Then Gunn--disappeared. Mussdorf blinked, and looked. The little pickpocket had been right before him an instant ago. Now where he had been was nothing but those pulsing ribbons on cobalt, pounding, beating, throbbing. He's gone right in front of my eyes, Mussdorf thought. Evaporated. Into thin air. No, not into air. Into that blue color. It just absorbed him, like a blotter sops up ink! Mussdorf knew cold fright, shuddering. He whirled and ran, straight up the corridor toward the laboratory door. It shot back before the thrust of his arms. He leaped for the white tables as Emerson and Nichols stared at him, wondering at his pale face. Big brown hands seized on the straps that held Emerson, fighting to burst them. "Calm down, man," said Emerson evenly. "If those things could break, I'd have broken them. Undo the buckles." "Yeah, yeah. You're right," sobbed the big convict. "What happened to you?" "Not to me. To Gunn. Little Tilford Gunn. Gone. That--that damned black beast killed him with his blue color. Right in front of my eyes. It's going to take all of us to lick him. That's why I came back." "What are you babbling about?" said Emerson softly. "Take your time, man. What blue color?" "In the big room up the corridor. There's a deep roar and splashes of this deep light, as dark as a sapphire. Caught him, it did. Melted him into nothing at all. I--I can't forget it." He unsnapped the last buckle and stood silent as Emerson got up and stretched. His chest heaved as he gasped for air. He said suddenly, "We might as well get out of here while we can. If that thing wants to experiment on us any more--the hell with him. Let's go, and fast." Emerson was freeing Nichols, smiling thinly, "What about your fortune, Mussdorf? What about being a boss on Mars?" Mussdorf licked his lips, whispering, "Hell with that. I just want to get away from here, that's all. That black thing has power we've never seen, never dreamed of. I tell you, those blue bands--" Mussdorf swore. Emerson whirled, reaching for his solar gun. Irgi stood in the doorway, brooding at them. Almost he seemed to shake his vast head, sadly. "Stop him, one of you," babbled Mussdorf, striving to get past them. "Maybe one of us can get away." The thing stretched out his tentacles so swiftly that Emerson rasped curses as his gun-arm was clapped and held tight against his side. Nichols writhed beside him in another viselike arm. Mussdorf had fainted. Looking down at him, Emerson smiled thinly, and said to Nichols, "Whatever happened to Gunn must have been pretty bad. They told me at New Mars that Karl Mussdorf was pretty tough." "Yeah," whispered Nichols. Emerson looked up at the thing, studying it, thinking: maybe I can get it to listen to me. Maybe it will even let us go free if I can communicate with it. "What're you going to do with us?" he questioned as calmly as he could. The thing looked at him, and the thin mouth moved, but Valentine Emerson heard no sound. The thing shook his head again, sadly. * * * * * He could not make these beings understand that he was helping them, Irgi realized. They cannot hear my voice because it is pitched lower than their ears can detect. And even if they heard me, they would not understand. I shall cure them of the growth disease. By that act, they will know I am friendly. Time enough then to discuss other matters. Matters like the building of a great statue to him, Irgi, greatest of the Urg. He carried them into the Chamber of the Cones; set them down gently. The large one with the black hair and the shaggy brows was screaming something. He was undergoing an emotion: anger. And fright, too. Yes, the black haired one was frightened. More frightened than he was angry. Irgi watched him curiously. He must have seen the little one blasted when the Cones were pulsing. It was too bad about that, Irgi thought as he trussed them up. But these beings were so impetuous, almost childlike in their emotional hysteria. He could not let them know that the Cones were set to pulse in rhythm with his own body, not theirs. And anything foreign to that peculiar vibration--perished. It simply ceased to exist, wiped out by the flood of power loosed by the white block. Irgi twisted dials on the instrument panel. He knew the rhythm of these creatures, and adjusted to allow for it. This time the blue beam would not harm them. Instead they would blast into nothingness the growth disease that was slowly eating away their lives. There was danger for Irgi, too, in this. He could not remain in the Chamber to watch them. He must leave. He set the automatic regulators to begin in five parazaw, last for one azaw, then switch back. After that time, he could safely return, for the dark blue light and the roaring hum would cease, and the cones would be idle. Irgi glanced at the three beings. The black-haired one still raved, but the others lay silent, watching him. He nodded approval. The black-haired being was trying to loosen within the others the storms of emotions that held him thrall, but they were of different stuff. He went through the doors, and the doors slid shut. * * * * * Emerson rasped, "Shut up!" They lay silent for long moments. Emerson was studying the white block and the cones and the spiralling, gleaming rings. He frowned, trying to imagine their use. A tremendous powerhouse, of some sort. Probably atomic power sucked from the white rock in some alien manner. Atomic power that beat outward from the cones in bands of visible color. Could it be a bath of atoms, bombarding everything in the room? Mussdorf snarled, "I tell you he's going to do away with us like he did with Gunn." "Don't be a fool, man," answered Emerson wearily. "He wouldn't go to all this trouble just to kill us. One quick wrench with those tentacles of his, and we'd be dead ducks. He's got us in here for some reason. I'm not denying he may be experimenting on us. But there ought to be others joining with him in it. Funny, we haven't seen any others like him." "Look," said Nichols abruptly. The white block was radiating, pulsing, casting forth bluish beams that swept to the cones and fled outward in ever expanding arcs to splash against the walls. The blue light deepened, grew violet. It pulsed faster, swifter. And the humming of the cones was deafening. "I don't feel anything," said Emerson. "I can still see you fellows. Whatever it was happened to Gunn isn't happening to us." He turned; found himself free of the straps, sat up. He clambered to his feet and looked around. "The straps that held us are gone. Disappeared. Like Gunn." Mussdorf murmured oaths but he too got to his feet, asking, "What do we do now?" "Stay here and see what's next on the program. I still don't believe that thing's out to harm us." "Ahh, you always were a soft-hearted fool," Mussdorf snarled. "Why's he going to all this bother to save us? It doesn't add up. This is some fool scheme of his mad brain. He's no altruist. Not that black octopus. Gad, what a shape!" Nichols smiled wryly, "I believe we're just as peculiar to him as he is to us. He talks and we can't even hear his voice. He may hear us, but it's a cinch he doesn't know what we're talking about. Huh, it's somewhat of a 'Never the twain shall meet' angle. East and West, and that sort of thing." "Only it's solar and star system," agreed Emerson, walking toward the intricate control panels on the wall. He stretched an arm toward a dial-- He paused, staring. His arm. Good Lord, his _arm_! "Nichols! Mussdorf," he shouted, leaping for them. "Let me see your arms, your faces. Yes, you see? Mine, too. Free. Free of the lumps. They're _gone_! The bumps that mean cancer--gone. We're cured!" They stared in awed fascination at themselves. Nichols ripped at his jacket, pulled it open, ran exploring hands over his skin. He sobbed suddenly; began hysterically to cry, shoulders shaking. "Whatever it is, it's cured us," whispered Emerson, turning to stare upwards at the great glittering cones, that towered high above him. "Ada and the kids," Nichols sobbed. "If they were here we could cure them too." "The world can be freed from the Plague," Emerson breathed. "A fortune," grinned Mussdorf, eyes glinting. Emerson said, "If we knew how this thing worked, we could set it up on Earth. Duplicate it." Mussdorf slid a hand over the butt of his solar gun. He smiled grimly. "At a price, commander. Think of it. We'll be billionaires. That girl in New Mars--bah! I could have girls ten times better than her, just throwing themselves at me." "We came to do a job," Emerson said flatly, "and we're going to see it through." Mussdorf tugged at his gun, lifting it, aiming it at Emerson's broad chest. "I'm tired of these damned ideals of yours," he grated savagely. "You'll never change. Neither will I. The time for words is past. I'm acting--" His finger tightened on the trigger. And Emerson dove in at him, like a fullback at the line. The bolt of yellow never left the muzzle of the gun. It was smothered in a cobalt-dark spray of angry color. Color that sizzled. * * * * * Emerson brought his fist up hard, caught the big adventurer alongside his jaw, snapping his head back viciously. With hard lefts and rights, Emerson banged his fists mercilessly, swarming over Mussdorf, bruising his ribs, thudding home his big fists on jaw and belly. Mussdorf dropped, rolled over: lashed upward with both feet. Emerson sideswayed, drove in. His fists battered Mussdorf's jaw, rolling his head from side to side. His knuckles gashed the tight skin and drew blobs of blood. Mussdorf staggered dizzily, and pitched forward as Emerson hammered his head again. "I put up with you long enough," he spat at the prostrate man. "After this, when I give an order, you--obey!" Emerson bent, ripped the gun from Mussdorf; thrust it into his belt. "But this is what we came to get," Nichols said. "This means life--security--wealth--freedom from cancer--for all the people on Earth and Mars." "I know," Emerson nodded. "We'll have to take it." He glanced up at the cones and shook his head. They were far too vast to carry in the spaceship. He might duplicate them if he knew how they worked, though. "Quick," he rasped at Nichols. "Start hunting for plans--blue-prints--anything that might tell what this apparatus is, how it works, what its principle is." They sprang about the room, searching the scrolls that hung on the walls, the inscriptions graven in stone and metal. Off in one corner, a great leaden casket lay in a niche. It was Emerson who found it, and his yelp of delight brought Nichols running. "It's here, all here. Diagrams. Calculations. All of them worked out mathematically. They don't use our system, but it'll be easy enough to decipher theirs. We've got it, Car!" Nichols stood with head bent, lips soundlessly moving. "It's atomic power, all right," assured Emerson, "with that block as its source. But lord, what tremendous advances from the atomic power we know. The block is acted upon by the cones which cause it to send out streams of radioactive atoms, throwing them back to the cones that take them up in turn to hurl them all around the room. "Matter is constantly in motion, thanks to the molecules that comprise it. They keep moving about one another eternally; in the case of solids, they just about make it. That motion is carried on at a certain rate of speed. To an extent, you might say it vibrates at a certain pulse. If the atoms are attuned to that pulse, they feed and nourish. If the matter vibrates at a different rate than the atoms, the atoms destroy it. The straps that bound us are gone, but our clothes are unaffected. Perhaps that's because the things we wear are tuned in some manner to our own vibratory rate. Maybe it's because what we wear comes from Earth, and things from Earth have their own peculiar motion. I'm not sure, yet. But I do know anything that's in this room when the cones are set at a certain pulse either vibrates in harmony with that pulse or is wiped out of existence by the atoms that hit it. Like Gunn. Like the cancer cells that vibrated differently from our otherwise healthy bodies!" "The block," whispered Nichols. "We'll need the block!" "Certainly. It's radium, in all probability--perhaps treated in some manner we don't know of. But we can take it. It'll fit into this box. The box was made for it. It's lead." The doors were opening soundlessly. Warned by eyes upon him, Emerson whirled and dove for the cone controls. He set a hand on a lever and turned to face the thing. "I don't know whether you can hear me, fella," he grated. "But this thing is tuned to _our_ bodies now, not yours. We want that block--" jerking his head toward the shimmering white square, "--to take with us. If you don't step aside--you die!" "Kill him anyhow," whispered Nichols. "Yes, you soft fool," snarled Mussdorf through swollen, cut lips from the floor. "Pull the lever and do away with him." Emerson shook his head, still looking at the thing that stood so still in the doorway, staring back at him. "That would be murder. He's an intelligent being. If he doesn't interfere, he stays alive." The black monster turned, and moved off down the corridor. Emerson exhaled with relief, found his palm wet and sticky. He rubbed it on his thigh, turning to the others. "Snap into it," he barked. "Get off the floor, Mussdorf, and give Nichols a hand. Lug that leaden box between the cones, beneath the block. I'm going to release the pressure that keeps it suspended. We want that block. We need it. We can build the cones and the rings back on Earth, but there isn't anything like that block anywhere else in all the Universe!" * * * * * They worked feverishly, sliding the box across the floor. Emerson studied the control panels, sweat beading his brow with the effort of his concentration. He summoned the years of his tutelage under the world's greatest physicists at Earth University, the years of knowledge acquired in laboratory and spaceship on Earth and in the great red city of New Mars. He only had one chance here. It had to be successful. If he made a mistake, he was like to draw on them the concentrated fury of a billion annihilating atoms. He touched levers hesitantly, frowning; striving to remember the diagrams etched in metal on the box. Here, this one. This should be it. He wrapped his fingers carefully about the gleaming white knob, turned it with infinitesimal slowness, looking at the great white block. He saw it quiver, settle slowly floorwards. "It's in," yelled Nichols, slamming the leaden cover down and locking it. It took the three of them to budge it, to slide it across the floor. "Hell," panted Mussdorf. "We'll never make it. Once we get it into the corridor, that black fiend'll be on top of us again." Somehow they got it out of the Chamber, and scraped it along the corridor. Luckily, the way was level, and the ramp that lead from the Chamber of the Cones to the great square was smooth. But in the square they ran into an unsurmountable difficulty. There was no way to lift it into the spaceship. "We can't do it," acknowledged Emerson glumly. "It would take a crane to lift that." Mussdorf kicked at the box, and swore. Nichols ran quivering fingers through his hair, trembling. Then Emerson started to grin. "A crane, sure. We have one here, if we can only make it work. The thing, the black thing. He's as strong as any crane I ever saw!" "Think he'll do it?" asked Mussdorf. "I can try. Maybe a threat to use the solar blasters on him will do the trick." He really didn't think so, recalling the way the black being had sidestepped the bolts before; but it was their only hope. He pulled his two guns and turned; stopped short, staring. The black creature was coming down the ramp, slithering his great bulk toward them. He ignored them, heading directly toward the leaden box. Irgi lifted the leaden casket in three of his rippling tentacles, balancing it. He moved toward the spaceship, thrust the box through the open door. Emerson frowned. He went to the thing, touching it and looking upward into its eyes. The thing looked down at Emerson unblinking. It pointed to the transparent globe above, then patted Emerson on his wrist with a force that nearly snapped it. "He's going to open the globe for us. He's going to set us free!" * * * * * Irgi watched the ship twinkle to a glittering dot high in the heavens. Sadly he turned and moved back along the empty corridors, once again alone. He wished they were still here, even though he never could understand them. At least they were beings who moved, and talked among themselves, showed emotions. But what a strange world they came from! A world where heroes were worshipped, where tall strong statues were built to the great men of their race. Irgi liked that idea, though it was foreign to Urg. He rather thought there would be a statue to him, there on that planet called Earth. Yes, for the beings would tell how Irgi helped them, how he gave them the white block that would save them from extinction, even though it meant his own death, eventually. Irgi was happy. There was no doubt of it. There would be a fine statue to him on that distant planet. Irgi, savior of the race called men. A hero to mankind, to be worshipped. He wished wistfully that he could have been there to see it. But he was afraid of unleashing those creatures' terror. They might even have done something rash to themselves, if he had crowded his bulk into the spacecraft. No, it was better this way. * * * * * And in the spaceship, Emerson and Mussdorf and Nichols squatted over the leaden casket, commenting on it, copying the alien symbols and designs for study. Emerson frowned thoughtfully, choosing his words. "As near as I can judge, it's a form of atomic bombardment of matter. Suppose its rate of vibration is adjusted to matter _a_. Anything other than matter _a_, such as foreign substance _b_, is hit so swiftly and so often by those hurtling atoms that they simply wipe it out of existence. "Back in the twentieth century, they were using just this principle to cure cancer. They bombarded the cancer with radioactive atoms--overcrowding the atoms with neutrons beyond their ability to hold them for very long--and the atoms ate away the cancer. I think they treated other diseases too, with some success. Goiter, for one. And, if I recall rightly, the atoms could build up blood cells or eliminate them. "But this block and the cones seem to be the ultimate perfection of that idea. Maybe atoms possess some degree of intellect, for all we know. We'll never really be sure. They do have a power of attraction, and appear to be drawn to the danger spot as though magnetized to it." They were silent, thoughtful. "Yeah," said Mussdorf at last. "It begins to trickle through. Gunn wasn't in harmony with that black beast, so he went out of existence immediately. Gunn was human and the other wasn't." Emerson nodded, and his eyes widened. "My God!" he whispered. "This block and the cones could make a man immortal!" Mussdorf gagged; laughed suddenly. "Then why did that thing let us cart it off right from under its nose? Why, he even helped us." "I wish I knew," muttered Emerson, troubled. "I wish I knew." Mussdorf scowled; looked at him sideways, clearing his throat. "I'm sorry I went off my nut back there," he mumbled. "The thought of all the dough this thing was worth sort of slapped me haywire. Why, just to be free of space cancer, Val--and hell! They'll give us pensions for this job. I'm sorry." "Skip it," said Emerson. "That black thing was enough to make us all jittery. He seemed a good enough egg, though. But I was a little disappointed in him. He sure was bluffed when I touched that lever. Boy, he turned tail fast enough." "Maybe he was just what he looked like, Val," murmured Nichols thoughtfully. "An animal--left by the real builders of the Cones to turn it over to someone like us, with a use for it." "Sure," nodded Mussdorf. "That's what he was. Car's hit it. Just a big animal who knew enough to work the things, and no more." * * * * * Irgi was alone, and cold. It would get steadily colder for him, without the block to feed his body. But Irgi kept smiling. He would be a hero someday. There would be a statue to him. Again he wished that he could see it. But he knew he would never be happy on Earth. There would always be the fear that the earthmen seemed to have. To Irgi, it seemed a silly sort of fright, too. They were always on the verge of harming themselves. As in the Chamber of the Cones when that one had placed his hand on the lever to loose the fury of the cones. Why had he done that? And those others urging him to pull it! Did fear turn those beings into madmen? Didn't they know that they would have blasted themselves to nothingness? They must have known that the controls would automatically shift back to his own vibratory rate, not theirs. The machine had been built for him. In rest, it was tuned to his pulse. He had been afraid for them, and so had gone away, leaving them to slide the box as best they could. He had meant to carry it for them, since it was best that a race carry on instead of one lone Urgian. For Irgi would die without the block. Well, it was like exchanging one form of immortality for another. But he still wished he could have seen that statue. "_An animal_," said Emerson heavily. "_Well, maybe you're right. Just an animal, scared of three men. Let's forget him._" * * * * * Irgi shivered. It was growing colder.... 
17239	----	THE DESTINY OF MAN VIEWED IN THE LIGHT OF HIS ORIGIN BY JOHN FISKE TWENTIETH EDITION. BOSTON HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1893 Copyright, 1884, BY JOHN FISKE. TO MY CHILDREN, MAUD, HAROLD, CLARENCE, RALPH, ETHEL, AND HERBERT, This Essay _IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED._ PREFACE. Having been invited to give an address before the Concord School of Philosophy this summer, upon some subject relating to the question of immortality there under discussion, it seemed a proper occasion for putting together the following thoughts on the origin of Man and his place in the universe. In dealing with the unknown, it is well to take one's start a long way within the limits of the known. The question of a future life is generally regarded as lying outside the range of legitimate scientific discussion. Yet while fully admitting this, one does not necessarily admit that the subject is one with regard to which we are forever debarred from entertaining an opinion. Now our opinions on such transcendental questions must necessarily be affected by the total mass of our opinions on the questions which lie within the scope of scientific inquiry; and from this point of view it becomes of surpassing interest to trace the career of Humanity within that segment of the universe which is accessible to us. The teachings of the doctrine of evolution as to the origin and destiny of Man have, moreover, a very great speculative and practical value of their own, quite apart from their bearings upon any ultimate questions. The body of this essay is accordingly devoted to setting forth these teachings in what I conceive to be their true light; while their transcendental implications are reserved for the sequel. As the essay contains an epitome of my own original contributions to the doctrine of evolution, I have added at the end a short list of references to other works of mine, where the points here briefly mentioned are more fully argued and illustrated. The views regarding the progress of human society, and the elimination of warfare, are set forth at greater length in a little book now in the press, and soon to appear, entitled "American Political Ideas." PETERSHAM, September 6, 1884. CONTENTS. I. Man's Place in Nature as affected by the Copernican Theory. II. As affected by Darwinism. III. On the Earth there will never be a Higher Creature than Man. IV. The Origin of Infancy. V. The Dawning of Consciousness. VI. Lengthening of Infancy and Concomitant Increase of Brain-Surface. VII. Change in the Direction of the Working of Natural Selection. VIII. Growing Predominance of the Psychical Life. IX. The Origins of Society and of Morality. X. Improvableness of Man. XI. Universal Warfare of Primeval Men. XII. First checked by the Beginnings of Industrial Civilisation. XIII. Methods of Political Development, and Elimination of Warfare. XIV. End of the Working of Natural Selection upon Man. Throwing off the Brute-Inheritance. XV. The Message of Christianity. XVI. The Question as to a Future Life. THE DESTINY OF MAN. I. Man's Place in Nature, as affected by the Copernican Theory. When we study the Divine Comedy of Dante--that wonderful book wherein all the knowledge and speculation, all the sorrows and yearnings, of the far-off Middle Ages are enshrined in the glory of imperishable verse--we are brought face to face with a theory of the world and with ways of reasoning about the facts of nature which seem strange to us to-day, but from the influence of which we are not yet, and doubtless never shall be, wholly freed. A cosmology grotesque enough in the light of later knowledge, yet wrought out no less carefully than the physical theories of Lucretius, is employed in the service of a theology cumbrous in its obsolete details, but resting upon fundamental truths which mankind can never safely lose sight of. In the view of Dante and of that phase of human culture which found in him its clearest and sweetest voice, this earth, the fair home of man, was placed in the centre of a universe wherein all things were ordained for his sole behoof: the sun to give him light and warmth, the stars in their courses to preside over his strangely checkered destinies, the winds to blow, the floods to rise, or the fiend of pestilence to stalk abroad over the land,--all for the blessing, or the warning, or the chiding, of the chief among God's creatures, Man. Upon some such conception as this, indeed, all theology would seem naturally to rest. Once dethrone Humanity, regard it as a mere local incident in an endless and aimless series of cosmical changes, and you arrive at a doctrine which, under whatever specious name it may be veiled, is at bottom neither more nor less than Atheism. On its metaphysical side Atheism is the denial of anything psychical in the universe outside of human consciousness; and it is almost inseparably associated with the materialistic interpretation of human consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with it is utterly condemned by modern science.[1] But our feeling toward Atheism goes much deeper than the mere recognition of it as philosophically untrue. The mood in which we condemn it is not at all like the mood in which we reject the corpuscular theory of light or Sir G.C. Lewis's vagaries on the subject of Egyptian hieroglyphics. We are wont to look upon Atheism with unspeakable horror and loathing. Our moral sense revolts against it no less than our intelligence; and this is because, on its practical side, Atheism would remove Humanity from its peculiar position in the world, and make it cast in its lot with the grass that withers and the beasts that perish; and thus the rich and varied life of the universe, in all the ages of its wondrous duration, becomes deprived of any such element of purpose as can make it intelligible to us or appeal to our moral sympathies and religious aspirations. And yet the first result of some of the grandest and most irrefragable truths of modern science, when newly discovered and dimly comprehended, has been to make it appear that Humanity must be rudely unseated from its throne in the world and made to occupy an utterly subordinate and trivial position; and it is because of this mistaken view of their import that the Church has so often and so bitterly opposed the teaching of such truths. With the advent of the Copernican astronomy the funnel-shaped Inferno, the steep mountain of Purgatory crowned with its terrestrial paradise, and those concentric spheres of Heaven wherein beatified saints held weird and subtle converse, all went their way to the limbo prepared for the childlike fancies of untaught minds, whither Hades and Valhalla had gone before them. In our day it is hard to realize the startling effect of the discovery that Man does not dwell at the centre of things, but is the denizen of an obscure and tiny speck of cosmical matter quite invisible amid the innumerable throng of flaming suns that make up our galaxy. To the contemporaries of Copernicus the new theory seemed to strike at the very foundations of Christian theology. In a universe where so much had been made without discernible reference to Man, what became of that elaborate scheme of salvation which seemed to rest upon the assumption that the career of Humanity was the sole object of God's creative forethought and fostering care? When we bear this in mind, we see how natural and inevitable it was that the Church should persecute such men as Galileo and Bruno. At the same time it is instructive to observe that, while the Copernican astronomy has become firmly established in spite of priestly opposition, the foundations of Christian theology have not been shaken thereby. It is not that the question which once so sorely puzzled men has ever been settled, but that it has been outgrown. The speculative necessity for man's occupying the largest and most central spot in the universe is no longer felt. It is recognized as a primitive and childish notion. With our larger knowledge we see that these vast and fiery suns are after all but the Titan like _servants_ of the little planets which they bear with them in their flight through the abysses of space. Out from the awful gaseous turmoil of the central mass dart those ceaseless waves of gentle radiance that, when caught upon the surface of whirling worlds like ours, bring forth the endlessly varied forms and the endlessly complex movements that make up what we can see of life. And as when God revealed himself to his ancient prophet He came not in the earthquake or the tempest but in a voice that was still and small, so that divine spark the Soul, as it takes up its brief abode in this realm of fleeting phenomena, chooses not the central sun where elemental forces forever blaze and clash, but selects an outlying terrestrial nook where seeds may germinate in silence, and where through slow fruition the mysterious forms of organic life may come to take shape and thrive. He who thus looks a little deeper into the secrets of nature than his forefathers of the sixteenth century may well smile at the quaint conceit that man cannot be the object of God's care unless he occupies an immovable position in the centre of the stellar universe. II. Man's Place in Nature, as affected by Darwinism. When the Copernican astronomy was finally established through the discoveries of Kepler and Newton, it might well have been pronounced the greatest scientific achievement of the human mind; but it was still more than that. It was the greatest revolution that had ever been effected in Man's views of his relations to the universe in which he lives, and of which he is--at least during the present life--a part. During the nineteenth century, however, a still greater revolution has been effected. Not only has Lyell enlarged our mental horizon in time as much as Newton enlarged it in space, but it appears that throughout these vast stretches of time and space with which we have been made acquainted there are sundry well-marked changes going on. Certain definite paths of development are being pursued; and around us on every side we behold worlds, organisms, and societies in divers stages of progress or decline. Still more, as we examine the records of past life upon our globe, and study the mutual relations of the living things that still remain, it appears that the higher forms of life--including Man himself--are the modified descendants of lower forms. Zoölogically speaking, Man can no longer be regarded as a creature apart by himself. We cannot erect an order on purpose to contain him, as Cuvier tried to do; we cannot even make a separate family for him. Man is not only a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate, but he belongs, as a genus, to the catarrhine family of apes. And just as lions, leopards, and lynxes--different genera of the cat-family--are descended from a common stock of carnivora, back to which we may also trace the pedigrees of dogs, hyænas, bears, and seals; so the various genera of platyrrhine and catarrhine apes, including Man, are doubtless descended from a common stock of primates, back to which we may also trace the converging pedigrees of monkeys and lemurs, until their ancestry becomes indistinguishable from that of rabbits and squirrels. Such is the conclusion to which the scientific world has come within a quarter of a century from the publication of Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species;" and there is no more reason for supposing that this conclusion will ever be gainsaid than for supposing that the Copernican astronomy will some time be overthrown and the concentric spheres of Dante's heaven reinstated in the minds of men. It is not strange that this theory of man's origin, which we associate mainly with the name of Mr. Darwin, should be to many people very unwelcome. It is fast bringing about a still greater revolution in thought than that which was heralded by Copernicus; and it naturally takes some time for the various portions of one's theory of things to become adjusted, one after another, to so vast and sweeping a change. From many quarters the cry goes up,--If this be true, then Man is at length cast down from his high position in the world. "I will not be called a mammal, or the son of a mammal!" once exclaimed an acquaintance of mine who perhaps had been brought up by hand. Such expressions of feeling are crude, but the feeling is not unjustifiable. It is urged that if man is physically akin to a baboon, as pigs are akin to horses, and cows to deer, then Humanity can in nowise be regarded as occupying a peculiar place in the universe; it becomes a mere incident in an endless series of changes, and how can we say that the same process of evolution that has produced mankind may not by and by produce something far more perfect? There was a time when huge bird-like reptiles were the lords of creation, and after these had been "sealed within the iron hills" there came successive dynasties of mammals; and as the iguanodon gave place to the great Eocene marsupials, as the mastodon and the sabre-toothed lion have long since vanished from the scene, so may not Man by and by disappear to make way for some higher creature, and so on forever? In such case, why should we regard Man as in any higher sense the object of Divine care than a pig? Still stronger does the case appear when we remember that those countless adaptations of means to ends in nature, which since the time of Voltaire and Paley we have been accustomed to cite as evidences of creative design, have received at the hands of Mr. Darwin a very different interpretation. The lobster's powerful claw, the butterfly's gorgeous tints, the rose's delicious fragrance, the architectural instinct of the bee, the astonishing structure of the orchid, are no longer explained as the results of contrivance. That simple but wasteful process of survival of the fittest, through which such marvellous things have come into being, has little about it that is analogous to the ingenuity of human art. The infinite and eternal Power which is thus revealed in the physical life of the universe seems in nowise akin to the human soul. The idea of beneficent purpose seems for the moment to be excluded from nature, and a blind process, known as Natural Selection, is the deity that slumbers not nor sleeps. Reckless of good and evil, it brings forth at once the mother's tender love for her infant and the horrible teeth of the ravening shark, and to its creative indifference the one is as good as the other. In spite of these appalling arguments the man of science, urged by the single-hearted purpose to ascertain the truth, be the consequences what they may, goes quietly on and finds that the terrible theory must be adopted; the fact of man's consanguinity with dumb beasts must be admitted. In reaching this conclusion, the man of science reasons upon the physical facts within his reach, applying to them the same principles of common-sense whereby our everyday lives are successfully guided; and he is very apt to smile at the methods of those people who, taking hold of the question at the wrong end, begin by arguing about all manner of fancied consequences. For his knowledge of the history of human thinking assures him that such methods have through all past time proved barren of aught save strife, while his own bold yet humble method is the only one through which truth has ever been elicited. To pursue unflinchingly the methods of science requires dauntless courage and a faith that nothing can shake. Such courage and such loyalty to nature brings its own reward. For when once the formidable theory is really understood, when once its implications are properly unfolded, it is seen to have no such logical consequences as were at first ascribed to it. As with the Copernican astronomy, so with the Darwinian biology, we rise to a higher view of the workings of God and of the nature of Man than was ever attainable before. So far from degrading Humanity, or putting it on a level with the animal world in general, the Darwinian theory shows us distinctly for the first time how the creation and the perfecting of Man is the goal toward which Nature's work has all the while been tending. It enlarges tenfold the significance of human life, places it upon even a loftier eminence than poets or prophets have imagined, and makes it seem more than ever the chief object of that creative activity which is manifested in the physical universe. III. On the Earth there will never be a Higher Creature than Man. In elucidating these points, we may fitly begin by considering the question as to the possibility of the evolution of any higher creature than Man, to whom the dominion over this earth shall pass. The question will best be answered by turning back and observing one of the most remarkable features connected with the origin of Man and with his superiority over other animals. And let it be borne in mind that we are not now about to wander through the regions of unconditional possibility. We are not dealing with vague general notions of development, but with the scientific Darwinian theory, which alleges development only as the result of certain rigorously defined agencies. The chief among these agencies is Natural Selection. It has again and again been illustrated how by the cumulative selection and inheritance of slight physical variations generic differences, like those between the tiger and the leopard, or the cow and the antelope, at length arise; and the guiding principle in the accumulation of slight physical differences has been the welfare of the species. The variant forms on either side have survived while the constant forms have perished, so that the lines of demarcation between allied species have grown more and more distinct, and it is usually only by going back to fossil ages that we can supply the missing links of continuity. In the desperate struggle for existence no peculiarity, physical or psychical, however slight, has been too insignificant for natural selection to seize and enhance; and the myriad fantastic forms and hues of animal and vegetal life illustrate the seeming capriciousness of its workings. Psychical variations have never been unimportant since the appearance of the first faint pigment-spot which by and by was to translate touch into vision, as it developed into the lenses and humours of the eye.[2] Special organs of sense and the lower grades of perception and judgment were slowly developed through countless ages, in company with purely physical variations of shape of foot, or length of neck, or complexity of stomach, or thickness of hide. At length there came a wonderful moment--silent and unnoticed, as are the beginnings of all great revolutions. Silent and unnoticed, even as the day of the Lord which cometh like a thief in the night, there arrived that wonderful moment at which psychical changes began to be of more use than physical changes to the brute ancestor of Man. Through further ages of ceaseless struggle the profitable variations in this creature occurred oftener and oftener in the brain, and less often in other parts of the organism, until by and by the size of his brain had been doubled and its complexity of structure increased a thousand-fold, while in other respects his appearance was not so very different from that of his brother apes.[3] Along with this growth of the brain, the complete assumption of the upright posture, enabling the hands to be devoted entirely to prehension and thus relieving the jaws of that part of their work, has coöperated in producing that peculiar contour of head and face which is the chief distinguishing mark of physical Man. These slight anatomical changes derive their importance entirely from the prodigious intellectual changes in connection with which they have been produced; and these intellectual changes have been accumulated until the distance, psychically speaking, between civilized man and the ape is so great as to dwarf in comparison all that had been achieved in the process of evolution down to the time of our half-human ancestor's first appearance. No fact in nature is fraught with deeper meaning than this two-sided fact of the extreme physical similarity and enormous psychical divergence between Man and the group of animals to which he traces his pedigree. It shows that when Humanity began to be evolved an entirely new chapter in the history of the universe was opened. Henceforth the life of the nascent soul came to be first in importance, and the bodily life became subordinated to it. Henceforth it appeared that, in this direction at least, the process of zoölogical change had come to an end, and a process of psychological change was to take its place. Henceforth along this supreme line of generation there was to be no further evolution of new species through physical variation, but through the accumulation of psychical variations one particular species was to be indefinitely perfected and raised to a totally different plane from that on which all life had hitherto existed. Henceforth, in short, the dominant aspect of evolution was to be not the genesis of species, but the progress of Civilization. As we thoroughly grasp the meaning of all this, we see that upon the Darwinian theory it is impossible that any creature zoologically distinct from Man and superior to him should ever at any future time exist upon the earth. In the regions of unconditional possibility it is open to any one to argue, if he chooses, that such a creature may come to exist; but the Darwinian theory is utterly opposed to any such conclusion. According to Darwinism, the creation of Man is still the goal toward which Nature tended from the beginning. Not the production of any higher creature, but the perfecting of Humanity, is to be the glorious consummation of Nature's long and tedious work. Thus we suddenly arrive at the conclusion that Man seems now, much more clearly than ever, the chief among God's creatures. On the primitive barbaric theory, which Mr. Darwin has swept away, Man was suddenly flung into the world by the miraculous act of some unseen and incalculable Power acting from without; and whatever theology might suppose, no scientific reason could be alleged why the same incalculable Power might not at some future moment, by a similar miracle, thrust upon the scene some mightier creature in whose presence Man would become like a sorry beast of burden. But he who has mastered the Darwinian theory, he who recognizes the slow and subtle process of evolution as the way in which God makes things come to pass, must take afar higher view. He sees that in the deadly struggle for existence which has raged throughout countless aeons of time, the whole creation has been groaning and travailing together in order to bring forth that last consummate specimen of God's handiwork, the Human Soul. To the creature thus produced through a change in the direction in which natural selection has worked, the earth and most of its living things have become gradually subordinated. In all the classes of the animal and vegetal worlds many ancient species have become extinct, and many modern species have come into being, through the unchecked working of natural selection, since Man became distinctively human. But in this respect a change has long been coming over the face of nature. The destinies of all other living things are more and more dependent upon the will of Man. It rests with him to determine, to a great degree, what plants and animals shall remain upon the earth and what shall be swept from its surface. By unconsciously imitating the selective processes of Nature, he long ago wrought many wild species into forms subservient to his needs. He has created new varieties of fruit and flower and cereal grass, and has reared new breeds of animals to aid him in the work of civilization; until at length he is beginning to acquire a mastery over mechanical and molecular and chemical forces which is doubtless destined in the future to achieve marvellous results whereof today we little dream. Natural selection itself will by and by occupy a subordinate place in comparison with selection by Man, whose appearance on the earth is thus seen more clearly than ever to have opened an entirely new chapter in the mysterious history of creation. IV. The Origin of Infancy. But before we can fully understand the exalted position which the Darwinian theory assigns to man, another point demands consideration. The natural selection of psychical peculiarities does not alone account for the origin of Man, or explain his most signal difference from all other animals. That difference is unquestionably a difference in kind, but in saying this one must guard against misunderstanding. Not only in the world of organic life, but throughout the known universe, the doctrine of evolution regards differences in kind as due to the gradual accumulation of differences in degree. To cite a very simple case, what differences of kind can be more striking than the differences between a nebula, a sun, a planet like the earth, and a planet like our moon? Yet these things are simply examples of cosmical matter at four different stages of cooling. The physical differences between steam, water, and ice afford a more familiar example. In the organic world the perpetual modification of structures that has been effected through natural selection exhibits countless instances of differences in kind which have risen from the accumulation of differences in degree. No one would hesitate to call a horse's hoof different in kind from a cat's paw; and yet the horse's lower leg and hoof are undoubtedly developed from a five-toed paw. The most signal differences in kind are wont to arise when organs originally developed for a certain purpose come to be applied to a very different purpose, as that change of the fish's air-bladder into a lung which accompanied the first development of land vertebrates. But still greater becomes the revolution when a certain process goes on Until it sets going a number of other processes, unlocking series after series of causal agencies until a vast and complicated result is reached, such as could by no possibility have been foreseen. The creation of Man was one of these vast and complicated results due to the unlocking of various series of causal agencies; and it was the beginning of a deeper and mightier difference in kind than any that slowly evolving Nature had yet witnessed. I have indicated, as the moment at which the creation of mankind began, the moment when psychical variations became of so much more use to our ancestors than physical variations that they were seized and enhanced by natural selection, to the comparative neglect of the latter. Increase of intellectual capacity, in connection with the developing brain of a single race of creatures, now became the chief work of natural selection in originating Man; and this, I say, was the opening of a new chapter, the last and most wonderful chapter, in the history of creation. But the increasing intelligence and enlarged experience of half-human man now set in motion a new series of changes which greatly complicated the matter. In order to understand these changes, we must consider for a moment one very important characteristic of developing intelligence. The simplest actions in which the nervous system is concerned are what we call reflex actions. All the visceral actions which keep us alive from moment to moment, the movements of the heart and lungs, the contractions of arteries, the secretions of glands, the digestive operations of the stomach and liver, belong to the class of reflex actions. Throughout the animal world these acts are repeated, with little or no variation, from birth until death, and the tendency to perform them is completely organized in the nervous system before birth. Every animal breathes and digests as well at the beginning of his life as he ever does. Contact with air and food is all that is needed, and there is nothing to be learned. These actions, though they are performed by the nervous system, we do not class as psychical, because they are nearly or quite unattended by consciousness. The psychical life of the lowest animals consists of a few simple acts directed toward the securing of food and the avoidance of danger, and these acts we are in the habit of classing as instinctive. They are so simple, so few, and so often repeated, that the tendency to perform them is completely organized in the nervous system before birth. The animal takes care of himself as soon as he begins to live. He has nothing to learn, and his career is a simple repetition of the careers of countless ancestors. With him heredity is everything, and his individual experience is next to nothing. As we ascend the animal scale till we come to the higher birds and mammals, we find a very interesting and remarkable change beginning. The general increase of intelligence involves an increasing variety and complication of experiences. The acts which the animal performs in the course of its life become far more numerous, far more various, and far more complex. They are therefore severally repeated with less frequency in the lifetime of each individual. Consequently the tendency to perform them is not completely organized in the nervous system of the offspring before birth. The short period of ante-natal existence does not afford time enough for the organization of so many and such complex habitudes and capacities. The process which in the lower animals is completed before birth is in the higher animals left to be completed after birth. When the creature begins its life it is not completely organized. Instead of the power of doing all the things which its parents did, it starts with the power of doing only some few of them; for the rest it has only latent capacities which need to be brought out by its individual experience after birth. In other words, it begins its separate life not as a matured creature, but as an infant which needs for a time to be watched and helped. V. The Dawning of Consciousness. Here we arrive at one of the most wonderful moments in the history of creation,--the moment of the first faint dawning of consciousness, the foreshadowing of the true life of the soul. Whence came the soul we no more know than we know whence came the universe. The primal origin of consciousness is hidden in the depths of the bygone eternity. That it cannot possibly be the product of any cunning arrangement of material particles is demonstrated beyond peradventure by what we now know of the correlation of physical forces.[4] The Platonic view of the soul, as a spiritual substance, an effluence from Godhood, which under certain conditions becomes incarnated in perishable forms of matter, is doubtless the view most consonant with the present state of our knowledge. Yet while we know not the primal origin of the soul, we have learned something with regard to the conditions under which it has become incarnated in material forms. Modern psychology has something to say about the dawning of conscious life in the animal world. Reflex action is unaccompanied by consciousness. The nervous actions which regulate the movements of the viscera go on without our knowledge; we learn of their existence only by study, as we learn of facts in outward nature. If you tickle the foot of a person asleep, and the foot is withdrawn by simple reflex action, the sleeper is unconscious alike of the irritation and of the movement, even as the decapitated frog is unconscious when a drop of nitric acid falls on his back and he lifts up a leg and rubs the place. In like manner the reflex movements which make up the life of the lowest animals are doubtless quite unconscious, even when in their general character they simulate conscious actions, as they often do. In the case of such creatures, the famous hypothesis of Descartes, that animals are automata, is doubtless mainly correct. In the case of instincts also, where the instinctive actions are completely organized before birth, and are repeated without variation during the whole lifetime of the individual, there is probably little if any consciousness. It is an essential prerequisite of consciousness that there should be a period of delay or tension between the receipt of an impression and the determination of the consequent movement. Diminish this period of delay and you diminish the vividness of consciousness. A familiar example will make this clear. When you are learning to play a new piece of music on the piano, especially if you do not read music rapidly, you are intensely conscious of each group of notes on the page, and of each group of keys that you strike, and of the relations of the one to the other. But when you have learned the piece by heart, you think nothing of either notes or keys, but play automatically while your attention is concentrated upon the artistic character of the music. If somebody thoughtlessly interrupts you with a question about Egyptian politics, you go on playing while you answer him politely. That is, where you had at first to make a conscious act of volition for each movement, the whole group of movements has now become automatic, and volition is only concerned in setting the process going. As the delay involved in the perception and the movement disappears, so does the consciousness of the perception and the movement tend to disappear. Consciousness implies perpetual discrimination, or the recognition of likenesses and differences, and this is impossible unless impressions persist long enough to be compared with one another. The physical organs in connection with whose activity consciousness is manifested are the upper and outer parts of the brain,--the cerebrum and cerebellum. These organs never receive impressions directly from the outside world, but only from lower nerve-centres, such as the spinal cord, the medulla, the optic lobes, and other special centres of sensation. The impressions received by the cerebrum and cerebellum are waves of molecular disturbance sent up along centripetal nerves from the lower centres, and presently drafted off along centrifugal nerves back to the lower centres, thus causing the myriad movements which make up our active life. Now there is no consciousness except when molecular disturbance is generated in the cerebrum and cerebellum faster than it can be drafted off to the lower centres.[5] It is the surplus of molecular disturbance remaining in the cerebrum and cerebellum, and reflected back and forth among the cells and fibres of which these highest centres are composed, that affords the physical condition for the manifestation of consciousness. Memory, emotion, reason, and volition begin with this retention of a surplus of molecular motion in the highest centres. As we survey the vertebrate sub-kingdom of animals, we find that as this surplus increases, the surface of the highest centres increases in area. In the lowest vertebrate animal, the amphioxus, the cerebrum and cerebellum do not exist at all. In fishes we begin to find them, but they are much smaller than the optic lobes. In such a highly organized fish as the halibut, which weighs about as much as an average-sized man, the cerebrum is smaller than a melon-seed. Continuing to grow by adding concentric layers at the surface, the cerebrum and cerebellum become much larger in birds and lower mammals, gradually covering up the optic lobes. As we pass to higher mammalian forms, the growth of the cerebrum becomes most conspicuous, until it extends backwards so far as to cover up the cerebellum, whose functions are limited to the conscious adjustment of muscular movements. In the higher apes the cerebrum begins to extend itself forwards, and this goes on in the human race. The cranial capacity of the European exceeds that of the Australian by forty cubic inches, or nearly four times as much as that by which the Australian exceeds the gorilla; and the expansion is almost entirely in the upper and anterior portions. But the increase of the cerebral surface is shown not only in the general size of the organ, but to a still greater extent in the irregular creasing and furrowing of the surface. This creasing and furrowing begins to occur in the higher mammals, and in civilized man it is carried to an astonishing extent. The amount of intelligence is correlated with the number, the depth, and the irregularity of the furrows. A cat's brain has a few symmetrical creases. In an ape the creases are deepened into slight furrows, and they run irregularly, somewhat like the lines in the palm of your hand. With age and experience the furrows grow deeper and more sinuous, and new ones appear; and in man these phenomena come to have great significance. The cerebral surface of a human infant is like that of an ape. In an adult savage, or in a European peasant, the furrowing is somewhat marked and complicated. In the brain of a great scholar, the furrows are very deep and crooked, and hundreds of creases appear which are not found at all in the brains of ordinary men. In other words, the cerebral surface of such a man, the seat of conscious mental life, has become enormously enlarged in area; and we must further observe that it goes on enlarging in some cases into extreme old age.[6] Putting all these facts together, it becomes plain that in the lowest animals, whose lives consist of sundry reflex actions monotonously repeated from generation to generation, there can be nothing, or next to nothing, of what we know as consciousness. It is only when the life becomes more complicated and various, so that reflex action can no longer determine all its movements and the higher nerve-centres begin to be evolved, that the dawning of consciousness is reached. But with the growth of the higher centres the capacities of action become so various and indeterminate that definite direction is not given to them until after birth. The creature begins life as an infant, with its partially developed cerebrum representing capabilities which it is left for its individual experience to bring forth and modify. VI. Lengthening of Infancy, and Concomitant Increase of Brain-Surface. The first appearance of infancy in the animal world thus heralded the new era which was to be crowned by the development of Man. With the beginnings of infancy there came the first dawning of a conscious life similar in nature to the conscious life of human beings, and there came, moreover, on the part of parents, the beginning of feelings and actions not purely self-regarding. But still more, the period of infancy was a period of plasticity. The career of each individual being no longer wholly predetermined by the careers of its ancestors, it began to become teachable. Individuality of character also became possible at the same time, and for the same reason. All birds and mammals which take care of their young are teachable, though in very various degrees, and all in like manner show individual peculiarities of disposition, though in most cases these are slight and inconspicuous. In dogs, horses, and apes there is marked teachableness, and there are also marked differences in individual character. But in the non-human animal world all these phenomena are but slightly developed. They are but the dim adumbrations of what was by and by to bloom forth in the human race. They can scarcely be said to have served as a prophecy of the revolution that was to come. One generation of dumb beasts is after all very like another, and from studying the careers of the mastodon, the hipparion, the sabre-toothed lion, or even the dryopithecus, an observer in the Miocene age could never have foreseen the possibility of a creature endowed with such a boundless capacity of progress as the modern Man. Nevertheless, however dimly suggestive was this group of phenomena, it contained the germ of all that is preëminent in humanity. In the direct line of our ancestry it only needed that the period of infancy should be sufficiently prolonged, in order that a creature should at length appear, endowed with the teachableness, the individuality, and the capacity for progress which are the peculiar prerogatives of fully-developed Man.[7] In this direct line the manlike apes of Africa and the Indian Archipelago have advanced far beyond the mammalian world in general. Along with a cerebral surface, and an accompanying intelligence, far greater than that of other mammals, these tailless apes begin life as helpless babies, and are unable to walk, to feed themselves, or to grasp objects with precision until they are two or three months old. These apes have thus advanced a little way upon the peculiar road which our half-human forefathers began to travel as soon as psychical variations came to be of more use to the species than variations in bodily structure. The gulf by which the lowest known man is separated from the highest known ape consists in the great increase of his cerebral surface, with the accompanying intelligence, and in the very long duration of his infancy. These two things have gone hand in hand. The increase of cerebral surface, due to the working of natural selection in this direction alone, has entailed a vast increase in the amount of cerebral organization that must be left to be completed after birth, and thus has prolonged the period of infancy. And conversely the prolonging of the plastic period of infancy, entailing a vast increase in teachableness and versatility, has contributed to the further enlargement of the cerebral surface. The mutual reaction of these two groups of facts must have gone on for an enormous length of time since man began thus diverging from his simian brethren. It is not likely that less than a million years have elapsed since the first page of this new chapter in the history of creation was opened: it is probable that the time has been much longer. In comparison with such a period, the whole recorded duration of human history shrinks into nothingness. The pyramids of Egypt seem like things of yesterday when we think of the Cave-Men of western Europe in the glacial period, who scratched pictures of mammoths on pieces of reindeer-antler with a bit of pointed flint. Yet during an entire geologic æon before these Cave-Men appeared on the scene, "a being erect upon two legs," if we may quote from Serjeant Buzfuz, "and wearing the outward semblance of a man and not of a monster," wandered hither and thither over the face of the earth, setting his mark upon it as no other creature yet had done, leaving behind him innumerable tell-tale remnants of his fierce and squalid existence, yet too scantily endowed with wit to make any written disclosure of his thoughts and deeds. If the physiological annals of that long and weary time could now be unrolled before us, the principal fact which we should discern, dominating all other facts in interest and significance, would be that mutual reaction between increase of cerebral surface and lengthening of babyhood which I have here described. Thus through the simple continuance and interaction of processes that began far back in the world of warm-blooded animals, we get at last a creature essentially different from all others. Through the complication of effects the heaping up of minute differences in degree has ended in bringing forth a difference in kind. In the human organism physical variation has well-nigh stopped, or is confined to insignificant features, save in the grey surface of the cerebrum. The work of cerebral organization is chiefly completed after birth, as we see by contrasting the smooth ape-like brain-surface of the new-born child with the deeply-furrowed and myriad-seamed surface of the adult civilized brain. The plastic period of adolescence, lengthened in civilized man until it has come to cover more than one third of his lifetime, is thus the guaranty of his boundless progressiveness. Inherited tendencies and aptitudes still form the foundations of character; but individual experience has come to count as an enormous factor in modifying the career of mankind from generation to generation. It is not too much to say that the difference between man and all other living creatures, in respect of teachableness, progressiveness, and individuality of character, surpasses all other differences of kind that are known to exist in the universe. VII. Change in the Direction of the Working of Natural Selection. In the fresh light which these considerations throw upon the problem of man's origin, we can now see more clearly than ever how great a revolution was inaugurated when natural selection began to confine its operations to the surface of the cerebrum. Among the older incidents in the evolution of organic life, the changes were very wonderful which out of the pectoral fin of a fish developed the jointed fore-limb of the mammal with its five-toed paw, and thence through much slighter variation brought forth the human arm with its delicate and crafty hand. More wondrous still were the phases of change through which the rudimentary pigment-spot of the worm, by the development and differentiation of successive layers, gave place to the variously-constructed eyes of insects, mollusks, and vertebrates. The day for creative work of this sort has probably gone by, as the day for the evolution of annulose segments and vertebrate skeletons has gone by,--on our planet, at least. In the line of our own development, all work of this kind stopped long ago, to be replaced by different methods. As an optical instrument, the eye had well-nigh reached extreme perfection in many a bird and mammal ages before man's beginnings; and the essential features of the human hand existed already in the hands of Miocene apes. But different methods came in when human intelligence appeared upon the scene. Mr. Spencer has somewhere reminded us that the crowbar is but an extra lever added to the levers of which the arm is already composed, and the telescope but adds a new set of lenses to those which already exist in the eye. This beautiful illustration goes to the kernel of the change that was wrought when natural selection began to confine itself to the psychical modification of our ancestors. In a very deep sense all human science is but the increment of the power of the eye, and all human art is the increment of the power of the hand.[8] Vision and manipulation,--these, in their countless indirect and transfigured forms, are the two coöperating factors in all intellectual progress. It is not merely that with the telescope we see extinct volcanoes on the moon, or resolve spots of nebulous cloud into clusters of blazing suns; it is that in every scientific theory we frame by indirect methods visual images of things not present to sense. With our mind's eye we see atmospheric convulsions on the surfaces of distant worlds, watch the giant ichthyosaurs splashing in Jurassic oceans, follow the varied figures of the rhythmic dance of molecules as chemical elements unite and separate, or examine, with the aid of long-forgotten vocabularies now magically restored, the manners and morals, the laws and superstitions, of peoples that have ceased to be.[9] And so in art the wonderful printing-press, and the engine that moves it, are the lineal descendants through countless stages of complication, of the simple levers of primitive man and the rude stylus wherewith he engraved strange hieroglyphs on the bark of trees. In such ways, since the human phase of evolution began, has the direct action of muscle and sense been supplemented and superseded by the indirect work of the inquisitive and inventive mind. VIII. Growing Predominance of the Psychical Life. Let us note one further aspect of this mighty revolution. In its lowly beginnings the psychical life was merely an appendage to the life of the body. The avoidance of enemies, the securing of food, the perpetuation of the species, make up the whole of the lives of lower animals, and the rudiments of memory, reason, emotion, and volition were at first concerned solely with the achievement of these ends in an increasingly indirect, complex, and effective way. Though the life of a large portion of the human race is still confined to the pursuit of these same ends, yet so vast has been the increase of psychical life that the simple character of the ends is liable to be lost sight of amid the variety, the indirectness, and the complexity of the means. But in civilized society other ends, purely immaterial in their nature, have come to add themselves to these, and in some instances to take their place. It is long since we were told that Man does not live by bread alone. During many generations we have seen thousands of men, actuated by the noblest impulse of which humanity is capable, though misled by the teachings of a crude philosophy, despising and maltreating their bodies as clogs and incumbrances to the life of the indwelling soul. Countless martyrs we have seen throwing away the physical earthly life as so much worthless dross, and all for the sake of purely spiritual truths. As with religion, so with the scientific spirit and the artistic spirit,--the unquenchable craving to know the secrets of nature, and the yearning to create the beautiful in form and colour and sound. In the highest human beings such ends as these have come to be uppermost in consciousness, and with the progress of material civilization this will be more and more the case. If we can imagine a future time when warfare and crime shall have been done away with forever, when disease shall have been for the most part curbed, and when every human being by moderate labour can secure ample food and shelter, we can also see that in such a state of things the work of civilization would be by no means completed. In ministering to human happiness in countless ways, through the pursuit of purely spiritual ends, in enriching and diversifying life to the utmost, there would still be almost limitless work to be done. I believe that such a time will come for weary and suffering mankind. Such a faith is inspiring. It sustains one in the work of life, when one would otherwise lose heart. But it is a faith that rests upon induction. The process of evolution is excessively slow, and its ends are achieved at the cost of enormous waste of life, but for innumerable ages its direction has been toward the goal here pointed out; and the case may be fitly summed up in the statement that whereas in its rude beginnings the psychical life was but an appendage to the body, in fully-developed Humanity the body is but the vehicle for the soul. IX. The Origins of Society and of Morality. One further point must be considered before this outline sketch of the manner of man's origin can be called complete. The psychical development of Humanity, since its earlier stages, has been largely clue to the reaction of individuals upon one another in those various relations which we characterize as social.[10] In considering the origin of Man, the origin of human society cannot be passed over. Foreshadowings of social relations occur in the animal world, not only in the line of our own vertebrate ancestry, but in certain orders of insects which stand quite remote from that line. Many of the higher mammals are gregarious, and this is especially true of that whole order of primates to which we belong. Rudimentary moral sentiments are also clearly discernible in the highest members of various mammalian orders, and in all but the lowest members of our own order. But in respect of definiteness and permanence the relations between individuals in a state of gregariousness fall far short of the relations between individuals in the rudest human society. The primordial unit of human society is the family, and it was by the establishment of definite and permanent family relationships that the step was taken which raised Man socially above the level of gregarious apehood. This great point was attained through that lengthening of the period of helpless childhood which accompanied the gradually increasing intelligence of our half-human ancestors. When childhood had come to extend over a period of ten or a dozen years--a period which would be doubled, or more than doubled, where several children were born in succession to the same parents--the relationships between father and mother, brethren and sisters, must have become firmly knit; and thus the family, the unit of human society, gradually came into existence.[11] The rudimentary growth of moral sentiment must now have received a definite direction. As already observed, with the beginnings of infancy in the animal world there came the genesis in the parents of feelings and actions not purely self-regarding. Rudimentary sympathies, with rudimentary capacity for self-devotion, are witnessed now and then among higher mammals, such as the dog, and not uncommonly among apes. But as the human family, with its definite relationships, came into being, there must necessarily have grown up between its various members reciprocal necessities of behaviour. The conduct of the individual could no longer be shaped with sole reference to his own selfish desires, but must be to a great extent subordinated to the general welfare of the family. And in judging of the character of his own conduct, the individual must now begin to refer it to some law of things outside of himself; and hence the germs of conscience and of the idea of duty. Such were no doubt the crude beginnings of human morality. With this genesis of the family, the Creation of Man may be said, in a certain sense, to have been completed. The great extent of cerebral surface, the lengthened period of infancy, the consequent capacity for progress, the definite constitution of the family, and the judgment of actions as good or bad according to some other standard than that of selfish desire,--these are the attributes which essentially distinguish Man from other creatures. All these, we see, are direct or indirect results of the revolution which began when natural selection came to confine itself to psychical variations, to the neglect of physical variations. The immediate result was the increase of cerebrum. This prolonged the infancy, thus giving rise to the capacity for progress; and infancy, in turn, originated the family and thus opened the way for the growth of sympathies and of ethical feelings. All these results have perpetually reacted upon one another until a creature different in kind from all other creatures has been evolved. The creature thus evolved long since became dominant over the earth in a sense in which none of his predecessors ever became dominant; and henceforth the work of evolution, so far as our planet is concerned, is chiefly devoted to the perfecting of this last and most wonderful product of creative energy. X. Improvableness of Man. For the creation of Man was by no means the creation of a perfect being. The most essential feature of Man is his improvableness, and since his first appearance on the earth the changes that have gone on in him have been enormous, though they have continued to run along in the lines of development that were then marked out. The changes have been so great that in many respects the interval between the highest and the lowest men far surpasses quantitatively the interval between the lowest men and the highest apes. If we take into account the creasing of the cerebral surface, the difference between the brain of a Shakespeare and that of an Australian savage would doubtless be fifty times greater than the difference between the Australian's brain and that of an orang-outang. In mathematical capacity the Australian, who cannot tell the number of fingers on his two hands, is much nearer to a lion or wolf than to Sir Rowan Hamilton, who invented the method of quaternions. In moral development this same Australian, whose language contains no words for justice and benevolence, is less remote from dogs and baboons than from a Howard or a Garrison. In progressiveness, too, the difference between the lowest and the highest races of men is no less conspicuous. The Australian is more teachable than the ape, but his limit is nevertheless very quickly reached. All the distinctive attributes of Man, in short, have been developed to an enormous extent through long ages of social evolution. This psychical development of Man is destined to go on in the future as it has gone on in the past. The creative energy which has been at work through the bygone eternity is not going to become quiescent to-morrow. We have learned something of its methods of working, and from the careful observation of the past we can foresee the future in some of its most general outlines. From what has already gone on during the historic period of man's existence, we can safely predict a change that will by and by distinguish him from all other creatures even more widely and more fundamentally than he is distinguished today. Whenever in the course of organic evolution we see any function beginning as incidental to the performance of other functions, and continuing for many ages to increase in importance until it becomes an indispensable strand in the web of life, we may be sure that by a continuance of the same process its influence is destined to increase still more in the future. Such has been the case with the function of sympathy, and with the ethical feelings which have grown up along with sympathy and depend largely upon it for their vitality. Like everything else which especially distinguishes Man, the altruistic feelings were first called into existence through the first beginnings of infancy in the animal world. Their rudimentary form was that of the transient affection of a female bird or mammal for its young. First given a definite direction through the genesis of the primitive human family, the development of altruism has formed an important part of the progress of civilization, but as yet it has scarcely kept pace with the general development of intelligence. There can be little doubt that in respect of justice and kindness the advance of civilized man has been less marked than in respect of quick-wittedness. Now this is because the advancement of civilized man has been largely effected through fighting, through the continuance of that deadly struggle and competition which has been going on ever since organic life first appeared on the earth. It is through such fierce and perpetual struggle that the higher forms of life have been gradually evolved by natural selection. But we have already seen how in many respects the evolution of Man was the opening of an entirely new chapter in the history of the universe. In no respect was it more so than in the genesis of the altruistic emotions. For when natural selection, through the lengthening of childhood, had secured a determinate development for this class of human feelings, it had at last originated a power which could thrive only through the elimination of strife. And the later history of mankind, during the past thirty centuries, has been characterized by the gradual eliminating of strife, though the process has gone on with the extreme slowness that marks all the work of evolution. It is only at the present clay that, by surveying human history from the widest possible outlook, and with the aid of the habits of thought which the study of evolution fosters, we are enabled distinctly to observe this tendency. As this is the most wonderful of all the phases of that stupendous revolution in nature which was inaugurated in the Creation of Man, it deserves especial attention here; and we shall find it leading us quite directly to our conclusion. From the Origin of Man, when thoroughly comprehended in its general outlines, we shall at length be able to catch some glimpses of his Destiny. XI. Universal Warfare of Primeval Men. In speaking of the higher altruistic feelings as being antagonistic to the continuance of warfare, I did not mean to imply that warfare can ever be directly put down by our horror of cruelty or our moral disapproval of strife. The actual process is much more indirect and complex than this. In respect of belligerency the earliest men were doubtless no better than brutes. They were simply the most crafty and formidable among brutes. To get food was the prime necessity of life, and as long as food was obtainable only by hunting and fishing, or otherwise seizing upon edible objects already in existence, chronic and universal quarrel was inevitable. The conditions of the struggle for existence were not yet visibly changed from what they had been from the outset in the animal world. That struggle meant everlasting slaughter, and the fiercest races of fighters would be just the ones to survive and perpetuate their kind. Those most successful primitive men, from whom civilized peoples are descended, must have excelled in treachery and cruelty, as in quickness of wit and strength of will. That moral sense which makes it seem wicked to steal and murder was scarcely more developed in them than in tigers or wolves. But to all this there was one exception. The family supplied motives for peaceful coöperation.[12] Within the family limits fidelity and forbearance had their uses, for events could not have been long in showing that the most coherent families would prevail over their less coherent rivals. Observation of the most savage races agrees with the comparative study of the institutions of civilized peoples, in proving that the only bond of political union recognized among primitive men, or conceivable by them, was the physical fact of blood-relationship. Illustrations of this are found in plenty far within the historic period. The very township, which under one name or another has formed the unit of political society among all civilized peoples, was originally the stockaded dwelling-place of a clan which traced its blood to a common ancestor. In such a condition of things the nearest approach ever made to peace was a state of armed truce; and while the simple rules of morality were recognized, they were only regarded as binding within the limits of the clan. There was no recognition of the wickedness of robbery and murder in general. This state of things, as above hinted, could not come to an end as long as men obtained food by seizing upon edible objects already in existence. The supply of fish, game, or fruit being strictly limited, men must ordinarily fight under penalty of starvation. If we could put a moral interpretation upon events which antedated morality as we understand it, we should say it was their duty to fight; and the reverence accorded to the chieftain who murdered most successfully in behalf of his clansmen was well deserved. It is worthy of note that, in isolated parts of the earth where the natural supply of food is abundant, as in sundry tropical islands of the Pacific Ocean, men have ceased from warfare and become gentle and docile without rising above the intellectual level of savagery. Compared with other savages, they are like the chimpanzee as contrasted with the gorilla. Such exceptional instances well illustrate the general truth that, so long as the method of obtaining food was the same as that employed by brute animals, men must continue to fight like dogs over a bone. XII. First checked by the Beginnings of Industrial Civilization. But presently man's superior intelligence came into play in such wise that other and better methods of getting food were devised. When in intervals of peace men learned to rear flocks and herds, and to till the ground, and when they had further learned to exchange with one another the products of their labour, a new step, of most profound significance, was taken. Tribes which had once learned how to do these things were not long in overcoming their neighbours, and flourishing at their expense, for agriculture allows a vastly greater population to live upon a given area, and in many ways it favours social compactness. An immense series of social changes was now begun. Whereas the only conceivable bond of political combination had heretofore been blood-relationship, a new basis was now furnished by territorial contiguity and by community of occupation. The supply of food was no longer strictly limited, for it could be indefinitely increased by peaceful industry; and moreover, in the free exchange of the products of labour, it ceased to be true that one man's interest was opposed to another's. Men did not at once recognize this fact, and indeed it has not yet become universally recognized, so long have men persisted in interpreting the conditions of industrial life in accordance with the immemorial traditions of the time when the means of subsistence were strictly limited, so that one man's success meant another's starvation. Our robber tariffs--miscalled "protective"--are survivals of the barbarous mode of thinking which fitted the ages before industrial civilization began. But although the pacific implications of free exchange were very slowly recognized, it is not the less true that the beginnings of agriculture and commerce marked the beginnings of the greatest social revolution in the whole career of mankind. Henceforth the conditions for the maintenance of physical life became different from what they had been throughout the past history of the animal world. It was no longer necessary for men to quarrel for their food like dogs over a bone; for they could now obtain it far more effectively by applying their intelligence to the task of utilizing the forces of inanimate nature; and the due execution of such a task was in no wise assisted by wrath and contention, but from the outset was rather hindered by such things. Such were the beginnings of industrial civilization. Out of its exigencies, continually increasing in complexity, have proceeded, directly or indirectly, the arts and sciences which have given to modern life so much of its interest and value. But more important still has been the work of industrial civilization in the ethical field. By furnishing a wider basis for political union than mere blood-relationship, it greatly extended the area within which moral obligations were recognized as binding. At first confined to the clan, the idea of duty came at length to extend throughout a state in which many clans were combined and fused, and as it thus increased in generality and abstractness, the idea became immeasurably strengthened and ennobled. At last, with the rise of empires, in which many states were brought together in pacific industrial relations, the recognized sphere of moral obligation became enlarged until it comprehended all mankind. XIII. Methods of Political Development, and Elimination of Warfare. This rise of empires, this coalescence of small groups of men into larger and larger political aggregates, has been the chief work of civilization, when looked at on its political side.[13] Like all the work of evolution, this process has gone on irregularly and intermittently, and its ultimate tendency has only gradually become apparent. This process of coalescence has from the outset been brought about by the needs of industrial civilization, and the chief obstacle which it has had to encounter has been the universal hostility and warfare bequeathed from primeval times. The history of mankind has been largely made up of fighting, but in the careers of the most progressive races this fighting has been far from meaningless, like the battles of kites and crows. In the stream of history which, beginning on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, has widened until in our day it covers both sides of the Atlantic and is fast extending over the remotest parts of the earth,--in this main stream of history the warfare which has gone on has had a clearly discernible purpose and meaning. Broadly considered, this warfare has been chiefly the struggle of the higher industrial civilization in defending itself against the attacks of neighbours who had not advanced beyond that early stage of humanity in which warfare was chronic and normal. During the historic period, the wars of Europe have been either contests between the industrial and the predatory types of society, or contests incident upon the imperfect formation of large political aggregates. There have been three ways in which great political bodies have arisen. The earliest and lowest method was that of _conquest without incorporation_. A single powerful tribe conquered and annexed its neighbours without admitting them to a share in the government. It appropriated their military strength, robbed them of most of the fruits of their labour, and thus virtually enslaved them. Such was the origin of the great despotic empires of Oriental type. Such states degenerate rapidly in military strength. Their slavish populations, accustomed to be starved and beaten or massacred by the tax-gatherer, become unable to fight, so that great armies of them will flee before a handful of freemen, as in the case of the ancient Persians and the modern Egyptians. To strike down the executive head of such an assemblage of enslaved tribes is to effect the conquest or the dissolution of the whole mass, and hence the history of Eastern peoples has been characterized by sudden and gigantic revolutions. The second method of forming great political bodies was that of _conquest with incorporation_. The conquering tribe, while annexing its neighbours, gradually admitted them to a share in the government. In this way arose the Roman empire, the largest, the most stable, and in its best days the most pacific political aggregate the world had as yet seen. Throughout the best part of Europe, its conquests succeeded in transforming the ancient predatory type of society into the modern industrial type. It effectually broke up the primeval clan-system, with its narrow ethical ideas, and arrived at the broad conception of rights and duties coextensive with Humanity. But in the method upon which Rome proceeded there was an essential element of weakness. The simple device of representation, by which political power is equally retained in all parts of the community while its exercise is delegated to a central body, was entirely unknown to the Romans. Partly for this reason, and partly because of the terrible military pressure to which the frontier was perpetually exposed, the Roman government became a despotism which gradually took on many of the vices of the Oriental type. The political weakness which resulted from this allowed Europe to be overrun by peoples organized in clans and tribes, and for some time there was a partial retrogression toward the disorder characteristic of primitive ages. The retrogression was but partial and temporary, however; the exposed frontier has been steadily pushed eastward into the heart of Asia; the industrial type of society is no longer menaced by the predatory type; the primeval clan-system has entirely disappeared as a social force; and warfare, once ubiquitous and chronic, has become local and occasional. The third and highest method of forming great political bodies is that of _federation_. The element of fighting was essential in the two lower methods, but in this it is not essential. Here there is no conquest, but a voluntary union of small political groups into a great political group. Each little group preserves its local independence intact, while forming part of an indissoluble whole. Obviously this method of political union requires both high intelligence and high ethical development In early times it was impracticable. It was first attempted, with brilliant though ephemeral success, by the Greeks, but it failed for want of the device of representation. In later times it was put into operation, with permanent success, on a small scale by the Swiss, and on a great scale by our forefathers in England. The coalescence of shires into the kingdom of England, effected as it was by means of a representative assembly, and accompanied by the general retention of local self-government, afforded a distinct precedent for such a gigantic federal union as men of English race have since constructed in America. The principle of federation was there, though not the name. And here we hit upon the fundamental contrast between the history of England and that of France. The method by which the modern French nation has been built up has been the Roman method of conquest with incorporation. As the ruler of Paris gradually overcame his vassals, one after another, by warfare or diplomacy, he annexed their counties to his royal domain, and governed them by lieutenants sent from Paris. Self-government was thus crushed out in France, while it was preserved in England. And just as Rome achieved its unprecedented dominion by adopting a political method more effective than any that had been hitherto employed, so England, employing for the first time a still higher and more effective method, has come to play a part in the world compared with which even the part played by Rome seems insignificant. The test of the relative strength of the English and Roman methods came when England and France contended for the possession of North America. The people which preserved its self-government could send forth self-supporting colonies; the people which had lost the very tradition of self-government could not. Hence the dominion of the sea, with that of all the outlying parts of the earth, fell into the hands of men of English race; and hence the federative method of political union--the method which contains every element of permanence, and which is pacific in its very conception--is already assuming a sway which is unquestionably destined to become universal. Bearing all this in mind, we cannot fail to recognize the truth of the statement that the great wars of the historic period have been either contests between the industrial and the predatory types of society or contests incident upon the imperfect formation of great political aggregates. Throughout the turmoil of the historic period--which on a superficial view seems such a chaos--we see certain definite tendencies at work; the tendency toward the formation of larger and larger political aggregates, and toward the more perfect maintenance of local self-government and individual freedom among the parts of the aggregate. This two-sided process began with the beginnings of industrial civilization; it has aided the progress of industry and been aided by it; and the result has been to diminish the quantity of warfare, and to lessen the number of points at which it touches the ordinary course of civilized life. With the further continuance of this process, but one ultimate result is possible. It must go on until warfare becomes obsolete. The nineteenth century, which has witnessed an unprecedented development of industrial civilization, with its attendant arts and sciences, has also witnessed an unprecedented diminution in the strength of the primeval spirit of militancy. It is not that we have got rid of great wars, but that the relative proportion of human strength which has been employed in warfare has been remarkably less than in any previous age. In our own history, of the two really great wars which have permeated our whole social existence,--the Revolutionary War and the War of Secession,--the first was fought in behalf of the pacific principle of equal representation; the second was fought in behalf of the pacific principle of federalism. In each case, the victory helped to hasten the day when warfare shall become unnecessary. In the few great wars of Europe since the overthrow of Napoleon, we may see the same principle at work. In almost every case the result has been to strengthen the pacific tendencies of modern society. Whereas warfare was once dominant over the face of the earth, and came home in all its horrid details to everybody's door, and threatened the very existence of industrial civilization; it has now become narrowly confined in time and space, it no longer comes home to everybody's door, and, in so far as it is still tolerated, for want of a better method of settling grave international questions, it has become quite ancillary to the paramount needs, of industrial civilization. When we can see so much as this lying before us on the pages of history, we cannot fail to see that the final extinction of warfare is only a question of time. Sooner or later it must come to an end, and the pacific principle of federalism, whereby questions between states are settled, like questions between individuals by due process of law, must reign supreme over all the earth. XIV. End of the Working of Natural Selection upon Man. Throwing off the Brute-Inheritance. As regards the significance of Man's position in the universe, this gradual elimination of strife is a fact of utterly unparalleled grandeur. Words cannot do justice to such a fact. It means that the wholesale destruction of life, which has heretofore characterized evolution ever since life began, and through which the higher forms of organic existence have been produced, must presently come to an end in the case of the chief of God's creatures. It means that the universal struggle for existence, having succeeded in bringing forth that consummate product of creative energy, the Human Soul, has done its work and will presently cease. In the lower regions of organic life it must go on, but as a determining factor in the highest work of evolution it will disappear. The action of natural selection upon Man has long since been essentially diminished through the operation of social conditions. For in all grades of civilization above the lowest, "there are so many kinds of superiorities which severally enable men to survive, notwithstanding accompanying inferiorities, that natural selection cannot by itself rectify any particular unfitness." In a race of inferior animals any maladjustment is quickly removed by natural selection, because, owing to the universal slaughter, the highest completeness of life possible to a given grade of organization is required for the mere maintenance of life. But under the conditions surrounding human development it is otherwise.[14] There is a wide interval between the highest and lowest degrees of completeness of living that are compatible with maintenance of life. Hence the wicked flourish. Vice is but slowly eliminated, because mankind has so many other qualities, beside the bad ones, which enable it to subsist and achieve progress in spite of them, that natural selection--which always works through death--cannot come into play. The improvement of civilized man goes on mainly through processes of direct adaptation. The principle in accordance with which the gloved hand of the dandy becomes white and soft while the hand of the labouring man grows brown and tough is the main principle at work in the improvement of Humanity. Our intellectual faculties, our passions and prejudices, our tastes and habits, become strengthened by use and weakened by disuse, just as the blacksmith's arm grows strong and the horse turned out to pasture becomes unfit for work. This law of use and disuse has been of immense importance throughout the whole evolution of organic life. With Man it has come to be paramount. If now we contrast the civilized man intellectually and morally with the savage, we find that, along with his vast increase of cerebral surface, he has an immensely greater power of representing in imagination objects and relations not present to the senses. This is the fundamental intellectual difference between civilized men and savages.[15] The power of imagination, or ideal representation, underlies the whole of science and art, and it is closely connected with the ability to work hard and submit to present discomfort for the sake of a distant reward. It is also closely connected with the development of the sympathetic feelings. The better we can imagine objects and relations not present to sense, the more readily we can sympathize with other people. Half the cruelty in the world is the direct result of stupid incapacity to put one's self in the other man's place. So closely inter-related are our intellectual and moral natures that the development of sympathy is very considerably determined by increasing width and variety of experience. From the simplest form of sympathy, such as the painful thrill felt on seeing some one in a dangerous position, up to the elaborate complication of altruistic feelings involved in the notion of abstract justice, the development is very largely a development of the representative faculty. The very same causes, therefore, deeply grounded in the nature of industrial civilization, which have developed science and art, have also had a distinct tendency to encourage the growth of the sympathetic emotions. But, as already observed, these emotions are still too feebly developed, even in the highest races of men. We have made more progress in intelligence than in kindness. For thousands of generations, and until very recent times, one of the chief occupations of men has been to plunder, bruise, and kill one another. The selfish and ugly passions which are primordial--which have the incalculable strength of inheritance from the time when animal consciousness began--have had but little opportunity to grow weak from disuse. The tender and unselfish feelings, which are a later product of evolution, have too seldom been allowed to grow strong from exercise. And the whims and prejudices of the primeval militant barbarism are slow in dying out from the midst of peaceful industrial civilization. The coarser forms of cruelty are disappearing, and the butchery of men has greatly diminished. But most people apply to industrial pursuits a notion of antagonism derived from ages of warfare, and seek in all manner of ways to cheat or overreach one another. And as in more barbarous times the hero was he who had slain his tens of thousands, so now the man who has made wealth by overreaching his neighbours is not uncommonly spoken of in terms which imply approval. Though gentlemen, moreover, no longer assail one another with knives and clubs, they still inflict wounds with cruel words and sneers. Though the free--thinker is no longer chained to a stake and burned, people still tell lies about him, and do their best to starve him by hurting his reputation. The virtues of forbearance and self-control are still in a very rudimentary state, and of mutual helpfulness there is far too little among men. Nevertheless in all these respects some improvement has been made, along with the diminution of warfare, and by the time warfare has not merely ceased from the earth but has come to be the dimly remembered phantom of a remote past, the development of the sympathetic side of human nature will doubtless become prodigious. The manifestation of selfish and hateful feelings will be more and more sternly repressed by public opinion, and such feelings will become weakened by disuse, while the sympathetic feelings will increase in strength as the sphere for their exercise is enlarged. And thus at length we see what human progress means. It means throwing off the brute-inheritance,--gradually throwing it off through ages of struggle that are by and by to make struggle needless. Man is slowly passing from a primitive social state in which he was little better than a brute, toward an ultimate social state in which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it. The ape and the tiger in human nature will become extinct. Theology has had much to say about original sin. This original sin is neither more nor less than the brute-inheritance which every man carries with him, and the process of evolution is an advance toward true salvation. Fresh value is thus added to human life. The modern prophet, employing the methods of science, may again proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Work ye, therefore, early and late, to prepare its coming. XV. The Message of Christianity. Now what is this message of the modern prophet but pure Christianity?--not the mass of theological doctrine ingeniously piled up by Justin Martyr and Tertullian and Clement and Athanasius and Augustine, but the real and essential Christianity which came, fraught with good tidings to men, from the very lips of Jesus and Paul! When did St. Paul's conception of the two men within him that warred against each other, the appetites of our brute nature and the God-given yearning for a higher life,--when did this grand conception ever have so much significance as now? When have we ever before held such a clew to the meaning of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount? "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." In the cruel strife of centuries has it not often seemed as if the earth were to be rather the prize of the hardest heart and the strongest fist? To many men these words of Christ have been as foolishness and as a stumbling-block, and the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount have been openly derided as too good for this world. In that wonderful picture of modern life which is the greatest work of one of the great seers of our time, Victor Hugo gives a concrete illustration of the working of Christ's methods. In the saintlike career of Bishop Myriel, and in the transformation which his example works in the character of the hardened outlaw Jean Valjean, we have a most powerful commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. By some critics who could express their views freely about "Les Misérables" while hesitating to impugn directly the authority of the New Testament, Monseigneur Bienvenu was unsparingly ridiculed as a man of impossible goodness, and as a milksop and fool withal. But I think Victor Hugo understood the capabilities of human nature, and its real dignity, much better than these scoffers. In a low stage of civilization Monseigneur Bienvenu would have had small chance of reaching middle life. Christ himself, we remember, was crucified between two thieves. It is none the less true that when once the degree of civilization is such as to allow this highest type of character, distinguished by its meekness and kindness, to take root and thrive, its methods are incomparable in their potency. The Master knew full well that the time was not yet ripe,--that he brought not peace, but a sword. But he preached nevertheless that gospel of great joy which is by and by to be realized by toiling Humanity, and he announced ethical principles fit for the time that is coming. The great originality of his teaching, and the feature that has chiefly given it power in the world, lay in the distinctness with which he conceived a state of society from which every vestige of strife, and the modes of behaviour adapted to ages of strife, shall be utterly and forever swept away. Through misery that has seemed unendurable and turmoil that has seemed endless, men have thought on that gracious life and its sublime ideal, and have taken comfort in the sweetly solemn message of peace on earth and good will to men. I believe that the promise with which I started has now been amply redeemed. I believe it has been fully shown that so far from degrading Humanity, or putting it on a level with the animal world in general, the doctrine of evolution shows us distinctly for the first time how the creation and the perfecting of Man is the goal toward which Nature's work has been tending from the first. We can now see clearly that our new knowledge enlarges tenfold the significance of human life, and makes it seem more than ever the chief object of Divine care, the consummate fruition of that creative energy which is manifested throughout the knowable universe. XVI. The Question as to a Future Life. Upon the question whether Humanity is, after all, to cast in its lot with the grass that withers and the beasts that perish, the whole foregoing argument has a bearing that is by no means remote or far-fetched. It is not likely that we shall ever succeed in making the immortality of the soul a matter of scientific demonstration, for we lack the requisite data. It must ever remain an affair of religion rather than of science. In other words, it must remain one of that class of questions upon which I may not expect to convince my neighbour, while at the same time I may entertain a reasonable conviction of my own upon the subject.[16] In the domain of cerebral physiology the question might be debated forever without a result. The only thing which cerebral physiology tells us, when studied with the aid of molecular physics, is against the materialist, so far as it goes. It tells us that, during the present life, although thought and feeling are always manifested in connection with a peculiar form of matter, yet by no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense the products of matter. Nothing could be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. It is not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. What goes on in the brain is an amazingly complex series of molecular movements, with which thought and feeling are in some unknown way correlated, not as effects or as causes, but as concomitants. So much is clear, but cerebral physiology says nothing about another life. Indeed, why should it? The last place in the world to which I should go for information about a state of things in which thought and feeling can exist in the absence of a cerebrum would be cerebral physiology! The materialistic assumption that there is no such state of things, and that the life of the soul accordingly ends with the life of the body, is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy. No evidence for it can be alleged beyond the familiar fact that during the present life we know Soul only in its association with Body, and therefore cannot discover disembodied soul without dying ourselves. This fact must always prevent us from obtaining direct evidence for the belief in the soul's survival. But a negative presumption is not created by the absence of proof in cases where, in the nature of things, proof is inaccessible.[17] With his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the materialist transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet who sings of the New Jerusalem with its river of life and its streets of gold. Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle of evidence for either view. But when we desist from the futile attempt to introduce scientific demonstration into a region which confessedly transcends human experience, and when we consider the question upon broad grounds of moral probability, I have no doubt that men will continue in the future, as in the past, to cherish the faith in a life beyond the grave. In past times the disbelief in the soul's immortality has always accompanied that kind of philosophy which, under whatever name, has regarded Humanity as merely a local incident in an endless and aimless series of cosmical changes. As a general rule, people who have come to take such a view of the position of Man in the universe have ceased to believe in a future life. On the other hand, he who regards Man as the consummate fruition of creative energy, and the chief object of Divine care, is almost irresistibly driven to the belief that the soul's career is not completed with the present life upon the earth. Difficulties on theory he will naturally expect to meet in many quarters; but these will not weaken his faith, especially when he remembers that upon the alternative view the difficulties are at least as great. We live in a world of mystery, at all events, and there is not a problem in the simplest and most exact departments of science which does not speedily lead us to a transcendental problem that we can neither solve nor elude. A broad common-sense argument has often to be called in, where keen-edged metaphysical analysis has confessed itself baffled. Now we have here seen that the doctrine of evolution does not allow us to take the atheistic view of the position of Man. It is true that modern astronomy shows us giant balls of vapour condensing into fiery suns, cooling down into planets fit for the support of life, and at last growing cold and rigid in death, like the moon. And there are indications of a time when systems of dead planets shall fall in upon their central ember that was once a sun, and the whole lifeless mass, thus regaining heat, shall expand into a nebulous cloud like that with which we started, that the work of condensation and evolution may begin over again. These Titanic events must doubtless seem to our limited vision like an endless and aimless series of cosmical changes. They disclose no signs of purpose, or even of dramatic tendency;[18] they seem like the weary work of Sisyphos. But on the face of our own planet, where alone we are able to survey the process of evolution in its higher and more complex details, we do find distinct indications of a dramatic tendency, though doubtless not of purpose in the limited human sense. The Darwinian theory, properly understood, replaces as much teleology[19] as it destroys. From the first dawning of life we see all things working together toward one mighty goal, the evolution of the most exalted spiritual qualities which characterize Humanity. The body is cast aside and returns to the dust of which it was made. The earth, so marvellously wrought to man's uses, will also be cast aside. The day is to come, no doubt, when the heavens shall vanish as a scroll, and the elements be melted with fervent heat. So small is the value which Nature sets upon the perishable forms of matter! The question, then, is reduced to this: are Man's highest spiritual qualities, into the production of which all this creative energy has gone, to disappear with the rest? Has all this work been done for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a bubble that bursts, a vision that fades? Are we to regard the Creator's work as like that of a child, who builds houses out of blocks, just for the pleasure of knocking them down? For aught that science can tell us, it may be so, but I can see no good reason for believing any such thing. On such a view the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle without a meaning. Why, then, are we any more called upon to throw away our belief in the permanence of the spiritual element in Man than we are called upon to throw away our belief in the constancy of Nature? When questioned as to the ground of our irresistible belief that like causes must always be followed by like effects, Mr. Mill's answer was that it is the result of an induction coextensive with the whole of our experience; Mr. Spencer's answer was that it is a postulate which we make in every act of experience;[20] but the authors of the "Unseen Universe," slightly varying the form of statement, called it a supreme act of faith,--the expression of a trust in God, that He will not "put us to permanent intellectual confusion." Now the more thoroughly we comprehend that process of evolution by which things have come to be what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in Man is to rob the whole process of its meaning. It goes far toward putting us to permanent intellectual confusion, and I do not see that any one has as yet alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason for our accepting so dire an alternative. For my own part, therefore, I believe in the immortality of the soul, not in the sense in which I accept the demonstrable truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work. Such a belief, relating to regions quite inaccessible to experience, cannot of course be clothed in terms of definite and tangible meaning. For the experience which alone can give us such terms we must await that solemn day which is to overtake us all. The belief can be most quickly defined by its negation, as the refusal to believe that this world is all. The materialist holds that when you have described the whole universe of phenomena of which we can become cognizant under the conditions of the present life, then the whole story is told. It seems to me, on the contrary, that the whole story is not thus told. I feel the omnipresence of mystery in such wise as to make it far easier for me to adopt the view of Euripides, that what we call death may be but the dawning of true knowledge and of true life. The greatest philosopher of modern times, the master and teacher of all who shall study the process of evolution for many a day to come, holds that the conscious soul is not the product of a collocation of material particles, but is in the deepest sense a divine effluence. According to Mr. Spencer, the divine energy which is manifested throughout the knowable universe is the same energy that wells up in us as consciousness. Speaking for myself, I can see no insuperable difficulty in the notion that at some period in the evolution of Humanity this divine spark may have acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the wreck of material forms and endure forever. Such a crowning wonder seems to me no more than the fit climax to a creative work that has been ineffably beautiful and marvellous in all its myriad stages. Only on some such view can the reasonableness of the universe, which still remains far above our finite power of comprehension, maintain its ground. There are some minds inaccessible to the class of considerations here alleged, and perhaps there always will be. But on such grounds, if on no other, the faith in immortality is likely to be shared by all who look upon the genesis of the highest spiritual qualities in Man as the goal of Nature's creative work. This view has survived the Copernican revolution in science, and it has survived the Darwinian revolution. Nay, if the foregoing exposition be sound, it is Darwinism which has placed Humanity upon a higher pinnacle than ever. The future is lighted for us with the radiant colours of hope. Strife and sorrow shall disappear. Peace and love shall reign supreme. The dream of poets, the lesson of priest and prophet, the inspiration of the great musician, is confirmed in the light of modern knowledge; and as we gird ourselves up for the work of life, we may look forward to the time when in the truest sense the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever, king of kings and lord of lords. REFERENCES. C.P., Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, 1874; U.W., The Unseen World, 1876; D., Darwinism and Other Essays, 1879; E.E., Excursions of an Evolutionist, 1884. 1: C.P. ii. 432-451. 2: C.P. ii. 89-91. 3: C.P. ii. 318-321; D. 45. 4: U.W. 40-42; D. 65-74; E.E. 278-282, 327, 336. 5: C.P. ii. 154-159. 6: C.P. ii. 133-135. 7: D. 45-48; E.E. 306-319. 8: C.P. ii. 310. 9: E.E. 109-146. 10: C.P. ii. 284-323. 11: C.P. ii. 342-346, 358-363. 12: C.P. ii. 202-208. 13: C.P. ii. 213-224. 14: C.P. ii. 334. 15: C.P. ii. 312-315. 16: U.W. 54; E.E. 289-291. 17: U.W. 47-50; D. 75. 18: D. 96-102. 19: C.P. ii. 406. 20: C.P. i. 45-71, 286; ii. 162; U.W. 6; D. 87-95. * * * * * John Fiske's Writings. MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS: Old Tales and Superstitions interpreted by Comparative Mythology, _17th Edition_. 12mo, $2.00. OUTLINES OF COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. Based on the Doctrine of Evolution, with Criticisms on the Positive Philosophy. _14th Edition_. 2 vols., 8vo, $6.00 THE UNSEEN WORLD, and other Essays, _12th Edition_. 12mo, $2.00. EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST. _15th Edition_. 12mo, $2.00. DARWINISM, and other Essays. _8th Edition_. 12mo, $2.00. THE DESTINY OF MAN, viewed in the Light of His Origin. _20th Edition_. 16mo, $1.00. THE IDEA OF GOD, as affected by Modern Knowledge. A Sequel to "The Destiny of Man." _14th Thousand_. 16mo, $1.00. THE CRITICAL PERIOD OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 1783-1789. _12th Edition_. Crown 8vo, $2.00. THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty. _10th Thousand_. Crown 8vo, $2.00. THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE. In Riverside Library for Young People. 16mo, 75 cents. THE DISCOVERY AND SPANISH CONQUEST OF AMERICA. With Maps, _11th Thousand_. 2 vols., crown 8vo, $4.00. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. _8th Thousand_. 2 vols., crown 8vo, $4.00. 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Hill, and Bibliographical Notes by Mr. Fiske. 12mo, $1.00, net._ If this admirable volume (Fiske's "Civil Government") can be fairly taught to our rising generation, the future, we believe, will show that Mr. Fiske has never done more useful work than in its preparation.--_The Congregationalist_ (Boston). THE CRITICAL PERIOD OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 1783-1789. _With Map, Notes, etc. Crown 8vo, $2.00._ The author combines in an unusual degree the impartiality of the trained scholar with the fervor of the interested narrator.... The volume should be in every library in the land.--_The Congregationalist_ (Boston). An admirable book.... Mr. Fiske has a great talent for making history interesting to the general reader.--_New York Times_. THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND; _Or, the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty. 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His treatment is a marvel of clearness and comprehensiveness; discarding non-essential details, he selects with a fine historic instinct the main currents of history, traces them with the utmost precision, and tells the whole story in a masterly fashion. His little volume will be a text-book for older quite as much as for young readers.--_Christian Union_ (New York). OUTLINES OF COSMIC PHILOSOPHY _Based on the Doctrine of Evolution, with Criticisms on the Positive Philosophy. In two volumes. 8vo, $6.00._ "You must allow me to thank you for the very great interest with which I have at last slowly read the whole of your work.... I never in my life read so lucid an expositor (and therefore thinker) as you are; and I think that I understand nearly the whole, though perhaps less clearly about cosmic theism and causation than other parts. It is hopeless to attempt out of so much to specify what has interested me most, and probably you would not care to hear. 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RALSTON, in _Athenæum_ (London). A perusal of this thorough work cannot be too strongly recommended to all who are interested in comparative mythology.--_Revue Critique_ (Paris). THE DESTINY OF MAN, _Viewed in the Light of his Origin. 16mo, gilt top, $1.00._ Mr. Fiske has given us in his "Destiny of Man" a most attractive condensation of his views as expressed in his various other works. One is charmed by the directness and clearness of his style, his simple and pure English, and his evident knowledge of his subject.... Of one thing we may be sure, that none are leading us more surely or rapidly to the full truth than men like the author of this little book, who reverently study the works of God for the lessons which he would teach his children.--_Christian Union_ (New York). THE IDEA OF GOD, _As Affected by Modern Knowledge. 16mo, gilt top, $1.00._ The charms of John Fiske's style are patent. 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27237	----	AN ESSAY ON THE SCRIPTURAL DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY BY THE REV. JAMES CHALLIS, M.A., F.R.S., F.R.A.S. PLUMIAN PROFESSOR OF ASTRONOMY AND EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, AND FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE. _Anagke gar moi epikeitai ouai gar moi estin, ean me euaggelzûmai --1 Cor. ix. 16 RIVINGTONS London, Oxford, and Cambridge MDCCCLXXX RIVINGTONS London . . . . . . _Waterloo Place_ Oxford . . . . . . _Magdalen Street_ Cambridge . . . . _Trinity Street_ [_All rights reserved_] {1} AN ESSAY ON THE SCRIPTURAL DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY. Considering that under the existing conditions of humanity, disease, and decay, and death abound on every side, it is surprising that the word "immortality" obtained a place in systems of philosophy, the authors of which must be supposed to have been unacquainted with divine revelation. It is not surprising that in the absence of such aid the belief of immortality should not have been firmly held, or that by some philosophers it should have been expressly disavowed. Even in the Canonical Scriptures, the words "immortal" and "immortality" occur only in the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, and consequently not till "life and immortality had been brought to light through the Gospel." It is a remarkable circumstance that these words are met with more frequently in the Apocryphal Books, 2 Esdras, Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus, than in the Canonical Scriptures. The {2} explanation of the apparent silence of the Scriptures, especially those of the Old Testament, on so essential a doctrine, will, I think, be found to be given by the course of argument adopted in this essay. It may, further, be noticed that, according to philosophical dogma not derived from the teaching of Scripture, immortality is regarded as a principle, or innate quality, in virtue of which the human soul is exempt from the experience of death or annihilation. On this account Greek and Roman philosophers speak of "the immortality of _the soul_," and even in the present day the same terms are used, the soul being regarded as _per se_ immortal. But neither in the Scriptures, nor in the Apocrypha, is "immortality" qualified by the adjunct "of the soul;" the reason for which may be that since death, as far as our senses inform us, is an _objective_ reality, the writers judged that mortality and freedom from mortality could only be predicated of _body_. It must, however, be taken into account that according to the doctrine of Scripture there is "a spiritual body" as well as "a natural body," so that while the natural body is, as we know, subject to the law of death, it may be true that the spiritual body is capable of immortality. This point will be farther discussed in the course of the essay. To account for the absence of any direct announcement of man's immortality in the Old Testament, and for its being sparingly mentioned in the New {3} Testament, the following argument seems legitimate and sufficient. These Scriptures, as already intimated, give no countenance to the idea that the soul of man possesses any innate principle of immortality; on the contrary, they reveal immortality by revealing _the means_ by which the spirit of man is _made_ immortal. As, according to natural science, the external world, both the animate part and the inanimate, has become such as we now perceive it to be by processes of generation and development, so there is reason from Scripture to say that a spiritual world is being created in an analogous manner, and that to this creation all other creations are subordinate and contributory. Moreover, we, the subjects of this creation, are so constituted that we are conscious of, and can ourselves take cognizance of, the means by which it is effected. These considerations may be applied to account for the mode in which immortality is treated of in the Bible. It concerns us, above all things, to discern and feel the operations whereby our spirits are formed both intellectually and morally for an immortal existence; and, accordingly, Scripture is full of instruction, addressed both to the understanding and the heart, concerning those means. Thus, although the final effect is not directly named till the scheme of the spiritual creation is completely unfolded, it is yet true that the whole of the Scriptures from beginning to end has relation to man's immortality. {4} Not only did the philosophy of Greece and Rome fail to substantiate the reality of an immortal existence; other philosophical systems, as well the mystical conceptions of Eastern nations, as the metaphysical speculations of modern Europe, have equally failed to arrive at certainty respecting this verity. Now, it will be found, I think, to be established by the argument of this essay, that in all these instances the cause of failure is the same. The doctrine cannot, in fact, be understood and believed without an understanding of the means by which the immortal spirit is _formed_, and the ascertainment of those means is beyond the power of unaided human intelligence. Although the evidences of an immortal destiny may be in us and around us, they cannot be discerned apart from enlightenment by a divine revelation as to the purpose and end of the whole creation. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments profess to be a revelation of the mind and will of the Creator of all things. If they are really such, they must be capable of giving the information which, as said above, is necessary for certifying the doctrine of man's immortality. I shall, therefore, with express reference to the title of the essay, first make the _hypothesis_ that the Scriptures are indeed a revelation from God, written to reveal His will and His acts, and on this ground I shall proceed to inquire what information can be derived from them respecting the {5} _creation_ of the spirit of man for an immortal destiny. The character of the information obtained may possibly suffice to establish both the truth of the hypothesis and the certainty of the doctrine of immortality. Before commencing the argument, it will be well to state on what principles, and according to what rules, Scripture will be cited for conducting it. It will be supposed that the Holy Scriptures, as a whole, consist of words of God written for our sakes; and although they were written by human authors, under diverse circumstances, and in various ages, the several parts are still to be regarded as having virtually but _one author_, the Holy Spirit, and as constituting on that account a consistent whole. This view is almost necessitated by the noticeable circumstance that very little information is given in the Scriptures themselves respecting the authors of the writings, or the time and place of their composition. This is true, for instance, of such cardinal books as the four Gospels. Respecting these matters enough is said to show that human hands have been employed to write the books of Scripture, while so much has been left unsaid that we must infer that this kind of information is of little moment by reason of the _internal_ evidence the Scriptures contain of their divine authorship. Such evidence, it seems to me, is especially given by the fact that the Scriptures present a faithful _transcript_ of {6} the world as it has been and is, in respect to the calamities, wars, and revolutions that have befallen nations, and those weaknesses and wickednesses of individuals and peoples, the accounts of which are so great a stumbling-block to the "unstable and the unlearned." These very accounts, it is possible, may be intended to tell us, if rightly inquired into, why these things are so, why there is evil in the world, and what shall be the end of it. The world has existed, it is believed, nearly six thousand years, and at this day we see that many suffer from sorrow and pain, labour and poverty are the lot of a very large proportion of the populations, calamities by fire and water are frequent, plague and pestilence still visit the earth, cruelty and murders are rife, and so far from there being an end of wars, never before have men fabricated such potent implements for killing each other. Such facts as these constitute, after all, the difficulties which beset humanity, and it may be presumed that, with the intent of accounting for their existence, they are put on record in the word of God. On the broad principle that the Author of a world like this will have vouchsafed reasons for its being such as it is, I accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the word of God written for this very purpose, and instead of cavilling, as some do, at difficulties which probably have no other foundation than their own ignorance, it will be my {7} endeavour to make use of Scripture for explaining the perplexities and difficulties which actually surround the facts of human experience. The discussion of the particular question I have taken in hand will give occasion for employing the Scriptures in this manner, and in doing so I shall quote from all parts indiscriminately, regarding the whole as sufficiently authoritative and trustworthy for the purposes of the argument. The above-mentioned general purpose the Scriptures may be supposed to be adequate to fulfil, whether as expressed in the Hebrew tongue, or in that of the Septuagint, or as translated in the English version, notwithstanding that, as must be admitted, faults of transcription, or translation, or interpretation have given rise to many verbal errors. But the difficulties produced by these imperfections are of slight importance in comparison with the great difficulty of discovering how and on what principles to interpret the Scriptures so as to derive from them the particular doctrines they are designed to teach. Amid the great diversity of views that exists relative to modes of interpretation, it may safely be maintained that the foremost and chief requisite for making true deductions from the Scriptures is to have _confidence_ in them as being depositions of Divine wisdom. Men of science, in their endeavours to discover the secrets of Nature, are baffled again and again, and yet by little and {8} little they obtain accessions to knowledge just because they never doubt but that Nature, if rightly interrogated, will give them true answers. It seems, therefore, reasonable to expect that the words of God, handled on principles analogous to those which have been successfully applied in acquiring knowledge of His works, might be found capable of answering the hard questions which are now, more, perhaps, than in past times, agitating men's minds. This philosophy, having a surer basis than that of any mere human intellectual system, might be expected to succeed where these have failed. The bearing of these remarks on the main subject of the essay will be seen as we go on. Commencing now, after the foregoing preliminaries, the general argument, I remark, in the first place, that since, as matter of fact, all men die, they cannot partake of immortality unless they are restored to life after death. We have, therefore, to inquire both as to what the Scriptures say concerning _death_, and what they reveal concerning _resurrection_. Again, it may be taken for granted that as in the natural world, so in the spiritual world, the Creator of all things effects His purposes by operating according to _laws_. On this principle St. Paul in Rom. viii. 2 speaks of "the law of sin and death," meaning that sin and death are invariably related to each other as antecedent and consequent. By an irrevocable law {9} death is ordained to be "the wages of sin" (Rom. vi. 23). Of ourselves we can judge that it does not consist with the power and wisdom of an omnipotent and omniscient Creator that the sinful should live for ever. But if this be so, it must evidently be true also that immortality, being exemption from death, is the _consequence_ of freedom from sin, that is, of perfect righteousness. This is as necessary a law as the other. Hence the inquiry respecting the means by which man is made immortal resolves itself into inquiring by what means he is made righteous; and, as the first step in this inquiry, we have to consider what Scripture says concerning the entrance of sin and death into the world. If sin be defined to be doing what is contrary to the will of God, as expressed by a command, righteousness, being its opposite, will consist in acting according to His will. Hence sin and righteousness both imply that a revelation of the will of God has been antecedently made, either directly by a command or law, or by the voice of conscience. It is on this principle that St. Paul says, "apart from law sin is dead" (Rom. vii. 8), and in another place speaks of "the righteousness _of the law_" being fulfilled (Rom. viii. 4). Accordingly, when Adam was placed in the garden of Eden, a _command_ was expressly given him for trial of his obedience. {10} The narrative in Scripture of the circumstances under which sin was first committed is deserving of special consideration on account of the instruction it conveys. It states that Eve, knowing that God had commanded Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, yet, being deceived by the serpent and enticed by her own desires, "took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also to her husband with her, and he did eat" (Gen. iii. 6). Thus, as St. Paul writes, "Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression" (1 Tim. ii. 14). But both partook of the forbidden fruit, and by so doing both sinned alike against their Maker, the deed being sinful, not as considered by itself, but by reason of the antecedent command, which made it an act of _disobedience_. If we assume that the account of Eve's temptation is to be taken as literally true, so that the tempter had actually the form of a serpent and addressed to her _spoken_ words, these facts will have to be regarded as altogether _miraculous_. There are good reasons for admitting this view, when it is considered, first, that the information which this portion of Scripture gives equally concerns all of every age, and in order that it might be intelligible to all, it was necessary that in the infancy of the world it should be conveyed by _objective_ representation; and, again, that various instances are met with in the Bible of analogous {11} teaching of essential doctrine by means of miracles. The translation of Enoch, the Deluge, the destruction of Sodom, the plagues of Egypt and deliverance of Israel, the giving of the law from Sinai, the passage of Jordan, the ascension of Elijah, and the resurrection of Christ, are all symbolic miracles, the interpretations of which have intimate relation to the doctrine of man's immortality. This being understood, I shall proceed to discuss particularly the meaning of the Scriptural account of the beginning of sin through temptation by the serpent, and on the supposition that the facts as recorded are real but symbolic, I shall endeavour to deduce from them their doctrinal signification. The first question to consider is, Why is the tempting spirit called a _serpent_? The Scripture affirms that "the serpent was more subtil (_phronimôatos_) than any beast of the field" (Gen. iii. 1); and our Lord, addressing his apostles, said, "Lo, I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye, therefore, wise (_phronimoi_) as serpents, and harmless as doves." Yet, as we know, the serpent is not endowed in any special manner with sagacity or reason. The fact is, the epithet "subtil" is applied to the serpent with reference to its form and movements, which convey the abstract idea of subtlety on the same principle that the words "tortuous" and "twisting" have an abstract meaning when we speak of "tortuous policy," {12} or "twisting the meaning of a sentence." Now this subtle entity--this serpent--although presented to Eve in bodily form, was not the less that spirit of evil, the personal existence of which, on the hypothesis that the Scriptures are true, as well as its influence on human minds, must be admitted. Accordingly our first parents were tempted by what St. Paul calls "the wiles (_tas methodeias_) of the devil" (Eph. vi. 11). Again, the statement in Gen. iii. 6, that "when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat," is in accordance with what St. John teaches as to "the lust of the flesh," "the lust of the eyes," and "the pride of life," being opposed to "doing the will of God" (1 John ii. 16, 17). Also, as we have seen, Adam was associated with a partner, who, having been overcome, in consequence of such desires, by the wiles of Satan, committed sin, and then induced her husband to do the same. Thus, since the world at that time consisted of these two individuals, it is an obvious inference, as well as one of great significance, that Adam was tempted just as all his offspring are--that is, by the world, the flesh, and the devil--and, as all his offspring do, yielded to the temptation. Although Adam was created in the image of his Maker in respect to being endowed with powers of {13} understanding and reasoning, and although he was made capable of learning and doing righteousness, he was not originally _made righteous_, forasmuch as he sinned: but those whom God makes righteous sin no more, because all the works of God are perfect. "The first man Adam was made a living soul," the breath of life being breathed into his nostrils (Gen. ii. 7). He thus partook of natural life, but not of spiritual life. He was, as St. Paul says, "of the earth, earthy," and all we who are descended from him "bear the image of the earthy" (1 Cor. xv. 47, 49). The mind (_to phronêma_) of this natural man is at "enmity with God," and "neither is, nor can be, subject to the law of God" (Rom. viii. 7). This accounts for our perceiving in children from their very infancy a spirit of disobedience, this spirit being derived through natural descent from that which our first parents exhibited in the infancy of the world. The author of the Apocryphal Book, 2 Esdras, writes: "The first man Adam, bearing a wicked heart, transgressed, and was overcome; and so be all they that are born of him" (iii. 21). In the Wisdom of Solomon this passage occurs: "Wisdom preserved the first formed father of the world, that was created alone, and brought him out of his fall" (x. 1). But it is to be remarked that the word here translated "fall" is _paraptôma_, the same word that St. Paul uses in Rom. iv. 25 and v. 16, to designate "_our_ transgressions." {14} Cruden in his Concordance gives under the word "fall" an elaborate statement of received views respecting "the fall of man," although that word, as the Concordance shows, does not once occur in the Canonical Scriptures in any relation to the sin of Adam. It is very noteworthy that after the account of Adam's sin in Genesis, no express mention is made of it in subsequent Canonical Books, till we come to the fifth chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, where the introduction of sin into the world by _one man_ is prominently adduced in an argumentative passage which appears to me to have been much misunderstood.[1] The reason that a fact which is so essential an element in theological systems is so little adverted to in the Scriptures, I consider to be, that these systems have hitherto not recognized an analogy which may be presumed to exist between God's natural creation and His spiritual creation. From what is stated in Genesis i. and ii. there is reason to say that the natural creation was at its beginning without form, and dark, and unfurnished, and that by the power of the Creator, operating, we may presume, according to laws, it was brought into the state of order, light, and adornment (_kosmos_) which we now behold. Hence, arguing from analogy, we {15} might infer that the spiritual creation has its beginning in the reign of sin and death, and that by the power of the Spirit of God, operating according to law on our spirits, it has its consummation in the establishment of righteousness and life. This analogical inference suffices, I think, to explain why, after the brief initial account of the entrance of sin and death into the world, the purport of the whole of Scripture is to record the subsequent prevalence of sin, and to reveal by what means grace abounded in the gift of righteousness, and how it abounded all the more because the law of sin and death "passed" from one man "upon all men" (Rom. v. 12). The apostle Paul argues that whereas "_death_ reigned through one, _much rather_ shall they who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in _life_ through one Jesus Christ" (Rom. v. 17); and in accordance with this doctrine he adds (v. 20), "The law entered by the way (_pareisêlen_) _in order that_ the offence might abound, but where sin abounded grace did much more abound." It seems impossible to draw from such sentences as these any other inference than that, according to the scheme of the spiritual creation, the reign of sin and death is the necessary antecedent of the evolution of life from righteousness. The apostle sums up his argument by saying (v. 19), "For as by the disobedience of one man the many were made sinners, so also by the obedience {16} of one shall the many be made righteous" (_dikaioi katastatêsontai oi polloi_). It is evident that "the many" here includes all that are born in the world, in contradistinction to "the one," Adam, who was created, and from whom all have descended by natural generation. Now, considering that righteousness and life, as necessarily as their opposites sin and death, are related to each other by law as antecedent and consequent, the above revelation that "all will be made righteous" is as direct an assertion of the immortality of all men as could possibly be made. It is, therefore, of the greatest moment, as regards our argument, to ascertain on what grounds we are told that all will eventually be "made righteous" through the obedience of Jesus Christ, and what is the exact meaning of this doctrine. The purpose of this essay will be completely fulfilled if it should be shown that these questions admit of being satisfactorily answered. But before attempting to do this, it is necessary to have a precise understanding of the previous assertion that through Adam's disobedience "the many were made sinners." This preliminary inquiry I now proceed to enter upon. If we adopt the view expressed in a passage already quoted (2 Esdras iii. 21), we shall, in effect, admit that the transgression of Adam was _the consequence_ of his "bearing a wicked heart," and that all who are born of him sin because by _natural generation_ they {17} have received from him the same wicked heart. According to this view it must be supposed that "the wicked heart" is in respect to goodness a _tabula rasa_, and that till goodness be formed in it, it is led by natural desires to do evil. Certainly the moral phenomena exhibited by very young children accord with this supposition; and it may reasonably be presumed that St. Paul, in giving to the Romans, to whom he had not personally preached, a synoptical statement of the doctrines he was accustomed to teach, did not set before them the Scriptural account of the introduction and prevalence of sin in any manner not intelligible to ordinary minds from common experience. What then are we to understand by the assertion that "through the disobedience of one man the many were made sinners"? In answer to this question it is to be said that the word _parakoê_ may be taken in this passage to signify "disobedience" abstractedly, and not a special act of disobedience, because _upakoê_ in the next clause does not require to be taken in a specific sense, but rather as referring to that holy spirit which was in Jesus Christ, in virtue of which his will was always in subjection to the will of his heavenly Father, and he became "obedient unto death." According to this interpretation, "disobedience" is here put for that wickedness of heart the antecedent existence of which the sin of Adam gave {18} evidence of, and which, by being transmitted from father to son through natural generation, has made all men sinners, to the end that all may be eventually made righteous by spiritual generation. It is true that the sin of Adam, being the first violation of a command received from God, first made disobedience an objective reality, and that thus sin entered into the world. But although _actual_ transgression had this beginning, it does not follow that the _proneness_ of the heart of man to transgress was contingent on Adam's sin, or thereby came into existence. On the other hand, it will probably be urged that to ascribe its existence to any other cause is "to make God the author of sin." In answer to this objection it may be said that if it were valid as regards God's moral essence, one might with as good reason urge that it was inconsistent with His power and intelligence that the natural creation should have its beginning in darkness and chaos. However, whether or not this view be accepted, I shall assume that the reality of the natural wickedness of the human heart is admitted, and consequently the remainder of the argument, inasmuch as it has reference to the means by which the wicked heart is subdued and made righteous, will in either case be the same. The relation of "one" to "many," considered only as a natural fact, is so peculiar and essential an {19} element in the past history and progressive development of the human race, that it might well be supposed to be specially significant with respect to their future destiny; and, in fact, St. Paul has taught us to draw the reasonable inference that whereas through the first Adam the many, by a law from which they cannot rid themselves, have been made sinners, _à fortiori_ through a "second Adam" the many will be made righteous. The course of our argument, consequently, now demands an inquiry as to the means by which the many will be made (_katastathêsontai_) righteous through the obedience of Jesus Christ. The future tense is particularly to be noticed. As soon as it was shown by the sin of Adam that the natural man is incapable of obedience to the will of God, a preordained dispensation was begun, whereby the natural man is converted into the spiritual man and made fit for immortality. This dispensation was introduced by a _promise_, the terms of which could be understood by Adam and Eve after they had learned that the spirit of evil (in whom is "the power of death") through their disobedience brought death into the world. The promise was given in the words "he (_autos_, _Sept._) shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel" (Gen. iii. 15). Hebrew commentators have, I think, rightly taken this passage in the sense--he ("the seed of the woman") shall bruise thee at thy _ending_, and thou shalt bruise him at his {20} _beginning_. The promise, accordingly, signifies that the power of Satan would prevail _at first_, and for a time, even to putting to death the Son of God (Luke xxii. 53), but that _in the end_ that power would by the Son of God be overcome (Luke x. 18). And since with the victory over the spirit of evil an end is put to evil itself, the promise is, in effect, that Adam and his race shall eventually be exempt from death and evil, and partake of a happy immortality. But in the very next sentence _conditions_ are annexed (Gen. iii. 16-19). Because of the imperfection of the natural man, and his opposition, through the subtlety of Satan and the desires of the flesh, to the will of his Maker, labour and sorrow, pain and _death_, were ordained to be his lot, in order that he may _thereby_ be made meet to partake of the promise. It is by reason of these conditions that the promise becomes, in effect, a _covenant_, in which of necessity two parties are concerned: God on His part promises happiness and immortality, but to be received only on the above-stated conditions; and man's part is to submit to the conditions, as being ordered by a "faithful Creator," and to look in faith for the fulfilment of the promise. Here, then, are all the essentials of a covenant, excepting _surety_ for its fulfilment, which on acknowledged principles of justice might be asked for by man, seeing that he has to satisfy the conditions before he enjoys the benefit. Such security is amply {21} given by God, as will be shown in the sequel of the argument. In short, this covenant admits of being described in terms exactly suited to human covenants, because the providence of God has so ordered these, that, together with other purposes, they answer this, the principal one, of making intelligible the divine covenant. This same covenant might with more exactness be called a _will_, or _testament_, because from its very conditions the benefit it confers cannot be received till after _death_ (see Heb. ix. 16, 17). Also, because this covenanted promise runs through the whole of the Scriptures, they have been appropriately named the Scriptures of the Old Testament and of the New Testament, not, however, as signifying that the Old Testament is superseded by the New, but that it reveals an earlier stage of development of the same covenant. The character and purpose of this covenant began to be unfolded at the threshold of the world's history, on the occasion of offerings being brought to God by Cain and Abel. Abel's offering consisted of "the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof," and was, therefore, proper for expressing, by visible tokens, the character of the covenant in three essential particulars: first, that it is a covenant of _life_, the animals chosen affording _food_, and that of the choicest kind, for supporting life; secondly, that the covenanted life is entered upon after death, the animals being _slain_ {22} for food; thirdly, that pain and death, although, according to law, consequent upon sin, were ordained, not alone for the judicial punishment of sin, the animals that were slain being "_harmless_," but for rendering the spirit of man meet to partake of the future life. Abel was himself in his death the first witness (_martus_) to this truth, and by the same means many chosen servants of God have been "purified and made white" (Dan. xii. 10). The offering of Cain was also proper for food, but as consisting of "fruits of the ground," it was not, like Abel's, susceptible of any meaning relative to the covenant. Grace was given to Abel to select an offering which, as being significant of the covenant, was accepted by God; but the same grace was not given to Cain. "The Lord had respect to Abel and to his offering: but to Cain and to his offering He had not respect." The narrative goes on to say that because the Lord had not the same respect to Cain's offering as to Abel's, Cain was "very wroth, and his countenance fell," and that on this account he was rebuked. It should be noticed that the terms of the rebuke have no reference to the choice of offering, but to "doing well," implying that Cain's conduct was not "righteous" like that of Abel. To quiet his troubled spirit, he is told that it is God's pleasure that he should stand towards his brother in the relation of protector and ruler. Cain repudiated this relation {23} and slew his brother, acting thus as the unrighteous world, of whom he may be regarded as the representative, have always acted towards God's elect, whom Abel typified. These remarks will afterwards be seen to bear on the general argument. The distinction which God made between the offerings of Cain and Abel, and His express approval of Abel's offering, might serve to make known, at the time and in succeeding generations, the purport of the promise made originally to Adam, and the ordained conditions of its fulfilment. In fact, the special acceptance by God of Abel's offering may be looked upon as the primary institution of _sacrifice_. The researches of men of learning have abundantly shown that the sacrificing of animals was a very ancient and wide-spread religious practice, but have left altogether unexplained how it _originated_, and whence arose the custom of ratifying a covenant between man and man by _killing_ animals; for what reason also the slaying of _innocuous_ and _helpless_ victims came to be the principal act of religious worship among the Jews, and why it was thought among the Gentiles that such sacrifices _pleased_ the gods. These questions do not appear to admit of answers apart from information derived from Scripture. The answers will, I think, be found to be given by what, in reliance on such aid, has been already said, and by what remains to be said, {24} respecting the covenant of immortality. It is quite possible that, as has happened with respect to other practices, that of sacrificing animals was continued long after its original signification ceased to be understood. This may be affirmed of the ratifying of covenants by killing victims (which no sane person nowadays would think of doing), and generally of the sacrifices offered by Gentile nations in honour of their gods, which eventually became mere matters of _custom_, without any distinct appreciation of their intrinsic meaning. In such cases all clue from tradition or history fails, and the explanation of the sources of the practices can be looked for only in the records of Scripture. It might, however, be questioned whether Abel himself, in making his offering, understood that it had the symbolic meanings ascribed to it above. The answer to this inquiry, given on the authority of what is said in Heb. xi. 4, would seem to be that he did so understand it, inasmuch as it is stated that he brought an acceptable offering _by faith_, and, according to Heb. xi. 1, faith may be defined to be an intelligent belief and hopeful expectation of the covenanted life. Also, as bearing on this question, it may be mentioned that in passages of Scripture where Abel is subsequently spoken of (as Matt. xxiii. 85, Heb. xi. 4, 1 John iii. 12), his _righteousness_ is specially referred to. Now, since to do righteousness {25} is to do what is pleasing to God, and, as we are told in Heb. xi. 6, "without faith it is impossible to please God," it follows that Abel's righteousness was the consequence of his faith. In fact, according to St. Paul's teaching, faith and righteousness are by law related to each other as antecedent and consequent (Rom. iii. 27, 28). Consequently we may here draw an inference which forms an essential part of the general argument for immortality. For since we have admitted, as a necessary and self-evident principle, that righteousness is the foundation of immortality, and Scripture presents to us in Abel an instance of the attainment of righteousness by faith, it follows that _faith is a means of partaking of immortality_. This doctrine will be farther treated of in the sequel; but in the mean time it will be well to explain that I consider "righteousness" to consist in obedience by word and deed to the "royal law" according to which, in a perfect social state, every one would do to others as he would that they should do to him. This relation between man and man should, I think, rather be called _righteousness_ than _morality_, because the latter word is derived from _mores_ (manners), and does not etymologically denote "rectitude," whereas the Greek word for righteousness (_dikaiosunê_) refers to the deciding of what is morally right by a judge, and the office of a judge, as respects social relations, is the {26} highest that men are appointed to discharge towards their fellow men. It should also be noticed that the "faith" I am speaking of does not consist in believing what is not understood, which seems to be a psychological contradiction, but in believing _in consequence of_ understanding. "By faith we _understand_ that the worlds [or ages (_tous aiônas_)] were framed by the word of God" (Heb. xi. 3). In short, the faith spoken of in Scripture is the basis of all intellectual, as well as of all moral excellence, and is inclusive of what is usually called "talents," or "gifts." The same covenant, under different typical circumstances, was renewed, first with Noah (Gen. ix. 8-17), and afterwards with Abraham (Gen. xvii. 1-8). The faith of Noah was exhibited not only in building an ark in obedience to God's command, but also in sacrificing clean animals on coming out of the ark. These sacrifices, being offered immediately after the world had been destroyed by the baptism of the Flood, were peculiarly significant of an understanding and acceptance of the covenant of a life to come. After the mention made in the Epistle to the Hebrews of the faith and obedience of which Noah gave evidence by building the ark, it is said of him that "he thereby became heir [inheritor] of the _righteousness_ which is according to faith" (Heb. xi. 7). Such righteousness, we have already argued, entitles the possessor of it to immortality. {27} So also Abraham, when God promised that the land of Canaan should be given to his seed, "builded an altar to the Lord" (Gen. xii. 7, 8), for the purpose, it may be presumed, of sacrificial worship, testifying thus not only belief of the fulfilment of the particular promise, but faith also in the covenanted future life. That Abraham's faith, while he sojourned in Canaan, was directed towards the experience of the world to come, is plainly declared in Heb. xi. 10, where it is asserted that "he looked for a city having foundations, whose builder and maker is God." It was in consequence of such faith that the gift of righteousness was reckoned to him as a _favour_, and "he was called the friend of God" (James ii. 28). Now, the above-mentioned renewal of the covenant was made with Abraham, not solely in respect to his being father of the Hebrew nation, but in respect also to his being typically father of all that believe of all times and nations (compare Gen. xvii. 1-8, with Rom. iv. 11, 16, 17). And all this elect seed receive, in common with their spiritual father, the gift of righteousness through faith--are saved by faith; so that the doctrine that faith is the means whereby the elect are made meet for immortality, which was inferred from the history of Abel, is exemplified in a more comprehensive manner by what is recorded of Abraham. We have argued above that the patriarchs Noah {28} and Abraham testified their belief and acceptance of the covenant of life by sacrifice. But in the patriarchal times the only surety for the fulfilment of the promise was the direct word of God. With the exception of what is said of Melchisedek, who typified a High Priest to come, no mention is made of the mediation of priests till the priesthood of Aaron was regularly constituted. From that time the priest was mediator between God and the people, and in virtue of his office gave assurance of the fulfilment of the covenant to those who, by offering clean animals for sacrifice, signified their acceptance of its conditions. The priest gave such assurance by mediatorially receiving the offerings, and representing, by sprinkling the blood of the slain animals, _the purifying effect of the suffering of death_. After the ordinances of the law had been instituted, Moses said to the people, "I have set before you life and death: choose life" (Deut. xxx. 19). Seeing that no one can escape the death which is the termination of the present life, this choice between life and death necessarily refers to the covenanted life, the fulfilment of the conditions of which secures from death in the world to come. The author of the Apocryphal Book 2 Esdras, who was wiser, I think, than the author of "The Divine Legation of Moses," has shown that he so understood the passage; for after saying (vii. 48, 44), "The day of doom shall be the end of this time, and the {29} beginning of the immortality for to come, wherein corruption is past, intemperance is at an end, infidelity is cut off, righteousness is grown, and truth is sprung up," he adds (in _v._ 59) with reference to this description of the life to come, "This is the life whereof Moses spake unto the people while he lived, saying, Choose thee life, that thou mayest live." Sacrifice remained the chief symbol of religious faith up to the time of that great sacrifice of the Son of God, the acceptance of which by the Father sealed the covenant of everlasting life, and made all other sureties sure. The ground of assurance lies in the fact that Jesus Christ in his life and death went through all the experience whereby _our_ spirits are formed for immortality. "He learned obedience by the things that he suffered" (Heb. v. 8). He was made perfect "through sufferings" (Heb. ii. 10). "He made him to be sin (_hamartian_; compare Gal. iii. 13) for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Cor. v. 21). Joining with these passages that remarkable one in which Christ is spoken of as "a priest who is made according to the power of an indissoluble (_akatalytou_) life" (Heb. vii. 16), it is evident that our community with him in suffering, in death, and, as we have reason to hope, in resurrection, is ample surety to us for the fulfilment of the covenant of immortality. For as death is the dissolution of life, indissoluble {30} life means exemption from death, and is, therefore, identical with immortality. That suffering in the flesh is efficacious, as is argued in the foregoing doctrine, towards doing away with sin, may be maintained on the authority both of St. Paul and St. Peter, the former apostle having said, "He that is dead has been justified from sin" (Rom. vi. 7), and the other, "He that has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin" (1 Peter iv. 1). But here it is particularly to be noted that this effect is not produced upon _all_ who suffer in the flesh. These apostles are speaking of such as have faith; and it is only when suffering is accompanied by a faith which apprehends the covenant of life, and especially lays hold of the surety for its fulfilment given by the suffering and death of the Son of God, that it avails to free from sin. The elect, who through the grace of God have such faith, are drawn by the perfect love, and the _sympathy_ in its strictest sense, which were manifested by the obedience unto death of Jesus Christ, to follow the example of his obedience, and thereby to attain to righteousness. By this reasoning it is shown, _but only so far as regards the elect_, that "the many are made righteous by the obedience of Christ." It will in the sequel be argued that the death of Christ has another aspect and a wider effect. As there was no more occasion for signifying acceptance of the covenant by sacrifice after the sacrifice {31} of Jesus Christ, that form of religious worship came to an end. Thenceforth faith in the covenant was to be expressed by means of symbols which pointed to the sacrifice made once and for all time on the cross. The ordained symbols are _bread_ and _wine_, taken in the Lord's Supper. The minister of the Gospel has succeeded to the Jewish priest in respect to giving _surety_ officially for the fulfilment of the covenant, and on that account may with propriety be called a _priest_. There is no longer an altar, because the acceptance of the covenant is not, as in the Jewish worship, indicated by sacrifice, but by partaking of _food_ in the forms of bread and wine at "the _table_ of the Lord." The Christian minister, in delivering these symbols to the worshippers, gives, in virtue of his mediating office, sureties for the fulfilment of the covenant of eternal life; the worshipper who partakes of them in faith receives them as such sureties, and looks for the fulfilment of the covenant. No doubt this office should be discharged by a good and wise minister, who has been regularly appointed thereto; but for the efficacy of the ordinance the chief requisite is _faith_ on the part of the recipient--an intelligent faith such as that which has just been mentioned. The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is justly regarded as the central ordinance of the Christian religion, and, therefore, of necessity has relation to the means whereby immortality is secured. In fact, {32} in each of the four records of its institution given in Scripture, the word "testament" (_diathêkê_) occurs: in St. Matthew and St. Mark we have, "This is my blood of the New Testament," and in St. Luke and 1 Cor. xi., "This cup is the New Testament in my blood." What is the meaning of "testament" in these passages, and how is the testament related to the "blood" of Jesus Christ? It is worthy of notice that these questions have received no special consideration in the recent controversies respecting the Lord's Supper, although in order to arrive at the full signification of that ordinance it is clearly necessary to be able to give answers to them. As far as regards the general meaning of the testament, or covenant, its relation to our immortality, and the surety for its fulfilment given by the blood (i.e. the death) of Jesus Christ, enough, I think, has been said in the foregoing arguments; it remains to inquire, for more complete understanding of the doctrine of the Sacrament, what relations the symbols _bread_ and _wine_ have to the _Body_ and _Blood_ of Christ. "Bread strengthens man's heart," and "wine makes it glad" (Ps. civ. 15). To strengthen the _heart_ is to produce confidence. Now, it may be asserted that confidence and joy, being incorporeal entities, are the same in essence under whatever external conditions they are generated. They are the same whether experienced in consequence of taking {33} bread and wine, or in consequence of understanding and accepting the covenant of life made sure by the body and blood of Christ. Although physical science is wholly incapable of informing us _how_ the _corporeal_ elements bread and wine produce in those who partake of them _feelings_ of strength and gladness (the antecedents and consequents not being in the same category), we can yet understand that the Creator of all things might by His immediate will attach to those substances such effects, not alone for the sake of man's body, but for the higher purpose of thereby informing his spirit that there is cause for confidence and joy in the broken body of the Lord, and his poured-out blood. This view is justified by the language of St. Paul, where he says, speaking of the Son of God, that "all things were created through him and _unto_ him" (_eis auton_, Col. i. 16); from which doctrine it may be inferred that our Lord, having regard to the cognizable effects of bread and wine spoken of by the Psalmist, said of bread, "This is my body," and of wine, "This is my blood," because his body and blood, when "spiritually discerned," have _the very same effects_. But why did Christ say, "This _is_ my body," "This _is_ my blood"? The answer to this question may be given at once by pointing to a rule in Scriptural teaching, according to which the symbol and the thing symbolized are expressed in _identical_ terms. {34} The Bible must have been read to little purpose by those who have not discovered that this characteristic pervades all parts both of the Old and the New Testament. On this principle, when speaking to the Jews, our Lord made no distinction between his own body and the visible temple at Jerusalem, just because his body was the proper habitation of the Holy Spirit antecedently to, and comprehensively of, the dwelling of the Spirit in any temple made with hands. St. Paul also employs like teaching where he says, "They are not all Israel that are of Israel" (Rom. ix. 6), the first "Israel" meaning God's elect of all nations and times, and the other the Jewish people, by whom the elect are typified. The rationale of this mode of teaching appears to be, that we could not speak, or even think, of abstract verities, such as that Jesus Christ is to us the author of life, and strength, and joy, without perceptions and feelings antecedently derived from external realities; and the more closely abstractions are viewed by the intervention of their necessary objective antecedents, the more exact and effective will be our knowledge. I venture here to express the opinion that all the contention and diversity of views that have arisen about Transubstantiation and the Real Presence are referable to the non-recognition of the above-mentioned principle of Scriptural teaching by symbols, and generally to an inability to understand and rightly interpret the {35} concrete and symbolic language of Scripture. Defect of knowledge in this respect has given occasion to many errors. With regard to the doctrine of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, I am of opinion that the above-mentioned dogmas, and the forms of worship connected with them, which appear to be rightly designated as _superstitious_, have had the effect of very much keeping out of view the relation of that ordinance to the _covenant_ which, through the death of Jesus Christ, makes immortality sure. Perhaps it should rather be said that the superstitious practices give evidence that "the blood of the new covenant" is not understood. From the preceding discussion I draw the conclusion that our Lord, in saying of the wine, "This is my blood of the New Testament," expressed the doctrine that his blood (signifying his death) is both the _pledge_ and the means, through faith, of partaking of the joy (signified by the wine) of a new and ever-lasting life. The Testament is new because it contains the promise of a future inheritance under better sureties than those of the old covenant of the Law. After having thus considered what the Scriptures say concerning _death_, we have next to inquire what they reveal concerning _resurrection_. As preliminary to this inquiry, it may be remarked that the foregoing arguments relative to Christ's partaking with us in death, are such as point directly to the conclusion that {36} we shall participate with him in resurrection. In St. Paul's teaching (1 Cor. xv. 12-19) Christ's resurrection and the resurrection of the dead are events so necessarily related that, "if the dead rise not, Christ was not raised up." But the fact of Christ's resurrection was substantiated by so many witnesses, who saw him alive after his death, that we may with certainty infer, according to this doctrine, that the dead will rise. It is, however, to be observed that the argument of the apostle in the passage just quoted is expressly addressed to those who have faith and knowledge, and cannot be adduced in proof of the doctrine of the resurrection of all men. For evidence as to the truth of this doctrine recourse must be had to other parts of Scripture. For the present purpose it will suffice to cite two remarkable sayings of our Lord, recorded in St. John's Gospel. He first says, "The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live" (John v. 25); and then (in _vv._ 28 and 29 of the same chapter) he says, "The hour is coming in which all that are in their graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment" (_kriseôs_). The first passage refers to a _partial_ resurrection, inasmuch as it makes mention of those only who shall hear the voice of the Son of {37} God, and hearing shall live; whereas the other passage asserts that _all_ who are in sepulchres (_mnêmeiois_) shall hear his voice, and divides these into two classes--those that have done good, who rise to _live_ (the class just before mentioned), and those that have done evil, who rise to be _judged_. The assertion in _vv._ 28 and 29 is, accordingly, a revelation respecting the resurrection of all the dead, and is to be taken as comprehensive of the other; so that the class that will partake of "the resurrection of life" are the same as those of whom it is said in the first passage that they will hear the voice of the Son of God and will _live_. As far as regards the distinction into two classes, this doctrine agrees with that preached by St. Paul, where he affirms that his unbelieving countrymen "themselves allowed that there would be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and the unjust" (Acts xxiv. 15). It may here be remarked that it is not necessary to infer from its being said in John v. 28, 29, that "all that are in their graves shall hear his voice and come forth," that all will rise _simultaneously_. Rather the separate mention in _v._ 25 of those that hear and live, and especially the assertion that the hour in which _these_ hear is not only coming, but "_now is_," would seem to apply exclusively to the resurrection of "the just," and to indicate that this resurrection is antecedent to that of "the unjust." However, to settle this question, {38} which is a very important one, recourse will now be had to other passages of Scripture. On the principle of regarding, for application in this argument, the _whole_ of the Canonical Scriptures as authoritative, it is legitimate to refer to the Book of Revelation for information respecting the resurrection of the dead. Now, in Rev. xx. 5 we have in express terms, "This is the first resurrection." And again, in the next verse, "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power." It is evident, therefore, that this is the resurrection of the just, and that those who are thus "blessed and holy" are thenceforth exempt from mortality. This conclusion has a very important bearing on our argument; for, on turning to _v._ 4 of the same chapter, we find that the partakers of this resurrection are described as martyrs "who were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God," and generally as those who "received not the mark of the beast on their forehead and on their hand," which may be interpreted as meaning that by intelligent faith and righteous deeds they overcame their spiritual adversaries. It seems, therefore, allowable to infer that this is the company of those who in Scripture are so often called "the elect," who by suffering, experience, and hope, are in this life "sealed" unto the day of redemption (Rev. vii. 2-8, and Eph. iv. 80). {39} It is, besides, said of these chosen ones that they "lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years," but that "the rest of the dead lived not till the thousand years were finished." It would thus appear that a definite interval of long duration is interposed between the resurrection of the just and the unjust. It is also to be particularly noticed that the seer, speaking of what pertains to that interval of a thousand years during which the spirit of evil is "bound," says that he "saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given to them" (Rev. xx. 4). This must refer to the judgment undergone by those who have part in the _first_ resurrection, because the rest of the dead do not rise to be judged till the thousand years are ended. As to the elect being judged, the teaching of St. Paul is very explicit, where he says, identifying himself with the general company of the faithful, "We must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done through the body, according to what he hath done, whether good or bad" (2 Cor. v. 10. So also Rom. xiv. 10). It is not expressly said in the passage above quoted who they are who sat on thrones and had judgment given to them; but the information is supplied in Matt. xix. 28, where we read, "Jesus said to them [that is, as the context shows, to Peter and the other apostles], Verily I say to you, that ye who have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit on the {40} throne of his glory, ye also shall sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel." A like revelation, addressed exclusively to the apostles, is given in Luke xxii. 28-80. "The twelve tribes of Israel" is the symbolic designation of the elect--those that are sealed (see Rev. vii. 3-8). It must now be taken into account that the experience and the deeds of _the present life_ alone determine whether any individual is or is not of the number of the elect. Those only who by the favour of God are justified in this life by works done through faith are reckoned among "the just" who partake of the first resurrection. But Scripture nowhere asserts that their spiritual state differs at their resurrection from what it was at the time of their death; rather, it negatives this assumption by describing their state in the interval as that of "_sleep_." Consequently, not being yet "made perfect," they have need to pass through the judgment just spoken of (compare 1 Cor. iii. 11-15), in order that by the completion of their _spiritual creation_ they might be made meet for immortality. To them, although there is judgment, there is no "_condemnation_," and, therefore, no "second death." Such, it seems to me, is the Scriptural doctrine of immortality, as far as regards _the elect_. Before proceeding to speak of the judgment of the whole world, it will be appropriate to consider here what judgment is abstractedly, and what are its {41} purpose and effect. These questions can only be answered by means of what is matter of human experience, and in terms derived therefrom. Now we all know that kings, judges, and magistrates administer justice and judgment for the purpose of making righteousness and truth prevail, and that for the same end they inflict punishment on the guilty. Whatever is this is judgment, and what is not this is not judgment. The portion of the Scriptures which speaks in plainest terms of the object and effect of judgment is, perhaps, that contained in Psalms xcvi., xcvii., xcviii., and xcix. If the words of these Psalms do not refer to the judgment that is to come upon the earth and the whole world in the future age, they will require to be taken in a non-natural sense. But such a sense is here inadmissible, because consistently with what may be inferred, as said above, from _human experience_ respecting judgment, namely, that its purpose is to cause righteousness and truth to prevail, this Scripture declares in terms expressive of the highest joy and exultation that for this end the world is judged. Let us, therefore, now inquire what Scripture reveals respecting the judgment and immortality of the rest of mankind--those who are not numbered among the elect. First, it is clearly implied in Rev. xx. 5, that they live again at the end of the thousand years. Next, as we have already inferred from the words of {42} Christ recorded in John v. 29, they rise to be _judged_. If, as we have argued, it is needful that even the elect should be judged, much rather must judgment overtake the unbelieving and the unrighteous? We are, moreover, expressly told who is to be the righteous Judge: "The Father hath committed all judgment to the Son" (John v. 22). The sinners who, acting "through ignorance" as agents of Satan, arraigned, condemned, and put to death the blameless Son of God, were not alone guilty, inasmuch as it was appointed that they should make manifest and consummate the wickedness that reigns in the heart of the collective world. For this reason Jesus Christ, in fulfilment of a just retribution, is ordained to be Judge of all the world, and of Satan also. Respecting the _outward means_ by which judgment is executed on the ungodly, many things seem to be said in the Book of Revelation; but from being expressed in symbolic language, they are generally "hard to be understood." I shall make no attempt to give explanations of the details of this symbolism, such an inquiry not being necessary for my present purpose; but a few remarks on the contents of the Apocalypse which have a general relation to the purpose and effect of judgment may here be appropriately introduced as bearing on the question of immortality. In the first place, it may be stated that its prophetic language and symbols resemble in so many {43} particulars what we meet with in various parts of the prophecies of the Old Testament, that it might almost be regarded as an epitome of these prophecies. This view is supported by the announcement made in Rev. x. 7, which affirms that, "in the days of the voice of the seventh trumpet, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God shall be finished, according to the gospel He declared (_os euêggelise_) unto His servants the prophets" (see also Rev. xxii. 6). It is here to be particularly remarked that after the sounding of six trumpets severally significant of judgment, it is proclaimed that the mystery of God would be finished at the sounding of the seventh and last, this consummation having been antecedently made known as a _gospel_ to the Old Testament prophets. This text accordingly agrees with the tenor of the argument previously adduced respecting the final effect of judgment in establishing the reign, so much to be desired, of truth and righteousness. At the end of the judgment "the temple of God is opened in heaven, and there is seen in His temple the ark of His covenant" (Rev. xi. 19). This is the covenant of immortality, which, having been originally made (as has already been indicated) with Adam after his transgression, was afterwards renewed with Noah and with Abraham, was represented by symbols and proclaimed orally by Moses in the wilderness, and, finally, was confirmed by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. {44} Equally remarkable is another revelation, which tells us that the elect, the one hundred and forty-four thousand who have been made perfect by the experience they have gone through in the thousand years of the first resurrection, are joined with the Son of God in the execution of the general judgment. In Rev. xix. 14, it is said that "the armies in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean." This clothing proves that the attendant army consisted of the saints made perfect in righteousness, as will be evident by comparing _vv._ 7 and 8 of the same chapter. In _v._ 15 it is asserted respecting "The Word of God," that "he shall rule the nations with a rod of iron;" and he says himself, speaking of his faithful followers, "To him that overcometh and keepeth my works unto the end will I give power over the nations; and he shall rule them with a rod of iron" (Rev. ii. 26, 27). Also we have in Psalm cxlix. 6-9, "Let a two-edged sword be in their hand, to execute vengeance upon the nations, punishments upon the peoples; to bind their kings with chains, and their rulers with fetters of iron; to execute upon them the judgment written: this honour have all His saints." Moreover, St. Paul writes to the Corinthians: "Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world?" "Know ye not that we shall judge angels?" In short, the doctrine of Scripture on this prerogative of the saints is very explicit. {45} Again, it is uniformly affirmed in Scripture that every one will be judged "according to his works." Of course, "words" are included in "works;" for our Lord said expressly, "Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment; for by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned" (Matt. xii. 86, 87). It would seem that the judgment, as being conducted by _external_ means, takes account of human _thoughts_ only so far as their consequences are manifested by overt deeds and spoken words. It is not the less true, according to the doctrine of the Lord himself (in Mark iv. 22, and Luke viii. 17), that in the day of judgment all secret and hidden things will be revealed. The words in St. Mark, "neither was anything kept secret but in order that (_hina_) it should come abroad," seem expressly to indicate the relation in which things hidden in the present age stand to the revelations of that day. St. Paul also writes to the Romans, speaking of them who have not received the law by direct communication: "They show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing them witness, and their thoughts, one with another, accusing, or also excusing, in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men, according to my gospel, through Jesus Christ" (Rom. ii. 15, 16). (This, I think, should be the translation of the passage.) It may be noticed that {46} here again "gospel" is mentioned in connection with "judgment." Now, the very terms, "judgment according to works," imply that the works brought into judgment are not all equally bad, and that there may be both "good and bad;" which also may be inferred from the passage just quoted from the Epistle to the Romans. In fact, it is not too much to assume that all the deeds and experience of the present life are contributory in different ways to the final purpose of the judgment. We have already argued, in accordance with what is said in 2 Cor. v. 10, that the saints will be judged according to their works, and from 1 Cor. iii. 11-15, we learn that their works will be tried by fire, but they themselves will be saved, "yet so as by fire." We have now to enter upon the important inquiry as to whether Scripture reveals an analogous dispensation with respect to the rest of mankind. Hard as it may be for us to conceive by what means the deeds and experience of all men, the living and the dead, will be brought under review in the day of judgment, that so it will be is undoubtedly the teaching of Scripture. Our understanding of this wonderful event may perhaps be assisted by taking into account what St. Paul said to the Athenians: "In Him we live, and move, and have our being;" whence it may be inferred that all our works and {47} words, and even feelings and thoughts, are known to God. With reference to this question, it would, I think, be legitimate to call to our aid the knowledge of the external creation, which has been so largely extended in the present day. After long attention given to the acquisition of such knowledge, I seem to see that it points to the conclusion that all the forces of nature are resident in a universal aetherial medium, extending through all space, and pervading all visible and tangible substances, by the intervention of which all power is exerted, whether it be by the immediate will of God, or mediately, by that of angels or of men. (I assume that there can be no exertion of power apart from the will and consciousness of an agent.) Consequently the Spirit of the Universe must be cognizant of every exertion of power and of its effects. To this consideration another of peculiar significance is to be added. The faculty which we possess to a limited extent, depending on bodily conditions and organization, of _remembering_ the consequences of exerted power, whether as operating ourselves, or being operated upon, must be conceived of as pertaining, without any limitation, to the Creator of the aetherial substance and the Source of all power. In this manner it seems possible to understand how all actions and all events may be written down (speaking metaphorically) in the Book of God's _remembrance_, and so be brought into judgment. {48} The universality and the character of the future judgment are declared in Rev. xx. 11-13, with particular reference to the presence and majesty of "One who sat on a great white throne," who, doubtless, is God the Father, the Creator of heaven and earth. The seer says in this passage, "I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works." The mention made of "the books" indicates that what is here said of the general judgment pertains exclusively to God the Father, by whose almighty power and omniscience, as I have endeavoured to show in the preceding paragraph, all the deeds and experience of the present life are held in remembrance to be brought under judgment. But it would be an error to suppose that this general judgment is different from that the process and results of which, as effected through the Son of man and his attendant armies, are symbolically described in previous parts of the Apocalypse. The judgment was ordained by decree of the Father, and prearranged by His wisdom, and in accordance therewith it is executed by the Son, who, apparently on this account, speaks thus of himself: "To him that overcometh will I give to sit with me in my throne, as I also overcame and sat with my Father in His throne" (Rev. iii. 21). This throne {49} which the Son shares with the Father may be presumed to be the seat of power exercised in judgment (compare Rev. ii. 26, 27). Why "the book of life" is mentioned in connection with the books from the contents of which the dead are judged, will be shown in the sequel of the argument. There are other considerations relating to the future judgment which it is necessary to enter into in order to complete the argument for the immortality of all men. We live in a world in which sorrow and pain and death abound everywhere and at all times, and although these are actual consequences of sin, inasmuch as they would be non-existent if sin did not antecedently exist, it is not the less true that the _law_ which in the present time of imperfection connects suffering with sin, tends in its operation towards bringing on eventually a state of perfection. Thus there is a final cause for that law. I have already (page 14) illustrated this doctrine by reference to the process whereby the actual condition and adornment of this earth were elaborated by the operation of physical laws out of a state of darkness and chaos. This view is corroborated by the noticeable fact that suffering in this life, whether caused by the three scourges, war, pestilence, and famine, or what we call accident, or by the injustice and cruelty of men, by no means in proportion to guilt, since even the innocent thereby sometimes suffer. Now, as all {50} human deeds and experience are taken cognizance of in the great day of judgment, it must be admitted that sufferings of the kind just mentioned will be included in the account. In what way, and with what effect, will, I think, be to some extent indicated by the following considerations. Besides the principle of animal life (_psyche_) which man partakes of in common with the creatures of a lower order, there is within him a spirit (_pneuma_) which is being formed, educated, and built up, all the time that it is the tenant of a corporeal "vessel." On account of this law of progressiveness, the spirit of a child, as we can all see, differs in its feelings and its understanding from that of a man. In short, spirit perfected is the principle of immortal life. Now, during our waking hours our spirits are replete with consciousness and thought, which, however, at the moment of falling asleep depart from us. The spirit is then taken into the keeping of the angels of God, to be by them restored into its place in the body at the moment of waking up and of return to consciousness. In like manner at death the spirits of all men, good and wicked, pass into the custody of the Creator of spirits, to wait for the return to consciousness by being on the morning of their resurrection again united with body,--not, however, with the same natural body, but with a spiritual body (1 Cor. xv. 44). The union of spirit with bodily essence appears to be a {51} necessary condition of human consciousness, and to have been ordained for the special reasons that we are destined to live hereafter not only individually, but in _social_ relations also, and that only through the medium of body is there communion between one man's spirit and that of another. This being understood, it is next to be observed that in the forming and building up ("edification") of spirit, the human _will_ is concerned, and that, according to a man's choice of action, his spirit may be educated for being good or for being wicked, may be sanctified or defiled. There is, in short, no act or experience in human life which in this respect is indifferent. But what the spirit is thus made during its passage through this life, such it is when it is taken into the hands of its Creator, and such, as we may conclude from the teaching of Scripture and from its having in the mean time existed apart from body, it will be, with all its imperfections, on the day of its resurrection. It has already been maintained that, because of imperfection, it is necessary that even the elect should be judged, to the end that by this means their spirits may be made perfect. But our concern now is with the effect of judgment on those who are not of the number of the elect. For the purpose of illustrating what I am about to say on this head, I shall begin with making an application of the argument in a particular instance. {52} I have recently seen it stated, among the news of the day, that it is the practice of a barbarous African king to cut off the heads of twelve or more of his subjects, merely to pay a compliment to a distinguished visitor. Are we to think that this transaction both begins and ends here? Although we have no ground for asserting that the victims in this case are to be counted among God's elect, inasmuch as they must be supposed to be devoid of the faith and righteousness which are necessary to constitute a title to that high privilege, we may yet believe that the bodily suffering they endured was contributory to the formation of their spirits for their future destiny. If even those who have "understanding"--elect saints--have undergone sufferings and been "beheaded" in order that thus they might be "purified and made white," (compare Dan. xi. 33-35, and xii. 10, with Rev. xx. 4), why should we not believe that the sufferings of those poor Africans, who are equally children of God, had like effect? That suffering is in this manner efficacious is proved by the sacrifice of the Son of God on the cross, who, after having proved by his miracles that he had all human ills under control, _voluntarily_ submitted to be made perfect by enduring shame and pain, that thus he might both exemplify and justify the ways of God in the creation of immortal spirits. This sacrifice is a full and sufficient explanation of all the evil in the world. When, therefore, in the time of the {53} resurrection of the unjust the slayer and the slain, in this instance, appear before the judgment-seat of God, and are condemned, as not being among those who are saved in the first resurrection, to undergo the second death, is it not reasonable to conclude that the tribulation and pain of that event will fall much more heavily on the murderer than on those he slew, and that the punishment and sufferings that have still to be endured in order that the final purpose of the judgment may be accomplished, will be inflicted with far greater severity on him than on them? (See on this point what is said concerning the future judgment in the Wisdom of Solomon vi. 3-6.) On this principle many apparent anomalies in the present age of the world admit of explanation. Why, for instance, is so large a proportion of mankind condemned, irrespective of their deserts, to be poor, and to labour with their hands in anxiety for the maintenance of themselves and their families? We have reason from Scripture to say that such conditions of life, if united with the _faith_ that looks for better things to come, may be counted among means ordained by God for preparing the spirits of His elect for their destined inheritance ("Hate not laborious work, neither husbandry, which the Most High hath ordained" [Ecclesiasticus vii. 15]). And where such faith is absent, may we not still say that conditions of the present life to which the great mass of mankind are {54} subject must be contributory to forming their spirits for their future existence? Leaving out of consideration who are the elect, and who not, which God only knows, can we think that the patience of the labourer and artisan, the endurance of the seafaring man, and the devotedness of the soldier, who at the call of duty, and in spite of the promptings of self-preservation, exposes himself to almost certain death on the field of battle, have no relation to their future destiny? As regards, especially, the spirit of self-sacrifice of the soldier, so opposed to all the calculations of personal interest, it seems to me that the desire of glory, or the expectation of reward, will not wholly account for it, but rather that it is indicative of there being in the warrior's breast an undefined conviction that he better fulfils the purpose of life by braving a painful death than by living at home in ease. It is worthy of remark that although in Scripture war is spoken of as a calamity, the occupation of a soldier is nowhere condemned, but is rather commended on account of its disciplinary effect and abstractedness from the affairs of life (see 2 Tim. ii. 3, 4). It should be observed that the different kinds of human experience adverted to above are all supposed to stand apart from personal acts done in violation of the dictates of _conscience_. Such acts will doubtless be tried by the course of the general judgment, and will have effect in the condemnation of the offenders, and {55} in punishment awarded according to the guiltiness of their deeds. The calamities of human life may be put generally under the two heads of "tribulation" and "slaughter"--different kinds of sorrow and trouble, and different kinds of death. These constitute the groaning and travailing of the whole creation unto the time being (_a chri tou nun_), spoken of by St. Paul in Rom. viii. 22 and called in St. Mark xiii. 8, the beginnings of sorrows (_ôdinôn_). But in the time of the world to come, the same forms of suffering have their consummation and ending. In Rev. vii. 14, mention is made of "_the_ great tribulation," and at the same time of "a countless multitude who come out of it." This can be no other than that "great tribulation" respecting which our Lord said, according to St. Matt. xxiv. 21, that it will be "such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, _nor ever shall be_," and according to St. Mark xiii. 19, that "those days shall be affliction such as was not from the beginning of the creation which God created unto this time, _neither shall be_." The identity of the events spoken of in the Gospels and in the Apocalypse may also be inferred from the words _cheimônos_ (tempest-time) and _sabbatô_ (on the sabbath) contained in Matt. xxiv. 20, the former referring to the storm of indignation and wrath which proceeds from "the Lamb" when he comes to execute Judgment, and the latter to the time in which the {56} judgment takes place, which is designated the sabbath, or seventh day, as following upon the termination of the present age of the world, and also as being that sabbath of which, as said in Luke vi. 5, "the Son of man is Lord." Again, in proof of the doctrine that the process, or effect, of the general judgment is characterized in Scripture as "slaughter," Isa. xxxiv. 1-6 may be cited, it being said in that passage that "the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations," that "he hath delivered them to the slaughter," and in connection therewith that "all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heaven shall be rolled together as a scroll" (compare Rev. vi. 18-14). Of the same import is the prophecy in Rev. xiv. 14-20, at the end of which the treading of "the great winepress of the wrath of God" is described in terms closely agreeing with those in Isa. lxiii. 1-4. We have, besides, the remarkable passage, Rev. xix. 17-21, which represents the fowls of heaven as being called together to feast on the flesh of the slain, after great slaughter had been wrought by "the sharp sword" which proceeds out of the mouth of him who is called "The Word of God." This sword represents the cutting and destructive effect of the words of judgment and condemnation which the Son of God will pronounce on sinners when he comes to judge the whole world. It is not necessary for my purpose to interpret particularly the symbolism {57} contained in the passages just quoted; it suffices to draw from them the general inference that, as regards _all_ men, trouble and pain and death in the present age of the world are the beginnings of an [oe]conomy for forming spirits for immortality, which is destined to be consummated in the age to come. To complete the argument from Scripture it only remains now to take into consideration those passages which expressly reveal the effect of the general judgment, and to ascertain what relation the revelations have to the question of immortality. These passages are of two kinds, some being composed entirely of symbolic language requiring interpretation, while others are expressed in terms that may be readily understood. The former must be supposed to admit of being interpreted consistently with the plain meaning of the other kind. Accordingly, for the purpose above mentioned, I proceed now to offer an interpretation of Rev. xx. 11-15, this passage evidently giving a synoptical account, in symbolic terms, of the process and the effect of the general judgment. I have already adverted (p. 48) to the contents of _vv._ 11 and 12, so far as they refer to the Person of the Judge, and to His judging the dead, according to their works, "out of the things written in the _books_." "The great _white_ throne" (_v._ 11) is evidently the seat of righteous judgment. The inspired writer, in order {58} to account for his seeing in vision the dead, "small and great, standing before the throne," reveals, besides, that "the sea gave up the dead that were in it, and Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them" (_v._ 13). Now, the context hardly allows of taking "the sea" here in its literal objective sense, requiring rather the interpretation that the natural sea symbolizes by its invisible depths the incognizable state of the dead before resurrection. In the "new heaven and earth," which is the end of all creation, "sea exists no longer" (Rev. xxi. 1). Hades, as apparently might be inferred from the proper sense of the word, signifies that invisible state of departed spirits which, as just said, is symbolized as being concealed in the depths of "the sea," and also, as I have already pointed out, has to death a necessary relation of sequence ("Hades followed with him" [Rev. vi. 8]). This explains why Death and Hades are represented as a conjoint power having possession of the dead. In Rev. i. 18, as well as in Rev. vi. 8, they are mentioned in close connection, and in the latter passage power is said to be given to them in common. I take occasion to make some remarks here on 1 Peter iii. 19, as the sense of this passage might be thought to be contradictory to the meaning assigned above to Hades. It affirms that "in spirit Christ went and preached to the spirits in custody {59} (_en phylakê_)." Now, the literal meaning of the concrete terms, "went and preached" (_poreutheis ekêruxen_), is _excluded_ by "in spirit" going before, and they consequently require an abstract interpretation. It has already been argued (p. 50) that the word "custody" applies to departed spirits in the sense of their being in the _keeping_ of the Creator of spirits; whence it follows that "spirits in custody" and "spirits in Hades" have the same meaning. But neither of these expressions signifies anything as to _locality_, for the simple reason that locality cannot be predicated of spirit apart from body. The abstract interpretation of the passage of St. Peter may, I think, be reached by the following argument. The word _ekêruxen_ above cited is not that ordinarily used with respect to preaching the Gospel, and therefore it is the more to be noticed that where Noah is called "a preacher of righteousness" (2 Peter ii. 5), the Greek word is _kêruka_. May we not hence infer that Noah, by "the spirit of Christ" which was in him (compare 1 Peter i. 11), preached to the unbelieving and "disobedient" of his day, and that their spirits, although the world in which they lived was so long since destroyed by the Flood, are, together with all other departed spirits, still in God's custody, to be hereafter raised up and judged? We are farther informed respecting Noah's preaching, which consisted apparently of deeds rather than of words, that "by preparing an ark for the {60} saving of his house, he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is according to faith" (Heb. xi. 7). We have now to inquire what interpretation may be given to the symbolic language (in Rev. xx. 14) which affirms that "Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire," and that "this is the second death, the lake of fire." The first mention of the lake of fire occurs in Rev. xix. 20, where it is described as "burning with brimstone," and both "the beast," and "the false prophet" associated with him (_ho met autou_), are said to be "cast alive" into this lake. But the rest (_oi loipoi_), namely, "the kings of the earth and their armies, gathered together to make war against him who sat on the horse and against his army," were slain by the sword that proceeds out of his mouth, that is, by the sharp and searching words of righteousness and truth, whereby he, "The Word of God," judges and pronounces condemnation in the last day (compare John xii. 48). In Rev. xx. 7-10, we are farther told that Satan, after being let loose from prison at the end of the thousand years when "the rest of the dead" live again (v. 5), and after collecting together all the _risen_ nations of the earth, "the number of whom is as the sand of the sea" (v. 8), leads them to their destruction in battle against the God of heaven, and is himself "cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where are the beast {61} and the false prophet" (v. 10). Consequently, "Satan," who is opposed to God the Father, the God of heaven, "the beast," which, as signifying the spirit of the world, is opposed to the Holy Spirit, and "the false prophet," who is the symbolic representative of all _anti-Christian_ power objectively opposed to the Son of God, are all three cast into a lake of fire "_burning with brimstone_." But of Death and Hades it is only said that they were cast into a lake of fire. Their being cast into the depths of "a lake" signifies that they become incognizable entities, and "lake of fire" indicates that they remain such by an irreversible law, fire being the symbol of force of law (see Deut. xxxiii. 2). For this reason "the lake of fire" is put in apposition (in _v._ 14) with "the second death," which is the extinction of death. Now, Satan, the beast, and the false prophet, being regarded as _personal_ existences motived by _will_, and in that respect unlike Death and Hades, are cast not simply into a lake of fire, but into a lake burning with brimstone, which apparently signifies that from the time these "adversaries" cease to have cognizable existence, their antecedent power and influence will be regarded by those who were once subject to them with antipathy and abhorrence, so that any return to the same subjection will (as we say) be morally impossible. When in the end God has become "all in all," no antagonism remains; all {62} enemies have been subdued. Any one who is unwilling to accept the foregoing interpretation might reasonably be asked in what other way he can explain why, of all created things, _brimstone_ is specially mentioned with reference to this "mystery" (see Rev. xvii. 5, 16). In the last verse of the passage under consideration we have, "And if any one (_ei tis_) was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire" (v. 15). It is to be observed that the lake of fire is not here said to be burning with brimstone. This sentence must accordingly receive an interpretation analogous to that given above with respect to Death and Hades. When the final judgment has had complete effect, there will no longer be objective existence of any whose names are not in the book of life, because all will have been made meet for the inheritance of life. For this reason "the book of life" is mentioned (in _v._ 12) in immediate connection with the books containing the records according to which the judgment is transacted. I am well aware that the preceding interpretations do not accord with views entertained by many in the present day. I remember to have heard a sermon on the text, "This is the second death," in the course of which the preacher did not once advert to the word "This," but gave a description, the most terrible his imagination could supply, of what he judged to be the second {63} death. We find revealed in Scripture respecting "the terrors of the Lord"--the anguish and tribulation, the slaughter and destruction, proceeding from His wrath in the day of judgment--quite enough to deter sinners from going on in sin, without gratuitously adding the doctrine of the perpetuity of evil, the preaching of which seems to have the effect of hindering the belief and expectation of the impending realities of that great day. Besides, it may well be asked how such preaching can be reconciled with the Gospel revelations, stated in language devoid of symbol, which are contained in Rev. xxi.; to which I shall afterwards have occasion to call attention. But, first, it will be necessary to inquire what is the doctrine of Scripture respecting future "punishment" and "torment." On proceeding to this part of the argument it will be proper to revert to a principle which has already been admitted as self-evident (p. 9), namely, that a state of perfect righteousness and a happy immortality are so essentially and necessarily related that one cannot subsist without the other. It is, however, to be said that this doctrine is nowhere expressed in such words in Scripture. In fact, the abstract terms, "essentially and necessarily related," are altogether unlike any Scriptural mode of expression. Yet it may be that the truth which we think we understand when we express it in such terms may admit of being {64} _extracted_ in a more definite form from the concrete language of Scripture; and, in order that our argument for immortality may be shown to rest entirely on a Scriptural foundation, I shall now endeavour to show that this is the case with respect to the above-stated doctrine, by citing and discussing various passages of the Old and New Testament. In the first place, I remark that righteousness and salvation, righteousness and peace, are so often and in such manner mentioned together in the word of God, that we may thence infer that, according to a law of the Divine (Economy, personal righteousness is a condition necessarily antecedent to salvation (safety) and peace (see Ps. xxiv. 5, and lxxxv. 7-18; Isa. xlv. 7, 8, xlvi. 18, li. 5, lxii. 1, and many like passages). For, on the other hand, it is twice expressly declared that God has said, "There is no peace to the wicked" (Isa. xlviii. 22, and lvii. 21). So in Rev. xiv. it is affirmed respecting sinners (who are comprehensively described as those who worship the beast and his image, and receive the mark of his name on the forehead or the hand--in their beliefs or their deeds) that "they have no rest day nor night" (_vv._ 9 and 11). Of the same sinners it is also declared that "they shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in {65} the presence of the Lamb" (v. 10). The fire of the torment is the operation of the holy law of righteousness which they have broken, and the brimstone by the offensiveness of its smoke represents the self-condemnation and reproach of conscience with which they are tormented when their sins are laid bare in the presence of the holy angels and of the _Lamb_, who by reason of their sins was slain. Lastly, we are told that "the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever." The general signification of "smoke," regarded as a symbol, appears to be, effect or consequence. Thus, in the remarkable symbol of "a smoking furnace" seen in vision by Abraham (Gen. xv. 17), the fire of the furnace may represent the operation of the law, and the smoke may symbolize "the abounding" of the sins of mankind consequent upon that operation (see Rom. v. 20; also compare 2 Esdras iv. 48). But in the passage before us we have "smoke of torment," of which smoke it is said that it "ascends up for ever and ever," signifying, it would seem, the perpetuity of the _effect_ of the torment. This interpretation accordingly agrees with that previously given (p. 61) relative to "the lake of fire burning with brimstone." There is, however, this difference to be noted, that whereas the present passage relates especially to the effect of the _pain and torment_ attendant upon the _process_ of being judged, the other speaks of the effect of the second _death_ to {66} which the wicked, after being tried by the judgment, are condemned. The portion of Scripture contained in Matt. xxv. 31-46, gives, concerning the awards to be respectively adjudged to the righteous and unrighteous, and the final consequences of the judgment, certain revelations, symbolically expressed, which are made by the Lord himself, the future Judge. In order to complete the argument from Scripture respecting the effect of judgment, we must endeavour to interpret these revelations. "When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, he will sit on the throne of his glory: and all nations will be gathered before him: and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and he will place the sheep on his right hand, and the goats on his left" (_vv._ 31-33). We are thus told that all of all nations will come into the presence of the Judge, and that he will separate them into two portions, as distinct the one from the other as sheep are from goats. From what is said farther on we gather that one portion are "the just" (_oi dikaioi_, _v._ 37), and the other the unjust; but no mention is made of a particular process of separation. Consequently there is nothing here which contradicts the conclusion before arrived at (p. 38), that the just are separated from the unjust by partaking of the first resurrection; rather, that conclusion is in {67} accordance with this revelation respecting the place of honour "on the right hand" being assigned to the just, and their being prepared to receive it when the whole assembly, just and unjust, are gathered together before the Judge. In _v._ 34, as also in _v._ 40, the Judge is called "the King" (_ho Basileus_), forasmuch as he is "the faithful and true" One, who "in righteousness judges and makes war," and to whom belongs in a special manner the title of "King of kings and Lord of lords" (see Rev. xix. 11, 16). We have next to consider the statements of the grounds on which the awards are made, which are very remarkable. "Then shall the King say to them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came to me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say to them, Verily I say to you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" {68} (_vv._ 84-40). What is chiefly noteworthy in these words is, that the Judge identifies himself with suffering humanity, and accounts as "brethren" even "the least" of those that suffer, having, when he "dwelt among us," participated in the toils and afflictions to which sinful man is subject (although "in him was no sin)," and submitted in the end to the shame and pain of dying on the cross, although he had shown by his miracles that he had power over death and all the ills of humanity. As is written in Isaiah liii. 4, "He hath borne _our_ griefs and carried _our_ sorrows." This the Son of God voluntarily took upon himself out of love and compassion towards us, knowing that, by ordinance of his Father, the Creator of spirits, "we must through many tribulations enter into the kingdom of God" (Acts xiv. 22), and be made heirs of immortality, and that consequently we had need of such assurance of obtaining the appointed inheritance as that which is given by his partaking with us of life, death, and resurrection (see what is said on this part of the subject in p. 29). Besides this, the sympathy of Jesus Christ with human suffering, which was also shown by his miracles of healing, is specially a reason for giving _practical_ proof, by acts of benevolence and mercy towards our fellow men, that we partake of the same spirit. It is with reference to such _outward_ evidence of faith and righteousness, that the decision of the Judge, given {69} in the passage above quoted, is pronounced. It seems, too, from the questions put to the Judge by the company of the righteous, and the answer they received, that their acts of kindness and mercy, done in humility and faith, were accepted by the Judge, out of his sympathy and community with the sufferers, as done to himself, although the doers had not had previous knowledge or expectation that their good deeds would be so accepted. The sentence pronounced on the unrighteous, and the reasons for it, are thus stated in _vv._ 41-45: "Then shall he say also to them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into the [oe]onian fire (_to pur to aiônion_, i.e. the fire of judgment in the future _aiôn_) prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry, and ye gave me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily, I say to you, inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me." It should be noticed that the terms of this award are the exact contraries of those of the award to the righteous. On the one hand, the King says, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit {70} the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world;" on the other, he says, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into the [oe]onian fire prepared for the devil and his angels;" and the account of what the Judge further says to the unrighteous, and of what they say to him, although somewhat briefer than that relating to the righteous, is made up of exactly opposite particulars. On this principle, since the decision respecting the righteous is pronounced on the grounds of positive works of righteousness done in humility and faith, that respecting the unrighteous has regard only to the _omission_ to do such works through presumption and unbelief. The same exhibition of opposite circumstances and qualities, and the same principle of condemnation for sins of omission exclusively of those of commission, are observable in the two other symbolic representations contained in the same chapter--the parable of the ten virgins, and the parable of the talents. In short, the general purport of the chapter is to indicate, that in the sight of the righteous Judge sins of omission, not less than sins of commission, demand condemnation and punishment; the reasons for which appear to be that both kinds are equally violations of the royal law, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (James ii. 8), and perfect obedience to this law is the necessary foundation of a _common_ immortality. It only remains now to speak of the final issue of {71} the judgment stated thus in _v._ 46: "And these shall go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into external life." It must be admitted that the first clause of this sentence, taken as it is usually taken, expresses the perpetuity of evil, inasmuch as "punishment" is an evil. But after this has been conceded, there is still something more to be said on this doctrine. It is evident from the context that by "these" is meant the ungodly just before spoken of, who, having shown, by their neglecting to give proof of love towards their neighbours, that the love of God is not in them (see 1 John iv. 20), are counted as enemies, and as such must be punished. For there is no neutral position: all who do not obey the commands of Christ are opposed to him, and all that is opposed to him is destined to be brought under subjection. Further, it is to be noticed that although the final decision is expressed generally in accordance with the before-mentioned principle of employing exactly opposite terms relatively to the righteous and the wicked, here the opposite of "eternal life" is "eternal punishment," and not "eternal death," the latter expression being nowhere found in Scripture. May it not hence be argued that, as among men the punishment of the guilty has not for its purpose the infliction of pain and penalty, but rather is the means employed to the end that laws may be obeyed, so the end of divine punishment is for correction, and for {72} giving effect to and establishing the law of universal righteousness. If it should hence be inferred that the word "eternal" is applied to future punishment with reference to that permanence of _effect_ which, as has already been indicated (p. 65), is symbolically represented by the perpetual ascent of "the smoke of torment," against this inference it might reasonably be urged that "eternal" ought to be taken in the same sense relatively to the "punishment" of the wicked, as relatively to the "life" of the righteous, and eternity is here predicated of the one just as of the other. Now, although this reasoning appears to be irrefragable, the additional arguments from Scripture which I am about to adduce will, I think, show that there must be some other way of regarding the doctrine of future punishment, which, although not inconsistent with that to which the foregoing interpretation of Matt. xxv. 46 has conducted, differs from it either as to point of view or comprehensiveness. In the first place, it is to be observed that in our Lord's discourses doctrine was very generally taught by parables and symbolic language, which required to be interpreted in order that the abstract and spiritual truths thereby conveyed might be understood. (This remark applies to the whole of the passage, Matt. xxv. 31-46, brought under review in the foregoing discussion.) In Mark iv. 34, it is said that "without a parable he spake not to them," that is, {73} to the multitude, and that "in private he explained all things to his disciples." Being asked by the disciples, when he was preaching to a great multitude assembled together on the sea-shore to hear him, why he spake to them in parables, he answered, "Because it is given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him it shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables, because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand" (Matt. xiii. 10-13). It is here affirmed that although parables from their very character are expressed in terms which the use of the senses renders intelligible, there are those who do not or will not understand them, who for this reason, on the principle of not giving to those who have not, are spoken to only in parables, so that they continue in ignorance. As every effect or consequence implies the antecedence of the _purpose_ of an agent, with respect to this consequence we find it stated in Luke viii. 10, that our Lord expressly addressed the disciples in these words: "Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest in parables, _that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand_." To a selected few is granted the favour of being able to discern, _through the objective sense_ of {74} parables, the interior signification whereby mysteries of the kingdom of God are revealed, whilst from the rest--the multitude--although the objective sense is the same to them as to the others, the knowledge of the mysteries is withheld. This is evidently a dispensation analogous to that according to which, as Christ declared, "Many are called, but few are chosen" (Matt. xxii. 14). It is also in accordance with views expressed in a previous part of this Essay respecting the distinction between "the elect" and the rest of mankind. It is further to be considered that the Lord promised the apostles that after his departure from them, "the Holy Spirit would teach them all things, and bring all things to their remembrance which he had said to them" (John xiv. 26), and it may be assumed that after the Day of Pentecost this promise was fulfilled, and that they were then enlightened to discern the spiritual meaning of his doctrine. In this way it may be accounted for that while Christian doctrine rests fundamentally on the words and deeds of Christ as recorded in the Gospels, it is taught in the Acts of the Apostles and the apostolical Epistles in terms of a more abstract character, which, in fact, may be regarded as unfolding the spiritual import of the teaching, the life, and the death of Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul, although he was not one of the originally selected apostles, had special grace and {75} power given him for understanding fully and teaching the doctrine of Christ. Now, this apostle, so gifted with understanding and knowledge, writes in his Epistle to the Romans: "By the obedience of one shall the many be made righteous" (v. 19); the context evidently showing that the "one" is Jesus Christ, and that "the many" are _all_ the sinful sons of Adam. I have already adverted to this text (p. 19), and called attention to the significance of the future tense, "shall be made righteous." According to our argument, when they have been made righteous, they are _saved_. Hence, quite consistently with this passage in the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul has said in his first Epistle to Timothy (iv. 10), "We trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, especially of those that believe." If this sentence had not contained the last clause, there might have been some excuse for questioning whether St. Paul preached the doctrine of the eventual salvation of all men; but inasmuch as he adds, "especially of those that believe," it is as clear as words can make anything clear, that he taught that all are saved in the sense in which he taught that those who believe are saved. The reason for making the distinction expressed by the word "especially" is, I think, sufficiently apparent from the doctrine, previously maintained in this Essay (pp. 88-40), that the elect righteous are raised up first, and partake already of salvation, honour, {76} and glory, during a certain interval preceding the resurrection of the rest of mankind. Now, since all that are saved, as being at rest and in felicity, are free from sin and evil, this teaching of St. Paul is directly opposed to the doctrine of the perpetuity of evil which is usually inferred (see p. 71) from the saying of our Lord in Matt. xxv. 46. Thus apparently there is irreconcilable contradiction between the teaching of Christ and the teaching of St. Paul on a most momentous subject. Since, however, the same spirit of wisdom was in the apostle as in his Lord, it is not possible that there can really be such contradiction; and because, consequently, the seeming contradiction must be attributable to our defect of knowledge, or inability, to interpret rightly the allegorical teaching of Christ, we might do well, although no solution of the difficulty should be at hand, to accept this gospel of salvation, in the confidence that, as being declared by St. Paul in plain terms, it must be true Christian doctrine. I am not, however, prepared to grant that the solution of the above-mentioned difficulty is not discoverable; and accordingly I make bold to indicate a line of argument by which, as it seems to me, a solution is attainable. The first step in this argument is to admit the reality of that analogy between God's natural creation and His spiritual creation which has already been taken into consideration (see p. 14), {77} and to infer therefrom that the spiritual creation is actually in progress towards a foreordained perfect consummation. For the purpose of illustrating this view by way of contrast, I may mention that I once heard a sermon in which the preacher, who was regarded in his day as a leader of religious thought, advanced the theory that the word "remedy" expressed the central idea of the divine scheme of salvation. According to this theology, which looks backwards rather than forwards, the prevalence of sin and mortality, and the need of a remedy for the many ills and errors that beset humanity, were contingent on Adam's transgression. It may be granted that this is so far true, that sin and death entered into the world because Adam was not made incapable of sinning. But this theory overlooks the possibility of there being a _final_ cause for the actual facts of humanity, and seems to be a substitution of _propter hoc_ for _post hoc_. The analogy of the natural creation points to a different, and apparently a juster, view of the divine [oe]conomy, according to which the reign of sin and death in Adam and all his posterity is a necessary part of a prearranged scheme, now actually in progress, which is destined, by its completion hereafter, to make, not one man only, but a countless multitude, incapable of sinning and meet for immortality. On this point, however, after what has been already said (see p. 57), there is no occasion to say {78} more here. I proceed, therefore, to the next step, which is to indicate certain inferences that may be drawn from the character of progressiveness which pertains at present to the spiritual creation. It may, in the first place, be asserted that "the law of opposites," referred to in pp. 69 and 70, is a necessary accompaniment of that general law of progression. The author of the Book of Ecclesiasticus, who certainly put on record many wise sayings, has thus stated the law of opposites: "Good is set against evil, and life against death: so is the sinner against the godly. So look upon all the works of the Most High, and there are two and two, one against another" (xxxiii. 14, 15). Now, evidently this duality will cease, and unity be universally established, when, as argued in the preceding paragraph, the predestined consummation is reached, and the purpose of the whole creation, external and spiritual, is fulfilled. This doctrine of the termination of evil appears to have been understood and proclaimed by the writer of the fourth Book of Esdras, in which we meet with the following emphatic declaration: "Take heaven and earth to witness; for I have broken the evil in pieces, and created the good: for I live, saith the Lord" (ii. 14). In the mean while, as being subject to conditions of earth, and time, and space, we are also subject to this law of duality and antagonism, so that we have no knowledge or perception of anything of {79} which we do not also know the _opposite_. For this reason it is not possible to make known the conditions under which men are saved without at the same time stating the conditions under which they are _not_ saved. This will account for the _oppositeness_ and _parallelism_ of the statements in Matt. xxv. 46, concerning the consequences to the wicked and the righteous of their respective deeds, as well as for many statements of like character in other parts of Scripture. But this does not explain why the punishment of the wicked is said to be "eternal." Relatively to this question I submit the following considerations. Recurring once more to the position, that the existing order of things is part of a progressive scheme, the purpose of which is to create immortal souls, it may, I think, be reasonably assumed that there is nothing in human cognizance or experience, whether it be thought or feeling, word or deed, which is not contributory in some manner to this end. If a mechanist, after planning a machine for a certain purpose, introduced in the execution of it parts which contributed nothing towards effecting that purpose, would not this be considered to be an imperfection? Such imperfection is wholly inadmissible in the workmanship of an omniscient and omnipotent Creator. Accordingly, since, as being conditioned by _time_, we are capable of entertaining the thought that the punishment of the wicked in the world to come may {80} be eternal, many, in fact, having professed their belief that so it will be, we must conclude, on the above principle, that even this thought is contributory towards the eventual bringing in of immortality. But it will be asked, in what way? To this question we may give the general answer, that as such thought is operative on human action, and implies the existence of _time_, it must be reckoned as part of the total of human thought and experience conditioned by time, which was ordained from the beginning to be the means, whether in this age or in the age to come (_aiôn ho mellôn_), of forming spirits for immortality. Then, again, we have reason from Scripture to infer that the immortal spirit is in effect "spiritual _body_" (1 Cor. xv. 44), composed of functional parts or qualities constituting it such a whole that it is adapted for communion with other spirit; in which case the _temporal_ processes of creation above mentioned might be supposed to be designed to give to immortal spirit a character appropriate to its destiny. And we may, at least, be certain that Jesus Christ knew what was required for accomplishing his Father's purpose of creating spirits which, while retaining _individuality_ and _will_, would be incapable of sinning, and that in his wisdom he employed such manner of teaching as would either now or hereafter conduct to that end. I take occasion to observe here, parenthetically, that whereas, according to the above argument, the {81} word "eternal" (from _[oe]etas_) is applicable to punishment because we can think of eternal punishment by thinking of time, the word "endless" is not in the same manner applicable, simply because it does not explicitly indicate relation to _time_. The Greek equivalent of the English word "everlasting," and of the Latin word "_sempiternus_," namely _aidios_ from _aei_, is used in Rom. i. 20, and in Jude 6, in the sense of _aiônios_, and, as involving like the latter the conception of time, is similarly applicable to future punishment. But besides "_eternal_ life," we have in Scripture "_indissoluble_ life" (_xôn akatalytos_, Heb. vii. 16), the remarkable epithet _akatalytos_ not being etymologically expressive of time, and therefore not wrongly, although not strictly, translated by "endless" in the Authorized Version. No such epithet is applied in Scripture to "punishment" or "torment." (See more on this question in an Appendix to the Essay.) Reasoning analogous to that employed above relative to the assertion in Matt. xxv. 46, that the wicked "go away into eternal punishment," is applicable to other declarations of like tenor in various portions of Scripture. One of these, recorded in Matt. xxvi. 24 as having been spoken by the Lord to the "_twelve_," demands special notice. Translated literally according to the tenses of the Greek, this passage is, "Woe to that man through whom the Son of man has been betrayed! good was it for him, if that man was not {82} born." The translation in the Authorized Version, "it had been good for that man if he had not been born," may be taken to convey, regard being had to difference of idiom, the true sense of the original. Exactly the same passage occurs in Mark xiv. 21, where our translators have given, "good were it for that man if he had never been born." Although this translation, as containing the word "never," deviates still more than the other from the literal rendering, it may be justified on the principle that the declaration, in whatever form it be made, is one in which _time_ enters as a necessary element, whereby alone it is within the reach of thought. Accordingly, this saying of our Lord, regarded as having relation to experience in the world to come, is in the same category as his assertion of the eternity of future punishment, and would appear, by applying the argument already expounded (p. 80) with respect to that doctrine, to be in like manner contributory towards generating in the spirit of man an incapability of sinning. It is farther to be taken into account that these words were addressed by the Lord to his _apostles_--to the elect of the elect--with particular reference to the sin of _betraying_ the Son of man, which was exemplified by the outward act of Judas, who also by his self-destruction exhibited the damnatory power of the inward consciousness of such guilt. The exceeding sinfulness of such apostasy as that which Judas, chosen to be {83} an apostle, was guilty of, may be assigned as the reason that it was denounced by our Lord in terms which do not appear to have been applied to any other kind of "transgression" (compare Acts i. 17, 25). In Heb. x. 26, 27, we are taught that "if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries." This is apostasy not of the same degree and character as that of a chosen apostle, but still is such that "the called" are not exempt from falling into it, as is clearly implied by the tenor of this passage. To those who thus fall and do not repent, is reserved "the fiery indignation" (_pyros zylos_), which is destined hereafter to devour the adversaries. It may be presumed that the adversaries thus specially referred to are those of whom it is said in Rev. xx. 9, that having been deceived by Satan, after their resurrection at the end of the thousand years, and gathered together in warfare against the beloved city, they were _devoured by fire_ from God out of heaven. Accordingly their destruction is identical with the second death. 2 Peter ii. 20, 21, is a passage of like import to that just considered. It is therein asserted of those who are overcome by the pollutions of the world after having escaped them through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, that "it had been {84} better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them." This may be taken to signify that the punishment in the day of judgment consequent upon sin and error arising out of ignorance, will be "more tolerable" than that which will be inflicted on those who have knowingly apostatized from the way of truth. What is said in Matt. xviii. 6, "Whoso shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea," may be accounted for on the principle that any form of death of which the body is susceptible in this world is rather to be endured, and less to be feared, than the punishment which, through the judgment in the world to come, awaits the enemies of Christ who put a stumbling-block in the way of them that humble themselves as little children and believe on him. Analogous principles may be applied to account for the declarations made in Scripture respecting blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. In St. Matt. xii. 31, 82, it is recorded that our Lord said, "All sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven to men, but the blasphemy of the Spirit shall not be forgiven to men. And whoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever speaketh against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, {85} neither in this world, nor in the world to come." The same doctrine is thus expressed in St. Mark iii. 28, 29: "Verily I say to you, all sins shall be forgiven to the sons of men, and all blasphemies whatever wherewith they may blaspheme. But whoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness," but is subject to the judgment in the future _aiôn_ (_enochos estin aiôniou kriseôs_). From the latter evangelist we also learn that our Lord spoke these words because the scribes from Jerusalem had said, "He hath an unclean spirit." It is particularly to be noticed that both passages declare in the fullest manner that all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven to men, at the same time that they pronounce that blasphemy (not sin, _amartia_) against the Holy Ghost is not forgiven. To account for this apparent contradiction, it must be remembered that the forgiveness, or _remission_ (_aphesis_) of sin, necessarily implies antecedence of law and transgression of the law; and whereas St. Paul teaches that "the law entered that transgression might abound" (Rom. v. 20), it is quite consistent with this doctrine to find that in the gospel of Christ provision is made for the remission of all sin and blasphemy. Now, such remission consists in "repentance towards God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ" (Acts xx. 21); and therefore, when the gift of righteousness (i.e. the grace of Christ) is received, the believer begins to partake {86} of a spirit such as that which was "without measure" in Christ. This is essentially a _holy_ spirit, the antecedent of which in Jesus Christ was perfect righteousness. Therefore the scribes blasphemed when they said of Christ, "He hath an unclean spirit," it not being possible that a perfectly righteous body can be the vessel of an unclean spirit. But it is possible that the faithful, after receiving the grace of Christ and fellowship of the Spirit, may by unrighteous conduct "grieve the Holy Spirit" (Eph. iv. 80), and even by persistence in sin defile the gift of the Spirit which had been imparted to them. In the foregoing passage from St. Matthew xii., it is said that there is forgiveness for one who "speaketh against the Son of man," which expression may signify, generally, wilful and overt opposition to "the law of Christ" (Gal. vi. 2); but that there is no forgiveness for one who _speaks_ against the Holy Spirit, i.e. one who by wilful and _overt_ conduct does violence to the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit which he has already partaken of. Of such an one it is written in Heb. x. 29, "he hath trodden underfoot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified an unholy thing, and hath done despite to the Spirit of grace." But not every sin committed after faith and the baptism of repentance has this effect. The apostle John tells us that although all unrighteousness {87} (_adikia_, transgression of the strict law of Christ) is sin, there is sin of a believing brother which is not unto death, and may be repented of in this world; and there is sin unto death, respecting which prayer for repentance would be unavailing (1 Epist. v. 16, 17). This is "the blasphemy of the Spirit," which is not forgiven in this world, because forgiveness implies repentance; neither is it forgiven in the world to come, because beyond the grave there is no repentance. What remains for such sinners is the "[oe]onian judgment" (see p. 69) mentioned in St. Mark iii. 29, and "the sorer punishment" spoken of in Heb. x. 29, which is the same as the condemnation to the second death consequent upon that judgment. (I take occasion to remark that in Mark iii. 29, instead of _kriseôs_, some early manuscripts have _amaritêmatos_, which, as far as I can see, does not admit of being interpreted consistently with the context and the usage of _enochos_.) There is still another passage--Mark ix. 42-50--which, on account of its peculiar significance, it is necessary to discuss with reference to the Scriptural argument for immortality. It will suffice for conducting the discussion to cite _vv._ 43 and 44, the literal translation of which is as follows:--"If thy hand cause thee to offend, cut it off: it is well for thee to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands to go into geenna, into the unquenchable fire, where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not {88} quenched." The concluding part of this text is evidently derived from Isaiah lxvi. 24, where the prophet reveals that the Lord has said respecting the worshippers, consisting of "all flesh," that shall come before him when "the new heavens and the new earth" are established, that "they shall go forth and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched: and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh." This passage has so important a bearing on the sense of that quoted above from St. Mark, that we must by all means endeavour to find out its interpretation. Respecting Biblical Interpretation, Burnet in one of his treatises has enunciated two principles, which cannot but be assented to: first, that besides the portions of Scripture which have a literal or historical meaning, there are others which must be taken allegorically; and, secondly, that an allegorical meaning, is to be admitted when the literal sense involves an absurdity, or contradiction to the nature of things.[2] The right application of these principles may be said to constitute a large portion of the science of Scripture. But in applying them it is often difficult to decide, respecting a particular passage, whether it is to be {89} taken literally or allegorically; and again, after deciding that the passage must be allegorical, there is generally the still greater difficulty of discovering what the true sense is. In illustration of the second of the above principles Burnet cites, apart from the context, _vermem nunquam moriturum_, and admits that these words have an allegorical signification. This plainly follows from the single consideration that the worm (_skôlêx_) here spoken of is literally that which is seen to feed on dead bodies, and to say of it that it does not die is contradictory to experience. When, however, the same author goes on to give as the allegorical sense nothing more definite than "_extremam miseriam_," it may well be asked, By what kind of induction has this conclusion been reached? The feeble worm which feeds on mortal remains presents to our sight nothing capable of causing pain or misery. Rather it may, I think, be asserted that Scripture here adverts to this natural fact for the purpose of indicating by a distinct and visible emblem that there is a living principle which destroys mortality, and which for that reason alone is not itself subject to death. If we be guided solely by what _we see with our eyes_, this appears to be the only allegorical sense that can be attributed to the first clause of Mark ix. 44.[3] We have next to inquire as to the {90} interpretation of the other clause, and what is the mutual relation between the two clauses. Although the worm which devours dead bodies is not emblematic of anything that causes pain, the case is quite otherwise with respect to the emblematic meaning of _fire_. It is evident that fire which is "unquenchable" is not natural fire, and consequently may be taken to be, as has already been assumed, the devouring fire of judgment and of condemnation consequent upon violation of the law of righteousness (see p. 88). The destruction of the impenitent unrighteous by the operation of this law (which is their second death), is attended with pain and woe such as will not have been before, nor will be after. It was inferred (p. 84) from our Lord's teaching in Matt. xviii. 6, that any form of _death_ of which the body is susceptible in this world is rather to be endured than falling under condemnation in the world to come. In Mark ix. 42-48, we are taught that any form of bodily _pain_, as that of losing a hand, a foot, or an eye, is to be preferred to entering with the body whole into the "_geenna_ of fire." This is, in fact, at once the greatest and the _last_ of human suffering and tribulation. For it should be noticed that at the end of this very passage (v. 49) it is said that "every one shall be salted [made 'good,' _v._ 50] with fire," signifying the effect finally produced by the unquenchable fire. And with this agrees the emblem {91} of the worm that "dieth not," taken as indicating that the final effect of the torment of the judgment is to swallow up death, and to bring in, by establishing the reign of righteousness, life and immortality. The signification of one emblem must be taken in conjunction with that of the other. Moreover, by giving particular attention to the context of Isa. lxvi. 24, it will be seen that what is there revealed is quite in accordance with the above interpretation. For, first, in _v._ 16 we have, "By fire and by his sword [the sword of the Word of God spoken of in Rev. xix. 15] will the Lord plead with all flesh," that is, in the judgment which has been appointed for the trial and tribulation of all men. Then, by taking into account what is said in _vv._ 22 and 23, we may gather that "all flesh," having become denizens of "the new heavens and the new earth" in which, as St. Peter declares (2 Epist. iii. 13), righteousness dwells, "come to worship the Lord." Of _these worshippers_, consisting of "all flesh," it is affirmed that "they shall go forth and look upon the carcases of the transgressors," which, on account of the ill savour coming up from them, will be "an abhorring to all flesh" (compare Isa. xxxiv. 3). Thus there is here represented, but by a different figure, the same truth as that which has already been deduced from the ascending up for ever and ever of the brimstone smoke of torment (see pp. 61 and 65); namely, {92} that the subjecting of all the deeds and secrets of the present life to the scrutiny of judgment, and the consequent condemnation of all the unredeemed to the pains of a second death, will have the effect of making sin against a "faithful Creator" to be seen and felt to be so hateful and abominable a thing, that such sin will cease to be possible, notwithstanding that all men will retain individuality and volition. For all will thus at length be made new creatures incapable of sinning. This remark may serve to introduce the final stage of the general argument, which I now proceed to enter upon. I have been endeavouring to show that the symbolic assertions in Rev. xx. respecting "the lake of fire" and its "burning with brimstone," the casting therein of the devil, the beast, and the false prophet, and their being tormented "day and night for ever and ever," the judgment of all the dead, small and great, according to their recorded deeds, "the second death," and the casting into the lake of fire of "any one not found written in the book of life," do not necessitate, as is commonly thought, the conclusion that evil, which had a beginning, fulfils no purpose and has no ending. As to this question the seer gives, in Rev. xxi. 1-4, the following explicit revelation: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth passed away; and there is no more sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, {93} coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be with them, their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the first things passed away." Now, it seems hardly possible that the announcement of the termination of evil could be made in terms more direct and more intelligible than these. Hence, according to acknowledged principles of Biblical interpretation, we must not attribute to the above-mentioned symbolic and less intelligible passages any meaning inconsistent with that announcement. The arguments I have adduced respecting the interpretation of the figurative statements contained in the latter half of chap. xx. are directed to showing that these figures do, in fact, admit of meanings consistent with the gospel revelations given in chap. xxi. 1-4. It is of so much importance, as regards the Scriptural doctrine of immortality, to establish this point, that I propose now to supplement the former arguments by additional considerations. In the Book of Daniel (xii. 6, 7) we read of "a man clothed in linen, who was upon the water of a river, and held up his right hand and his left hand unto {94} heaven, and sware by Him that liveth for ever," that at the end of an appointed time a certain purpose would be accomplished, and "all these things be finished." This refers, as the context shows, to "the time of the end" of the present age (_aiôn_). The announcement made in this manner by the man clothed in linen indicates that he is the precursor of the angel of whom, in _vv._ 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 of Rev. x., the apostle John relates as follows: "I saw a mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud, and a rainbow upon his head, and his face as the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire; and, having in his hand a little book open, he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot upon the earth.... and lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by Him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven and the things therein, and the earth and the things therein, and the sea and the things therein, that time shall be no more; but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, in the time when he is about to sound his trumpet, also [_kai_, merely indicating the apodosis] the mystery of God is finished (_etelesthê_, aor. ind.), according to the gospel He made known to His servants the prophets." The soundings of the seven trumpets are significant of progressive steps in the general judgment; the days pertaining to the voice of the seventh angel are those immediately preceding the actual sounding of his trumpet, which announces the {95} completion (as indicated by the number seven) of the mystery of God's creation in time, and marks the end of the age (_ho aiôn ho mellôn_) following upon the conclusion of the present age. When all that pertains to this final interval "is finished," there is no more succession of events whereby time is cognizable, and therefore time is no more. The might, and glorious investiture, and majestic attitude of the angel who proclaims this truth, conspire to point out its great significance. The little book in his hand is the word of prophecy by which we learn these mysteries. It is, no doubt, beyond the limit of our thoughts, conditioned as we are by time, to conceive of a state of things in which time is no more. Apparently for this reason commentators have proposed to translate, _chronos ouk estai eti_, "the time shall not be yet," or "time shall no more intervene." The former of these translations is excluded by the usage of _ouk eti_ in the analogous affirmations in Rev. xxi. 1, 4, and the other, which is an arbitrary comment rather than a translation, is for the same reason excluded. (I have preferred _ouk estai eti_ to _ouketi estai_, because the words occur in the former order in each of the three instances in Rev. xxi.) There can be no question as to the philological correctness of the translation, "time shall be no more." The unwillingness to admit it appears to have arisen solely from a fixed persuasion, gratuitously and very generally entertained, that time {96} has a _necessary_ existence, and therefore cannot come to an end. Some have affirmed that when time ends, eternity begins; which is a self-contradictory dogma, because eternity (from _[oe]tas_) is essentially time. The teaching of Scripture on this point is directly opposed to these views; for the apostle Peter tells those for whose sake he wrote his second Epistle, to bear in mind "this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Epist. iii. 8). This is equivalent to saying that time is not an independent entity, but that both its existence and its quality are determined by the _will_ of the Creator of all things. It is in virtue of our being made in His image, and partaking intellectually of the divine nature, that we are capable _in thought_ of giving indefinite and arbitrary extension to time, whether it be past time or time to come. This faculty, as I have already argued in p. 80, is to be placed in the category of the different conditions, whether depending on experience of the course of time, or on affections of our bodily and mental constitutions, under which the spirit of man is formed for immortality. All such conditions are determined by the purpose for which they are imposed, and when that purpose is fulfilled in the perfection of humanity the conditions come to an end. It is thus that the being conditioned by time eventually ceases. It will be proper here to meet an objection to the {97} doctrine that time will have an end which might be drawn from the expression, _eis tous aiônas tôn aiônôn_, which frequently occurs in Scripture, and seems to be indicative of an unlimited succession of ages. So far as time is under human cognizance, and has relation to human experience, Scripture speaks in express terms of only _two_ ages--the present one, which lasts to the end of the _generations_ of men in the existing order of things; and the age to come, which embraces the course of the judgment of all who lived in the first age, and terminates with the second death of those who had no part in the first resurrection. When it is said of the Creator of heaven and earth, that He is "from everlasting to everlasting" (_apo tou aiônos meôs tou aiônos su ei_, Ps. xc. 2), and that "He liveth for ever and ever" (_ho zôn eis tous aiônas tôn aiônôn_, Rev. x. 6), the word _aiôn_ is not used to signify, as in the instances of the two "ages" just mentioned, an interval having beginning and ending, but is to be taken in an abstract sense, derived from our ordinary perception of the existence and quality of time, and from the faculty which, as said before, we possess of thinking of time as indefinitely extended. The first of the cited passages affirms what in these days we should express by saying that God is necessarily and essentially self-existent, and the other, what we mean by saying that He is necessarily and essentially a _living_ God. But {98} Scripture uses no such terms as these, because it is written on the principle of employing in an abstract sense only such terms as are rendered intelligible by personal sensation and observation, and by experience drawn under actual conditions from the outer world. It is thus that the word "age" acquired its primary meaning, before it was susceptible of the abstract application just mentioned. There is also to be said, as a reason for accepting this doctrine respecting our relation to time, that Scripture teaches analogous doctrine respecting our relation to _space_. When our Lord astonished his disciples by saying that the passage of a camel through the eye of a needle is not an impossibility, he explained that "this is impossible with men, but not with God; for with God all things are possible" (Mark x. 25-27). By this saying he asserted that space, and the mutual relations of body and space, are such as they are by the will and power of God, and by the same power might be changed. Considering, therefore, that "the new heavens and the new earth" constitute a "new creation," it is quite in accordance with the above inference from our Lord's words to find it said of "the new Jerusalem, the holy city," that "the length, and the breadth, and the height of it are equal" (Rev. xxi. 16). For a city to be such as to conform to this description, it is plain that material substance and space must {99} be related to each other in an entirely new manner, unrecognizable by present experience. The apostle Paul adverts to the eventual status of the spirit of man with respect to time and space where he says, "I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. viii. 38, 39). (In this sentence the recognized passage of time, the powers [_dynameis_] of nature, and the measurable qualities of space, seem all to be regarded as things _created_.) Also corresponding to the change in the external creation it is revealed that there will be a change of the outward man, the natural body giving place to the "spiritual body." It would appear, therefore, from the whole of the foregoing argument that our spirits, after being bound by earthly and temporal conditions, undergo complete transformation, being conjoined with bodily essence related in a new manner to _space_, and being also released from the condition of _time_. But although this mode of existence may be a necessary condition of the immortal state, especially as such state embraces associated members, it is not the sole, nor the principal, condition of immortality, as the remainder of the argument will show. It has already been noticed that St. Peter {100} characterizes "the new heavens and the new earth" by saying that "righteousness dwells therein." This is as much as to say that it is a perfect _social_ state, whose end is at once the glory of God and the happiness of man. The words of the apostle (2 Epist. iii. 13) signify that the new creation, by satisfying this condition, is the fulfilment of an antecedent promise. Now, the argument of this Essay is in entire agreement with this doctrine, inasmuch as it was from the first assumed (p. 9) that immortality cannot consist with any other than a state of righteousness, and then (pp. 19 and 20) it was argued that after Adam's transgression a _promise_ was made that himself and his race would eventually be exempt from the power of Satan and attain to immortality. The passage Rev. xxi. 1-4, quoted in p. 92, seems to certify the complete fulfilment of this promise and to indicate the manner of its fulfilment. But there are other passages in this concluding portion of the Apocalypse, which might be thought to bear a contrary signification, to which, therefore, our attention must now be directed. In xxi. 8 we have, "But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all lies, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death." If we give to this symbolism, as consistency requires, {101} an interpretation analogous to that applied to Rev. xx. 10, we shall conclude that sinners of all classes will eventually have no cognizable existence, transgression being brought to an end by the effect of the general judgment and the pains of the second death. This may explain why it is added, "which is the second death." It is worthy of remark that "all lies" are said to have their part in "the lake" although the casting of lies into a lake is objectively an impossibility. But this variation of the designation ("lies" being put for "liars") may be intended to signify generally that all transgression disappears, because transgressors cease to be cognizable _as transgressors_. There is another thing to be noticed respecting the same passage: it contains no such clause as, "They shall be tormented day and night to the ages of ages," which occurs at the end of Rev. xx. 10. This omission may be accounted for on the principle stated in p. 96, according to which expressions involving time are not applicable to the condition of things in the new creation, in which time exists no more. I take the occasion to remark here that the above-cited clause appears to be the only passage in the Apocalypse which asserts the perpetuity of _personal_ experience of torment, as distinct from the perpetuity of its effect; also that the personal subject of the verb _basanisthêsontia_, according to grammatical rules, would be the devil, the beast, and the {102} false prophet, each of which is represented as personal, and endowed with volition and power. But these, as I have maintained in p. 61, are the powers which, according to the law of opposites, are antagonist to God the Father, the Holy Ghost, and the Son of God; and the assertion that they are tormented for ever and ever may be taken to mean, according to the principle of interpretation explained in p. 97, that they exist _necessarily_, but only as they exist, when subdued, in the contempt and hatred in which they are held by those who have felt their power and have overcome it, this spiritual effect being a condition of immortality. (See end of p. 61.) It remains to speak of one other subject connected with the revelations made in the Apocalypse, which, understood as it respects our argument, is of very great moment, inasmuch as it has relation to the means by which the spirit of man is endowed with immortality. The Son of God is named in the Apocalypse "The Word of God" (xix. 18), "King of kings and Lord of lords" (xvii. 14, and xix. 16), "the root and the offspring of David, the bright and morning star" (xxii. 16), and by other titles expressive of honour and dignity; but no name occurs so frequently, and in such various applications, as "the Lamb." What, it may be asked, is the reason for this? In order to answer this question let us take into consideration some instances, specially {103} significant, in which this name occurs. From what is recorded in chap. v. 6-13 as having been seen in vision by the apostle, we are instructed as follows respecting the character and office of the Lamb: "In the midst of the throne [the seat of the Lord God Almighty] and of the four living beings, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns [emblematic of perfect power] and seven eyes [perfection of wisdom], which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth." And he came and took out of the right hand of Him who sat upon the throne a book "sealed with seven seals." "And when he had taken the book, the four living beings and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb.... And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof; for thou wast slain." Then "an innumerable company of angels" (Heb. xii. 22) was heard to say with a loud voice, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. And every created thing which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all things in them, were heard to say, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever." Then follows in chap. vi. the opening of the seven {104} seals, which, from the descriptions given at the successive openings, appear to symbolize the various kinds of human experience, both good and evil, which mark the course of events in the present world, all centering in the work of redemption by the sacrifice of the Son of God; on which account the Lamb _slain_ can alone open the seven seals and disclose their meaning. At the end of what is said relative to the sixth seal mention is made of "the great day of the wrath of the Lamb," which, because by reason of the sins of men he was so unjustly slain, is ordained to be seen and felt by the whole world after the termination of the present age (see Rev. i. 7). The expectation of that wrath, although none can escape it, all but very few in the present day are unwilling, through terror or unbelief, to entertain. The state of terror of all classes at the signs of the approach of that day appears to be described at the end of the chapter. (See vi. _vv._ 15-17.) Next, in chap. vii., comes the sealing of all the elect, represented symbolically by the sealing of twelve thousand of each of the twelve tribes of Israel, the number twelve specially signifying election. Then in _vv._ 9-17 is recorded a most wonderful vision. The seer says, "After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, whom no man could number, of all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white {105} robes, and palms in their hands: and they cry with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God who sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb." This multitude whom no man can number, the number of whom is elsewhere said to be as "the sand of the sea," must embrace all that are not of the number of the elected and sealed one hundred and forty-four thousand, and their ascription here of praise to God for salvation accords with the teaching of St. Paul, that "God is the Saviour of all men, especially of those that believe." This is made still plainer by what is said respecting this multitude clothed in white robes in _vv._ 14-17. The seer is told by one of the elders that "These are they who come out of the great tribulation, and washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve Him day and night in His temple; and He that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. And they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne will feed them, and will lead them to fountains of waters of life; and God will wipe away all tears from their eyes." It is evident that the revelation here made is _proleptical_, describing a state of things identical with that which in Rev. xxi. 3, 4 (before quoted in p. 93), is said to pertain to the new heavens and the {106} new earth. The explanation that may be given of this anticipation of the subsequent revelation is referable to a principle which governs much that is contained in Scripture, although it has been generally overlooked--the principle, namely, of following sometimes an order determined by _relativity_, although it sets aside order as to time. This, however, is not done except for some purpose. In the present instance, the effect of declaring the salvation of all men in immediate sequence to the sealing of the elect for salvation, is to indicate that the general scheme whereby all eventually partake of salvation consists of related and progressive parts to be unfolded by course of time. The name of "the Lamb" is also given to our Lord in various other passages, which, with the view of contributing to the general argument, I proceed now to cite and make some remarks upon. The accuser of the brethren (Satan) is overcome by those who loved not their lives unto death, "on account of the _blood_ of the Lamb" (xii. 10, 11). The beast will be worshipped by all dwellers upon earth "whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb _slain_ from the foundation of the world" (xiii. 8). "A Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father's name written on their foreheads.... These are they who follow the Lamb wheresoever he goeth. {107} These were purchased from among men, the firstfruits to God and to the Lamb" (xiv. 1, 4). The worshippers of the beast "shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb" (xiv. 10). Those who have gotten the victory over the beast "sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of the nations. Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy: for all nations shall come and worship before thee, because thy judgments are made manifest" (xv. 2-4). The law given by Moses, and the gospel of Jesus Christ, constitute together a great and wonderful [oe]conomy, redounding to the praise and glory of God, and to the salvation of man. Kings of the earth "shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them, because he is Lord of lords and King of kings, and they that are with him are called, and elect, and faithful" (xvii. 14). The marriage of the Lamb and his bride--that is, the union of Christ with the whole assembly of the redeemed--does not take place till "the wife has made herself ready," till she has arrayed herself in the fine linen, clean and white, which it was given her to put on, the fine linen being "the righteousness of saints" (xix. 7, 8). This doctrine accords well {108} with the view taken throughout this Essay, namely, that righteousness (the "unspeakable gift," 2 Cor. ix. 15) is necessary as an antecedent condition of salvation, and therefore of immortality. It is further to be noticed that this union between the Lamb and the bride is not perfected while time lasts, requiring the condition of a new creation. For it was not till the first heaven and the first earth passed away that John "saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (xxi. 2), and that "the Lamb's wife" was shown to him by "one of the seven angels that had the seven vials full of the last seven plagues" (xxi. 9). The performance of this office by an angel who in the antecedent judgment had been a minister of wrath and punishment, may be taken to be significant of the _means_ by which the glorious consummation is brought about. Finally, we have in the following concluding portions of apocalyptic prophecy a description of what may be said to constitute the joy of the marriage supper, namely, the perfection through righteousness, not only of the union between Christ and the elect Church, but also of that between God and all peoples. Speaking of "the holy city Jerusalem," John says, "I saw no temple therein; for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city hath no need of the sun, neither of the {109} moon, to shine on it; for the glory of God gave light to it, and the Lamb is the lamp thereof. And the nations shall walk by the light of it, and the kings of the earth bring their glory into it. And the gates of it shall not be shut by day, for there will not be night there. And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it. And there shall not enter into it anything unclean, and that worketh abomination and lying, but only they that are written in the Lamb's book of life" (xxi. 22-27). The seer goes on to say, "And he showed me a river of water of life, bright as crystal, coming forth from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it and of the river, on the one side and the other [the river being in the middle of the street, and the tree spreading from one side to the other], was the tree of life, producing twelve fruits, and yielding its fruit according to each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him: and they shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads. And night shall be no more: and they shall have no need of light of a lamp, and light of the sun; because the Lord God will give them light, and they shall reign to the ages of ages" (xxii. 1-5). The foregoing citations, and indeed the whole tenor of the contents of the Apocalypse, clearly point to the {110} conclusion that what is symbolized by "the Lamb" and "the Lamb slain" runs through all it teaches respecting the course of experience and future destination of the race of man--is "the lamp" that enlightens the whole. Now, I think I may assert that the reason this is so is given by the arguments adduced in this Essay. It has been maintained that on the day that Adam fell into disobedience by the wiles of Satan, his Creator made a promise by covenant that he and his offspring should in the end be freed from the power of Satan and evil, and partake of immortality. The terms of the covenant were that man must pass through toil, and pain, and death, that thereby his spirit might be formed for receiving the gift of an immortal life. Evidence of an intelligent belief of the efficacy of these conditions was given by the faithful of old by their sacrificing clean animals, and surety for the fulfilment of the covenant was given on God's part by a favourable acceptance, either directly or mediately, of this expression of their faith. In process of time the only begotten Son of God, out of sympathy with suffering humanity, and from knowledge of his Father's purpose towards us, satisfied in his own person the very same conditions, and thus at once exemplified and justified the means by which that purpose is accomplished. At the same time he made sure the grounds for belief of the fulfilment of the covenanted promise, first by marvellous {111} works before he suffered, which showed that he had command over all the ills of humanity, and after his death, by resurrection from the grave the third day, which gave proof of the reality of a power that could overcome death. The miracles of Christ are an essential part of the work of his ministry, inasmuch as they were needed to prove that he possessed power greater than that of his adversaries, and consequently that he submitted _voluntarily_ to be "led as a _lamb_ to the slaughter," and to endure all the pain and indignities of the cross. Out of love towards those whom he vouchsafes to call his brethren, he showed how they must undergo physical suffering and the pains of death in order that their spirits might be formed for an endless life. It was with understanding and belief that the way to life was made sure by fellowship with Christ in suffering, that some of the most favoured of his faithful followers, apostles and apostolic men, willingly suffered after his example. But pain and death are not in this way efficacious for salvation, unless they be accompanied by a faith which lays hold of the covenant and promise of life made and ratified from the beginning by God, and which looks for the fulfilment in the world to come. Those who, having this faith, do good works are God's elect, who live again at the first resurrection, to die no more. The rest of mankind, although they go through suffering and death, and although their {112} sufferings are not without effect in forming their spirits for immortality (such is the virtue of the sacrifice of the Son of God "for the sins of the whole world"), rise to be judged for their unbelief and unrighteousness, and to be condemned to undergo a second death. The Lamb slain is appointed to execute the judgment and take vengeance on the unrighteous. What better title could there be for his undertaking this "strange work" (Isa. xxviii. 21), than his having so cruelly and unjustly suffered at the hands of sinful men? Yet the portions of Scripture we have had under consideration necessitate the conclusion that the consecration of the way to life through death by the death of the Son of God, which applies to the death of believers, applies also to the second death of unbelievers; so that this death also is followed by life. But here a difficulty presents itself which needs explanation. Although Scripture speaks of a first resurrection and a second death, it makes no mention of a _second resurrection_. This, I think, may be accounted for as follows. By considering the context, both preceding and following, of the clause, "This is the first resurrection," in Rev. xx. 5, it will be apparent that "resurrection" does not here mean simply returning to life after death, but may be taken to embrace the whole period of the thousand years, together with all that concerns "the happy and the holy" who {113} have part therein. This interpretation is in accordance with the sense in which our Lord speaks of resurrection where he says, "In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels, of God in heaven" (Matt. xxii. 30). That "the resurrection" (_hê anastasis_) designates a state or condition of life into which the elect of God are _introduced_ by returning to life after death, is still more explicitly signified by the following corresponding passage of St. Luke (xx. 34-36): "The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage; but they who are accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage: neither can they die any more; for they are equal to the angels, and are children of God, being children of the resurrection." Now, it may certainly be inferred from what is said in Rev. xx. 5, that the rest of the dead, who have no part in this first resurrection, return to life at the end of the thousand years. But they return to life to be judged, condemned, and suffer death again. This, therefore, is in no sense a resurrection answering to the description above given of the first resurrection, and accordingly is not called in Scripture the second resurrection. What really corresponds to the holiness and happiness of the first resurrection state is the finally perfected and all-comprehending state called "the new heaven and the new earth," life in which, according to our {114} argument, comes out of the second and last death, and is unconditioned by time. This is the heavenly state which is described in Rev. vii. 11-17, xxi. 2-4, and 10-27. Thus, although this may be regarded as that subsequent resurrection to which "the first resurrection" by its very designation points, it is not called "the second resurrection," because it is not, like the first, limited or conditioned by _time_. The portion of the Apocalypse which is strictly symbolical and prophetical begins at _v._ 1 of chap. iv. and ends with _v._ 5 of chap. xxii. The first three chapters, including the epistles to the seven Churches, and the verses from chap. xxii. 5 to the end of the book, may be taken to be respectively introduction and conclusion, the contents of which, although strictly related to those of the intermediate symbolical part, are not of a character so exclusively figurative. This circumstance has to be taken into account in proposing interpretations of passages contained in them. Now, there are certain passages in the concluding part which appear to be contradictory to the doctrine of salvation maintained in this Essay, and accordingly, before bringing the argument to a close, I shall endeavour to ascertain the true interpretations of these passages. The angel who showed John "these things" (xxii. 8) says of himself, "I am the fellow-servant of thee, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of those who {115} keep the words of this book;" and yet this speaker is not distinguished from him who afterwards says (_vv._ 12, 13), "Lo, I come quickly, and my reward is with me, to render to each according as his work is. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end," who, without doubt, is the Lord himself. This may be accounted for by the following considerations. This angel, of whom it is twice asserted that he refused to receive worship proffered to him by the seer (xix. 10, and xxii. 9), is the same that is spoken of in Rev. i. 1, with reference to "the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him, to shew to his servants things which must shortly come to pass," in these terms: "He [Jesus Christ] by sending signified it [the revelation] through his angel to his servant John." In certain passages in the introductory part of the Apocalypse, as Rev. i. 8, 17-20, and throughout the epistles to the seven Churches, the Lord speaks in his own person; and this again he does expressly in some passages in the concluding part, as xxii. 7, 12, 13, 16, 20; and although the speaker in _vv._ 10 and 11 appears to be the same as the speaker in _v._ 9, who certainly is the angel, such words as those two verses contain could hardly have been uttered by any one but the Lord, and, at least, they may be attributed to him on the principle that what the Lord does through his ministering angel may be said to be done by himself. It is as {116} ministering to Jesus Christ that the angel calls himself a "fellow-servant" of prophets and apostles, and, generally, of those who keep the words of this revelation. For these reasons in the following remarks I take _vv._ 10 and 11 as spoken by Jesus Christ. The words addressed by the speaker to John are (_vv._ 10, 11): "Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book; for the time is at hand. He who is unrighteous, let him commit injustice still; and he who is filthy, let him be filthy still; and he who is righteous, let him do righteousness still; and he who is holy, let him be holy still. Lo, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to render to each as his work is." This passage has been interpreted as meaning that in the world to come the conditions of the righteous and the wicked are irrevocably fixed. I would rather say, having regard to the precise opposition of the clauses of which it is composed, that the passage declares that in the end unrighteousness and filthiness are irrevocably separate from their opposites righteousness and holiness; and to account for the terms in which this statement is made, it may suffice to refer to the principle that according to the concrete, or objective, teaching of the Apocalypse, holiness and filthiness would not be spoken of abstractedly, that is, apart from holy and _filthy_ persons, and in like manner righteousness and unrighteousness would not be mentioned apart from their necessary {117} antecedents, _personal_ righteous and unrighteous _deeds_. The expressions "commit injustice" and "do righteousness," which do not occur in the English version, are exact renderings of the Greek. Another passage which, as bearing on our argument, requires to be taken into account, is _v._ 15 of the same chapter, which asserts that "without are dogs, and sorcerers, and fornicators, and murderers, and idolaters, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie." This is expressing in concrete language, such as is constantly employed in Scripture, that there is no unrighteousness in the city of God. Such language, being concerned only with _objective_ realities, cannot express a _negation_, and, consequently, cannot assert that unrighteousness is _not_ within the city. Hence it is not possible, except by means of such terms as those actually employed, to express concretely that the city of God is free from all unrighteousness. By comparing Rev. xxi. 8 with the interpretation here given of Rev. xxii. 15, it will be seen that the exclusion from the city of God of all things sinful and abominable is declared to be effected by "the second death." I have now completed the argument respecting man's immortality which I proposed to found upon the words of Scripture. I have argued on the hypothesis that for this purpose the Scriptures are trustworthy and sufficient, and I have admitted that we {118} can know nothing for certain concerning our immortality apart from the declared will of "Him who alone hath immortality" (1 Tim. vi. 16). Accordingly, Scripture must be consulted in order to learn what God has willed respecting the destiny of man. The principal result of this inquiry is, that by the will of God righteousness and salvation are so inseparably connected that only as being personally righteous can man be saved and partake of immortality. The question, therefore, as to the immortality of all men resolves itself into inquiring whether, and by what means, all men are made righteous. Arguments relating to this inquiry may be said to constitute the whole of this Essay. I am prepared to expect that it will be objected to these arguments that they are _new_, and on this account that the conclusions drawn from them are not _true_. I admit the validity of this inference if the arguments and conclusions are really new, but I maintain that in so far as they are founded upon, and correctly supported by, Scripture, they cannot be new, because we must not suppose that the Scriptural doctrine of man's salvation was not fully understood before these days--for instance, in the days of primitive Christianity. As the objection on the ground of newness cannot be sustained, the only course left to the objector is to examine the arguments, for the purpose of ascertaining whether they are sound and strictly Scriptural. {119} I think, however, it is possible that Scriptural doctrine, as taught originally by prophets, apostles, and apostolic men, may have become so obscured and mixed up with human traditions and accretions, that bringing it again to light would appear like promulgating new doctrine. This remark leads me to state on what authorities I have chiefly relied in the composition of this Essay. I may say at once that my views have been determined for the most part by long study of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and the Apocalypse of the Apostle John. I was not, however, able to accept St. Paul's Epistle as it is translated in the Authorized Version, nor could I agree with any commentary upon it that had come before me. For these reasons I published a revised Translation, with Introduction and Notes (Deighton, Bell, & Co., 1871), which may, perhaps, claim consideration, if on no other ground, because it is the production of a mind not unacquainted with classical studies, but trained especially by mathematics and the pursuit of physical science for inquiring respecting the method and laws of divine operation. I have stated in the preface to that work (p. x.) the particular bearing which, as it seemed to me, such studies have on the interpretation of St. Paul's Epistle. Under the influence of the same mental training, I was induced long since to direct my attention towards the interpretation of the Apocalypse, and I purpose {120} shortly, if God be willing, to publish the fruits of my researches. Any reader of this Essay will perceive that it contains much which depends on views which I entertain respecting the general scheme and the symbolism of the Apocalypse. With respect to the interpretation of symbolical Scripture, I have not abstained from having recourse to books which, although they are not included in the Canon of Scripture, are specially adapted to reveal principles on which the prophetical and symbolical parts of Canonical Scripture may be interpreted. I refer to three books in particular, the fourth Book of Esdras, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas. There is historic evidence that these books were largely made use of in the days of primitive Christianity. The first has obtained an honourable place in the Articles of the Church of England, owing, no doubt, to the traditional influence which the Church of Rome still had at the time of the Reformation. In the midst of much error and superstition pervading that Church, she faithfully performed the part of keeper of the ancient sacred writings, and to her we are indebted for the preservation for ecclesiastical use of that most instructive book, although at the Council of Trent it was not admitted into the Romish Canon. The other two books above mentioned were long regarded by the Primitive Church as being useful for instruction in doctrine, and of {121} authority little less than that of Scripture; in attestation of which assertion it may be stated that the Codex Sinaiticus contains the whole of the Epistle of Barnabas, and a portion of the Shepherd of Hermas, although no other early Christian writings are in the same manner associated with the Canonical Books. In drawing inferences from the above sources of information, I have endeavoured to keep closely to the rules of induction which have conducted to such signal discoveries in Natural Philosophy, and to refrain from accepting any inference which the Scriptural data did not justify. The modern advances in physical science, which have shown in what path we must proceed in order to reach a knowledge of God's works, indicate, it may be presumed, that an analogous method is to be pursued in order to gain a knowledge of His word. But it will, perhaps, be said, that if the knowledge of what is revealed in Scripture be obtainable only by means such as those which have been exemplified in this Essay, the considerations that must be entered into are so remote from common apprehension, that but very few can be supposed to be endowed with capacity for understanding them. This, it must be admitted, is actually the case, and, besides, is in conformity with the arbitrament according to which God grants to an elected few gifts and graces which He withholds from the many. Yet it seems to be the will of God to vouchsafe at {122} certain times and places, and among certain peoples, a more than ordinary measure of knowledge; and perhaps we shall not err in believing that the prophecy in the Book of Daniel, "Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased" (xii. 4), is being fulfilled in our time and nation. There is also a remarkable passage in the Apocalypse, which seems to reveal that before "the time of the end" (Dan. xii. 4), the gospel in its most comprehensive sense will be preached among all nations: "And I saw another angel flying in mid-heaven, having the [oe]onian gospel [i.e. the gospel pertaining to the future age] to preach to those that dwell upon the earth, and to every nation and tribe and tongue and people, saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give Him glory because the hour of His judgment is come: and worship Him who made the heaven, and the earth, and the sea, and fountains of waters" (Rev. xiv. 6, 7). I cannot forbear noticing the coincidence of the plain meaning of the words of this prophecy with the views advocated in this Essay: first, in respect to calling the gospel "[oe]onian" and thus asserting its applicability to the future age; next, in its announcement of the gospel in connection with the advent of "the hour of judgment;" and, lastly, in the loud call the angel makes to the dwellers on earth to give glory and worship to the Creator of heaven, earth, sea, and the fountains of waters. {123} But the dulness of hearers and incapacity to understand the doctrine of Scripture are not the only obstacles those will have to contend against who undertake to preach "the [oe]onian gospel." There are the interests and attractions of the present world, which, since the love of them is necessarily disturbed by the announcement that the world to come offers what is much more to be desired, operate, sometimes it may be in a manner which is not suspected, in hardening the heart against listening to and receiving that gospel. I think that in this way only can it be accounted for that the passages of Scripture which unequivocally declare the salvation of all men are comparatively unattended to, whilst belief is generally expressed in those supposed to be of opposite import. I am apprehensive that on the same accounts the arguments by which I have endeavoured to show that the latter passages admit of being interpreted consistently with the others, will receive little attention. There exists, moreover, in the present day so long-standing and so general an inability to discern the inner and true sense of Scripture, "the letter which killeth" having been preferred to "the spirit which maketh alive," that it has become a matter of much difficulty to comprehend and explain the terms in which the gospel in its entirety is therein proclaimed, and either to give, or to receive, instruction which may conduce to an intelligent acceptance of it. {124} In addition to which there prevails a tendency to rely on traditional and formal doctrine, and to assign to it an authority co-ordinate with that of Scripture, although as having had its origin at times when primitive faith and knowledge had in great measure declined, and "the mystery of iniquity" was already working, it cannot but be mixed with a human element of untruth. This tendency, which appears to be attributable to a consciousness of inability to form an independent judgment of the truths of Scripture, operates at present in creating a prejudice against all attempts to go beyond the boundaries by which Scriptural knowledge is assumed to be circumscribed. Nevertheless, regarding it as a duty to employ the opportunities and the ability which God has given me in making such an attempt, I have endeavoured to place the doctrine of the salvation and immortality of all men on a Scriptural basis, and I have now only to ask for an unprejudiced consideration of the arguments I have adduced for that purpose. [1] See the notes to Rom. v. 12-20, given in pp. 36-38 of my "Translation of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans" (Cambridge: Deighton and Co, 1871). [2] The treatise referred to is entitled "De Faturâ, Bestauratione," and the passage cited is very near the end of it. This treatise is an appendix to another, the title of which is "De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium." [3] So far this explanation of Mark ix. 44 is the same as that which I have given in a letter to the editor of the _Clerical Journal_, which is inserted in the number for June 5, 1862 (p. 526). {125} APPENDIX. I have allowed to stand in the Essay (pp. 76-81) the views I held at the time it was composed respecting the interpretation of Matt. xxv. 46, because I considered that these views, although in certain respects they are inconsistent with those I maintain in this Appendix, might contribute, by comparison with the latter, towards an understanding of the passage. The interpretation which, after long consideration, I have finally adopted, was first published in two letters, contained under the head of "Correspondence," in the numbers of the _Guardian_ for December 27, 1877, and January 16, 1878. With the view of offering some additional arguments in support of that interpretation, and making it more generally intelligible, I propose to begin with producing _in extenso_ the two letters referred to. "ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. "Sir, "After reading attentively the letters of your correspondents to which the sermon of Dr. Farrar has given occasion, it appeared to me that some views in addition to those which have hitherto been proposed, and in certain respects controverting them, may be worthy of consideration. I beg, {126} therefore, to be allowed space for making the following remarks:-- "We are taught in the Scriptures that hereafter there will be a new constitution of the universe, 'new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness' (2 Peter iii. 13), and that in this perfect social state 'there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain' (Rev. xxi. 4). To reconcile this revelation, so intelligible and so comprehensive, with the meaning of passages which seem to say that the punishment of the wicked will be 'endless,' presents a very great difficulty. We are not at liberty in such cases to accept some parts of Scripture and reject others in order to get rid of the difficulty, but must believe that the truth, if it should be reached, will establish the consistency of all, and that seeming contradictions are only due to our ignorance. I propose for consideration the following solution of the above-stated difficulty:-- "Jesus Christ in his ministration on earth said, in the course of giving instruction to his _disciples_ (Matt. xxiv. 3), 'These [on the left hand] shall go into eternal punishment, and the righteous into eternal life' (Matt. xxv. 46). Considering that in all he said and did he had in view his Father's purpose of making the spirits of men meet for immortality, it may be asked, In what way was such teaching contributory to this end? May we not conclude from our Lord's words, apart from all other inferences, that eternal life is necessarily preceded by righteousness, and eternal punishment is as necessarily consequent upon sin, and that the knowledge of these divine decrees contributes to the formation of spirits for the life to come? This inference might be accepted as abstractedly true; but then the question arises, What is meant by _duration_ as signified by the word 'eternal'? It should be remarked that in the statement of the doctrine I have employed the word 'necessarily' in a sense that is not unusual, and is generally thought to be intelligible. But it is to be taken into account that no such use of the term occurs in Scripture, where, in fact, it would be wholly {127} incongruous. The reason of this is that the Scriptures contain no abstract truths which are not expressed, or expressible, in terms understood from the facts and conditions of human experience. This may especially be said of the discourses of our Lord, in consequence of which they are much misunderstood by the many who are incapable of discerning the spiritual through the literal, who, as he said, 'have eyes and see not, and ears and hear not.' Assuming, therefore, that there is truth in speaking of righteousness and life as being _necessarily_ connected, as also of sin and punishment as being in like manner connected, we have to inquire in what way these abstract truths are expressed in the language of Scripture. I venture to make answer that this is done by its recognition of a special faculty we are all conscious of possessing, that of thinking and speaking of time (and space also) as indefinitely extended. (The mathematician knows that without the supposition, whether as to greatness or smallness, of _ad libitum_ extent of space and time, he is unable to conduct his reasoning.) On this principle Scripture speaks of duration through 'ages, and ages,' because by such emphatic reference to our capacity for thinking of unlimited duration, the anterior necessity of certain abstract truths, as especially the being and attributes of Deity, and the characters of divine judgment, is expressed in terms drawn from common thought and experience. "But the omnipotent Creator, who, for purposes towards us, made time and space to be what we perceive them to be, has also the power to change or _unmake_ them. If it were not so, there would be a power above that of the Creator, which is impossible. The difficulty concerning the duration of future punishment appears to be attributable to a preconception tacitly, perhaps unconsciously, entertained by most persons that time and space have an independent existence, although the teaching of Scripture is directly opposed to this view. St. Paul speaks of 'height' and 'depth' as of things _created_ (Rom. viii. 39); St. Peter has, 'One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day' (2 Epist. iii. 8); and in {128} Rev. x. 6 it is expressly said that when the scheme of redemption is finished 'time shall be no more.' The foregoing argument suffices, I think, to show that 'endless' and eternal are not convertible terms, for the special reason that the latter is significant of time as being derived from _[oe]tas_, whereas the other has _per se_ no necessary relation to time. (For the same etymological reason I consider 'eternal' to be preferable to 'ever-lasting.') I cannot forbear adverting here to a serious misstatement, as it seems to me, in Mr. Churton's letter in the Guardian of December 12 (p. 1714). He says that the teaching of Holy Scripture as to the matter of _duration_, is precisely the same with respect to eternal life and eternal death, having apparently overlooked the remarkable expression in Heb. vii. 16, 'indissoluble life' (_zôês akatalytou_), in which endlessness is signified by an epithet not explicitly indicative of time. No such epithet is applied in Scripture to future punishment. This difference is of great importance when taken with reference to the declaration in Scripture that time itself has an end. "It would certainly appear that the apostle Paul did not teach that the future punishment of the wicked will be endless; otherwise, how could he have written, 'God is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe' (1 Tim. iv. 10)? Is not this to assert that all are saved in the same sense that some who believe are saved, although there may be difference as to the order or mode of the salvation? We know that in the present age faith avails to save if it rests on the assurance given by the suffering and death of Jesus Christ that by passing through the same gate of suffering we are prepared to enter into life; for such faith yields the fruit of patience and righteousness. But _in the age to come_ there is neither faith, nor repentance, nor _probation_, but 'a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation' (Heb. x. 27). The appointed Judge is the Son of man, who, having suffered an unjust and painful death at the hands of sinful men, is entitled to execute the vengeance on sinners. All men are judged; but the elect, {129} who have been sealed by faith and good works, escape condemnation, and are those that are 'specially' saved. The rest are condemned to undergo _the second death_. This is that 'threefold woe' and 'great tribulation' so plainly foretold in Scripture. It was by these 'terrors of the Lord' that St. Paul sought to 'persuade' men, and not, as it would seem, by saying that the misery will be without end. As matter of experience, the preaching of this hopeless destiny does not deter from sin, but only makes sad tender spirits whom God has not made sad. Why should we not rather believe that the purpose of avenging justice is fulfilled when that great and final tribulation (Mark xiii. 19) has availed, in virtue of the suffering whereby the Son of God 'consecrated' the way to life, for the _purification_ and salvation of the condemned, seeing that even saints and martyrs have need to be purified by suffering (see Dan. xii. 10)? This view reconciles all apparent contradictions, and accords with the gospel declared in Rev. xxi. In making the foregoing statements I have necessarily tried to be brief; but I hope, ere long, to be able to publish a justification of them by arguments drawn at greater length from Scripture. "Cambridge, December 21, 1877." "ETERNAL LIFE. "After the publication of my letter in the _Guardian_ of December 27 (p. 1786), I received from various quarters interrogations and arguments, which led me to see that there was an omission in one part of my reasoning, by supplying which the whole of the argument might be made much more complete. In particular, it was maintained by my correspondents, I admit quite logically, that if eternal punishment in Matt. xxv. 4:6 could be taken to mean punishment which has an end, by parity of reasoning 'eternal life' must there mean life which has an end. As I find that the same argument has been adduced in the correspondence of the _Guardian_, I hope I may {130} be allowed, notwithstanding the length to which the discussion of the subject has gone, the opportunity of a supplementary letter for showing how, by rectifying the above-mentioned defect, the views I have proposed meet this difficulty. "In the Scriptures definite mention is made of only two ages, the present age and the future age, or, in other words, 'this world and the world to come' (Matt. xii. 32). The plural ages (_aiônes_) and 'ages of ages' are expressions to which we can by no mental effort attach a definite signification, and consequently, as I endeavoured to show in my former letter, they admit of various abstract applications. As in the present age, so in the age to come, there is a _succession_ of events which take place under conditions of time. These events have received comparatively but small attention in the theology of the present day, apparently because it is not generally seen that they are spoken of much more largely by the prophets of the Old Testament than in the New Testament, in which it is assumed that the old prophets are understood; and again, because the epitome given in the Book of Revelation (see Rev. x. 7) of the communications vouchsafed to the prophets is expressed in symbols which we find it hard to interpret. There are, however, passages in the New Testament which expressly make known the relation of deeds and events of the present age to those of the age to come; as especially our Lord's discourse 'as he sat on the Mount of Olives,' and the apostles 'Peter and James and John and Andrew' asked Him privately to tell them what would be the sign of his coming, and of _the end of the world_ (_tês synteleias tou aiônos_). There is also that remarkable passage in which St. Matthew records that Jesus said to Peter, 'Ye who have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.' The number 'twelve' in Scripture symbolism always signifies 'election;' the judges may be presumed to be of the order of prophets and apostles--the elect of the elect--and the twelve tribes of Israel the whole number of the elect (see Rev. vii. 4-8). Now, these {131} twelve times twelve thousand, symbolizing the complete number of the redeemed of every age and nation, are 'the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb,' and being made perfect by suffering and judgment, farther on in the events of that age 'follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth,' and together with him execute the final judgment on the whole world (Rev. xix. 14), inclusive even of the judgment on Satan and his angels. This doctrine seems to have been generally taught in the days of the apostles, inasmuch as St. Paul writes to the Corinthians (1 Epist. vi. 2, 3), 'Know ye not that the saints shall judge the world?' 'Know ye not that we shall judge angels?' Even in the Psalms we read, 'This honour have all His saints' (see Psalm cxlix. 6-9). "On these premises, it seems to me, the following argument may be founded relative to the interpretation of Matt. xxv. 46. In that chapter the _separation_ between the sheep and the goats is spoken of as initiatory to the general judgment, and the chapter closes with an exposition of the principles on which the judgment is conducted as regards both the one class and the other. The details and the processes of the judgment, together with its _results_, are to be sought for in the writings of the prophets and in the Book of Revelation. Now, when account is taken of all events of that future life, it may be said, I think, with truth, that the righteous who live and act in it throughout, when that life begins enter into 'eternal life,' the word 'eternal' being applicable because that age has a time-limit. _This_ eternal life, the mention of which was omitted in the former letter, merges into endless, or indissoluble, life, when time is no more, and words expressive of time cease to have application. In an analogous manner the unrighteous may be said to go into 'eternal punishment' when they enter upon the experience of the future age, the limit of the effects of the judgment and punishment which they are doomed to undergo being a 'second death.' However great and terrible may be the woe and tribulation attendant on that event, we know as matter of experience of life at present, that death, of itself, is but a passage into another state of existence. We have, {132} therefore, no right to affirm that after the effects of judgment and punishment are accomplished, the second death is not a transition into that state of things in the new heavens and new earth which is described in Rev. xxi. Rather, may we not conclude that eternal life and eternal punishment terminate alike with the end of time, and that in the consummation of all things both are merged in indissoluble life, that God may be all in all? This conclusion appears to meet the difficulty stated at the beginning of this letter. "I take this opportunity for expressing my approval of the arrangement of the New Lectionary, by which chapters of the Book of Revelation are now read more frequently than formerly before the people, this portion of Scripture being indispensable for communicating to them the doctrine of Jesus Christ in all its integrity. "Cambridge, January 12,1878." The difficulty experienced in the present day of rightly apprehending the doctrine taught by our Lord in Matt. xxv. 46, and in like passages, arises, according to the arguments contained in the Essay and in the foregoing letters, from the little attention that is paid in the Christian doctrine now generally accepted to what the Scriptures reveal respecting "the age to come" (_aiôn ho mellôn_) as distinguished from "the present age" (_aiôn outos, aiôn ho parôn_). The designation "age" applied in common to both, indicates that each has a beginning and an ending. The future age begins at the termination of the present age, the separation between them being the epoch of a resurrection of the dead--not, however, of all the dead, but "a resurrection of the just," that is, of those who have been prepared and sealed by faith, and suffering, and good works, in the present life, for immediate entrance into a new state of life. It is said of these that "they cannot {133} die any more, and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection" (Luke xx. 36). These are they who "have part in the first resurrection," of whom it is further said that "they _lived_ and reigned with Christ a thousand years," whereas of "the rest of the dead" it is said that "they _lived_ not till the thousand years were finished" (see Rev. xx. 4, 6). It is plain, therefore, that there will be a time of _separation_ of the one class from the other--the time of _threshing_, when the tares are separated from the wheat; and that whilst the elect at that time enter into the _[oe]onian_ life (that is, the life of the age to come), the rest of the dead when they live again enter into a state in which they undergo "[oe]onian punishment" (that is, punishment that pertains to the age to come), ending eventually in the second death, which, however, in common with all divine punishment, is inflicted for producing a certain effect foreordained in the counsels of the Almighty. (Respecting this effect, see what I have said in the Essay and at the end of the first of the foregoing letters.) That the words of the passage in St. Matthew might be understood, at least by the disciples to whom they were addressed, in the sense above indicated, may be inferred from the knowledge of the religious Jews of that time respecting the events of the future age, as conveyed to them by the writings of the prophets of the Old Testament, with which they were familiar. In proof of the general diffusion of such knowledge we may cite the response of Martha to the Lord respecting the resurrection of Lazarus, "I know that he shall rise again at the resurrection in the last day" (John xi. 24), and the common belief of a resurrection of the dead entertained by the numerous sect of the Pharisees, as well as the particular character of the unbelief of the smaller body of Sadducees (see Acts {134} xxiii. 8, where it is stated that "the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit: but the Pharisees confess both"). It is hard to perceive etymologically how the word _aiôuios_ could have received the meaning "ever-_lasting_." There is, in fact, a very remarkable passage of the Apocalypse in which that meaning is quite excluded: "And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the gospel of the age to come to preach (_euaggelion aiônion euaggelisai_) unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment is come: and worship Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters" (Rev. xiv. 6, 7). It is evident that if _aiônion euaggelion_ here meant an everlasting gospel, the event which the good news is intended to announce would never come. It may, perhaps, be asserted that this passage of the Apocalypse refers to a gospel announcement taking place at the present time, considering that a distinctive feature of this age is a large increase of the knowledge of the facts and laws of nature, and that possibly, contemporaneously with such knowledge, God may vouchsafe a fuller understanding of the Book of Revelation, and a discernment of the [oe]onian gospel it proclaims (compare Dan. xii. 3, 4). That the true interpretation of the Apocalypse will eventually be reached is implied by the words, "Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book" (Rev. xxii. 10). On reconsidering the arguments of the Essay it occurred to me that it would be proper to take notice in the Appendix of one other subject. In pages 9, 15, and 63 the doctrine that immortality is dependent on a state of perfected righteousness is regarded as "self-evident." I {135} now think that the use of that term is objectionable, inasmuch as, according to the title of the Essay, every such statement ought to rest wholly on Scriptural ground. I propose, therefore, to adduce here passages of Scripture which indicate an intimate relation between righteousness and life. Out of many texts which might be cited for this purpose, I have selected two, as follows. First, when under the law, Moses said to the Israelites, "I have set before you life and death: choose life," they must have understood his words as signifying that on condition of submission to the will of God and obedience to His righteous laws, they might look forward in faith to the enjoyment of the future covenanted life. (See what is said on this text in p. 28.) Again, the same dependence of life on righteousness forms an essential part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, although taught in a different manner. St. Paul, for instance, has given in Rom. v. 18, the following summary of Christian doctrine. Therefore as through one transgression (__di henos paraptômatos_), unto all men, unto condemnation (_eis katakrima_), so through one righteousness (_di henos dikaiômatos_, i.e. the obedience unto death of Jesus Christ), unto all men, unto life-justification (_eis dikaiôsin zôês_), where, it should be noticed, _zôês_ is not a dependent genitive, but, as in many instances in New Testament Greek, a genitive of quality. Thus this text declares that the justification of all men, which is their being eventually made righteous through the operation of the Son of God, has the quality of conferring _life_. Transcriber's notes: This book contains many fragments of Greek, so many that the convention of using "[Greek:...] to indicate transliterated Greek passages was abandoned in favor of using underscores to indicate Greek material. Transliteration was done according to the Project Gutenberg Greek How-To guidelines. Underscores are also used to indicate italicized words, but in all cases such words are English words. The sequence "[oe]" is used to indicate the Unicode oe-ligature character. 
52169	----	THE INNER HOUSE BY WALTER BESANT AUTHOR OF "THE WORLD WENT VERY WELL THEN" "FOR FAITH AND FREEDOM" "ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN" "HERR PAULUS" ETC. NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1888 THE INNER HOUSE. PROLOGUE. AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION. "Professor!" cried the Director, rushing to meet their guest and lecturer as the door was thrown open, and the great man appeared, calm and composed, as if there was nothing more in the wind than an ordinary Scientific Discourse. "You are always welcome, my friend, always welcome"--the two enthusiasts for science wrung hands--"and never more welcome than to-night. Then the great mystery is to be solved at last. The Theatre is crammed with people. What does it mean? You must tell me before you go in." The Physicist smiled. "I came to a conviction that I was on the true line five years ago," he said. "It is only within the last six months that I have demonstrated the thing to a certainty. I will tell you, my friend," he whispered, "before we go in." Then he advanced and shook hands with the President. "Whatever the importance of your Discovery, Professor," said the President, "we are fully sensible of the honor you have done us in bringing it before an English audience first of all, and especially before an audience of the Royal Institution." "Ja, Ja, Herr President. But I give my Discovery to all the world at this same hour. As for myself, I announce it to my very good friends of the Royal Institution. Why not to my other very good friends of the Royal Society? Because it is a thing which belongs to the whole world, and not to scientific men only." It was in the Library of the Royal Institution. The President and Council of the Institution were gathered together to receive their illustrious lecturer, and every face was touched with interrogation and anxiety. What was this Great Discovery? * * * * * For six months there had appeared, from time to time, mysterious telegrams in the papers, all connected with this industrious Professor's laboratory. Nothing definite, nothing certain: it was whispered that a new discovery, soon about to be announced, would entirely change the relations of man to man; of nation to nation. Those who professed to be in the secret suggested that it might alter all governments and abolish all laws. Why they said that I know not, because certainly nobody was admitted to the laboratory, and the Professor had no confidant. This big-headed man, with the enormous bald forehead and the big glasses on his fat nose--it was long and broad as well as fat--kept his own counsel. Yet, in some way, people were perfectly certain that something wonderful was coming. So, when Roger Bacon made his gunpowder, the monks might have whispered to each other, only from the smell which came through the key-hole, that now the Devil would at last be met upon his own ground. The telegrams were continued with exasperating pertinacity, until over the whole civilized world the eyes of all who loved science were turned upon that modest laboratory in the little University of Ganzweltweisst am Rhein. What was coming from it? One does not go so far as to say that all interest in contemporary business, politics, art, and letters ceased; but it is quite certain that every morning and every evening, when everybody opened his paper, his first thought was to look for news from Ganzweltweisst am Rhein. But the days passed by, and no news came. This was especially hard on the leader-writers, who were one and all waiting, each man longing to have a cut in with the subject before anybody else got it. But it was good for the people who write letters to the papers, because they had so many opportunities of suggestion and surmise. And so the leader-writers got something to talk about after all. For some suggested that Prof. Schwarzbaum had found out a way to make food artificially, by chemically compounding nitrogens, phosphates, and so forth. And these philosophers built a magnificent Palace of Imagination, in which dwelt a glorified mankind no longer occupied in endless toil for the sake of providing meat and drink for themselves and their families, but all engaged in the pursuit of knowledge, and in Art of all kinds, such as Fiction, Poetry, Painting, Music, Acting, and so forth, getting out of Life such a wealth of emotion, pleasure, and culture as the world had never before imagined. Others there were who thought that the great Discovery might be a method of instantaneous transmission of matter from place to place; so that, as by the electric wire one can send a message, so by some kind of electric method one could send a human body from any one part of the world to any other in a moment. This suggestion offered a fine field for the imagination; and there was a novel written on this subject which had a great success, until the Discovery itself was announced. Others, again, thought that the new Discovery meant some great and wonderful development of the Destructive Art; so that the whole of an army might be blown into countless fragments by the touch of a button, the discharge of a spring, the fall of a hammer. This took the fancy hugely, and it was pleasant to read the imaginary developments of history as influenced by this Discovery. But it seemed certain that the learned Professor would keep it for the use of his own country. So that there was no longer any room to doubt that, if this was the nature of the Discovery, the whole of the habitable world must inevitably fall under the Teutonic yoke, and an Empire of Armed Peace would set in, the like of which had never before been witnessed upon the globe. On the whole, the prospect was received everywhere, except in France and Russia, with resignation. Even the United States remembered that they had already many millions of Germans among them; and that the new Empire, though it would give certainly all the places to these Germans, would also save them a great many Elections, and therefore a good deal of trouble, and would relieve the national conscience--long grievously oppressed in this particular--of truckling to the Irish Vote. Dynamiters and anarchists, however, were despondent, and Socialists regarded each other with an ever-deepening gloom. This particular Theory of the great Discovery met, in fact, with universal credence over the whole civilized globe. From the great man himself there came no sign. Enterprising interviewers failed to get speech with him. Scientific men wrote to him, but got no real information in reply. And the minds of men grew more and more agitated. Some great change was considered certain--but what? One morning--it was the morning of Thursday, June 20, 1890--there appeared an advertisement in the papers. By the telegrams it was discovered that a similar advertisement had been published in every great city all over the world. That of the London papers differed from others in one important respect--in this, namely: Professor Schwarzbaum would himself, without any delay, read before a London audience a Paper which should reveal his new Discovery. There was not, however, the least hint in the announcement of the nature of this Discovery. * * * * * "Yes," said the Physicist, speaking slowly, "I have given the particulars to my friends over the whole earth; and, as London is still the centre of the world, I resolved that I would myself communicate it to the English." "But what is it?--what is it?" asked the President. "The Discovery," the Professor continued, "is to be announced at the same moment all over the world, so that none of the newspapers shall have an unfair start. It is now close upon nine o'clock by London time. In Paris it is ten minutes past nine; in Berlin it is six minutes before ten; at St. Petersburg it is eleven o'clock; at New York it is four o'clock in the afternoon. Very good. When the clock in your theatre points to nine exactly, at that moment everywhere the same Paper will be read." In fact, at that moment the clock began to strike. The President led the way to the Theatre, followed by the Council. The Director remained behind with the Lecturer of the evening. "My friend," said Professor Schwarzbaum, "my subject is nothing less"--he laid his finger upon the Director's arm--"nothing less than 'The Prolongation of the Vital Energy.'" "What! The Prolongation of the Vital Energy? Do you know what that means?" The Director turned pale. "Are we to understand--" "Come," said the Professor, "we must not waste the time." Then the Director, startled and pale, took his German brother by the arm and led him into the Theatre, murmuring, "Prolongation ... Prolongation ... Prolongation ... of the Vital--the Vital--Energy!" The Theatre was crowded. There was not a vacant seat: there was no more standing room on the stairs; the very doors of the gallery were thronged: the great staircase was thronged with those who could not get in, but waited to get the first news. Nay, outside the Institution, Albemarle Street was crowded with people waiting to hear what this great thing might be which all the world had waited six months to hear. Within the Theatre, what an audience! For the first time in English history, no respect at all had been paid to rank: the people gathered in the Theatre were all that the great City could boast that was distinguished in science, art, and letters. Those present were the men who moved the world. Among them, naturally, a sprinkling of the men who are born to the best things of the world, and are sometimes told that they help to move it. There were ladies among the company too--ladies well known in scientific and literary circles, with certain great ladies led by curiosity. On the left-hand side of the Theatre, for instance, close to the door, sat two very great ladies, indeed--one of them the Countess of Thordisá, and the other her only daughter, the Lady Mildred Carera. Leaning against the pillar beside them stood a young man of singularly handsome appearance, tall and commanding of stature. "To you, Dr. Linister," said the Countess, "I suppose everything that the Professor has to tell us will be already well known?" "That," said Dr. Linister, "would be too much to expect." "For me," her Ladyship went on delicately, "I love to catch Science on the wing--on the wing--in her lighter moods, when she has something really popular to tell." Dr. Linister bowed. Then his eyes met those of the beautiful girl sitting below him, and he leaned and whispered, "I looked for you everywhere last night. You had led me to understand--" "We went nowhere, after all. Mamma fancied she had a bad cold." "Then this evening. May I be quite--quite sure?" His voice dropped, and his fingers met hers beneath the fan. She drew them away quickly, with a blush. "Yes," she whispered, "you may find me to-night at Lady Chatterton's or Lady Ingleby's." From which you can understand that this young Dr. Linister was quite a man in society. He was young, he had already a great reputation for Biological research, he was the only son of a fashionable physician, and he would be very rich. Therefore, in the season, Harry Linister was _of_ the season. On most of the faces present there sat an expression of anxiety, and even fear. What was this new thing? Was the world really going to be turned upside down? And when the West End was so very comfortable and its position so very well assured! But there were a few present who rubbed their hands at the thought of a great upturn of everything. Up with the scum first; when that had been ladled overboard, a new arrangement would be possible, to the advantage of those who rubbed their hands. When the clock struck nine, a dead silence fell upon the Theatre; not a breath was heard; not a cough; not the rustle of a dress. Their faces were pale with expectancy; their lips were parted; their very breathing seemed arrested. Then the President and the Council walked in and took their places. "Ladies and Gentlemen," said the President shortly, "the learned Professor will himself communicate to you the subject and title of his Paper, and we may be certain beforehand that this subject and matter will adorn the motto of the Society--_Illustrous commoda vitæ._" Then Dr. Schwarzbaum stood at the table before them all, and looked round the room. Lady Mildred glanced at the young man, Harry Linister. He was staring at the German like the rest, speechless. She sighed. Women did not in those days like love-making to be forgotten or interrupted by anything, certainly not by science. The learned German carried a small bundle of papers, which he laid on the table. He carefully and slowly adjusted his spectacles. Then he drew from his pocket a small leather case. Then he looked round the room and smiled. That is to say, his lips were covered with a full beard, so that the sweetness of the smile was mostly lost; but it was observed under and behind the beard. The mere ghost of a smile; yet a benevolent ghost. The Lecturer began, somewhat in copy-book fashion, to remind his audience that everything in Nature is born, grows slowly to maturity, enjoys a brief period of full force and strength, then decays, and finally dies. The tree of life is first a green sapling, and last a white and leafless trunk. He expatiated at some length on the growth of the young life. He pointed out that methods had been discovered to hinder that growth, turn it into unnatural forms, even to stop and destroy it altogether. He showed how the body is gradually strengthened in all its parts; he showed, for his unscientific hearers, how the various parts of the structure assume strength. All this was familiar to most of his audience. Next he proceeded to dwell upon the period of full maturity of bodily and mental strength, which, in a man, should last from twenty-five to sixty, and even beyond that time. The decay of the bodily, and even of the mental organs, may have already set in, even when mind and body seem the most vigorous. At this period of the discussion most of the audience were beginning to flag in their attention. Was such a gathering as this assembled only to hear a discussion on the growth and decay of the faculties? But the Director, who knew what was coming, sat bolt upright, expectant. It was strange, the people said afterwards, that no one should have suspected what was coming. There was to be, everybody knew, a great announcement. That was certain. Destruction, Locomotion, Food, Transmission of Thought, Substitution of Speech for Writing--all these things, as has been seen, had been suggested. But no one even guessed the real nature of the Discovery. And now, with the exception of the people who always pretend to have known all along, to have been favored with the Great Man's Confidence, to have guessed the thing from the outset, no one had the least suspicion. Therefore, when the Professor suddenly stopped short, after a prolix description of wasting power and wearied organs, and held up an admonitory finger, everybody jumped, because now the Secret was to be divulged. They had come to hear a great Secret. "What is this Decay?" he asked. "What is it? Why does it begin? What laws regulate it? What check can we place upon it? How can we prevent it? How can we stay its progress? Can Science, which has done so much to make Life happy--which has found out so many things by which Man's brief span is crowded with delightful emotions--can Science do no more? Cannot Science add to these gifts that more precious gift of all--the lengthening of that brief span?" Here everybody gasped. "I ask," the speaker went on, "whether Science cannot put off that day which closes the eyes and turns the body into a senseless lump? Consider: we are no sooner arrived at the goal of our ambitions than we have to go away; we are no sooner at the plenitude of our wisdom and knowledge than we have to lay down all that we have learned and go away--nay, we cannot even transmit to others our accumulations of knowledge. They are lost. We are no sooner happy with those we love than we have to leave them. We collect, but cannot enjoy; we inherit--it is but for a day; we learn, but we have no time to use our learning; we love--it is but for an hour; we pass our youth in hope, our manhood in effort, and we die before we are old; we are strong, but our strength passes like a dream; we are beautiful, but our beauty perishes in a single day. Cannot, I ask again--cannot Science prolong the Vital Force, and stay the destroying hand of Decay?" At this point a wonderful passion seized upon many of the people present; for some sprang to their feet and lifted hands and shouted, some wept aloud, some clasped each other by the hand; there were lovers among the crowd who fell openly into each other's arms; there were men of learning who hugged imaginary books and looked up with wild eyes; there were girls who smiled, thinking that their beauty might last longer than a day; there were women down whose cheeks rolled the tears of sorrow for their vanished beauty; there were old men who heard and trembled. One of them spoke--out of all this crowd only one found words. It was an old statesman; an old man eloquent. He rose with shaking limbs. "Sir," he cried, his voice still sonorous, "give me back my manhood!" The Professor continued, regardless: "Suppose," he said, "that Science had found out the way, not to restore what is lost, but to arrest further loss; not to give back what is gone--you might as well try to restore a leg that has been cut off--but to prevent further loss. Consider this for a moment, I pray you. Those who search into Nature's secrets might, if this were done for them, carry on their investigations far beyond any point which had yet been reached; those who cultivate Art might attain to a greater skill of hand and truth of sight than has ever yet been seen; those who study human nature might multiply their observations; those who love might have a longer time for their passion; men who are strong might remain strong; women who are beautiful might remain beautiful--" "Sir," cried again the old man eloquent, "give me back my manhood!" The Lecturer made no reply, but went on: "The rich might have a time--a sensible length of time--in which to enjoy their wealth; the young might remain young; the old might grow no older; the feeble might not become more feeble--all for a prolonged time. As for those whose lives could never become anything but a burden to themselves and to the rest of the world--the crippled, the criminal, the poor, the imbecile, the incompetent, the stupid, and the frivolous--they would live out their allotted lives and die. It would be for the salt of the earth, for the flower of mankind, for the men strong of intellect and endowed above the common herd, that Science would reserve this precious gift." "Give me back my manhood!" cried again the old man eloquent. But he was not alone, for they all sprang to their feet together and cried aloud, shrieking, weeping, stretching forth hands, "Give--give--give!" But the Director, who knew that what was asked for would be given, sat silent and self-possessed. The Speaker motioned them all to sit down again. "I would not," he said, "limit this great gift to those alone whose intellect leads the world. I would extend it to all who help to make life beautiful and happy; to lovely women"--here the men heaved a sigh so deep, so simultaneous, that it fell upon the ear like the voice of thanksgiving from a Cathedral choir--"to those who love only the empty show and pleasures and vainglories of life"--here many smiled, especially of the younger sort--"even to some of those who desire nothing of life but love and song and dalliance and laughter." Again the younger sort smiled, and tried to look as if they had no connection at all with that band. "I would extend this gift, I repeat, to all who can themselves be happy in the sunshine and the light, and to all who can make the happiness of others. Then, again, consider. When you have enjoyed those things for a while; when your life has been prolonged, so that you have enjoyed all that you desire in full measure and running over; when not two or three years have passed, but perhaps two or three centuries, you would then, of your own accord, put aside the aid of Science and suffer your body to fall into the decay which awaits all living matter. Contented and resigned, you would sink into the tomb, not satiated with the joys of life, but satisfied to have had your share. There would be no terror in death, since it would take none but those who could say, 'I have had enough.' That day would surely come to every one. There is nothing--not research and discovery, not the beauty of Nature, not love and pleasure, not art, not flowers and sunshine and perpetual youth--of which we should not in time grow weary. Science cannot alter the Laws of Nature. Of all things there must be an end. But she can prolong; she can avert; she can--Yes, my friends. This is my Discovery; this is my Gift to Humanity; this is the fruit, the outcome of my life; for me this great thing has been reserved. Science can arrest decay. She can make you live--live on--live for centuries--nay, I know not--why not?--she can, if you foolishly desire it, make you live forever." Now, when these words were spoken there fell a deep silence upon the crowd. No one spoke; no one looked up; they were awed; they could not realize what it meant that would be given them; they were suddenly relieved of a great terror, the constant dread that lies in man's heart, ever present, though we conceal it--the dread of Death; but they could not, in a moment, understand that it was given. But the Director sprang to his feet, and grasped his brother physicist by the hand. "Of all the sons of Science," he said, solemnly, "thou shalt be proclaimed the first and best." The assembly heard these words, but made no sign. There was no applause--not a murmur, not a voice. They were stricken dumb with wonder and with awe. They were going to live--to live on--to live for centuries, nay, why not?--to live forever! "You all know," the Professor continued, "how at a dinner a single glass of champagne revives the spirits, looses the tongue, and brings activity to the brain. The guests were weary; they were in decay; the Champagne arrests that decay. My discovery is of another kind of Champagne, which acts with a more lasting effect. It strengthens the nerves, hardens the muscles, quickens the blood, and brings activity to the digestion. With new strength of the body returns new strength to the mind; mind and body are one." He paused a moment. Then he gave the leather case into the hands of the Director. "This is my gift, I say. I give to my brother full particulars and the history of the invention. I seek no profit for myself. It is your own. This day a new epoch begins for humanity. We shall not die, but live. Accident, fire, lightning, may kill us. Against these things we cannot guard. But old age shall no more fall upon us; decay shall no more rob us of our life and strength; and death shall be voluntary. This is a great change. I know not if I have done aright. That is for you to determine. See that you use this gift aright." Then, before the people had understood the last words, the speaker stepped out of the Theatre and was gone. But the Director of the Royal Institution stood in his place, and in his hand was the leather case containing the GIFT OF LIFE. * * * * * The Countess of Thordisá, who had been asleep throughout the lecture, woke up when it was finished. "How deeply interesting!" she sighed. "This it is, to catch Science on the wing." Then she looked round. "Mildred, dear," she said, "has Dr. Linister gone to find the carriage? Dear me! what a commotion! And at the Royal Institution, of all places in the world!" "I think, Mamma," said Lady Mildred, coldly, "that we had better get some one else to find the carriage. Dr. Linister is over there. He is better engaged." He was; he was among his brother physicists; they were eagerly asking questions and crowding round the Director. And the Theatre seemed filled with mad people, who surged and crowded and pushed. "Come, Mamma," said Lady Mildred, pale, but with a red spot on either cheek, "we will leave them to fight it out." Science had beaten love. She did not meet Harry Linister again that night. And when they met again, long years afterwards, he passed her by with eyes that showed he had clean forgotten her existence, unaltered though she was in face and form. CHAPTER I. THE SUPPER-BELL. When the big bell in the Tower of the House of Life struck the hour of seven, the other bells began to chime as they had done every day at this hour for I know not how many years. Very likely in the Library, where we still keep a great collection of perfectly useless books, there is preserved some History which may speak of these Bells, and of the builders of the House. When these chimes began, the swifts and jackdaws which live in the Tower began to fly about with a great show of hurry, as if there was barely time for supper, though, as it was yet only the month of July, the sun would not be setting for an hour or more. We have long since ceased to preach to the people, otherwise we might make them learn a great deal from the animal world. They live, for instance, from day to day; not only are their lives miserably short, but they are always hungry, always fighting, always quarrelling, always fierce in their loves and their jealousies. Watching the swifts, for instance, which we may do nearly all day long, we ought to congratulate ourselves on our own leisurely order, the adequate provision for food made by the Wisdom of the College, the assurance of preservation also established by that Wisdom, and our freedom from haste and anxiety, as from the emotions of love, hatred, jealousy, and rivalry. But the time has gone by for that kind of exhortation. Thus, our people, who at this hour crowded the great Square, showed in their faces, their attitudes, and their movements, the calm that reigned in their souls. Some were lying on the grass; some were sitting on the benches; some were strolling. They were for the most part alone; if not alone--because habit often survives when the original cause of the habit is gone--then in pairs. In the old unhappy days there would have been restless activity--a hurrying to and fro; there would have been laughter and talking--everybody would have been talking; there would have been young men eagerly courting the favors of young women, looking on them with longing eyes, ready to fight for them, each for the girl he loved; thinking each of the girl he loved as of a goddess or an angel--all perfection. The girls themselves ardently desired this foolish worship. Again, formerly, there would have been old men and old women looking with melancholy eyes on the scenes they were about to quit, and lamenting the days of their strength and their youth. And formerly there would have been among the crowd beggars and paupers; there would have been some masters and some servants; some noble and some bourgeois; there would have been every conceivable difference in age, rank, strength, intellect, and distinction. Again, formerly there would have been the most insolent differences in costume. Some of the men used to wear broadcloth, sleek and smooth, with glossy hats and gloves, and flowers at their button-hole; while beside them crawled the wretched half-clad objects pretending to sell matches, but in reality begging for their bread. And some of the women used to flaunt in dainty and expensive stuffs, setting off their supposed charms (which were mostly made by the dress-maker's art) with the curves and colors of their drapery. And beside them would be crawling the wretched creatures to whom in the summer, when the days were hot and fine, the Park was their only home, and rusty black their only wear. Now, no activity at all; no hurrying, no laughing, not even any talking. That might have struck a visitor as one of the most remarkable results of our system. No foolish talking. As for their dress, it was all alike. The men wore blue flannel jackets and trousers, with a flannel shirt and a flat blue cap; for the working hours they had a rougher dress. The women wore a costume in gray, made of a stuff called beige. It is a useful stuff, because it wears well; it is soft and yet warm, and cannot be objected to by any of them on the score of ugliness. What mutinies, what secret conspiracies, what mad revolts had to be faced before the women could be made to understand that Socialism--the only form of society which can now be accepted--must be logical and complete! What is one woman more than another that she should separate herself from her sisters by her dress? Therefore, since their subjugation they all wear a gray beige frock, with a jacket of the same, and a flat gray cap, like the men's, under which they are made to gather up their hair. This scene, indeed--the gathering of the People before the supper-bell--is one of which I never tire. I look at all the eager, hurrying swifts in the air, I remember the Past; and I think of the Present when I gaze upon the great multitude, in which no one regardeth his neighbor, none speaks to none. There are no individual aims, but all is pure, unadulterated Socialism, with--not far distant--the Ultimate Triumph of Science! I desire to relate the exact circumstances connected with certain recent events. It is generally known that they caused one deplorable Death--one of our own Society, although not a Physician of the HOUSE. I shall have to explain, before I begin the narrative, certain points in our internal management which may differ from the customs adopted elsewhere. We of the Later Era visit each other so seldom that differences may easily grow up. Indeed, considering the terrible dangers of travel--how, if one walks, there are the perils of unfiltered water, damp beds, sprained ankles, byrsitis of the knee, chills from frosts and showers; or if one gets into a wheeled vehicle, the wheels may fall off, or the carriage may be overturned in a ditch.... But why pursue the subject? I repeat, therefore, that I must speak of the community and its order, but that as briefly as may be. The Rebels have been driven forth from the Pale of Humanity to wander where they please. In a few years they will be released--if that has not already happened--by Death from the diseases and sufferings which will fall upon them. Then we shall remember them no more. The centuries will roll by, and they shall be forgotten; the very mounds of earth which once marked the place of their burial will be level with the ground around them. But the HOUSE and the Glory of the HOUSE will continue. Thus perish all the enemies of Science! The City of Canterbury, as it was rebuilt when Socialism was finally established, has in its centre a great Square, Park, or Garden, the central breathing-place and relaxation ground of the City. Each side is exactly half a mile in length. The Garden, thus occupying an area of a fourth of a square mile, is planted with every kind of ornamental tree, and laid out in flower-beds, winding walks, serpentine rivers, lakes, cascades, bridges, grottos, summer-houses, lawns, and everything that can help to make the place attractive. During the summer it is thronged every evening with the people. On its west side has been erected an enormous Palace of glass, low in height, but stretching far away to the west, covering an immense area. Here the heat is artificially maintained at temperatures varying with the season and the plants that are in cultivation. In winter, frost, bad weather, and in rain, it forms a place of recreation and rest. Here grow all kinds of fruit-trees, with all kinds of vegetables, flowers, and plants. All the year round it furnishes, in quantities sufficient for all our wants, an endless supply of fruit; so that we have a supply of some during the whole year, as grapes, bananas, and oranges; others for at least half the year, as peaches, strawberries, and so forth; while of the commoner vegetables, as peas, beans, and the like, there is now no season, but they are grown continuously. In the old times we were dependent upon the changes and chances of a capricious and variable climate. Now, not only has the erection of these vast houses made us independent of summer and winter, but the placing of much grass and corn land under glass has also assured our crops and secured us from the danger of famine. This is by no means one of the least advantages of modern civilization. On the South side of the Square stands our Public Hall. The building has not, like the House of Life, any architectural beauty--why should we aim at beauty, when efficiency is our sole object? The House of Life was designed and erected when men thought perpetually of beauty, working from their admiration of beauty in woman and in nature to beauty in things which they made with their own hands, setting beauty above usefulness; even thinking it necessary, when usefulness had been attained, to add adornment, as when they added a Tower to the House of Life, yet did nothing with their Tower and did not want it. The Public Hall is built of red brick; it resembles a row of houses each with a gable to the street. There is for each a broad plain door, with a simple porch, below; and above, a broad plain window twenty feet wide divided into four compartments or divisions, the whole set in a framework of wood. The appearance of the Hall is, therefore, remarkably plain. There are thirty-one of these gables, each forty feet wide; so that the whole length of the Hall is twelve hundred and forty feet, or nearly a quarter of a mile. Within, the roof of each of these gables covers a Hall separated from its neighbors by plain columns. They are all alike, except that the middle Hall, set apart for the College, has a gallery originally intended for an orchestra, now never used. In the central Hall one table alone is placed; in all the others there are four, every Hall accommodating eight hundred people and every table two hundred. The length of each Hall is the same--namely, two hundred and fifty feet. The Hall is lit by one large window at each end. There are no carvings, sculptures, or other ornaments in the building. At the back is an extensive range of buildings, all of brick, built in small compartments, and fire-proof; they contain the kitchens, granaries, _abattoirs_, larders, cellars, dairies, still-rooms, pantries, curing-houses, ovens, breweries, and all the other offices and chambers required for the daily provisioning of a city with twenty-four thousand inhabitants. On the East side of the Square there are two great groups of buildings. That nearest to the Public Hall contains, in a series of buildings which communicate with one another, the Library, the Museum, the Armory, the Model-room, and the Picture Gallery. The last is a building as old as the House. They were, when these events began, open to the whole Community, though they were never visited by any even out of idle curiosity. The inquisitive spirit is dead. For myself, I am not anxious to see the people acquire, or revive, the habit of reading and inquiring. It might be argued that the study of history might make them contrast the present with the past, and shudder at the lot of their forefathers. But I am going to show that this study may produce quite the opposite effect. Or, there is the study of science. How should this help the People? They have the College always studying and investigating for their benefit the secrets of medical science, which alone concerns their happiness. They might learn how to make machines; but machinery requires steam, explosives, electricity, and other uncontrolled and dangerous forces. Many thousands of lives were formerly lost in the making and management of these machines, and we do very well without them. They might, it is true, read the books which tell of the people in former times. But why read works which are filled with the Presence of Death, the Shortness of Life, and the intensity of passions which we have almost forgotten? You shall see what comes of these studies which seem so innocent. I say, therefore, that I never had any wish to see the people flocking into the Library. For the same reason--that a study and contemplation of things past might unsettle or disturb the tranquillity of their minds--I have never wished to see them in the Museum, the Armory, or any other part of our Collections. And since the events of which I have to tell, we have enclosed these buildings and added them to the College, so that the people can no longer enter them even if they wished. The Curator of the Museum was an aged man, one of the few old men left--in the old days he had held a title of some kind. He was placed there because he was old and much broken, and could do no work. Therefore he was told to keep the glass-cases free from dust and to sweep the floors every morning. At the time of the Great Discovery he had been an Earl or Viscount--I know not what--and by some accident he escaped the Great Slaughter, when it was resolved to kill all the old men and women in order to reduce the population to the number which the land would support. I believe that he hid himself, and was secretly fed by some man who had formerly been his groom, and still preserved some remains of what he called attachment and duty, until such time as the executions were over. Then he ventured forth again, and so great was the horror of the recent massacre, with the recollection of the prayers and shrieks of the victims, that he was allowed to continue alive. The old man was troubled with an asthma which hardly permitted him an hour of repose and was incurable. This would have made his life intolerable, except that to live--only to live, in any pain and misery--is always better than to die. For the last few years the old man had a companion in the Museum. This was a girl--the only girl in our Community--who called him--I know not why (perhaps because the relationship really existed)--Grandfather, and lived with him. She it was who dusted the cases and swept the floors. She found some means of relieving the old man's asthma, and all day long--would that I had discovered the fact, or suspected whither it would lead the wretched girl!--she read the books of the Library and studied the contents of the cases and talked to the old man, making him tell her everything that belonged to the past. All she cared for was the Past; all that she studied was to understand more and more--how men lived then, and what they thought, and what they talked. She was about eighteen years of age; but, indeed, we thought her still a child. I know not how many years had elapsed since any in the City were children, because it is a vain thing to keep account of the years; if anything happens to distinguish them, it must be something disastrous, because we have now arrived almost at the last stage possible to man. It only remains for us to discover, not only how to prevent disease, but how to annihilate it. Since, then, there is only one step left to take in advance, every other event which can happen must be in the nature of a calamity, and therefore may be forgotten. I have said that Christine called the old man her grandfather. We have long, long since agreed to forget old ties of blood. How can father and son, mother and daughter, brother and sister continue for hundreds of years, and when all remain fixed at the same age, to keep up the old relationship? The maternal love dies out with us--it is now but seldom called into existence--when the child can run about. Why not? The animals, from whom we learn so much, desert their offspring when they can feed themselves; our mothers cease to care for their children when they are old enough to be the charge of the Community. Therefore Christine's mother cheerfully suffered the child to leave her as soon as she was old enough to sit in the Public Hall. Her grandfather--if indeed he was her grandfather--obtained permission to have the child with him. So she remained in the quiet Museum. We never imagined or suspected, however, that the old man, who was eighty at the time of the Great Discovery, remembered everything that took place when he was young, and talked with the girl all day long about the Past. I do not know who was Christine's father. It matters not now; and, indeed, he never claimed his daughter. One smiles to think of the importance formerly attached to fathers. We no longer work for their support. We are no longer dependent upon their assistance; the father does nothing for the son, nor the son for the father. Five hundred years ago, say--or a thousand years ago--the father carried a baby in his arms. What then? My own father--I believe he is my own father, but on this point I may be mistaken--I saw yesterday taking his turn in the hay-field. He seemed distressed with the heat and fatigue of it. Why not? It makes no difference to me. He is, though not so young, still as strong and as able-bodied as myself. Christine was called into existence by the sanction of the College when one of the Community was struck dead by lightning. It was my brother, I believe. The terrible event filled us all with consternation. However, the population having thus been diminished by one, it was resolved that the loss should be repaired. There was precedent. A great many years previously, owing to a man being killed by the fall of a hay-rick--all hay-ricks are now made low--another birth had been allowed. That was a boy. Let us now return to our Square. On the same side are the buildings of the College. Here are the Anatomical collections, the storehouse of Materia Medica, and the residences of the Arch Physician, the Suffragan, the Fellows of the College or Associate Physicians, and the Assistants or Experimenters. The buildings are plain and fire-proof. The College has its own private gardens, which are large and filled with trees. Here the Physicians walk and meditate, undisturbed by the outer world. Here is also their Library. On the North side of the Square stands the great and venerable House of Life, the Glory of the City, the Pride of the whole Country. It is very ancient. Formerly there were many such splendid monuments standing in the country; now this alone remains. It was built in the dim, distant ages, when men believed things now forgotten. It was designed for the celebration of certain ceremonies or functions; their nature and meaning may, I dare say, be ascertained by any who cares to waste time in an inquiry so useless. The edifice itself could not possibly be built in these times; first because we have no artificers capable of rearing such a pile, and next because we have not among us any one capable of conceiving it, or drawing the design of it; nay, we have none who could execute the carved stone-work. I do not say this with humility, but with satisfaction; for, if we contemplate the building, we must acknowledge that, though it is, as I have said, the Glory of the City, and though it is vast in proportions, imposing by its grandeur, and splendid in its work, yet most of it is perfectly useless. What need of the tall columns to support a roof which might very well have been one-fourth the present height? Why build the Tower at all? What is the good of the carved work? We of the New Era build in brick, which is fire-proof; we put up structures which are no larger than are wanted; we waste no labor, because we grudge the time which must be spent in necessary work, over things unnecessary. Besides, we are no longer tortured by the feverish anxiety to do something--anything--by which we may be remembered when the short span of life is past. Death to us is a thing which may happen by accident, but not from old age or by disease. Why should men toil and trouble in order to be remembered? All things are equal: why should one man try to do something better than another--or what another cannot do--or what is useless when it is done? Sculptures, pictures, Art of any kind, will not add a single ear of corn to the general stock, or a single glass of wine, or a yard of flannel. Therefore, we need not regret the decay of Art. As everybody knows, however, the HOUSE is the chief Laboratory of the whole country. It is here that the Great Secret is preserved; it is known to the Arch Physician and to his Suffragan alone. No other man in the country knows by what process is compounded that potent liquid which arrests decay and prolongs life, apparently without any bound or limit. I say without any bound or limit. There certainly are croakers, who maintain that at some future time--it may be this very year, it may be a thousand years hence--the compound will lose its power, and so we--all of us, even the College--must then inevitably begin to decay, and after a few short years perish and sink into the silent grave. The very thought causes a horror too dreadful for words; the limbs tremble, the teeth chatter. But others declare that there is no fear whatever of this result, and that the only dread is lest the whole College should suddenly be struck by lightning, and so the Secret be lost. For though none other than the Arch Physician and his Suffragan know the Secret, the whole Society--the Fellows or Assistant Physicians--know in what strong place the Secret is kept in writing, just as it was communicated by the Discoverer. The Fellows of the College all assist in the production of this precious liquid, which is made only in the HOUSE OF LIFE. But none of them know whether they are working for the great Arcanum itself, or on some of the many experiments conducted for the Arch Physician. Even if one guessed, he would not dare to communicate his suspicions even to a Brother-Fellow, being forbidden, under the most awful of all penalties, that of Death itself, to divulge the experiments and processes that he is ordered to carry out. It is needless to say that if we are proud of the HOUSE, we are equally proud of the City. There was formerly an old Canterbury, of which pictures exist in the Library. The streets of that town were narrow and winding; the houses were irregular in height, size, and style. There were close courts, not six feet broad, in which no air could circulate, and where fevers and other disorders were bred. Some houses, again, stood in stately gardens, while others had none at all; and the owners of the gardens kept them closed. But we can easily understand what might have happened when private property was recognized, and laws protected the so-called rights of owners. Now that there is no property, there are no laws. There are also no crimes, because there is no incentive to jealousy, rapine, or double-dealing. Where there is no crime, there is that condition of Innocence which our ancestors so eagerly desired, and sought by means which were perfectly certain to fail. How different is the Canterbury of the present! First, like all modern towns, it is limited in size; there are in it twenty-four thousand inhabitants, neither more nor less. Round its great central Square or Garden are the public buildings. The streets, which branch off at right angles, are all of the same width, the same length, and the same appearance. They are planted with trees. The houses are built of red brick, each house containing four rooms on the ground-floor--namely, two on either side the door--and four on the first floor, with a bath-room. The rooms are vaulted with brick, so that there is no fear of fire. Every room has its own occupant; and as all the rooms are of the same size, and are all furnished in the same way, with the same regard to comfort and warmth, there is really no ground for complaint or jealousies. The occupants also, who have the same meals in the same Hall every day, cannot complain of inequalities, any more than they can accuse each other of gluttonous living. In the matter of clothes, again, it was at first expected that the grave difficulties with the women as to uniformity of fashion and of material would continue to trouble us; but with the decay of those emotions which formerly caused so much trouble--since the men have ceased to court the women, and the women have ceased to desire men's admiration--there has been no opposition. All of them now are clad alike; gray is found the most convenient color, soft beige the most convenient material. The same beautiful equality rules the hours and methods of work. Five hours a day are found ample, and everybody takes his time at every kind of work, the men's work being kept separate from that given to the women. I confess that the work is not performed with as much zeal as one could wish; but think of the old times, when one had to work eight, ten, and even eighteen hours a day in order to earn a poor and miserable subsistence! What zeal could they have put into their work? How different is this glorious equality in all things from the ancient anomalies and injustices of class and rank, wealth and poverty! Why, formerly, the chief pursuit of man was the pursuit of money. And now there is no money at all, and our wealth lies in our barns and garners. I must be forgiven if I dwell upon these contrasts. The history which has to be told--how an attempt was actually made to destroy this Eden, and to substitute in its place the old condition of things--fills me with such indignation that I am constrained to speak. Consider, for one other thing, the former condition of the world. It was filled with diseases. People were not in any way protected. They were allowed to live as they pleased. Consequently, they all committed excesses and all contracted disease. Some drank too much, some ate too much, some took no exercise, some took too little, some lay in bed too long, some went to bed too late, some suffered themselves to fall into violent rages, into remorse, into despair; some loved inordinately; thousands worked too hard. All ran after Jack-o'-Lanterns continually; for, before one there was dangled the hope of promotion, before another that of glory, before another that of distinction, fame, or praise; before another that of wealth, before another the chance of retiring to rest and meditate during the brief remainder of his life--miserably short even in its whole length. Then diseases fell upon them, and they died. We have now prevented all new diseases, though we cannot wholly cure those which have so long existed. Rheumatism, gout, fevers, arise no more, though of gout and other maladies there are hereditary cases. And since there are no longer any old men among us, there are none of the maladies to which old age is liable. No more pain, no more suffering, no more anxiety, no more Death (except by accident) in the world. Yet some of them would return to the old miseries; and for what?--for what? You shall hear. * * * * * When the Chimes began, the people turned their faces with one consent towards the Public Hall, and a smile of satisfaction spread over all their faces. They were going to Supper--the principal event of the day. At the same moment a Procession issued from the iron gates of the College. First marched our Warder, or Porter, John Lax, bearing a halberd; next came an Assistant, carrying a cushion, on which were the Keys of Gold, symbolical of the Gate of Life; then came another, bearing our banner, with the Labarum or symbol of Life: the Assistants followed, in ancient garb of cap and gown; then came the twelve Fellows or Physicians of the College, in scarlet gowns and flat fur-lined caps; after them, I myself--Samuel Grout, M.D., Suffragan--followed. Last, there marched the first Person in the Realm--none other than the Arch Physician Himself, Dr. Henry Linister, in lawn sleeves, a black silk gown, and a scarlet hood. Four Beadles closed the Procession; for, with us, the only deviation from equality absolute is made in the case of the College. We are a Caste apart; we keep mankind alive and free from pain. This is our work; this occupies all our thoughts. We are, therefore, held in honor, and excused the ordinary work which the others must daily perform. And behold the difference between ancient and modern times! For, formerly, those who were held in honor and had high office in this always sacred HOUSE were aged and white-haired men who arrived at this distinction but a year or two before they had to die. But we of the Holy College are as stalwart, as strong, and as young as any man in the Hall. And so have we been for hundreds of years, and so we mean to continue. In the Public Hall, we take our meals apart in our own Hall; yet the food is the same for all. Life is the common possession; it is maintained for all by the same process--here must be no difference. Let all, therefore, eat and drink alike. When I consider, I repeat, the universal happiness, I am carried away, first, with a burning indignation that any should be so mad as to mar this happiness. They have failed; but they cost us, as you shall hear, much trouble, and caused the lamentable death of a most zealous and able officer. Among the last to enter the gates were the girl Christine and her grandfather, who walked slowly, coughing all the way. "Come, grandad," she said, as we passed her, "take my arm. You will be better after your dinner. Lean on me." There was in her face so remarkable a light that I wonder now that no suspicion or distrust possessed us. I call it light, for I can compare it to nothing else. The easy, comfortable life our people led, and the absence of all exciting work, the decay of reading, and the abandonment of art, had left their faces placid to look upon, but dull. They were certainly dull. They moved heavily; if they lifted their eyes, they wanted the light that flashed from Christine's. It was a childish face still--full of softness. No one would ever believe that a creature so slight in form, so gentle to look upon, whose eyes were so soft, whose cheeks were like the untouched bloom of a ripe peach, whose half-parted lips were so rosy, was already harboring thoughts so abominable and already conceiving an enterprise so wicked. We do not suspect, in this our new World. As we have no property to defend, no one is a thief; as everybody has as much of everything as he wants, no one tries to get more; we fear not Death, and therefore need no religion; we have no private ambitions to gratify, and no private ends to attain; therefore we have long since ceased to be suspicious. Least of all should we have been suspicious of Christine. Why, but a year or two ago she was a little newly born babe, whom the Holy College crowded to see as a new thing. And yet, was it possible that one so young should be so corrupt? "Suffragan," said the Arch Physician to me at supper, "I begin to think that your Triumph of Science must be really complete." "Why, Physician?" "Because, day after day, that child leads the old man by the hand, places him in his seat, and ministers, after the old, forgotten fashion, to his slightest wants, and no one pays her the slightest heed." "Why should they?" "A child--a beautiful child! A feeble old man! One who ministers to another. Suffragan, the Past is indeed far, far away; but I knew not until now that it was so utterly lost. Childhood and Age and the offices of Love! And these things are wholly unheeded. Grout, you are indeed a great man!" He spoke in the mocking tone which was usual with him, so that we never knew exactly whether he was in earnest or not; but I think that on this occasion he was in earnest. No one but a very great man--none smaller than Samuel Grout--myself--could have accomplished this miracle upon the minds of the People. They did not minister one to the other. Why should they? Everybody could eat his own ration without any help. Offices of Love? These to pass unheeded? What did the Arch Physician mean? CHAPTER II. GROUT, SUFFRAGAN. It always pleases me, from my place at the College table, which is raised two feet above the rest, to contemplate the multitude whom it is our duty and our pleasure to keep in contentment and in health. It is a daily joy to watch them flocking, as you have seen them flock, to their meals. The heart glows to think of what we have done. I see the faces of all light up with satisfaction at the prospect of the food; it is the only thing that moves them. Yes, we have reduced life to its simplest form. Here is true happiness. Nothing to hope, nothing to fear--except accident; a little work for the common preservation; a body of wise men always devising measures for the common good; food plentiful and varied; gardens for repose and recreation, both summer and winter; warmth, shelter, and the entire absence of all emotions. Why, the very faces of the People are growing all alike--one face for the men, and another for the women; perhaps in the far-off future the face of the man will approach nearer and nearer to that of the woman, and so all will be at last exactly alike, and the individual will exist, indeed, no more. Then there will be, from first to last, among the whole multitude neither distinction nor difference. It is a face which fills one with contentment, though it will be many centuries before it approaches completeness. It is a smooth face, there are no lines in it; it is a grave face, the lips seldom smile, and never laugh; the eyes are heavy, and move slowly; there has already been achieved, though the change has been very gradual, the complete banishment of that expression which has been preserved in every one of the ancient portraits, which may be usefully studied for purposes of contrast. Whatever the emotion attempted to be portrayed, and even when the face was supposed to be at rest, there was always behind, visible to the eye, an expression of anxiety or eagerness. Some kind of pain always lies upon those old faces, even upon the youngest. How could it be otherwise? On the morrow they would be dead. They had to crowd into a few days whatever they could grasp of life. As I sit there and watch our People at dinner, I see with satisfaction that the old pain has gone out of their faces. They have lived so long that they have forgotten Death. They live so easily that they are contented with life: we have reduced existence to the simplest. They eat and drink--it is their only pleasure; they work--it is a necessity for health and existence--but their work takes them no longer than till noontide; they lie in the sun, they sit in the shade, they sleep. If they had once any knowledge, it is now forgotten; their old ambitions, their old desires, all are forgotten. They sleep and eat, they work and rest. To rest and to eat are pleasures which they never desire to end. To live forever, to eat and drink forever--this is now their only hope. And this has been accomplished for them by the Holy College. Science has justified herself--this is the outcome of man's long search for generations into the secrets of Nature. We, who have carried on this search, have at length succeeded in stripping humanity of all those things which formerly made existence intolerable to him. He lives, he eats, he sleeps. Perhaps--I know not, but of this we sometimes talk in the College--I say, perhaps--we may succeed in making some kind of artificial food, as we compound the great Arcanum, with simple ingredients and without labor. We may also extend the duration of sleep; we may thus still further simplify existence. Man in the end--as I propose to make and mould the People--will sleep until Nature calls upon him to awake and eat. He will then eat, drink, and sleep again, while the years roll by. He will lie heedless of all; he will be heedless of the seasons, heedless of the centuries. Time will have no meaning for him--a breathing, living, inarticulate mass will be all that is left of the active, eager, chattering Man of the Past. This may be done in the future, when yonder laboratory, which we call the House of Life, shall yield the secrets of Nature deeper and deeper still. At present we have arrived at this point--the chief pleasure of life is to eat and to drink. We have taught the People so much, of all the tastes which formerly gratified man this alone remains. We provide them daily with a sufficiency and variety of food; there are so many kinds of food, and the combinations are so endless, that practically the choice of our cooks is unlimited. Good food, varied food, well-cooked food, with drink also varied and pure, and the best that can be made, make our public meals a daily joy. We have learned to make all kinds of wine from the grapes in our hot-houses. It is so abundant that every day, all the year round, the People may call for a ration of what they please. We make also beer of every kind, cider, perry, and mead. The gratification of the sense of taste helps to remove the incentive to restlessness or discontent. The minds of most are occupied by no other thought than that of the last feast and the next; if they were to revolt, where would they find their next meal? At the outset we had, I confess, grave difficulties. There was not in existence any Holy College. We drifted without object or purpose. For a long time the old ambitions remained; the old passions were continued; the old ideas of private property prevailed; the old inequalities were kept up. Presently there arose from those who had no property the demand for a more equal share. The cry was fiercely resisted; then there followed civil war for a space, till both sides were horrified by the bloodshed that followed. Time also was on the side of them who rebelled. I was one, because at the time when the whole nation was admitted to a participation in the great Arcanum, I was myself a young man of nineteen, employed as a washer of bottles in Dr. Linister's laboratory, and therefore, according to the ideas of the time, a very humble person. Time helped us in an unexpected way. Property was in the hands of single individuals. Formerly they died and were succeeded by their sons; now the sons grew tired of waiting. How much longer were their fathers, who grew no older, to keep all the wealth to themselves? Therefore, the civil war having come to an end, with no result except a barren peace, the revolutionary party was presently joined by all but the holders of property, and the State took over to itself the whole wealth--that is to say, the whole land; there is no other wealth. Since that time there has been no private property; for since it was clearly unjust to take away from the father in order to give it to the son, with no limitation as to the time of enjoyment, everything followed the land--great houses, which were allowed to fall into ruin; pictures and works of art, libraries, jewels, which are in Museums; and money, which, however, ceased to be of value as soon as there was nothing which could be bought. As for me, I was so fortunate as to perceive--Dr. Linister daily impressed it upon me--that of all occupations, that of Physicist would very quickly become the most important. I therefore remained in my employment, worked, read, experimented, and learned all that my master had to teach me. The other professions, indeed, fell into decay more speedily than some of us expected. There could be no more lawyers when there was no more property. Even libel, which was formerly the cause of many actions, became harmless when a man could not be injured; and, besides, it is impossible to libel any man when there are no longer any rules of conduct except the one duty of work, which is done in the eyes of all and cannot be shirked. And how could Religion survive the removal of Death to some possible remote future? They tried, it is true, to keep up the pretence of it, and many, especially women, clung to the old forms of faith for I know not how long. With the great mass, religion ceased to have any influence as soon as life was assured. As for Art, Learning, Science--other than that of Physics, Biology, and Medicine--all gradually decayed and died away. And the old foolish pursuit of Literature, which once occupied so many, and was even held in a kind of honor--the writing of histories, poems, dramas, novels, essays on human life--this also decayed and died, because men ceased to be anxious about their past or their future, and were at last contented to dwell in the present. Another and a most important change which may be noted was the gradual decline and disappearance of the passion called Love. This was once a curious and inexplicable yearning--so much is certain--of two young people towards each other, so that they were never content unless they were together, and longed to live apart from the rest of the world, each trying to make the other happier. At least, this is as I read history. For my own part, as I was constantly occupied with Science, I never felt this passion; or if I did, then I have quite forgotten it. Now, at the outset people who were in love rejoiced beyond measure that their happiness would last so long. They began, so long as the words had any meaning, to call each other Angels, Goddesses, Divinely Fair, possessed of every perfect gift, with other extravagancies, at the mere recollection of which we should now blush. Presently they grew tired of each other; they no longer lived apart from the rest of the world. They separated; or, if they continued to walk together, it was from force of habit. Some still continue thus to sit side by side. No new connections were formed. People ceased desiring to make others happy, because the State began to provide for everybody's happiness. The whole essence of the old society was a fight. Everybody fought for existence. Everybody trampled on the weaker. If a man loved a woman, he fought for her as well as for himself. Love? Why, when the true principle of life is recognized--the right of every individual to his or her share--and that an equal share in everything--and when the continuance of life is assured--what room is there for love? The very fact of the public life--the constant companionship, the open mingling of women with men, and this for year after year--the same women with the same men--has destroyed the mystery which formerly hung about womanhood, and was in itself the principal cause of love. It is gone, therefore, and with it the most disturbing element of life. Without love, without ambition, without suffering, without religion, without quarrelling, without private rights, without rank or class, life is calm, gentle, undisturbed. Therefore, they all sit down to dinner in peace and contentment, every man's mind intent upon nothing but the bill of fare. This evening, directed by the observation of the Arch Physician, I turned my eyes upon the girl Christine, who sat beside her grandfather. I observed, first--but the fact inspired me with no suspicion--that she was no longer a child, but a woman grown; and I began to wonder when she would come with the rest for the Arcanum. Most women, when births were common among us, used to come at about five-and-twenty; that is to say, in the first year or two of full womanhood, before their worst enemies--where there were two women, in the old days, there were two enemies--could say that they had begun to fall off. If you look round our table, you will see very few women older than twenty-four, and very few men older than thirty. There were many women at this table who might, perhaps, have been called beautiful in the old times; though now the men had ceased to think of beauty, and the women had ceased to desire admiration. Yet, if regular features, large eyes, small mouths, a great quantity of hair, and a rounded figure are beautiful, then there were many at the table who might have been called beautiful. But the girl Christine--I observed the fact with scientific interest--was so different from the other women that she seemed another kind of creature. Her eyes were soft; there is no scientific term to express this softness of youth--one observes it especially in the young of the _cervus_ kind. There was also a curious softness on her cheek, as if something would be rubbed away if one touched it. And her voice differed from that of her elder sisters; it was curiously gentle, and full of that quality which may be remarked in the wood-dove when she pairs in spring. They used to call it tenderness; but, since the thing itself disappeared, the word has naturally fallen out of use. Now, I might have observed with suspicion, whereas I only remarked it as something strange, that the company among which Christine and the old man sat were curiously stirred and uneasy. They were disturbed out of their habitual tranquillity because the girl was discoursing to them. She was telling them what she had learned about the Past. "Oh," I heard her say, "it was a beautiful time! Why did they ever suffer it to perish? Do you mean that you actually remember nothing of it?" They looked at each other sheepishly. "There were soldiers--men were soldiers; they went out to fight, with bands of music and the shouts of the people. There were whole armies of soldiers--thousands of them. They dressed in beautiful glittering clothes. Do you forget that?" One of the men murmured, hazily, that there were soldiers. "And there were sailors, who went upon the sea in great ships. Jack Carera"--she turned to one of them--"you are a sailor, too. You ought to remember." "I remember the sailors very well indeed," said this young man, readily. I always had my doubts about the wisdom of admitting our sailors among the People. We have a few ships for the carriage of those things which as yet we have not succeeded in growing for ourselves; these are manned by a few hundred sailors who long ago volunteered, and have gone on ever since. They are a brave race, ready to face the most terrible dangers of tempest and shipwreck; but they are also a dangerous, restless, talkative, questioning tribe. They have, in fact, preserved almost as much independence as the College itself. They are now confined to their own port of Sheerness. Then the girl began to tell some pestilent story of love and shipwreck and rescue; and at hearing it some of them looked puzzled and some pained; but the sailor listened with all his ears. "Where did you get that from, Christine?" "Where I get everything--from the old Library. Come and read it in the book, Jack." "I am not much hand at reading. But some day, perhaps after next voyage, Christine." The girl poured out a glass of claret for the old man. Then she went on telling them stories; but most of her neighbors seemed neither to hear nor to comprehend. Only the sailor-man listened and nodded. Then she laughed out loud. At this sound, so strange, so unexpected, everybody within hearing jumped. Her table was in the Hall next to our own, so that we heard the laugh quite plainly. The Arch Physician looked round approvingly. "How many years since we heard a good, honest _young_ laugh, Suffragan? Give us more children, and soften our hearts for us. But, no; the heart you want is the hard, crusted, selfish heart. See! No one asks why she laughed. They are all eating again now, just as if nothing had happened. Happy, enviable People!" Presently he turned to me and remarked, in his lofty manner, as if he was above all the world, "You cannot explain, Suffragan, why, at an unexpected touch, a sound, a voice, a trifle, the memory may be suddenly awakened to things long, long past and forgotten. Do you know what that laugh caused me to remember? I cannot explain why, nor can you. It recalled the evening of the Great Discovery--not the Discovery itself, but quite another thing. I went there more to meet a girl than to hear what the German had to say. As to that I expected very little. To meet that girl seemed of far more importance. I meant to make love to her--love, Suffragan--a thing which you can never understand--real, genuine love! I meant to marry her. Well, I did meet her; and I arranged for a convenient place where we could meet again after the Lecture. Then came the Discovery; and I was carried away, body and soul, and forgot the girl and love and everything in the stupefaction of this most wonderful Discovery, of which we have made, between us, such admirable use." You never knew whether the Arch Physician was in earnest or not. Truly, we had made a most beautiful use of the Discovery; but it was not in the way that Dr. Linister would have chosen. "All this remembered just because a girl laughed! Suffragan, Science cannot explain all." I shall never pretend to deny that Dr. Linister's powers as a physicist were of the first order, nor that his Discoveries warranted his election to the Headship of the College. Yet, something was due, perhaps, to his tall and commanding figure, and to the look of authority which reigned naturally on his face, and to the way in which he always stepped into the first rank. He was always the Chief, long before the College of Physicians assumed the whole authority, in everything that he joined. He opposed the extinction of property, and would have had everybody win what he could, and keep it as long as he would; he opposed the Massacre of the Old; he was opposed, in short, to the majority of the College. Yet he was our Chief. His voice was clear, and what he said always produced its effect, though it did not upset my solid majority, or thwart the Grand Advance of the Triumph of Science. As for me, my position has been won by sheer work and merit. My figure is not commanding; I am short-sighted and dark-visaged; my voice is rough; and as for manners, I have nothing to do with them. But in Science there is but one second to Linister--and that is Grout. When the supper came to an end, we rose and marched back to the College in the same state and order with which we had arrived. As for the people, some of them went out into the Garden; some remained in the Hall. It was then nine o'clock, and twilight. Some went straight to their own rooms, where they would smoke tobacco--an old habit allowed by the College on account of its soothing and sedative influence--before going to bed. By ten o'clock everybody would be in bed and asleep. What more beautiful proof of the advance of Science than the fact that the whole of the twenty-four thousand people who formed the population of Canterbury dropped off to sleep the moment they laid their heads upon the pillow? This it is to have learned the proper quantities and kinds of food; the proper amount of bodily exercise and work; and the complete subjugation of all the ancient forces of unrest and disquiet. To be sure, we were all, with one or two exceptions, in the very prime and flower of early manhood and womanhood. It would be hard, indeed, if a young man of thirty should not sleep well. I was presently joined in the garden of the College by the Arch Physician. "Grout," he said, "let us sit and talk. My mind is disturbed. It is always disturbed when the memory of the Past is forced upon me." "The Evil Past," I said. "If you please--the Evil Past. The question is, whether it was not infinitely more tolerable for mankind than the Evil Present?" We argued out the point; but it was one on which we could never agree, for he remained saturated with the old ideas of private property and individualism. He maintained that there are no Rights of Man at all, except his Right to what he can get and what he can keep. He even went so far as to say that the true use of the Great Discovery should have been to cause the incompetent, the idle, the hereditarily corrupt, and the vicious to die painlessly. "As to those who were left," he said, "I would have taught them the selfishness of staying too long. When they had taken time for work and play and society and love, they should have been exhorted to go away of their own accord, and to make room for their children. Then we should have had always the due succession of father and son, mother and daughter; always age and manhood and childhood; and always the world advancing by the efforts of those who would have time to work for an appreciable period. Instead, we have"--he waved his hand. I was going to reply, when suddenly a voice light, clear, and sweet broke upon our astonished ears. 'Twas the voice of a woman, and she was singing. At first I hardly listened, because I knew that it could be none other than the child Christine, whom, indeed, I had often heard singing. It is natural, I believe, for children to sing. But the Arch Physician listened, first with wonder, and then with every sign of amazement. How could he be concerned by the voice of a child singing silly verses? Then I heard the last lines of her song, which she sang, I admit, with great vigor: "Oh, Love is worth the whole broad earth; Oh, Love is worth the whole broad earth; Give that, you give us all!" "Grout," cried the Arch Physician, in tones of the deepest agitation, "I choke--I am stifled. Listen! They are words that I wrote--I myself wrote--with my own hand--long, long ago in the Past. I wrote them for a girl--the girl I told you of at dinner. I loved her. I thought never again to feel as I felt then. Yet the memory of that feeling has come back to me. Is it possible? Can some things never die? Can we administer no drug that will destroy memory? For the earth reeled beneath my feet again, and my senses reeled, and I would once more--yes, I would once more have given all the world--yes, life--even life--only to call that woman mine for a year--a month--a day--an hour!" The Arch Physician made this astonishing confession in a broken and agitated voice. Then he rushed away, and left me alone in the summer-house. The singer could certainly have been none other than the girl Christine. How should she get hold of Dr. Linister's love-song? Strange! She had disturbed our peace at supper by laughing, and she had agitated the Arch Physician himself to such a degree as I should have believed impossible by singing a foolish old song. When I went to bed there came into my mind some of the old idle talk about witches, and I even dreamed that we were burning a witch who was filling our minds with disturbing thoughts. CHAPTER III. CHRISTINE AT HOME. When the girl Christine walked through the loitering crowd outside the Hall, some of the people looked after her with wondering eyes. "Strange!" said a woman. "She laughed! She laughed!" "Ay," said another, "we have forgotten how to laugh. But we used to laugh before"--she broke off with a sigh. "And she sings," said a third. "I have heard her sing like a lark in the Museum." "Once," said the first woman, "we used to sing as well as laugh. I remember, we used to sing. She makes us remember the old days." "The bad old days"--it was one of the Assistant Physicians who admonished her--"the times when nothing was certain, not even life, from day to day. It should bring you increased happiness to think sometimes of those old times." The first woman who had spoken was one whom men would have called beautiful in those old times, when their heads were turned by such a thing as a woman's face. She was pale of cheek and had black eyes, which, in those days of passion and jealousy, might have flashed like lightning. Now they were dull. She was shapely of limb and figure too, with an ample cheek and a full mouth. Formerly, in the days of love and rage, those limbs would have been lithe and active; now they were heavy and slow. Heaviness of movement and of eyes sensibly grows upon our people. I welcome every indication of advance towards the Perfect Type of Humanity which will do nothing but lie down, breathe, eat, and sleep. "Yes," she replied with a deep sigh. "Nothing was certain. The bad old times, when people died. But there was love, and we danced and sung and laughed." She sighed again, and walked away alone, slowly, hanging her head. The girl passed through them, leading the old man by the hand. I know very well, now, that we ought to have been suspicious. What meant the gleam and sparkle of her eyes, when all other eyes were dull? What meant the parting of her lips and the smile which always lay upon them, when no one else smiled at all? Why did she carry her head erect, when the rest walked with hanging heads? Why, again, did she sing, when no one else sang? Why did she move as if her limbs were on springs, when all the rest went slowly and heavily? These signs meant mischief. I took them for the natural accompaniments of youth. They meant more than youth: they meant dangerous curiosity; they meant--presently--Purpose. How should one of the People dare to have a Purpose unknown to the Sacred College? You shall hear. All that followed was, in fact, due to our own blindness. We should long before have shut up every avenue which might lead the curious to the study of the Past; we should have closed the Museum and the Library altogether. We did not, because we lived in the supposition that the more the old times were investigated, the more the people would be satisfied with the Present. When, indeed, one looks at the pictures of battle, murder, cruelty, and all kinds of passion; when one reads the old books, full of foolishness which can only be excused on the plea of a life too short to have a right comprehension of anything, it is amazing that the scene does not strike the observer with a kind of horror. When, which is seldom, I carry my own memory back to the old times and see myself before I went to the Laboratory, boy-of-all-work to a Brewery, ordered here and there, working all day long with no other prospect than to be a servant for a short span of life and then to die; when I remember the people among whom I lived, poor, starving, dependent from day to day on the chance of work, or, at best, from week to week; when I think of the misery from which these poor people have been rescued, I cannot find within me a spark of sympathy for the misguided wretches who voluntarily exchanged their calm and happy Present for the tumult and anxiety of the Past. However, we are not all reasonable, as you shall hear. It was already twilight outside, and in the Museum there was only light enough to see that a few persons were assembled in the Great Hall. Christine placed her grandfather in a high-backed wooden chair, in which he spent most of his time, clutching at the arms and fighting with his asthma. Then she turned up the electric light. It showed a large, rather lofty room, oblong in shape. Old arms were arranged round the walls; great glass-cases stood about, filled with a collection of all kinds of things preserved from the old times. There were illustrations of their arts, now entirely useless: such as the jewels they wore, set in bracelets and necklaces; their gloves, fans, rings, umbrellas, pictures, and statuary. Then there were cases filled with the old implements of writing--paper, inkstands, pens, and so forth--the people have long since left off writing; there were boxes full of coins with which they bought things, and for which they sold their freedom; there were things with which they played games--many of them dangerous ones--and whiled away the tedium of their short lives; there were models of the ships in which they went to sea, also models of all kinds of engines and machines which slaves--they were nearly all slaves--made for the purpose of getting more money for their masters; there were also crowns, coronets, and mitres, which formerly belonged to people who possessed what they called rank; there were the praying-books which were formerly used every day in great buildings like the House of Life; there were specimens of legal documents on parchment, by the drawing up of which, when law existed, a great many people procured a contemptible existence; there were also models, with figures of the people in them, of Parliament Houses, Churches, and Courts of Justice; there were life-size models of soldiers in uniform, when men were of understanding so contemptible as to be tempted to risk life--even life--in exchange for a gold-laced coat! But then our ancestors were indescribably foolish. There were musical instruments of all kinds--I have always been glad that music fell so soon into disuse. It is impossible to cultivate contentment while music is practised. Besides the ordinary weapons--sword, pike, and javelin--there were all kinds of horrible inventions, such as vast cannons, torpedo boats, dynamite shells, and so forth, for the destruction of towns, ships, and armor. It is a great and splendid Collection, but it ought to have been long, long before transferred to the custody of the Holy College. The girl looked inquiringly at her visitors, counting them all. There were ten--namely, five men and five women. Like all the people, they were young--the men about thirty, the women about twenty-two or twenty-three. The men were dressed in their blue flannels, with a flat cap of the same material; the women in their gray beige, short frock, the flat gray cap under which their hair was gathered, gray stockings, and heavy shoes. The dress was, in fact, invented by myself for both sexes. It has many advantages. First, there is always plenty of the stuff to be had; next, both flannel and beige are soft, warm, and healthy textures--with such a dress there is no possibility of distinction or of superiority; and, lastly, with such a dress the women have lost all power of setting forth their attractions so as to charm the men with new fashions, crafty subtleties of dress, provocations of the troublesome passion of love in the shape of jewels, ribbons, gloves, and the like. No one wears gloves: all the women's hands are hard; and although they are still young and their faces are unchanged, their eyes are dull and hard. I am pleased to think that there is no more foolishness of love among us. The people were standing or sitting about, not together, but separately--each by himself or herself. This tendency to solitary habits is a most healthy indication of the advance of humanity. Self-preservation is the first Law--separate and solitary existence is the last condition--of mankind. They were silent and regardless of each other. Their attitude showed the listlessness of their minds. "I am glad you are here," said Christine. "You promised you would not fail me. And yet, though you promised, I feared that at the last moment you might change your mind. I was afraid that you would rather not be disturbed in the even current of your thoughts." "Why disturb our minds?" asked one, a woman. "We were at peace before you began to talk of the Past. We had almost forgotten it. And it is so long ago"--her voice sank to a murmur--"so long ago." They all echoed, "It is so long ago--so long ago!" "Oh," cried the girl, "you call this to be at peace! Why, if you were so many stones in the garden you could not be more truly at peace. To work, to rest, to eat, to sleep--you call that Life! And yet you can remember--if you please--the time when you were full of activity and hope." "If to remember is to regret, why should we invite the pain of regret? We cannot have the old life except with the old conditions; the short life and the--" "If I could remember--if I had ever belonged to the Past," the girl interrupted, quickly; "oh, I would remember every moment--I would live every day of the old life over and over again. But I can do nothing--nothing--but read of the splendid Past and look forward to such a future as your own. Alas! why was I born at all, since I was born into such a world as this? Why was I called into existence when all the things of which I read every day have passed away? And what remains in their place?" "We have Life," said one of the men, but not confidently. "Life! Yes--and what a life! Oh, what a life! Well, we waste time. Listen now--and if you can, for once forget the present and recall the past. Do not stay to think how great a gulf lies between; do not count the years--indeed, you cannot. Whether they are one hundred or five hundred they do not know, even at the Holy College itself. I am sure it will make you happier--'twill console and comfort you--in this our life of desperate monotony, only to remember--to recall--how you used to live." They answered with a look of blank bewilderment. "It is so long ago--so long ago," said one of them again. "Look around you. Here are all the things that used to be your own. Let them help you to remember. Here are the arms that the men carried when they went out to fight; here are the jewels that the women wore. Think of your dress in the days when you were allowed to dress, and we did not all wear frocks of gray beige, as if all women were exactly alike. Will that not help?" They looked about them helplessly. No, they did not yet remember; their dull eyes were filled with a kind of anxious wonder, as might be seen in one rudely awakened out of sleep. They looked at the things in the great room, but that seemed to bring nothing back to their minds. The Present was round them like a net which they could neither cut through nor see through; it was a veil around them through which they could not pass. It had been so long with them; it was so unchanging; for so long they had had nothing to expect; for so long, therefore, they had not cared to look back. The Holy College had produced, in fact, what it had proposed and designed. The minds of the people had become quiescent. And to think that so beautiful a state of things should be destroyed by a girl--the only child in the Community! "Will it help," said the girl, "if we turn down the light a little? So. Now we are almost in darkness, but for the moonlight through the window. In the old times, when you were children, I have read that you loved to sit together and to tell stories. Let us tell each other stories." Nobody replied; but the young man called Jack took Christine's hand and held it. "Let us try," said the girl again. "I will tell you a story. Long ago there were people called gentlefolk. Grandad here was a gentleman. I have read about them in the old books. I wonder if any of you remember those people. They were exempt from work; the lower sort worked for them; they led a life of ease; they made their own work for themselves. Some of the men fought for their country--it was in the old time, you know, when men still fought; some worked for their country; some worked for the welfare of those who worked for bread; some only amused themselves; some were profligates, and did wicked things--" She paused--no one responded. "The women had no work to do at all. They only occupied themselves in making everybody happy; they were treated with the greatest respect; they were not allowed to do anything at all that could be done for them; they played and sang; they painted and embroidered; they knew foreign languages; they constantly inspired the men to do great things, even if they should be killed." Here all shuddered and trembled. Christine made haste to change the subject. "They wore beautiful dresses--think--dresses of silk and satin, embroidered with gold, trimmed with lace; they had necklaces, bracelets, and rings; their hands were white, and they wore long gloves to their elbows; they dressed their hair as they pleased. Some wore it long, like this." She pulled off her flat cap, and threw back her long tresses, and quickly turned up the light. She was transformed! The women started and gasped. "Take off your caps!" she ordered. They obeyed, and at sight of the flowing locks that fell upon their shoulders, curling, rippling, flowing, their eyes brightened, but only for a moment. "Yes," said the girl, "they wore their beautiful hair as they pleased. Oh!"--she gathered in her hands the flowing tresses of one--"you have such long and beautiful hair! It is a shame--it is a shame to hide it. Think of the lovely dresses to match this beauty of the hair!" "Oh," cried the women, "we remember the dresses. We remember them now. Why make us remember them? It is so long ago--so long ago--and we can never wear them any more." "Nay; but you have the same beauty," said Christine. "That at least remains. You have preserved your youth and your beauty." "Of what good are our faces to us," said another woman, "with such a dress as this? Men no longer look upon our beauty." "Let us be," said the woman who had spoken first. "There can be no change for us. Why disturb our minds? The Present is horrible. But we have ceased to care much for anything: we do our day's work every day--all the same hours of work; we wear the same dress--to every woman the same dress; we eat and drink the same food--to every one the same; we are happy because we have got all we can get, and we expect no more; we never talk--why should we talk? When you laughed to-day it was like an earthquake." Her words were strong, but her manner of speech was a monotone. This way of speaking grows upon us; it is the easiest. I watch the indications with interest. From rapid talk to slow talk; from animated talk to monotony; the next step will be to silence absolute. "There is no change for us," she repeated, "neither in summer nor in winter. We have preserved our youth, but we have lost all the things which the youthful used to desire. We thought to preserve our beauty; what is the good of beauty with such a dress and such a life? Why should we make ourselves miserable in remembering any of the things we used to desire?" "Oh," cried the girl, clasping her hands, "to me there is no pleasure possible but in learning all about the Past. I read the old books, I look at the old pictures, I play the old music, I sing the old songs; but it is not enough. I know how you were dressed--not all alike in gray beige frocks, but in lovely silk and beautiful embroidered stuffs. I will show you presently how you dressed. I know how you danced and played games and acted most beautiful plays, and I have read stories about you; I know that you were always dissatisfied, and wanting something or other. The stories are full of discontent; nobody ever sits down satisfied except one pair. There is always one pair, and they fall in Love--in Love," she repeated. "What is that, I wonder?" Then she went on again: "They only want one thing then, and the story-books are all about how they got it after wonderful adventures. There are no adventures now. The books tell us all this, but I want more. I want to know more: I want to see the old stories with my own eyes; I want to see you in your old dresses, talking in your own old way. The books cannot tell me how you talked and how you looked. I am sure it was not as you talk now--because you never talk." "There is no reason why we should talk. All the old desires have ceased to be. We no longer want anything or expect anything." "Come. I shall do my best to bring the Past back to you. First, I have learned who you were. That is why I have called you together. In the old times you all belonged to gentlefolk." This announcement produced no effect at all. They listened with lack-lustre looks. They had entirely forgotten that there were ever such distinctions as gentle and simple. "You will remember presently," said Christine, not discouraged. "I have found out in the ancient Rolls your names and your families." "Names and families," said one of the men, "are gone long ago. Christine, what is the good of reviving the memory of things that can never be restored?" But the man named Jack Carera, the sailor of whom I have already spoken, stepped forward. I have said that the sailors were a dangerous class, on account of their independence and their good meaning. "Tell us," he said, "about our families. Why, I, for one, have never forgotten that I was once a gentleman. It is hard to tell now, because they have made us all alike; but for many, many years--I know not how many--we who had been gentlemen consorted together." "You shall again," said Christine, "if you please. Listen, then. First, my grandfather. He was called Sir Arthur Farrance, and he was called a Baronet. To be a Baronet was, in those days, something greatly desired by many people. A man, in the old books, was said to enjoy the title of Baronet. But I know not why one man was so raised above another." "Heugh! Heugh! Heugh!" coughed the old man. "I remember that. Why, what is there to remember except the old times? I was a Baronet--the fifth Baronet. My country place was in Sussex, and my town address was White's and the Travellers'." "Yes," Christine nodded. "My grandfather's memory is tenacious; he forgets nothing of the things that happened when he was young. I have learned a great deal from him. He seems to have known all your grandmothers, for instance, and speaks of them as if he had loved them all." "I did--I did," said the old man. "I loved them every one." The girl turned to the women before her--the dull-eyed, heavy-headed women, all in the gray dresses exactly alike; but their gray flat caps had been thrown off, and they looked disturbed, moved out of the common languor. "Now I will tell you who you were formerly. You"--she pointed to the nearest--"were the Lady Mildred Carera, only daughter of the Earl of Thordisá. Your father and mother survived the Discovery, but were killed in the Great Massacre Year, when nearly all the old were put to death. You were a great beauty in your time, and when the Discovery was announced you were in your second season. People wondered who would win you. But those who pretended to know talked of a young scientific Professor." The woman heard as if she was trying to understand a foreign language. This was, in fact, a language without meaning to her. As yet she caught nothing. "You," said Christine, turning to the next, "were Dorothy Oliphant; you were also young, beautiful, and an heiress; you, like Lady Mildred, had all the men at your feet. I don't know what that means, but the books say so. Then the Discovery came, and love-making, whatever that was, seems to have gone out of fashion." The second woman heard this information with lack-lustre eyes. What did it matter? "You"--Christine turned to a third and to a fourth and fifth--"you were Rosie Lorrayne; you, Adela Dupré; you, Susie Campbell. You were all in Society; you were all young and beautiful and happy. Now for the men." She turned to them. The sailor named Jack gazed upon her with eyes of admiration. The other men, startled at first by the apparition of the tresses, had relapsed into listlessness. They hardly looked up as she addressed them. First she pointed to the sailor. "Your name--" "I remember my name," he said. "I have not forgotten so much as our friends. Sailors talk more with each other, and remember. I am named John Carera, and I was formerly first-cousin to Lady Mildred. Cousin"--he held out his hand--"have you forgotten your cousin? We used to play together in the old times. You promised to marry me when you should grow up." Lady Mildred gave him her hand. "It is so long ago--so long ago," she murmured; but her eyes were troubled. She had begun to remember the things put away and forgotten for so long. "You"--Christine turned to another--"were Geoffrey Heron. You were Captain in a Cavalry Regiment. You will remember that presently, and a great deal more. You"--she turned to another--"were Laurence de Heyn, and you were a young Lawyer, intending to be a Judge. You will remember that, in time. You"--she turned to another--"were Jack Culliford; and you were a Private Secretary, intending to go into Parliament, and to rise perhaps to be Prime Minister. And you"--she turned to the last--"were Arnold Buckland, already a Poet of Society. You will all remember these things before long. Lastly, you all belonged to the people who were born rich, and never used to have any care or anxiety about their daily bread. Nor did you ever do any work, unless you chose." "It is so long ago," said Lady Mildred--her face was brighter now--"that we have forgotten even that there ever were gentlefolk." "It is not strange," said Christine, "that you should have forgotten it. Why should you remember anything? We are only a herd, one with another; one not greater, and one not less, than another. Now that you know your names again and remember clearly, because I have told you"--she repeated the information for fear they should again forget--"who and what you were, each of you--you will go on to remember more." "Oh, what good? What good?" asked Lady Mildred. "Because it will rouse you from your lethargy," said the girl, impetuously. "Oh, you sit in silence day after day; you walk alone; you ought to be together as you used to be, talking, playing. See! I have read the books; your lives were full of excitement. It makes my heart beat only to read how the men went out to fight, daring everything, for the sake of the women they loved." "The men love us no longer," said Lady Mildred. "If the brave men fell--" But here all faces, except the sailor's, turned pale, and they shuddered. Christine did not finish the sentence. She, too, shuddered. In the old times I remember how, being then errand-boy in the Brewery, I used to listen, in the Whitechapel Road, to the men who, every Sunday morning and evening, used to tell us that religion was a mockery and a snare, invented by the so-called priests for their own selfish ends, so that they might be kept in sloth and at their ease. There was no need now for these orators. The old religion was clean dead and forgotten. When men ceased to expect Death, what need was there to keep up any interest in the future world, if there should be any? But the bare mention of the dreadful thing is still enough to make all cheeks turn pale. Every year, the farther off Death recedes, the more terrible he looks. Therefore they all shuddered. Among the musical instruments in the Museum there stands one, a square wooden box on legs, with wires inside it. There are many other musical instruments, the use of all (as I thought) forgotten. Very soon after the Great Discovery people ceased to care for music. For my own part, I have never been able to understand how the touching of chords and the striking of hammers on wires can produce any effect at all upon the mind except that of irritation. We preserve trumpets for the processions of the College because mere noise awes people, and because trumpets make more noise with less trouble than the human voice. But with music, such as it used to be, we have now nothing to do at all. I have been told that people were formerly greatly moved by music, so that every kind of emotion was produced in their minds merely by listening to a man or woman playing some instrument. It must have been so, because Christine, merely by playing the old music to the company, was able to bring back their minds to the long-forgotten Past. But it must be remembered that she had disturbed their minds first. She sat down, then, before this box, and she began to play upon it, watching the people meanwhile. She played the music of their own time--indeed, there has been none written since. It was a kind of witchery. First the sailor named Jack sprang to his feet and began to walk up and down the room with wild gestures and strange looks. Then the rest, one by one, grew restless; they looked about them; they left their chairs and began to look at each other, and at the things in the cases. The Past was coming slowly into sight. I have heard how men at sea perceive an island far away, but like a cloud on the horizon; how the cloud grows larger and assumes outline; how this grows clearer and larger still, until, before the ship reaches the harbor and drops her anchor, the cliffs and the woods, and even the single trees on the hill-sides, are clearly visible. Thus the listeners gradually began to see the Past again. Now, to feel these old times again, one must go back to them and become once more part of them. It is possible, because we are still of the age when we left them. Therefore, this little company, who had left the old time when they were still young, began to look again as they had then looked. Their eyes brightened, their cheeks flushed; their limbs became elastic; their heads were thrown back; the faces of the women grew soft, and those of the men strong; on all alike there fell once more the look of restless expectancy and of unsatisfied yearning which belonged to all ages in the old time. Presently they began to murmur, I know not what, and then to whisper to each other with gentle sighs. Then the girls--they were really girls again--caught each other by the hand, and panted and sighed again; and at last they fell upon each other's necks and kissed. As for the men, they now stood erect and firm, but for the most part they gazed upon the girls with wonder and admiration unspeakable, so great was the power of witchery possessed by this insignificant girl. Christine looked on and laughed gently. Then she suddenly changed her music, and began to play a March loud and triumphant. And as she played she spoke: "When the brave soldiers came home from battle and from victory, it was right that the people should all go forth to meet them. The music played for them; the children strewed roses under their feet; the bells were set ringing; the crowds cheered them; the women wept and laughed at the same time, and waved them welcome. Nothing could be too good for the men who fought for their country. Listen! I found the song of the Victors' Return in an old book. I wonder if you remember it. I think it is a very simple little thing." Then she sang. She had a strong, clear voice--they had heard her singing before--no one sang in the whole City except this child, and already it had been observed that her singing made men restless. I do not deny the fulness and richness of her voice; but the words she sang--Dr. Linister's words, they were--are mere foolishness: "With flying flag, with beat of drum, Oh, brave and gallant show! In rags and tatters home they come-- We love them better so. With sunburnt cheeks and wounds and scars; Yet still their swords are bright. Oh, welcome, welcome from the wars, Brave lads who fought the fight! "The girls they laugh, the girls they cry, 'What shall their guerdon be?-- Alas! that some must fall and die!-- Bring forth our gauds to see. 'Twere all too slight, give what we might,' Up spoke a soldier tall: 'Oh, Love is worth the whole broad earth; Oh, Love is worth the whole broad earth; Give that, you give us all!'" "Do you remember the song?" Christine asked. They shook their heads. Yet it seemed familiar. They remembered some such songs. "Geoffrey Heron," said the girl, turning to one of the men, "you were Captain Heron in the old days. You remember that you were in the army." "Was I?" He started. "No; yes. I remember. I was Captain Heron. We rode out of Portsmouth Dockyard Gates when we came home--all that were left of us. The women were waiting on the Hard outside, and they laughed and cried, and caught our hands, and ran beside the horses. Our ranks were thin, for we had been pretty well knocked about. I remember now. Yes--yes, I was--I was Captain Heron." "Go into that room. You will find your old uniform. Take off the blue flannels, and show us how you looked when you were in uniform." As if it was nothing at all unusual, the man rose and obeyed. It was observed that he now carried himself differently. He stood erect, with shoulders squared, head up, and limbs straight. They all obeyed whatever this girl ordered them to do. Christine began to play again. She played another March, but always loud and triumphant. When the soldier came back he was dressed in the uniform which he had worn in the time of the Great Discovery, when they left off taking account of time. "Oh!" cried Christine, springing to her feet. "See! See! Here is a soldier! Here is a man who has fought!" He stood before them dressed in a scarlet tunic and a white helmet; a red sash hung across him, and on his breast were medals. At sight of him the girl called Dorothy Oliphant changed countenance; all caught their breath. The aspect of the man carried them, indeed, back to the old, old time. "Welcome home, Captain Heron," said Christine. "We have followed your campaign day by day." "We are home again," the soldier replied, gravely. "Unfortunately, we have left a good many of our regiment behind." "Behind? You mean--they--are--dead." Christine shuddered. The others shuddered. Even Captain Heron himself for a moment turned pale. But he was again in the Past, and the honor of his regiment was in his hands. "You have fought with other men," said Christine. "Let me look in your face. Yes--it is changed. You have the look of the fighting man in the old pictures. You look as if you mean to have something, whatever it is, whether other men want it or not. Oh, you have fought with men! It is wonderful! Perhaps you have even killed men. Were you dreadfully afraid?" Captain Heron started and flushed. "Afraid?" he asked. "Afraid?" "Oh!" Christine clapped her hands. "I wanted to see that look. It is the look of a man in sudden wrath. Forgive me! It is terrible to see a man thus moved. No, Captain Heron, no! I understand. An officer in your regiment could be afraid of nothing." She sat down, still looking at him. "I have seen a soldier," she said. Then she sprang to her feet. "Now," she cried, "it is our turn. Come with me, you ladies; and you, gentlemen, go into that room. For one night we will put on the dresses you used to wear. Come!" They obeyed. There was nothing that they would not have done, so completely had she bewitched them. How long since they had been addressed as ladies and gentlemen! "Come," she said, in the room whither she led the women, "look about, and choose what you please. But we must make haste." There was a great pile of dainty dresses laid out for them to choose--dresses in silk and all kinds of delicate stuffs, with embroidery, lace, ribbons, jewels, chains, rings, bracelets, gloves, fans, shoes--everything that the folly of the past time required to make rich women seem as if they were not the same as their poorer sisters. They turned over the dresses, and cried out with admiration. Then they hastened to tear off their ugly gray frocks, and began to dress. But the girl called Dorothy Oliphant sank into a chair. "Oh, he has forgotten me! he has forgotten me! Who am I that he should remember me after all these years?" "Why," said Christine, "how should he remember? What matters that you have the same face? Think of your dull look and your heavy eyes; think of the dowdy dress and the ugly cap. Wait till you have put on a pretty frock and have dressed your hair; here is a chain of pearls which will look pretty in your hair; here is a sweet colored silk. I am sure it will fit you. Oh, it is a shame--it is a shame that we have to dress so! Never mind. Now I have found out the old dresses, we will have many evenings together. We will go back to the Past. He will remember you, Dorothy dear. Oh, how could you give them up? How _could_ you give up your lovely dresses?" "We were made to give them up because there were not enough beautiful dresses to go round. They said that no woman must be dressed better than another. So they invented--it was Dr. Grout, the Suffragan, who did it--the gray dress for the women and the blue flannel for the men. And I had almost forgotten that there were such things. Christine, my head is swimming. My heart is beating. I have not felt my heart beating for I know not how long. Oh, will Geoffrey remember me when I am dressed?" "Quick! Of course he will. Let me dress you. Oh, I often come here in the daytime and dress up, and pretend that it is the Past again. You shall come with me. But I want to hear you talk as you used to talk, and to see you dance as you used to dance. Then I shall understand it all." When they returned, the men were waiting for them. Their blue flannels were exchanged for black cloth clothes, which it had been the custom of those who called themselves gentlemen to wear in the evening. In ancient times this was their absurd custom, kept up in order to mark the difference between a gentleman and one of the lower class. If you had no dress-coat, you were not a gentleman. How could men ever tolerate, for a single day, the existence of such a social difference? As for me, in the part of London where I lived, called Whitechapel, there were no dress-coats. The change, however, seemed to have transformed them. Their faces had an eager look, as if they wanted something. Of course, in the old times everybody always wanted something. You can see it in the pictures--the faces are never at rest; in the portraits, the eyes are always seeking for something; nowhere is there visible the least sign of contentment. These unfortunate men had acquired, with their old clothes, something of the old restlessness. Christine laughed aloud and clapped her hands. The women did not laugh. They saluted the men, who bowed with a certain coldness. The manners of the Past were coming back to them swiftly, but the old ease was not recovered for the first quarter of an hour. Then Captain Heron, who had changed his uniform for civilian dress, suddenly flushed and stepped forward, whispering, "Dorothy, you have forgotten me?" Dorothy smiled softly, and gave him her hand with a quick sigh. No, she had not forgotten him. "Dance!" said Christine. "I want to see you dance. I will play for you." She played a piece of music called a Waltz. When this kind of music used to be played--I mean in the houses of (so-called) ladies, not those of the People--the young men and women caught each other round the waist and twirled round. They had many foolish customs, but none more foolish, I should suppose, than this. I have never seen the thing done, because all this foolishness was forgotten as soon as we settled down to the enjoyment of the Great Discovery. When, therefore, Christine began this music, they looked at each other for a few moments, and then, inspired by memory, they fell into each other's arms and began their dance. She played for them for a quarter of an hour. While the rest danced, the young man Jack stood beside the piano, as if he was chained to the spot. She had bewitched them all, but none so much as this man. He therefore gazed upon the girl with an admiration which certainly belonged to the old time. Indeed, I have never been able to understand how the Past could be so suddenly assumed. To admire--actually to admire--a woman, knowing all the time--it is impossible to conceal the fact--that she is your inferior, that she is inferior in strength and intellect! Well, I have already called them unfortunate men; I can say no more. How can people admire things below themselves? When she had played for a quarter of an hour or so, this young man called upon her to stop. The dancers stopped too, panting, their eyes full of light, their cheeks flushed and their lips parted. "Oh," Dorothy sighed, "I never thought to feel such happiness again. I could dance on forever." "With me?" murmured Geoffrey. "I was praying that the last round might never stop. With me?" "With you," she whispered. "Come!" cried the young man Jack. "It is too bad. Christine must dance. Play for us, Cousin Mildred, and I will give her a lesson." Mildred laughed. Then she started at the unwonted sound. The others laughed to hear it, and the walls of the Museum echoed with the laughter of girls. The old man sat up in his chair and looked around. "I thought I was at Philippe's, in Paris," he said. "I thought we were having a supper after the theatre. There was Ninette, and there was Madeleine--and--and--" He looked about him bewildered. Then he dropped his head and went to sleep again. When he was neither eating nor battling for his breath, he was always sleeping. "I am your cousin, Jack," said Mildred; "but I had long forgotten it. And as for playing--but I will try. Perhaps the old touch will return." It did. She played with far greater skill and power than the self-taught Christine, but not (as they have said since) with greater sweetness. Then Jack took Christine and gave her a first lesson. It lasted nearly half an hour. "Oh," cried the girl, when Lady Mildred stopped, "I feel as if I had been floating round in a dream. Was I a stupid pupil, Jack?" "You were the aptest pupil that dancing-master ever had." "I know now," she said, with panting breath and flushed cheeks, "what dancing means. It is wonderful that the feet should answer to the music. Surely you must have loved dancing?" "We did," the girls replied; "we did. There was no greater pleasure in the world." "Why did you give it up?" They looked at each other. "After the Great Discovery," said Dorothy Oliphant, "we were so happy to get rid of the terrors of old age, and the loss of our beauty, and everything, that at first we thought of nothing else. When we tried to dance again, something had gone out of it. The men were not the same. Perhaps we were not the same. Everything languished after that. There was no longer any enjoyment. We ceased to dance because we found no pleasure in dancing." "But now you do?" said Christine. "To-night we do, because you have filled our hearts with the old thoughts. To get out of the dull, dull round--why is it that we never felt it dull till to-night? Oh, so long as we can remember the old thoughts, let us continue to dance and to play and to sing. If the old thoughts cease to come back to us"--she looked at Geoffrey--"let us fall back into our dulness, like the men and women round us." "It was to please me first," said Christine. "You were so very kind as to come here to please me, because I can have no recollection at all of the Past, and I was curious to understand what I read. Come again--to please yourselves. Oh, I have learned so much--so very much more than I ever expected! There are so many, many things that I did not dream of. But let us always dance," she said--"let us always dance--let me always feel every time you come as if there was nothing in the world but sweet music calling me, and I was spinning round and round, but always in some place far better and sweeter than this." "Yes," Lady Mildred said, gravely. "Thus it was we used to feel." "And I have seen you as you were--gentlemen and gentlewomen together. Oh, it is beautiful! Come every night. Let us never cease to change the dismal Present for the sunny Past. But there is one thing--one thing that I cannot understand." "What is that?" asked Lady Mildred. "In the old books there is always, as I said before, a young man in love with a girl. What is it--Love?" The girls sighed and cast down their eyes. "Was it possible for a man so to love a girl as to desire nothing in the world but to have her love, and even to throw away his life--actually his very life--his very life--for her sake?" "Dorothy," said Geoffrey, taking both her hands, "was it possible? Oh, was it possible?" Dorothy burst into tears. "It _was_ possible!" she cried; "but oh, it is not possible any longer." "Let us pretend," said Geoffrey, "let us dream that it is possible." "Even to throw away your life--to die--actually your life?" asked Christine. "To die? To exist no longer? To abandon life--for the sake of another person?" A sudden change passed over all their faces. The light died out of their eyes; the smile died on their lips; the softness vanished from the ladies' faces; the men hung their heads. All their gallantry left them. And Geoffrey let Mildred's hands slip from his holding. The thought of Death brought them all back to the Present. "No," said Lady Mildred, sadly, and with changed voice, "such things are no longer possible. Formerly, men despised death because it was certain to come, in a few years at best; and why not, therefore, to-morrow? But we cannot brave death any more. We live, each for himself. That is the only safety; there is only the law of self-preservation. All are alike; we cannot love each other any more, because we are all alike. No woman is better than another in any man's eyes, because we are all dressed the same, and we are all the same. What more do we want?" she said, harshly. "There is no change for us; we go from bed to work, from work to rest and food, and so to bed again. What more can we want? We are all equals; we are all the same; there are no more gentlewomen. Let us put on our gray frocks and our flat caps again, and hide our hair and go home to bed." "Yes, yes," cried Christine, "but you will come again. You will come again, and we will make every night a Play and Pretence of the beautiful--the lovely Past. When we lay aside the gray frocks, and let down our hair, we shall go back to the old time--the dear old time." The young man named Jack remained behind when the others were gone. "If it were possible," he said, "for a man to give up everything--even his life--for a woman, in the old times, when life was a rich and glorious possession--how much more ought he not to be willing to lay it down, now that it has been made a worthless weed?" "I have never felt so happy"--the girl was thinking of something else. "I have never dreamed that I could feel so happy. Now I know what I have always longed for--to dance round and round forever, forgetting all but the joy of the music and the dance. But oh, Jack"--her face turned pale again--"how could they ever have been happy, even while they waltzed, knowing that every minute brought them nearer and nearer to the dreadful end?" "I don't know. Christine, if I were you, I would never mention that ugly topic again, except when we are not dressed up and acting. How lovely they looked--all of them--but none of them to compare with the sweetest rose-bud of the garden?" He took her hand and kissed it, and then left her alone with the old man in the great Museum. CHAPTER IV. WHAT IS LOVE? It would be idle to dwell upon the repetition of such scenes as those described in the last chapter. These unhappy persons continued to meet day after day in the Museum; after changing their lawful garments for the fantastic habits worn before the Great Discovery, they lost themselves nightly in the imagination of the Past. They presently found others among the People, who had also been gentlewomen and gentlemen in the old days, and brought them also into the company; so that there were now, every evening, some thirty gathered together. Nay, they even procured food and made suppers for themselves, contrary to the practice of common meals enjoined by the Holy College; they gloried in being a company apart from the rest; and because they remembered the Past, they had the audacity to give themselves, but only among themselves, airs of superiority. In the daytime they wore the common dress, and were like the rest of the People. The thing grew, however. Every evening they recalled more of the long-vanished customs and modes of thought--one remembering this and the other that little detail--until almost every particular of the ancient life had returned to them. Then a strange thing happened. For though the Present offered still--and this they never denied--its calm, unchanging face, with no disasters to trouble and no certain and miserable end to dread; with no anxieties, cares, and miseries; with no ambitions and no struggles; they fell to yearning after the old things; they grew to loathe the Present; they could hardly sit with patience in the Public Hall; they went to their day's work with ill-concealed disgust. Yet, so apathetic had the people grown that nothing of this was observed; so careless and so unsuspicious were we ourselves that though the singing and playing grew louder and continued longer every evening, none of us suspected anything. Singing, in my ears, was no more than an unmeaning noise; that the girl in the Museum should sing and play seemed foolish, but then children are foolish--they like to make a great noise. One afternoon--it was some weeks since this dangerous fooling began--the cause of the whole, the girl Christine, was in the Museum alone. She had a book in her hand, and was reading in it. First she read a few lines, and then paused and meditated a while. Then she read again, and laughed gently to herself. And then she read, and changed color. And again she read, and knitted her brows as one who considers but cannot understand. The place was quite deserted, save for her grandfather, who sat in his great chair, propped up with pillows and fast asleep. He had passed a bad night with his miserable asthma; in the morning, as often happens with this disease, he found himself able to breathe again, and was now therefore taking a good spell of sleep. His long white hair fell down upon his shoulders, his wrinkled old cheek showed a thousand crows' feet and lines innumerable; he looked a very, very old man. Yet he was no more than seventy-five or so, in the language of the Past. He belonged formerly to those who lived upon the labor of others, and devoured their substance. Now, but for his asthma, which even the College cannot cure, he should have been as perfectly happy as the rest of the People. The sunshine which warmed his old limbs fell full upon his chair; so that he seemed, of all the rare and curious objects in that collection, the rarest and most curious. The old armor on the wall, the trophies of arms, the glass vases containing all the things of the past, were not so rare and curious as this old man--the only old man left among us. I daily, for my own part, contemplated the old man with a singular satisfaction. He was, I thought, a standing lesson to the People, one daily set before their eyes. Here was the sole surviving specimen of what in the Past was the best that the men and women could expect--namely, to be spared until the age of seventy-five, and then to linger on afflicted with miserable diseases and, slowly or swiftly, to be tortured to death. Beholding that spectacle, I argued, all the people ought to rub their hands in complacency and gratitude. But our people had long ceased to reason or reflect. The lesson was consequently thrown away upon them. Nay, when this girl began her destructive career, those whom she dragged into her toils only considered this old man because he would still be talking, as all old men used to talk, about the days of his youth, for the purpose of increasing their knowledge of the Past, and filling their foolish souls with yearning after the bad old times. While Christine read and pondered, the door of the Museum opened. The young man called Jack stood there gazing upon her. She had thrown off her cap, and her long brown curls lay over her shoulders. She had a red rose in the bosom of her gray dress, and she had tied a crimson scarf round her waist. Jack (suffer me to use the foolishness of their language--of course his name was John)--closed the door silently. "Christine," he whispered. She started, and let her book fall. Then she gave him her hand, which he raised to his lips. (Again I must ask leave to report a great deal of foolishness.) "It is the sweet old fashion," he said. "It is my homage to my lady." They were now so far gone in folly that she accepted this act as if it was one natural and becoming. "I have been reading," she said, "a book full of extracts--all about love. I have never understood what love is. If I ask Dorothy, she looks at Geoffrey Heron and sighs. If I ask him, he tells me that he cannot be my servant to teach me, because he is already sworn to another. What does this mean? Have the old times come back again, so that men once more call themselves slaves of love? Yet what does it mean?" "Tell me," said Jack, "what you have been reading." "Listen, then. Oh, it is the strangest extravagance! What did men mean when they could gravely write down, and expect to be read, such things as-- "'I do love you more than words can wield the matter-- Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty; Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare?' 'Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty.' Did they really mean that?" "They meant more; they meant dearer than life itself!" said Jack, slowly. "Only it was stupid always to say the same thing." "Well, then, listen to this: "'Had I no eyes but ears, my ears would love That inward beauty and invisible; Or, were I deaf, thy outward parts would move Each part in me that were but sensible. Though neither eyes nor ears, to hear nor see, Yet should I be in love, by touching thee.' Now, Jack, what can that mean? Was anything more absurd?" "Read another extract, Christine." "Here is a passage more difficult than any other: "'Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind. Nor hath Love's mind of any judgment taste; Wings and no eyes, figure unheedy haste. And therefore is Love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.' Tell me, if you can, what this means. But perhaps you were never in love, Jack, in the old times." "Romeo was in love before he met Juliet," said Jack. "I, too, have been reading the old books, you see, Child. I remember--but how can I tell you? I cannot speak like the poet. Yet I remember--I remember." He looked round the room. "It is only here," he murmured, "that one can clearly remember. Here are the very things which used to surround our daily life. And here are youth and age. They were always with us in the old time--youth and age. Youth with love before, and age with love behind. Always we knew that as that old man, so should we become. The chief joys of life belonged to youth; we knew very well that unless we snatched them then we should never have them. To age we gave respect, because age, we thought, had wisdom; but to us--to us--who were young, age cried unceasingly-- "'Gather ye rose-buds while ye may.' If I could tell only you! Christine, come with me into the Picture Gallery. My words are weak, but the poets and the painters speak for us. Come! We shall find something there that will speak for me what I have not words to say for myself." Nothing in the whole world--I have maintained this in the College over and over again--has done so much harm to Humanity as Art. In a world of common-sense which deals with nothing but fact and actuality, Art can have no place. Why imitate what we see around us? Artists cheated the world; they pretended to imitate, and they distorted or they exaggerated. They put a light into the sky that never was there; they filled the human face with yearning after things impossible; they put thoughts into the heart which had no business there; they made woman into a goddess, and made love--simple love--a form of worship; they exaggerated every joy; they created a heaven which could not exist. I have seen their pictures, and I know it. Why--why did we not destroy all works of Art long ago--or, at least, why did we not enclose the Gallery, with the Museum, within the College wall? The Picture Gallery is a long room with ancient stone walls; statuary is arranged along the central line, and the pictures line the walls. The young man led the girl into the Gallery and looked around him. Presently he stopped at a figure in white marble. It represented a woman, hands clasped, gazing upward. Anatomically, I must say, the figure is fairly correct. "See," he said, "when in the olden times our sculptors desired to depict the Higher Life--which we have lost or thrown away for a while--they carved the marble image of a woman. Her form represented perfect beauty; her face represented perfect purity; the perfect soul must be wedded to the perfect body, otherwise there can be no perfection of Humanity. This is the Ideal Woman. Look in her face, look at the curves of her form, look at the carriage of her head; such a woman it was whom men used to love." "But were women once like this? Could they look so? Had they such sweet and tender faces? This figure makes me ashamed." "When men were in love, Christine, the woman that each man loved became in his mind such as this. He worshipped in his mistress the highest form of life that he could conceive. Some men were gross, their ideals were low; some were noble, then their ideals were high. Always there were among mankind some men who were continually trying to raise the ideal; always the mass of men were keeping the ideal low." "Were the women ashamed to receive such worship? Because they must have known what they were in cold reality." "Perhaps to the nobler sort," said the young man, "to be thought so good lifted up their hearts and kept them at that high level. But indeed I know not. Remember that when men wrote the words that you think extravagant, they were filled and wholly possessed with the image of the Perfect Woman. Nay, the nobler and stronger their nature, the more they were filled with that Vision. The deeper their love for any woman, the higher they placed her on the Altar of their worship." "And if another man should try to take that woman from them--" "They would kill that other man," said Jack, with a fierce gleam in his eye, which made the girl shudder. Yet she respected him for it. "If another man should come between us now, Christine, I would--Nay, dear, forgive my rude words. What has jealousy to do with you?" She dropped her eyes and blushed, and in all her limbs she trembled. This young man made her afraid. And yet--she knew not why--it made her happy, only to be afraid of him. "Let us see some of the pictures," said Jack. There were many hundreds of them. They represented I know not what; scenes of the old life in the old time. I dare say everything was there, with all the exaggerations which pleased the painters and cheated the senses of those who looked on. Fair women were painted fairer than women could ever be; their eyes were larger, softer, fuller of thought; their cheeks more tender, their limbs more comely. There were battle scenes; the young man led the girl past them. There were scenes from history--kings laying down crowns, traitors receiving sentence, and so forth; he passed them by. There were groups of nymphs, portraits of fair women, groups of girls dancing, girls at play, girls laughing, girls bathing; he passed them by. Presently he stopped before three panels side by side, representing a simple allegory of the old time. In the first picture, two, a young man and a girl, walked hand-in-hand beside a stream. The water danced and rippled in the sunlight; behind them was an orchard full of blossom; flowers sprang up at their feet--the flowers of spring. And they walked hand-in-hand, gazing in each other's eyes. The second picture showed a man in middle-age returning home from work; beside him walked his boys; in the porch the mother sat with her daughters spinning at the wheel. The stream was now a full majestic river; the trees were loaded with fruit not yet ripe; the fields were covered with corn, green still, but waving with light and shade under the summer sky; in the distance, passing away, was a heavy thunder-cloud. In the third panel an old pair stood beside a great river, looking out upon the ocean. Again they were hand-in-hand. The sun was setting in great splendor across the sea; the reapers were carrying their harvest home with songs and dances. And the old people still gazed in each other's face, just as they had done fifty years ago. "See, Christine!" said Jack. "In the first panel, this pair think of nothing but of each other. Presently they will have other thoughts. The stream beside which they wander is the Stream of Life. It widens as it goes. While they walk along its banks, the river grows broader and deeper. This means that as they grow older they grow wiser and learn more. So they go on continually, until they come to the mouth of the river, where it loses itself in the ocean of--what our friends tremble so much as to name. Tell me, is there terror, or doubt, or anxiety on their faces now that they have come to the end?" "No; their faces are entirely happy." "This you do not understand. Christine, if you were sure that in the end you would be as happy as that old woman at the end, would you be content to begin with the beginning? Would you play the part of that girl, and walk--with me--along the Stream of Life?" He took her hand, but she made no reply, save that her eyes filled with tears. Presently she murmured, "They are always happy--at the beginning and at the end. Did they know at the beginning that there would be an end?" "They knew; everybody knew; the very children knew almost from infancy the great Law of Nature, that for everything there is the allotted end. They knew it." "And yet they were always happy. I cannot understand it." "We have destroyed that happiness," said the young man. "Love cannot exist when there is no longer end, or change, or anything to hope or fear--no mystery, nothing to hope or fear. What is a woman outside the Museum in the eyes of the College? She is only the half of humanity, subject to disease and requiring food at intervals. She no longer attracts men by the sacred mystery of her beauty. She is not even permitted any longer to make herself beautiful by her dress; nor is she allowed to create the feeling of mystery and the unknown by seclusion. She lives in the open, like the rest. We all live together; we know what each one says and thinks and does; nay, most of us have left off thinking and talking altogether." But Christine was hardly listening; she could not understand this talk. She was looking at the pictures. "Oh," she said, "they look so happy! There is such a beautiful contentment in their eyes! They love each other so, that they think of nothing but their love. They have forgotten the end." "Nay, but look at the end." "They are happy still, although the river flows into the Ocean. How can they be happy?" "You shall learn more, Christine. You have seen enough to understand that the talk of the Physicians about the miseries of the old time is mischievous nonsense, with which they have fooled us into slavery." "Oh, if they heard you--" "Let them hear," he replied, sternly. "I hope, before long, we may make them hear. Christine, you can restore the old love by your own example. You alone have nothing to remember and nothing to unlearn. As for the rest of us, we have old habits to forget and prejudices to overcome before we can get back to the Past." Then he led her to another picture. The scene was a green village church-yard, standing amid trees--yews and oaks--and round a gray old church. Six strong men bore a bier piled with flowers towards an open grave, newly dug. Beside the grave stood one in a white robe, carrying a book. Behind the bier followed, hand-in-hand, a weeping company of men, women, and children. But he who walked first wept not. "Oh," cried Christine, "he is dead! He is dead!" She burst into tears. "Nay," said Jack; "it is the wife who is dead. The husband lives still. See, he follows with tottering step. His grandchild leads him as you lead your grandfather. And they are all weeping except him. Why does he alone not weep? He has been married for fifty years and more; all his life has been shared by the love and sympathy of the woman--the dead woman. She is dead, my dear"--he repeated these words, taking the girl's hands--"she is dead, and he sheds no tears. Why not? Look at his face. Is it unhappy? Tell me, Christine, do you read the sorrow of hopelessness in that old man's face?" "No, no," she said. "He is grave, but he is not unhappy. Yet here is Death, with all the terrible things that we read of in the books--the deep pit, the body to be lowered in the grave--oh!" She shuddered and turned her head. "As I read his face," said Jack, "I see hope and consolation." "Why is there a man in white?" "I will tell you some time. Meanwhile, observe that the old man is happy, though his wife is dead, and though he knows that to-morrow his turn will come, and a grave will be dug for him beside his wife, and he also will be laid among the cold clay-clods, as cold, as senseless as them, there to lie while the great world rolls round and round. He knows this, I say, and yet he is not unhappy." "What does it mean, Jack?" "I will tell you--soon." "We who are sailors," this young man continued, "are not like the rest of the world. We are always exposed to danger; we are not afraid to speak of Death; and though we have taken advantage (as we thought) of the Great Discovery, we have never forgotten the Past or the old ideas. We have to think for ourselves, which makes us independent. There is no Holy College on board ship, and no sacred Physician ventures his precious life upon a rolling deck. When we come ashore, we look round and see things. Then we go on board again and talk, in the night watches below the stars. I think the Holy College would be pleased if they could sometimes hear our talk. Christine, there is no happiness left in the world except among those whom the Great Discovery cannot save from the dangers of a storm. When you spoke to me my heart leaped up, because I saw what as yet you do not see. The others were too sluggish to remember, until you had dragged their thoughts into the old channels; but there was no need to drag me; for I remember always, and I only pretended until the others should come with me." Christine heard only half of this, for she was looking at the picture of the village funeral again. "Oh, how could men be happy with such an end before them?" she cried. "I cannot understand it. To be torn away, to be laid in a box, to be put away deep underground, there to lie forever--oh!" She trembled again. "And not to be unhappy!" "Look round the room, Christine. Read the faces. Here are portraits of men and women. Some of them are eager, some are calm, more are unhappy for thinking of the end. Here is a battle-field; the dead and wounded are lying about the ground. Look at this troop of horsemen charging. Is there any terror in their faces? What do they care about the men who have fallen? Their duty is to fight. See here again. It is a dying girl. What do you read in her face? I see no fear, but a sweet joy of resignation. Here is a man led forth to execution. There is no fear in his face." "I could never bear to be alone in this room, because Death is everywhere, and no one seems to regard it." "Christine, did you never hear, by any chance, from your grandfather why people were not afraid?" "No; he cannot bear to speak of such a thing. He trembles and shakes if it is even mentioned. They all do, except you." "What does he tell you?" "He talks of the time when he was young. It was long before the Great Discovery. Oh, he is very old. He was always going to feasts and dances. He had a great many friends, and some of them used to sing and dance in theatres. They were all very fond of suppers after the theatre, and there was a great deal of singing and laughing. They used to drive about in carriages, and they went to races. I do not understand, very well, the pleasure of his life." "Ah," said Jack, "he has forgotten the really important part of it." They were at a part of the Gallery where there was a door of strong oak, studded with big square nails, under an arch of carved stone. "Have you ever been into this place?" he asked. "Once I went in. But there is a dreadful tomb in it, with carved skulls and the figure of a dead man. So I ran away." "Come in with me. You shall not be frightened." He turned the great iron handle, and pushed open the heavy door. The room was lofty, with a pointed roof. It was lit by long narrow windows, filled with painted glass. There were seats of carved wood, with carved canopies on either side; there was the figure of a brass eagle, with a great book upon it; and under the three lights of the window at the end was a table covered with a cloth which hung in rags and tatters, and was covered with dust. It was, in fact, an ancient Chapel, shut up and suffered to fall into decay. "This," said the young man, "is the Chapel where, in the old time, they came to worship. They also worshipped in the great place that is now the House of Life. But here some of them worshipped also, though with less splendor." "Did they," asked the girl, "worship the Beautiful Woman of their dreams?" "No, not the Beautiful Woman. They worshipped her outside. In this Chapel they worshipped the Maker of Perfect Man and Perfect Woman. Come in with me, and I will tell you something of what it meant." * * * * * It was two hours and more before they came out of the Chapel. The girl's eyes were full of tears, and tears lay upon his cheeks. "My dear, my love," said Jack, "I have tried to show you how the old true love was nourished and sustained. It would not have lived but for the short duration of its life; it was the heritage of each generation, to be passed on unto the next. Only on one condition was it possible. It is a condition which you have been taught to believe horrible beyond the power of words. I have tried to show you that it was not horrible. My love, my sweet--fresh as the maidens who in the old time blossomed and flowered, and presently fulfilled that condition--the only woman among us who is young in heart, let us agree to love--we two--after the old fashion, under the old conditions. Do not shiver, dear. There is the old faith to sustain us. You shall go to sea with me. Perhaps we shall be cast away and drowned; perhaps we shall contract some unknown disease and die. We shall presently lie down to sleep, and awake again in each other's arms once more in a new life which we cannot now comprehend. Everything must have an end. Human life must have an end, or it becomes horrible, monstrous, selfish. The life beyond will be glorified beyond all our hopes, and beyond all our imagination. My dear, are you afraid?" She laid her head upon his shoulder. "Oh, Jack, with you I am afraid of nothing. I should not be afraid to die this very moment, if we died together. Is it really true? Can we love now as men loved women long ago? Oh, can you love me so? I am so weak and small a creature--so weak and foolish! I would die with you, Jack--both together, taking each other by the hand; and oh, if you were to die first, I could not live after. I must, then, die too. My head is swimming--my heart is beating--lay your arm about me. Oh, love, my love; I have never lived before. Oh, welcome Life, and welcome Death, so that we may never, never more be parted!" CHAPTER V. THE OPEN DOOR. It was in this way that the whole trouble began. There was an inquisitive girl foolishly allowed to grow up in this ancient Museum and among the old books, who developed a morbid curiosity for the Past, of which the books and pictures and collections taught her something; yet not all she wished to learn. She was unconsciously aided by the old man, who had been approaching his second childhood even at the time of the Great Discovery, and whose memory now continually carried him backward to the days of his youth, without the least recollection of the great intervals between. Lastly, there had come to the town, in the pursuit of his business, a sailor, restless and discontented, as is the case with all his class, questioning and independent; impatient of authority, and curiously unable to forget the old times. The sailor and the girl, between them, at first instigated and pushed on the whole business; they were joined, no doubt, by many others; but these two were the first leaders. The Chief Culprit of all, the nominal Leader--but you shall presently hear what kind of excuse could be made for him by himself. As for those whom they dragged reluctantly out of the tranquillity of oblivion, they were at first wholly drawn from the class which, at the outset, gave us so much trouble--the so-called gentle class--who desired nothing so much as to continue to live under the old conditions--namely, by the labor of others. It wanted, for these people, only the revival of memory to produce the revival of discontent. When their minds were once more filled with the thought of the things they had lost--the leadership, the land, the wealth, and with the memory of the arts which they had formerly loved--music, painting, letters--and with the actual sight, once more restored to them, of their old amusements--their dancing, their society, their singing, their games; and when the foolish old idol, Love, was once more trotted out, like an old-fashioned Guy Fawkes, decked in his silly old rainbow tints; when, night after night, they actually began to play, act, and to pretend these things, what could possibly follow but revolt, with subsequent punishment and expulsion? You shall hear. Of course, they would have been punished with expulsion had not--but everything in its place. Five or six weeks after the first evening, which I have described at full length, the Museum was again occupied by the same company, increased by a good many more. The women came in more readily, being sooner caught with the bait of fine dress, which had such an attraction for them that the mere sight of it caused them to forget everything that had been done for them--their present tranquillity, their freedom from agitation and anxiety--and carried them back to the old time, when they wore, indeed, those dainty dresses. What they endured, besides, they do not so readily remember; but the dresses carried back their minds to the society which once filled up the whole worthless lives of these poor creatures. I say, therefore, that it was easier to attract the women than the men; for the latter, no bait at all corresponding in power could be discovered. The company assembled were engaged in much the same sort of make-believe and play-acting as on the first evening. They were dressed in the old fashion; they danced, they sang, they talked and laughed--actually they talked and laughed--though what there is, from any view of life to laugh about, I never could understand. Laughing, however, belonged to the old manners; and they had now completely recovered the old manners--anything, however foolish, which belonged to that time would have been welcomed by them. So they laughed; for the same reason, they were full of animation; and the old, old unhappy emotion which I had thought blotted out forever--restlessness--had either broken out among them or was well simulated. They were all young, save for the old man who sat in his chair coughing, and sometimes talking. Christine had dressed him in a velvet coat, which gave him great dignity, and made him look as if he was taking part in the play. I say not that the acting was not very good--of the kind. Acting of any kind could never have served any useful purpose, even in the Past. Perhaps a company of beautiful women, beautifully dressed, and of gallant men--I talk their own foolish language--amusing themselves in this way, may have given pleasure to some, but not to those among whom I was born. In the days when these things were done every night at one part of the town, in another part the men were drinking, if they had any money, and the women and children were starving. And much they concerned themselves about dancing and laughing! Laughing, indeed! My part of the town was where they starved. There was mighty little laughing among us, I can promise you. In their masquerading they had naturally, as if it was a part of the life they represented, assumed, as I have said, the old expression of eagerness, as if there was always something wanting. And yet, I say, they laughed with each other. In the unreasonable, illogical way of the Past, although everybody always wanted everything for himself, and tried to overreach his neighbor, it was the custom to pretend that nobody wanted anything, but that everybody trusted his friend, and that everybody lived for the sole purpose of helping other people. Therefore, they shook hands continually, and grinned at each other when they met, as if they were pleased to meet and--. Well, the hypocrisies of the Past were as ridiculous as its selfishness was base. But three of the party sat apart in the Picture Gallery. They were Christine and the two cousins, Mildred and Jack Carera. They were talking seriously and gravely. "It comes, then," said Jack, "to this: that to all of us the Present has grown to be utterly hateful, and to one or two of us intolerable." "Intolerable!" the other two repeated. "We are resolved, for our own selves at least, that we will have no more of it, if we can help it. Are we not? But, Cousin Mildred, let us remember that we are only three. Perhaps, among our friends in the Museum, there may be half a dozen more who have learned to feel as strongly as ourselves. Is half a dozen a Party large enough to effect a Revolution? Remember, it is useless to think of remonstrance or petition with the College. No King, Council, or Parliament in the Past was ever half so autocratic as the College of Physicians. "I used to read," he went on, "ages ago, about the Domination of Priests. I don't think any Rule of Priests was ever half so intolerant or so thorough as the Rule of the Physicians. They have not only deprived us of the Right of Thought, but also of the Power of Thought. The poor people cannot think. It is a truly desperate state of things. A few years more and we, too, shall sink into the same awful slough--" "Some of us were in it already, but Christine pulled us out," said Mildred. "Shall we ever get another chance of getting out?" Jack asked. "I think not." "Well, Jack, go on." "As for these evening meetings of ours, you may be very sure that they will be found out before long, and that they will be stopped. Do you think that Grout--Grout!--will suffer his beloved invention of the common dress to be trampled on? Do you imagine that Grout will suffer the revival of the old forms of society?" "Oh," Christine replied, "if we could convert Dr. Grout!" "Another danger," said Jack, "is, that we may all get tired of these meetings. You see, they are not the real thing. Formerly, the evening followed the day; it was the feast after the fight. Where is now the fight? And all the dancing, courting, pretty speeches, and tender looks, meant only the fore-words of Love in earnest. Now, are we ready again for Love in earnest? Can the men once more worship the women upon whom they have gazed so long unmoved? If so, we must brave the College and face the consequences. I know of two people only who are at present so much in earnest as to brave the College. They are Christine and myself." He took the girl's hand and kissed it. "You may add one more, Jack," said Mildred. "If you go away with Christine, take me with you; for the Present is more intolerable than any possible Future." "That makes three, then. There may be more. Geoffrey and Dorothy are never tired of whispering and billing. Perhaps they, too, are strong enough to throw off the old terrors and to join us. But we shall see." "I think," said Mildred, "it might depend partly on how the case is put before them. If you made them see very clearly the miseries of their present life, and made them yearn ardently for the things which they have only just remembered, some of them might follow, at all costs. But for most the College and what it holds would prove too much." "Yet you yourself--and Christine--" "As for me, it seems as if I remember more than anybody because I think of the sorrows of the Past. I cannot tell now how I ever came to forget those sorrows. And they are now grown so dear to me, that for the very fear of losing them again, I would give up the Gift of the College and go with you. As for Christine, she has never known at all the dread which they now pretend used to fill all our minds and poisoned all our lives. How, then, should she hesitate? Besides, she loves you, Jack--and that is enough." "Quite enough," said Christine, smiling. "If you remember everything," Jack went on, gravely, "you remember, Mildred, that there was something in life besides play and society. In a corner of your father's park, for instance, there was an old gray building, with a small tower and a peal of bells. The place stood in a square enclosure, in which were an old broken cross, an ancient yew-tree, two or three head-stones, and the graves of buried villagers. You remember that place, Mildred? You and I have often played in that ground; on weekdays we have prowled about the old building and read the monuments on the walls; on Sundays we used to sit there with all the people. Do you remember?" Mildred clasped her hands. "How could I ever forget?" she cried. "How could any of us forget?" "Because Grout robbed you of your memory, my cousin. He could not rob mine." "Alas!" she lamented, "how can we ever get that back again?" "By memory, Mildred. It will come back presently. Think of that, and you will be less afraid to come with us. If that was able to comfort the world formerly when the world was full of life and joy and needed so little comfort, what should it not do for you now, when the world is so dull and dismal, and the Awful Present is so long that it seems never to have had a beginning, just as it promises never to have an end. Courage, Cousin Mildred. "And now," he went on, after a pause, "for my plan. My ship is bound for any port to which the College may despatch her. She must sail in about four or five weeks. I shall take you both on board. Christine will be my wife--you shall be our companion. Perhaps one or two more may go with us. We shall take certain things that we shall want. I can procure all these without the least suspicion, and we shall sail to an island of which I know, where the air is always warm and the soil is fruitful. There the sailors shall land us and shall sail away, unless they please to join us. And there we will live out our allotted lives, without asking anything of the College. The revival of that lost part of your memory, Mildred, will serve you in place of what they could have given you. You agree? Well, that is settled, then. Let us go back." * * * * * But, as you shall see, this plan was never carried out. When all went away that evening, Mildred remained behind. "Christine," she said, "I have something to tell you. Take me somewhere--to some dark place--where we can whisper." One might as well have talked at the top of his voice, just where they were, for any chance of being heard; but guilt made the woman tremble. "Come into the Picture Gallery," said Christine, leading the way. "No one can hear what we say there. My dear, in the old days when people were going to conspire they always began by going to dark galleries, vaults, and secret places. This is quite delightful. I feel like a conspirator." "Don't laugh at me, dear," said Mildred; "for, indeed, when you have heard what I have to say, you will feel very much more like a conspirator." The room was in darkness, but for the moonlight which poured in through the windows of one side, and made queer work with the pictures on which it fell. At the end the moonlight shone through the door, hardly ever used, which led from the Gallery into the Garden of the College beyond. "What is that?" Mildred caught Christine by the hand. "It is the door leading into the College Gardens. How came it open?" "Have you a key?" "I suppose there is a key on the old rusty bunch hanging up in the Museum, but I do not know--I have never tried the keys. Who could have opened it?" Christine walked down the Gallery hastily, Mildred following. The door was standing wide open. "Who has done this?" asked Christine, again. "I cannot tell who could have opened the door, or why. It has never been opened before." Mildred shuddered. "It is thrown open for some mischief," she said; "we shall find out soon enough by whom." Then they looked out through the door into the Garden of the College. The door faced a semicircular lawn run wild with rank grass never shorn; behind the lawn were trees; and the moonlight lay on all. Suddenly the girls caught hands and shrank back into the door-way, for a tall form emerged from the trees and appeared upon the lawn, where he walked with hanging head and hands clasped behind his back. "It is the Arch Physician!" Christine whispered. "It is Harry Linister," Mildred murmured. Then they retreated within and shut the door noiselessly; but they could not lock or fasten it. "I can see that part of the Garden from a window in the Library," said Christine. "He walks there every morning and every evening. He is always alone. He always hangs his head, and he always looks fit to cry for trouble. What is the good of being Arch Physician, if you cannot have things done as you want?" "My dear," said Mildred, "I am afraid you do not quite understand. In the old days--I mean not quite the dear old days, but in the time when people still discussed things and we had not been robbed of memory and of understanding--it was very well known that the Arch Physician was out-voted in the College by Grout and his Party." "By Doctor Grout?" "My dear, Grout was never a Doctor. He only calls himself Doctor. I remember when Grout was an ignorant man taken into Professor Linister's Laboratory to wash up the pots and bottles. He was thin, just as he is now--a short, dark, and sour-faced man, with bright eyes. Oh, a clever man, I dare say, but ignorant, and full of hatred for the class of culture and refinement. It was Grout who led the Party which took away land and wealth from individuals and transferred all to the State. It was Grout who ordered the Massacre of the Old. It was Grout who invented the horrible cruelty of the Common Dress. It was Grout who made the College what it is--not what it was meant to be. It was originally the Guardian of Life and Health. It has become the Tyrant of the People. It has destroyed everything--everything that makes life possible--and it tells the People to be happy because they live. It is Grout--Grout!--who has done this. Not the Arch Physician. Not Harry Linister." "Why do you say 'Harry Linister,' Mildred?" "My dear, I think that of all women living I have the greatest cause to hate the Great Discovery, because it robbed me of my lover." "Tell me how, dear." "I told you, Christine, that the revival of the Past was the revival of sorrows that I would never again forget. Listen, then, and I will tell you what they were. When the Great Discovery was announced, Harry Linister was already a man well known in Science, Christine; but he was also well known in Society as well. Science did not prevent him from falling in love. And he fell in love with--me. Yes--with me. We met that fatal evening at the Royal Institution, and we arranged, before the Lecture, where we should meet after the Lecture. My dear, I knew very well what he was going to say; and--oh, my poor heart!--how happy I was to think of it! There was nobody in London more clever, more handsome, and more promising than Harry. He was rich, if that mattered anything to me; he was already a Fellow of the Royal Society, for some great discoveries he had made; everybody said that a splendid career was before him--and he loved me, Christine." "Well?" "Well, the news of the Great Discovery carried him out of himself. He forgot his love--and me--and everything. When his eyes fell upon me again, I know not how long after, I was in the hideous Common Dress, and he no more recognized me than a stranger would recognize one out of a herd of sheep." "How could he forget? Do you think that Jack could ever forget me?" "I am sure he will not, at any rate. Now, Christine, I am going to try something serious. I am going to try to convert the Arch Physician himself!" "Mildred!" "Why not? He is still a man, I suppose. Nobody ever thought that Grout was a man; but Harry Linister was once a man, and should be still. And if he have a memory as well as eyes, why--then--" she sighed. "But that would be too much, indeed, to hope." "What if you win him, Mildred?" "Why, child, he used to love me. Is not that enough? Besides, he _knows the Great Secret_. If we have him with us, we have also with us all the people whom we can shake, push, or prick out of their present miserable apathy. Why did we ever agree to the stupid work day by day? We began by fighting for the wealth, and those who survived enjoyed it. Why did we not go on fighting? Why did we consent to wear this hideous dress? Why did we consent to be robbed of our intelligence, and to be reduced to the condition of sheep? All because the College had the Great Secret, and they made the People think that to forego that one advantage was worse than all other evils that could happen to them. It was Grout--the villany of Grout--that did it. Now, if we can by any persuasion draw the Arch Physician over to ourselves, we win the cause for all those who join us, because they will lose nothing." "How will you win him, Mildred?" "Child, you are young; you do not know the history of Delilah, of the Sirens, of Circe, of Cleopatra, of Vivien, of a thousand Fair Ladies who have witched away the senses of great men, so that they have become as wax in the hands of their conquerors. Poor Harry! His heart was not always as hard as stone, nor was it always as heavy as lead. I would witch him, if I could, for his own happiness, poor lad!--and for mine as well. Let him only come with us, bringing the precious Secret, and we are safe!" * * * * * It has been observed that many hard things were said concerning me--Grout--and that I have, nevertheless, written them down. First the things are all true, and I rejoice to think of the part that I have always played in the conduct of the People since the Great Discovery enabled me to obtain a share in that conduct. Next, it may be asked how I became possessed of this information. That you shall presently understand. All that I have done in my public capacity--as for private life, I never had any, except that one goes into a private room for sleep--has been for the Advancement of Humanity. In order to effect this advance with the greater ease, I found it necessary to get rid of useless hands--therefore the Old were sacrificed; to adopt one common standard in everything, so that there should be the same hours of work for all, the same food both in quantity and quality, the same dress, and the same housing. As by far the greater number belong to what were formerly known as the lower classes, everything has been a gain for them. Now, a gain for the majority is a gain for Humanity. As for the abolition of disturbing emotions, such as Love, Jealousy, Ambition, Study, Learning, and the like, the loss of them is, of course, pure gain. In short, I willingly set down all that may be or has been said against myself, being quite satisfied to let the truth speak for itself. I have now to tell of the Daring Attempt made upon the Fidelity of the Chief--the Arch Physician himself. CHAPTER VI. THE ARCH PHYSICIAN. The Arch Physician generally walked in the College Gardens for an hour or so every forenoon. They are very large and spacious Gardens, including plantations of trees, orchards, ferneries, lawns, flower-beds, and shrubberies. In one corner is a certain portion which, having been left entirely alone by the gardeners, has long since become like a tangled coppice, rather than a garden, covered with oaks and elms and all kinds of trees, and overgrown with thick underwoods. It was in this wild and secluded part that Dr. Linister daily walked. It lay conveniently at the back of his own residence, and adjoining the Museum and Picture Gallery. No one came here except himself, and but for the beaten path which his footsteps had made in their daily walk, the place would have become entirely overgrown. As it was, there were thick growths of holly and of yew; tall hawthorn-trees, wild roses spreading about among brambles; ferns grew tall in the shade, and under the great trees there was a deep shadow even on the brightest day. In this neglected wood there were creatures of all kinds--rabbits, squirrels, snakes, moles, badgers, weasels, and stoats. There were also birds of all kinds in the wood, and in the stream that ran through the place there were otters. In this solitary place Dr. Linister walked every day and meditated. The wildness and the solitude pleased and soothed him. I have already explained that he had always, from the outset, been most strongly opposed to the policy of the majority, and that he was never free from a certain melancholy. Perhaps he meditated on the world as he would have made it, had he been able to have his own way. * * * * * I have heard that much was said among the Rebels about my conduct during these events, as wanting in Gratitude. In the first place, if it is at all necessary for me to defend my conduct, let me point out that my duty to the Authority of the House must come before everything--certainly before the claims of private gratitude. In the second place, I owe no gratitude at all to Dr. Linister, or to anybody. I have made myself. Whatever I have done, alone I have done it, and unaided. Dr. Linister, it is very true, received me into his laboratory as bottle-washer and servant. Very good. He paid me my wages, and I did his work for him. Much room for gratitude there. He looked for the proper discharge of the work, and I looked for the regular payment of the wages. Where does the gratitude come in? He next taught me the elements of science. To be sure, he wanted the simpler part of his experiments conducted by a skilled, not an ignorant, hand. Therefore he taught me those elements. The better skilled the hand, the more he could depend upon the successful conduct of his research. Therefore, when he found that he could depend upon my eye and hand, he taught me more, and encouraged me to work on my own account, and gave me the best books to read. Very good. All for his own purposes. What happened next? Presently, Grout the Bottle-washer became so important in the laboratory that he became Grout the Assistant, or Demonstrator; and another Bottle-washer was appointed--a worthy creature who still performs that useful Function, and desires nothing more than to wash the bottles truly and thoroughly. Next, Grout became known outside the laboratory; many interesting and important discoveries were made by Grout; then Grout became too big a man to be any longer Dr. Linister's Assistant; he had his own laboratory; Grout entered upon his own field of research. This was a practical field, and one in which he quickly surpassed all others. Remember that Dr. Linister never claimed, or looked for, gratitude. He was much too wise a man. On all occasions, when it was becoming in him, he spoke in the highest terms of his former Assistant's scientific achievements. There was, in fact, no question of Gratitude at all. As for personal friendship, the association of years, the bond of union, or work in common--these are mere phrases, the worn-out old phrases of the vanished Past. Besides, there never was any personal friendship. Quite the contrary. Dr. Linister was never able to forget that in the old time I had been the servant and he the master. Where equality has been so long established, the continual reminder of former inequality is galling. Dr. Linister, indeed, was always antipathetic from the beginning. Except over a research, we could have nothing in common. In the old days he was what they called a gentleman; he was also a scholar; he used to play music and write verses; he would act and dance and sing, and do all kinds of things; he was one of those men who always wanted to do everything that other men can do, and to do it as well as other men could do it. So that, though he was a great scientific worker, he spent half his day at his club, or at his sports, or in Society; that is to say, with the women--and mostly, I think, among the games and amusements of the women. There was every day, I remember, a great running to and fro of page-boys with notes from them; and he was always ready to leave any, even the most important work, just to run after a woman's caprice. As for me, I never had any school education at all; I never had anything to do with Society; the sight of a woman always filled me with contempt for the man who could waste time in running after a creature who knew no science, never cared for any, and was so wont to disfigure her natural figure by the way she crowded on her misshapen clothes that no one could guess what it was like beneath them. As for music, art, and the rest of it, I never asked so much as what they meant; after I began to make my way, I had the laboratory for work, play, and all. When, again, it came to the time when the Property question became acute, and we attempted to solve it by a Civil War, although Dr. Linister adhered to his determination not to leave his laboratory, his sympathies were always with individualism. Nay, he never disguised his opinion, but was accustomed regularly to set it forth at our Council meetings in the House of Life--that the abolition of property and the establishment of the perfect Socialism were the greatest blows ever inflicted upon civilization. It is not, however, civilization which the College advances, but Science--which is a very different thing--and the Scientific End of Humanity. The gradual extinction of all the emotions--love, jealousy, ambition, rivalry--Dr. Linister maintained, made life so poor a thing that painless extinction would be the very best thing possible for the whole race. It is useless to point out, to one so prejudiced, the enormous advantage gained in securing constant tranquillity of mind. He was even, sometimes, an advocate for the revival of fighting--fighting, the old barbarous way of settling disputes, in which lives were thrown away by thousands on a single field. Nor would he ever agree with the majority of the House that the only End of Humanity is mere existence, at which Science should always aim, prolonged without exertion, thought, care, or emotion of any kind. In fact, according to the contention of my followers and myself, the Triumph of Science is as follows: The Philosopher finds a creature, extremely short-lived at the best, liable to every kind of disease and suffering from external causes, torn to pieces from within by all kinds of conflicting emotions; a creature most eager and insatiate of appetite, fiery and impetuous, quarrelsome and murderous, most difficult to drive or lead, guided only by its own selfish desires, tormented by intellectual doubts and questions which can never be answered. The Philosopher works upon this creature until he has moulded it into another so different that no one would perceive any likeness to the original creature. The new creature is immortal; it is free from disease or the possibility of disease; it has no emotions, no desires, and no intellectual restlessness. It breathes, eats, sleeps. Such is my idea of Science Triumphant. It was never Dr. Linister's. In manners, the Arch Physician preserved the old manners of courtesy and deference which were the fashion when he was brought up. His special work had been for many years the study of the so-called incurable diseases, such as asthma, gout, rheumatism, and so forth. For my own part, my mind, since I became Suffragan, has always been occupied with Administration, having steadily in view the Triumph of Science. I have, with this intention, made the Social Equality real and complete from every point; I have also endeavored to simplify labor, to enlarge the production and the distribution of food by mechanical means, and thus to decrease the necessity for thought, contrivance, and the exercise of ingenuity. Most of our work is so subdivided that no one understands more than the little part of it which occupies him for four hours every day. Workmen who know the whole process are impossible. They ask, they inquire, they want to improve; when their daily task is but a bit of mechanical drudgery, they do it without thought and they come away. Since labor is necessary, let it be as mechanical as possible, so that the head may not be in the least concerned with the work of the hand. In this--my view of things--the Arch Physician could never be brought to acquiesce. Had he been able to have his own way, the whole of my magnificent scheme would have been long ago destroyed and rendered impossible. I suppose it was this impossibility of having his own way which afflicted him with so profound a melancholy. His face was always sad, because he could never reconcile himself to the doctrine of human equality, without which the Perfection of Man is impossible. It will be seen, in short, that the Arch Physician and myself held hardly a single view in common. But he had been elected to his post, and I to mine. We shared between us the Great Secret; and if my views prevailed in our Council, it was due either to my own power of impressing my views upon my colleagues, or to the truth and justice of those views. But as to gratitude, there was no room or cause for any. * * * * * As, then, Dr. Linister walked to and fro upon the open space outside the Picture Gallery, his hands behind him, his head hanging, and his thoughts I know not where, he became conscious of something that was out of the usual order. When one lives as we live, one day following another, each like the one which went before, little departures from the accustomed order disturb the mind. For many, many years the Doctor had not given a thought to the Picture Gallery or to the door. Yet, because it stood open, and he had been accustomed to see it closed, he was disturbed, and presently lifted his head and discovered the cause. The door stood open. Why? What was the door? Then he remembered what it was, and whither it led. It opened into the ancient Picture Gallery, the very existence of which he had forgotten, though every day he saw the door and the building itself. The Picture Gallery! It was full of the pictures painted in the last few years before the Great Discovery; that is to say, it was full of the life which he had long ago lived--nay, he lived it still. As he stood hesitating without the door, that life came back to him with a strange yearning and sinking of the heart. He had never, you see, ceased to regret it, nor had he ever forgotten it. And now he was tempted to look upon it again. As well might a monk in the old times look upon a picture of fair women years after he had forsworn love. He hesitated, his knees trembling, for merely thinking what was within. Then he yielded to the temptation, and went into the Gallery. The morning sun streamed through the window and lay upon the floor; the motes danced in the sunshine; the Gallery was quite empty; but on the walls hung, one above the other, five or six in each row, the pictures of the Past. In some the pigments were faded; crimson was pale-pink; green was gray; red was brown; but the figures were there, and the Life which he had lost once more flashed upon his brain. He saw the women whom once he had loved so much; they were lying on soft couches, gazing upon him with eyes which made his heart to beat and his whole frame to tremble; they were dancing; they were in boats, dressed in dainty summer costume; they were playing lawn-tennis; they were in drawing-rooms, on horseback, on lawns, in gardens; they were being wooed by their lovers. What more? They were painted in fancy costumes, ancient costumes, and even with no costume at all. And the more he looked, the more his cheek glowed and his heart beat. Where had they gone--the women of his youth? Suddenly he heard the tinkling of a musical instrument. It was a thing they used to call a zither. He started, as one awakened out of a dream. Then he heard a voice singing; and it sang the same song he had heard that night five or six weeks ago--his own song: "The girls they laugh, the girls they cry, 'What shall their guerdon be?-- Alas! that some must fall and die!-- Bring forth our gauds to see. 'Twere all too slight, give what we might.' Up spoke a soldier tall: 'Oh! Love is worth the whole broad earth; Oh! Love is worth the whole broad earth; Give that, you give us all!'" This time, however, it was another voice--a fuller and richer voice--which sang those words. Dr. Linister started again when the voice began. He changed color, and his cheek grew pale. "Heavens!" he murmured. "Are there phantoms in the air? What does it mean? This is the second time--my own song--the foolish old song--my own air--the foolish, tinkling air that they used to like! And the voice--I remember the voice--whose voice is it? I remember the voice--whose voice is it?" He looked round him again, at the pictures, as if to find among them the face he sought. The pictures showed all the life of the Past; the ball-room with the dancers; the sports of the field; the drive in the afternoon, the ride in the morning; the bevy of girls; the soldiers and the sailors; the streets crowded with people; the vile slums and the picturesque blackguardism of the City--but not the face he wanted. Then he left off looking for the singer, and began to think of the faces before him. "On every face," he said, "there is unsatisfied desire. Yet they are the happier for that very dissatisfaction. Yes--they are the happier." He paused before a painted group of street children; some were playing over the gutter; some were sitting on door-steps, carrying babies as big as themselves; one was sucking a piece of orange-peel picked up on the pavement; one was gnawing a crust. They were all ragged and half starved. "Yet," said the Arch Physician, "they are happy. But we have no children now. In those days they could paint and draw--and we have lost the Art. Great heavens!" he cried, impatiently, "we have lost every Art. Cruel! cruel!" Then from within there broke upon his ears a strain of music. It was so long since he had heard any music that at first it took away his breath. Wonderful that a mere sound such as that of music should produce such an effect upon a man of science! "Oh," he sighed, heavily, "we have even thrown away that! Yet--where--where does the music come from? Who plays it?" While he listened, carried away by the pictures and by the music and by his own thoughts to the Past, his mind full of the Past, it did not surprise him in the least that there came out from the door between the Gallery and the Museum a young lady belonging absolutely to the Past. There was no touch of the Present about her at all. She did not wear the regulation dress; she did not wear the flat cap. "It is," said Dr. Linister, "the Face that belongs to the Voice. I know it now. Where did I see it last? To whom does it belong?" She stood for a few moments in the sunshine. Behind her was a great picture all crimson and purple, a mass of flaming color, before which her tall and slight figure, dressed in a delicate stuff of soft creamy color, stood clearly outlined. The front of the dress--at least that part which covered the throat to the waist--was of some warmer color; there were flowers at her left shoulder; her hair was braided tightly round her head; round her neck was a ribbon with something hanging from it; she wore brown gloves, and carried a straw hat dangling in her hand. It was, perhaps, the sunshine which made her eyes so bright, her cheek so glowing, her rosy lips so quivering. She stood there, looking straight down the Hall, as if she saw no one. Dr. Linister gazed and turned pale; his cheeks were so white that you might have thought him about to faint; he reeled and trembled. "GOOD GOD!" he murmured, falling back upon the interjection of the Past, "we have lost the Beauty of women! Oh, Fools! Fools! We have thrown all away--all--and for what?" Then the girl came swiftly down the Hall towards him. A smile of welcome was on her lips; a blush upon her cheek; her eyes looked up and dropped again, and again looked up and once more dropped. Then she stopped before him and held out both her hands. "Harry Linister!" she cried, as if surprised, and with a little laugh, "how long is it since last we met?" CHAPTER VII. THE FIDELITY OF JOHN LAX. That morning, while I was in my private laboratory, idly turning over certain Notes on experiments conducted for the artificial manufacture of food, I was interrupted by a knock at the door. My visitor was the Porter of the House of Life, our most trusted servant, John Lax. His duty it was to sleep in the House--his chamber being that ancient room over the South Porch--to inspect the furnaces and laboratories after the work of the day was closed, and at all times to keep an eye upon the Fabric itself, so that it should in no way fall out of repair. His orders were also to kill any strangers who might try to force their way into the House on any pretence whatever. He was a stout, sturdy fellow, vigorous and strong, though the Great Discovery had found him nearly forty years of age; his hair, though it had gone bald on the top, was still thick on the sides, and gave him a terrifying appearance under his cap of scarlet and gold. He carried a great halberd as a wand of office, and his coat and cap matched each other for color and for gold embroidery. Save as representing the authority of the House and College, I would never have allowed such a splendid appearance to any one. "What have you come to tell me, John?" I asked. I may explain that I had always found John Lax useful in keeping me informed as to the internal condition of the College and its Assistants--what was said and debated--what opinions were advanced, by what men, and so forth. "In the College itself, Suffragan," he said, "and in the House, things are mighty dull and quiet. Blessed if a little Discontent or a Mutiny, or something, wouldn't be worth having, just to shake up the lot. There's not even a grumbler left. A little rising and a few heads broken, and we should settle down again, quiet and contented again." "Don't talk like a fool, John." "Well, Suffragan, you like to hear all that goes on. I wonder what you'll say to what I'm going to tell you now?" "Go on, John. What is it?" "It's irregular, Suffragan, but your Honor is above the Law; and, before beginning a long story--mind you, a most important story it is--" "What is it about? Who's in it?" "Lots of the People are in it. They don't count. He's in it now--come!" "He?" John Lax had pointed over his shoulder so clearly in the direction of the Arch Physician's residence that I could not but understand. Yet I pretended. "He, John? Who is he?" "The Arch Physician is in it. There! Now, Suffragan, bring out that bottle and a glass, and I can then tell you the story, without fear of ill consequences to my throat that was once delicate." I gave him the bottle and a glass, and, after drinking a tumblerful of whiskey (forbidden to the People) he began. Certain reasons, he said, had made him suspicious as to what went on at night in the Museum during the last few weeks. The lights were up until late at night. Once he tried the doors, and found that they were locked. He heard the playing of music within, and the sound of many voices. Now, there is, as I told John Lax at this point, no law against the assemblage of the People, nor against their sitting up, or singing and playing together. I had, to be sure, hoped that they had long ceased to desire to meet together, and had quite forgotten how to make music. He remembered, John Lax went on to say, that there was a door leading into the Picture Gallery from the College Garden--a door of which he held the key. He opened this door quietly, and then, night after night, he crept into the Picture Gallery, and watched what went on through the door, which opened upon the Museum. He had found, in fact, a place close by the door, where, hidden behind a group of statuary, he could watch and listen in almost perfect security. I then heard, to my amazement, how a small company of the People were every night carrying on a revival of the Past; not with the laudable intention of disgusting themselves with the horrors of that time, but exactly the contrary. It was only the pleasant side of that time--the evening life of the rich and careless--which these foolish persons reproduced. They had, in fact, gone so far, John Lax told me, as to fall in love with that time, to deride the Present, and to pour abuse upon my name--mine--as the supposed chief author of the Social Equality. This was very well for a beginning. This was a startling awakener out of a Fool's Paradise. True, the company was small; they might be easily dispersed or isolated; means might be found to terrify them into submission. Yet it gave me a rude shock. "I've had my suspicions," John Lax continued, "ever since one morning when I looked into the Museum and see that young gal dressed up and carrying on before the looking-glass, more like--well, more like an actress at the Pav, as they used to make 'em, than like a decent woman. But now there's more." He stopped and whispered, hoarsely, "Suffragan, I've just come from a little turn about the Garden. Outside the Picture Gallery, where there's a bit o' turf and a lot of trees all standin' around, there's a very curious sight to see this minute; and if you'll get up and go along o' me, Suffragan, you'll be pleased--you will, indeed--astonished and pleased you will be." I obeyed. I arose and followed this zealous servant. He led me to a part of the Garden which I did not know; it was the place of which I have spoken. Here, amid a great thick growth of underwood, he took me into the ruins of an old garden or tool-house, built of wood, but the planks were decaying and were starting apart. "Stand there, and look and listen," whispered John Lax, grinning. The open planks commanded a view of a semicircular lawn, where the neglected grass had grown thick and rank. Almost under my eyes there was sitting upon a fallen trunk a woman, fantastically dressed--against the Rules--and at her feet lay none other than the Arch Physician himself! Then, indeed, I pricked up my ears and listened with all my might. "Are we dreaming, Mildred?" he murmured. "Are we dreaming?" "No, Harry; we have all been dreaming for a long, long time--never mind how long. Just now we are not dreaming, we are truly awake. You are my old playfellow, and I am your old sweetheart," she said, with a little blush. "Tell me what you are doing--always in your laboratory. I suppose, always finding some new secrets. Does it make you any happier, Harry, to be always finding something new?" "It is the only thing that makes life endurable--to discover the secrets of Nature. For what other purpose do we live?" "Then, Harry, for what purpose do the rest of us live, who do not investigate those secrets? Can women be happy in no other way? We do not prosecute any kind of research, you know." "Happy? Are we in the Present or the Past, Mildred?" He looked about him, as if expecting to see the figures of the Pictures in the Gallery walking about upon the grass. "Just now, Harry, we are in the Past. We are back--we two together--in the glorious and beautiful Past, where everything was delightful. Outside this place there is the horrible Present. You have made the Present for us, and therefore you ought to know what it is. Let me look at you, Harry. Why, the old look is coming back to your eyes. Take off that black gown, Harry, and throw it away, while you are with me. So. You are now my old friend again, and we can talk. You are no longer the President of the Holy College, the terrible and venerable Arch Physician, the Guardian of the House of Life. You are plain Harry Linister again. Tell me, then, Harry, are you happy in this beautiful Present that you have made?" "No, Mildred; I am never happy." "Then why not unmake the Present? Why not return to the Past?" "It is impossible. We might go back to the Past for a little; but it would become intolerable again, as it did before. Formerly there was no time for any of the fleeting things of life to lose their rapture. All things were enjoyed for a moment, and then vanished. Now"--he sighed wearily--"they last--they last. So that there is nothing left for us but the finding of new secrets. And for you, Mildred?" "I have been in a dream," she replied. "Oh, a long, long nightmare, that has never left me, day or night. I don't know how long it has lasted. But it has lifted at last, thank GOD!" The Arch Physician started and looked astonished. "It seems a long time," he said, "since I heard those words. I thought we had forgotten--" "It was a dream of no change, day after day. Nothing happened. In the morning we worked; in the afternoon we rested; in the evening we took food; at night we slept. And the mind was dead. There were no books to read; there was nothing to talk about; there was nothing to hope. Always the same work--a piece of work that nobody cared to do--a mechanical piece of work. Always the same dress--the same hideous, horrible dress. We were all alike; there was nothing at all to distinguish us. The Past seemed forgotten." "Nothing can be ever forgotten," said Dr. Linister; "but it may be put away for a time." "Oh, when I think of all that we had forgotten, it seems terrible! Yet we lived--how could we live?--it was not life. No thought, no care, about anything. Every one centred in himself, careless of his neighbor. Why, I did not know so much as the occupants of the rooms next to my own. Men looked on women, and women on men, without thought or emotion. Love was dead--Life was Death? Harry, it was a most dreadful dream. And in the night there used to come a terrible nightmare of nothingness! It was as if I floated alone in ether, far from the world or life, and could find nothing--nothing--for the mind to grasp or think of. And I woke at the point of madness. A dreadful dream! And yet we lived. Rather than go back to that most terrible dream, I would--I would--" She clasped her forehead with her hand and looked about her with haggard eyes. "Yes, yes," said Dr. Linister; "I ought to have guessed your sufferings--by my own. Yet I have had my laboratory." "Then I was shaken out of the dream by a girl--by Christine. And now we are resolved--some of us--at all costs and hazards--yes, even if we are debarred from the Great Discovery--to--live--again--to live--again!" she repeated, slowly. "Do you know, Harry, what that means? To go back--to live again! Only think what that means." He was silent. "Have you forgotten, Harry," she asked, softly, "what that means?" "No," he said. "I remember everything; but I am trying to understand. The accursed Present is around and above me, like a horrible black Fog. How can we lift it? How can we live again?" "Some of us have found out a way. In the morning we put on the odious uniform, and do our allotted task among the poor wretches who are still in that bad dream of never-ending monotony. We sit among them, silent ourselves, trying to disguise the new light that has come back to our eyes, in the Public Hall. In the evening we come here, put on the old dresses, and live the old life." "It is wonderful," he said. "I knew all along that human nature would one day assert itself again. I told Grout so. He has always been quite wrong!" "Grout! What does Grout know of civilized life? Grout! Why, he was your own bottle-washer--a common servant. He thought it was justice to reduce everybody to his own level, and happiness for them to remain there! Grout! Why, he has only one idea--to make us mere machines. Oh, Harry!" she said, reproach in her eyes, "you are Arch Physician, and you cannot alter things!" "No; I have the majority of the College against me." "Am I looking well, Harry, after all these years?" She suddenly changed her voice and manner and laughed, and turned her face to meet his. Witch! Abominable Witch! "Well, Mildred, was it yesterday that I loved you? Was the Great Discovery made only yesterday? Oh, you look lovelier than ever!" "Lovely means worthy of love, Harry. But you have killed love." "No, no. Love died. We did not kill love. Why did the men cease to love the women? Was it that they saw them every day, and so grew tired of them?" "Perhaps it was because you took from us the things that might have kept love alive; music, art, literature, grace, culture, society--everything." "We did not take them. They died." "And then you dressed us all alike, in the most hideous costume ever invented." "It was Grout's dress." "What is the good of being Arch Physician if one cannot have his own way?" Harry sighed. "My place is in the laboratory," he said. "I experiment, and I discover. The Suffragan administers. It has always been the rule. Yet you live again, Mildred. Tell me more. I do not understand how you contrive to live again." "We have a little company of twenty or thirty, who meet together in the evening after the dinner is over. No one else ever comes to the Museum. As soon as it is dark, you know very well, the People all creep home and go to bed; but my friends come here. It was Christine who began it. She found or made the dresses for us; she beguiled us into forgetting the Present and going back to the Past. Now we have succeeded in caring nothing at all about the Present. We began by pretending. It is no longer pretence. The Past lives again, and we hate the Present. Oh, we hate and loathe it!" "Yes, yes. But how do you revive the Past?" "We have dances. You used to dance very well formerly, my dear Harry. That was before you walked every day in a grand Procession, and took the highest place in the Public Hall. I wonder if you could dance again? Nature's secrets are not so heavy that they would clog your feet, are they? We sing and play: the old music has been found, and we are beginning to play it properly again. We talk; we act little drawing-room plays; sometimes we draw or paint; and--oh, Harry!--the men have begun again to make Love--real, ardent Love! All the dear old passions are reviving. We are always finding other poor creatures like ourselves, who were once ladies and gentlemen, and now are aimless and soulless; and we recruit them." "What will Grout say when he finds it out?" "He can never make us go back to the Present again. So far, I defy Grout, Harry." The Arch Physician sighed. "The old life!" he said; "the old life! I will confess, Mildred, that I have never forgotten it--not for a day; and I have never ceased to regret that it was not continued." "Grout pulled it to pieces; but we will revive it." "If it could be revived; but that is impossible." "Nothing is impossible to you--nothing--to you. Consider, Harry," she whispered. "You have the Secret." He started and changed color. "Yes, yes," he said; "but what then?" "Come and see the old life revived. Come this evening; come, dear Harry." She laid a hand upon his arm. "Come, for auld lang syne. Can the old emotions revive again, even in the breast of the Arch Physician?" His eyes met hers. He trembled--a sure sign that the old spirit was reviving in him. Then he spoke in a kind of murmur: "I have been living alone so long--so long--that I thought there was nothing left but solitude forever. Grout likes it. He will have it that loneliness belongs to the Higher Life." "Come to us," she replied, her hand still on his arm, her eyes turned so as to look into his. Ah, shameless Witch! "We are not lonely; we talk; we exchange looks and smiles. We have begun again to practise the old arts; we have begun to read in each other's souls. Old thoughts that we had long forgotten are pouring back into our minds; it is strange to find them there again. Come, Harry; forget the laboratory for a while, and come with us; but come without Grout. The mere aspect of Grout would cause all our innocent joys to take flight and vanish. Come! Be no more the Sacred Head of the Holy College, but my dear old friend and companion, Harry Linister, who might have been but for the Great Discovery--but that is foolish. Come, Harry; come this evening." CHAPTER VIII. THE ARCH TRAITOR. I dismissed John Lax, charging him with the most profound secrecy. I knew, and had known for a long time, that this man, formerly the avowed enemy of aristocrats, nourished an extraordinary hatred for the Arch Physician, and therefore I was certain that he would keep silence. I resolved that I would myself keep a watch, and, if possible, be present at the meeting of this evening. What would happen I knew not, nor could I tell what to do; there are no laws in our community to prevent such meetings. If the Arch Physician chooses to attend such a play-acting, how is he to be prevented? But I would myself watch. You shall hear how I was rewarded. Dr. Linister was, as usual, melancholy and preoccupied at Supper. He said nothing of what he intended. As for me, I looked about the Hall to see if there were any whom I could detect, from any unnatural restlessness, as members of this dangerous company; but I could see none, except the girl Christine, whose vivacity might be allowed on the score of youth. The face of John Lax, it is true, as he sat at the lowest place of our table, betokened an ill-suppressed joy and an eagerness quite interesting to one who understood the meaning of these emotions. Poor John Lax! Never again shall we find one like unto him for zeal and strength and courage. I waited until half-past nine o'clock; then I sallied forth. It was a dark night and still. There was no moon; the sky was cloudy; no wind was in the air, and from time to time there were low rumblings of distant thunder. I made my way cautiously and noiselessly through the dark Garden to the entrance of the Picture Gallery, which the faithful John Lax had left open for me. I ventured, with every precaution, into the Gallery. It seemed quite empty, but at the end there was a door opening into the Museum, which poured a narrow stream of light straight down the middle of the Gallery. I crept along the dark wall, and presently found myself at the end close to this door. And here I came upon the group of statuary of which John Lax had told me where I could crouch and hide in perfect safety, unseen myself, yet able to see everything that went on within. I confess that even the revelations of John Lax had not prepared me for the scene which met my eyes. There were thirty or forty men and women present; the room was lit up; there were flowers in vases set about; there was a musical instrument, at which one sat down and sang. When she had finished, everybody began to laugh and talk. Then another sat down and began to play, and then they went out upon the floor two by two, in pairs, and began to twirl round like teetotums. As for their dresses, I never saw the like; for the women were dressed in frocks of silk--white, pink, cream-colored, trimmed with lace; with jewels on their arms and necks, and long white gloves, and flowers in their hair. In their hands they carried fans, and their dresses were low, exposing their necks, and so much of their arms as was not covered up with gloves. And they looked excited and eager. The expression which I had striven so long to impart to their faces, that of tranquillity, was gone. The old unhappy eagerness, with flashing eyes, flushed cheeks, and panting breath, was come back to them again. Heavens! what could be done? As for the men, they wore a black-cloth dress--all alike--why, then, did they dislike the regulation blue flannel?--with a large white shirt-front and white ties and white gloves. And they, too, were full of the restless eagerness and excitement. So different were they all from the men and women whom I had observed day after day in the Public Hall, that I could remember not one except the girl Christine, and--and--yes, among them there was none other than the Arch Physician himself, laughing, talking, dancing among the rest. I could see perfectly well through the open door, and I was quite certain that no one could see me; but I crouched lower behind the marble group when they began to come out two by two, and to talk together in the dark Gallery. First came the girl Christine and the sailor, Jack Carera. Him at all events I remembered. They took each other's hands and began to kiss each other, and to talk the greatest nonsense imaginable. No one would ever believe that sane people could possibly talk such nonsense. Then they went back and another pair came out, and went on in the same ridiculous fashion. One has been to a Theatre in the old time and heard a couple of lovers talking nonsense on the stage; but never on any stage did I ever hear such false, extravagant, absurd stuff talked as I did when I lay hidden behind that group in marble. Presently I listened with interest renewed, because the pair which came into the Gallery was none other than the pair I had that morning watched in the Garden--the Arch Physician and the woman he called Mildred, though now I should hardly have known her, because she was so dressed up and disguised. She looked, indeed, a very splendid creature; not in the least like a plain woman. And this, I take it, was what these would-be great ladies desired--not to be taken as plain women. Yet they were, in spite of their fine clothes, plain and simple women just as much as any wench of Whitechapel in the old time. "Harry," she said, "I thank you from my very heart for coming. Now we shall have hope." "What hope?" he replied, "what hope? What can I do for you while the majority of the College continue to side with Grout? What hope can I bring you?" "Never mind the Majority. Consider, Harry. You have the Great Secret. Let us all go away together and found a new colony, where we will have no Grout; and we will live our own lives. Do you love me, Harry?" "Love you, Mildred? Oh"--he sighed deeply--"it is a stream that has been dammed up all these years!" "What keeps us here?" asked the girl. "It is that in your hands lies the Great Secret. Our people would be afraid to go without it. If we have it, Jack will take us to some island that he knows of across the seas. But we cannot go without the Secret. You shall bring it with you." "When could we go?" he asked, whispering. "We could go at any time--in a day--in a week--when you please. Oh, Harry, will you indeed rescue us? Will you come with us? Some of us are resolved to go--Secret or not. I am one of those. Will you let me go--alone?" "Is it impossible," he said, "that you should go without the Secret?" "Yes," she said; "the people would be afraid. But oh, to think of a new life, where we shall no longer be all the same, but different! Every one shall have his own possessions again--whatever he can win; every one his own profession; the women shall dress as they please; we shall have Art--and Music--and Poetry again. And--oh, Harry!"--she leaned her head upon his shoulder--"we shall have Love again. Oh, to think of it! Oh, to think of it! Love once more! And with Love, think of all the other things that will come back. _They must_ come back, Harry--the old Faith which formerly made us happy--" Her voice choked, and she burst into tears. I crouched behind the statues, listening. What did she cry about? The old Faith? She could have that if she wanted, I suppose, without crying over it. No law whatever against it. Dr. Linister said nothing, but I saw that he was shaking--actually shaking--and trembling all over. A most remarkable person! Who would have believed that weakness so lamentable could lie behind so much science? "I yield," he said--"I yield, Mildred. The Present is so horrible that it absolves me even from the most solemn oath. Love has been killed--we will revive it again. All the sweet and precious things that made life happy have been killed; Art and Learning and Music, all have been killed--we will revive them. Yes, I will go with you, my dear; and--since you cannot go without--I will bring the Secret with me." "Oh, Harry! Harry!" She flung herself into his arms. "You have made me more happy than words can tell. Oh, you are mine--you are mine, and I am yours!" "As for the Secret," he went on, "it belongs, if it is to be used at all, to all mankind. Why did the College of Physicians guard it in their own jealous keeping, save to make themselves into a mysterious and separate Caste? Must men always appoint sacred guardians of so-called mysteries which belong to all? My dear, since the Great Discovery, Man has been sinking lower and lower. He can go very little lower now. You have been rescued from the appalling fate which Grout calls the Triumph of Science. Yes--yes--" he repeated, as if uncertain, "the Secret belongs to all or none. Let all have it and work out their destiny in freedom, or let none have it, and so let us go back to the old times, when such great things were done against the fearful odds of so short and uncertain a span. Which would be the better?" "Only come with us, my lover. Oh, can a simple woman make you happy? Come with us; but let our friends know--else they will not come with us--that whenever we go, we have the Secret." "It belongs to all," he repeated. "Come with me, then, Mildred, to the House of Life. You shall be the first to whom the Secret shall be revealed. And you, if you please, shall tell it to all our friends. It is the Secret, and that alone, which keeps up the Authority of the College. Come. It is dark; but I have a key to the North Postern. Come with me. In the beginning of this new Life which lies before us, I will, if you wish, give the Secret to all who share it. Come, my Love, my Bride." He led her by the hand quickly down the Picture Gallery and out into the Garden. I looked round. The silly folk in the Museum were going on with their masquerade--laughing, singing, dancing. The girl Christine ran in and out among them with bright eyes and eager looks. And the eyes of the sailor, Jack Carera, followed her everywhere. Oh yes. I knew what those eyes meant--the old selfishness--the subjection of the Woman. She was to be his Property. And yet she seemed to like it. Forever and anon she made some excuse to pass him, and touched his hand as she passed and smiled sweetly. I dare say that she was a beautiful girl--but Beauty has nothing at all to do with the Administration of the people. However, there was no time to be lost. The Arch Physician was going to betray the Great Secret. Happily he would have to go all the way round to the North Postern. There was time, if I was quick, to call witnesses, and to seize him in the very act. And then--the Penalty. Death! Death! Death! CHAPTER IX. IN THE INNER HOUSE. The House of Life, you have already learned, is a great and venerable building. We build no such houses now. No one but those who belong to the Holy College--viz., the Arch Physician, the Suffragan, the Fellows or Physicians, and the Assistants--are permitted to enter its doors or to witness the work that is carried on within these walls. It is, however, very well understood that this work concerns the prolongation of the Vital Forces first, the preservation of Health next, and the enlargement of scientific truth generally. The House is, in fact, the great laboratory in which the Fellows conduct those researches of which it is not permitted to speak outside. The prevention of disease, the cure of hereditary and hitherto incurable diseases, the continual lowering of the hours of labor, by new discoveries in Chemistry and Physics, are now the principal objects of these researches. When, in fact, we have discovered how to provide food chemically out of simple matter, and thereby abolish the necessity for cultivation, no more labor will be required, and Humanity will have taken the last and greatest step of all--freedom from the necessity of toil. After that, there will be no more need for labor, none for thought, none for anxiety. At stated intervals food, chemically prepared, will be served out; between those intervals man will lie at rest--asleep, or in the torpor of unthinking rest. This will be, as I have said before, the Triumph of Science. The House, within, is as magnificent as it is without; that is to say, it is spacious even beyond our requirements, and lofty even beyond the wants of a laboratory. All day long the Fellows and the Assistants work at their tables. Here is everything that Science wants--furnaces, electric batteries, retorts, instruments of all kinds, and collections of everything that may be wanted. Here--behind the Inner House--is a great workshop where our glass vessels are made, where our instruments are manufactured and repaired. The College contains two or three hundred of Assistants working in their various departments. These men, owing to the restlessness of their intellect, sometimes give trouble, either because they want to learn more than the Fellows think sufficient for them, or because they invent something unexpected, or because they become dissatisfied with the tranquil conditions of their life. Some of them from time to time have gone mad. Some, who threatened more trouble, have been painlessly extinguished. Within the House itself is the Inner House, to enter which is forbidden, save to the Arch Physician, the Suffragan, and the Fellows. This place is a kind of House within a House. Those who enter from the South Porch see before them, more than half-way up the immense building, steps, upon which stands a high screen of wood-work. This screen, which is very ancient, protects the Inner House from entrance or observation. It runs round the whole enclosure, and is most profusely adorned with carved-work representing all kinds of things. For my own part, I have never examined into the work, and I hardly know what it is that is here figured. What does it advance science to carve bunches of grapes (which everybody understands not to be grapes) in wood? All these things in the House of Life--the carved wood, the carved stone, the carved marble, the lofty pillars, the painted windows--irritate and offend me. Yet the Arch Physician, who loved to sit alone in the Inner House, would contemplate these works of Art with a kind of rapture. Nay, he would wellnigh weep at thinking that now there are no longer any who can work in that useless fashion. As for what is within the Inner House, I must needs speak with caution. Suffice it, therefore, to say that round the sides of the screen are ancient carved seats under carved canopies, which are the seats of the Fellows; and that on a raised stone platform, approached by several steps, is placed the Coffer which contains the Secret of the Great Discovery. The Arch Physician alone had the key of the Coffer; he and his Suffragan alone possessed the Secret; the Fellows were only called into the Inner House when a Council was held on some new Discovery or some new adaptation of Science to the wants of Mankind. Now, after overhearing the intended treason of the Arch Physician, and witnessing his degradation and fall, I made haste to act; for I plainly perceived that if the miraculous Prolongation of the Vital Force should be allowed to pass out of our own hands, and to become public property, an end would at once be put to the Order and Discipline now so firmly established; the Authority of the College would be trampled under foot; everybody would begin to live as they pleased; the old social conditions might be revived; and the old social inequalities would certainly begin again, because the strong would trample on the weak. This was, perhaps, what Dr. Linister designed. I remembered, now, how long it was before he could forget the old distinctions; nay, how impossible it was for him ever to bring himself to regard me, though his Suffragan--whom he had formerly made his serving-man--as his equal. Thinking of that time, and of those distinctions, strengthened my purpose. What I did and how I prevented the treachery will approve itself to all who have the best interests of mankind at heart. * * * * * The House of Life after nightfall is very dark; the windows are high, for the most part narrow, and, though there are a great many of them, most are painted, so that even on a clear and bright day there is not more light than enough to carry on experiments, and, if I had my way, I would clear out all the painted glass. It is, of course, provided with the electric light; but this is seldom used except in the short and dark days of winter, when work is carried on after nightfall. In the evening the place is absolutely empty. John Lax, the Porter, occupies the South Porch and keeps the keys. But there is another and smaller door in the north transept. It leads to a Court of Cloisters, the ancient use of which has long been forgotten, the key of which is kept by the Arch Physician himself. It was with this key--at this entrance--that he came into the House. He opened the door and closed it behind him. His footstep was not the only one; a lighter step was heard on the stones as well. In the silence of the place and time the closing of the door rumbled in the roof overhead like distant thunder, and the falling of the footsteps echoed along the walls of the great building. The two companions did not speak. A great many years ago, in the old times, there was a Murder done here--a foul murder by a band of soldiers, who fell upon a Bishop or Saint or Angel--I know not whom. The memory of the Murder has survived the name of the victim and the very religion which he professed--it was, perhaps, that which was still maintained among the aristocracy when I was a boy. Not only is the memory of the murder preserved, but John Lax--who, soon after the Great Discovery, when we took over the building from the priests of the old religion, was appointed its Porter and heard the old stories--would tell all those who chose to listen how the Murderers came in at that small door and how the murder was committed on such a spot, the stones of which are to this day red with the blood of the murdered man. On the spot, however, stands now a great electrical battery. The Arch Physician, now about to betray his trust, led his companion, the woman Mildred Carera, by the hand past this place to the steps which lead to the Inner House. They ascended those steps. Standing there, still outside the Inner House, Dr. Linister bade the woman turn round and look upon the Great House of Life. The clouds had dispersed, and the moonlight was now shining through the windows of the South, lighting up the colored glass, painting bright pictures and patterns upon the floor, and pouring white light through those windows, which are not painted, upon the clustered pillars and old monuments of the place. Those who were now gathered in the Inner House listened, holding their breath in silence. "Mildred," said Dr. Linister, "long, long years ago we stood together upon this spot. It was after a Service of Praise and Prayer to the God whom then the world worshipped. We came from town with a party to see this Cathedral. When service was over, I scoffed at it in the light manner of the time, which questioned everything and scoffed at everything." "I remember, Harry; and all through the service my mind was filled with--you." "I scoff no more, Mildred. We have seen to what a depth men can sink when the Hope of the Future is taken from them. The memory of that service comes back to me, and seems to consecrate the place and the time. Mildred," he said, after a pause--oh, the House was very silent--"this is a solemn and a sacred moment for us both. Here, side by side, on the spot once sacred to the service of the God whom we have long forgotten, let us renew the vows which were interrupted so long ago. Mildred, with all my heart, with all my strength, I love thee." "Harry," she murmured, "I am thine--even to Death itself." "Even to Death itself," he replied. "Yes, if it comes to that. If the Great Discovery itself must be abandoned; if we find that only at that price can we regain the things we have lost." "It was Grout who destroyed Religion--not the Great Discovery," said the girl. We kept silence in the House, but we heard every word. And this was true, and my heart glowed to think how true it was. "Nay, not Grout, nor a thousand Grouts. Without the certainty of parting, Religion droops and dies. There must be something not understood, something unknown, beyond our power of discovery, or the dependence which is the ground of religion dies away in man's heart. He who is immortal and commands the secrets of Nature, so that he shall neither die, nor grow old, nor become feeble, nor fall into any disease, feels no necessity for any religion. This House, Mildred, is the expression of religion at the time of man's greatest dependence. To the God in whom, short-lived, ignorant, full of disease, he trusted he built this splendid place, and put into it all the beauty that he could command of sculpture and of form. But it speaks no longer to the People for whom it was built. When the Great Discovery was made, it would surely have been better to have found out whither it was going to lead us before we consented to receive it." "Surely--" said Mildred, but the other interrupted her. "We did not understand; we were blind--we were blind." "Yet--we live." "And you have just now told me how. Remember the things that men said when the Discovery was made. We were to advance continually; we were to scale heights hitherto unapproached; we were to achieve things hitherto unknown in Art as well as in Science. Was it for the Common Meal, the Common Dress, the Common Toil, the vacant face, the lips that never smile, the eyes that never brighten, the tongue that never speaks, the heart that beats only for itself, that we gave up the things we had?" "We did not expect such an end, Harry." "No; we had not the wit to expect it. Come, Mildred, I will give you the Secret, and you may give it, if you please, to all the world. Oh, I feel as if the centuries had fallen away! I am full of hope again. I am full of the old life once more; and, Mildred--oh, my sweet!--I am full of Love!" He stooped and kissed her on the lips. Then he led her into the Inner House. * * * * * Now, just before Dr. Linister turned the key of the postern, the door of the South Porch was softly closed, and a company of twenty men walked lightly and noiselessly, in slippers, up the nave of the House. Arrived at the Inner House, they ascended the steps and entered that dark Chapel, every man making straight for his own seat and taking it without a word or a breath. This was the College of Physicians hastily called by me, and gathered together to witness the Great Treachery of the Chief. They sat there silent and breathless listening to their talk. * * * * * The Secret was kept in a cipher, intelligible only to the two who then guarded it, in a fire-proof chest upon the stone table which was once the altar of the old Faith. Dr. Linister stood before the chest, his key in his hand. "It would be better," he said, "if the new departure could be made without the Secret. It would be far, far better if we could start again under the old conditions; but if they are afraid to go without the Secret, why--" He unlocked the chest. Then he paused again. "How many years have I been the guardian of this Secret? Mildred, when I think of the magnificent vistas which opened up before our eyes when this Great Discovery was made; when I think of the culture without bound or limit; the Art in which the hand was always to grow more and more dexterous; the Science which was to advance with gigantic strides--my child, I feel inclined to sink into the earth with shame, only to compare that dream with the awful, the terrible, the disgraceful reality! Let us all go away. Let us leave this place, and let us make a new beginning, with sadder minds, yet with this experience of the Present to guide us and to keep us from committing worse follies. See, dear--here is the Secret. The cipher in which it is written has a key which is in this paper. I place all in your hands. If accident should destroy me, you have the Secret still for yourself and friends. Use it well--use it better than we have used it. Kiss me, Mildred. Oh, my dear!" Then, as they lay in each other's arms, I turned on the electric light and discovered them. The chest stood open; the papers, cipher, key and all, were in the girl's hands; the Arch Physician was caught in the very act of his supreme Treachery! And lo! the Fellows of the Holy College were in the Inner House; every man in his place, every man looking on, and every man standing upright with eyes and gestures of scorn. "Traitor!" they cried, one and all. John Lax appeared at the door, halberd in hand. CHAPTER X. THE COUNCIL IN THE HOUSE. "Brothers of the Holy College!" I cried, "you have beheld the crime--you are witnesses of the Fact--you have actually seen the Arch Physician himself revealing the Great Secret, which none of yourselves, even of the College, hath been permitted to learn--the Secret confined by the Wisdom of the College to himself and to his Suffragan." "We are witnesses," they cried, with one consent. To my great satisfaction, even those who were of Dr. Linister's party, and who voted with him against the Administration and Policy of the College, spoke, on this occasion, for the plain and undeniable truth. "What," I asked, "is the Penalty when one of the least among us, even an Assistant only, betrays to the People any of the secrets--even the least secret--of the work carried on in this House?" "It is DEATH," they replied, with one voice. "It is DEATH," I repeated, pointing to the Arch Physician. At such a moment, when nothing short of annihilation appeared in view, one would have expected from the guilty pair an appearance of the greatest consternation and dismay. On the contrary, the Arch Physician, with an insensibility--or a bravado--which one would not have expected of him, stood before us all, his arms folded, his eyes steady, his lips even smiling. Beside him stood the girl, dressed in the ridiculous mummery of the nineteenth century, bowed down, her face in her hands. "It is I," she murmured--"it is I, Harry, who have brought you to this. Oh, forgive me! Let us die together. Since I have awakened out of the stupid torpor of the Present--since we remembered the Past--and Love--let us die together; for I could not live without you." She knelt at his feet, and laid her head upon his arm. "My love," she said, "my Lord and Love! let me die with you." At this extraordinary spectacle I laughed aloud. Love? I thought the old wives' tales of Love and Lordship were long, long since dead and forgotten. Yet here was a man for the sake of a woman--actually because she wanted to go away and begin again the old pernicious life--breaking his most sacred vows; and here was a woman--for the sake of this man--actually and truly for his sake--asking for death--death with him! Since, when they were both dead, there could be no more any feeling one for the other, why ask for death? What good could that do for either? "Your wish," I said to this foolish woman, "shall be gratified, in case the Judges of your case decide that your crime can be expiated by no less a penalty. Fellows of the College, let this guilty pair be confined for the night, and to-morrow we will try them solemnly in the College Court according to ancient custom." I know not how many years had elapsed since that Court was held. The offences of the old time were for the most part against property--since there had been no property, there had been no crimes of this kind. Another class of old offences consisted of violence rising out of quarrels; since almost all these quarrels originated in disputes about property--every man in the old time who had property was either a thief or the son of a thief, so that disputes were naturally incessant--there could be no longer any such quarrels or any such violence. A third class of crimes were caused by love, jealousy, and the like; these two had happily, as we believed, disappeared forever. The last class of crimes to vanish were those of mutiny. When the People grew gradually to understand that the welfare of all was the only rule of the governing body, and that selfishness, individualism, property, privilege, would no longer be permitted, they left off murmuring, and mutiny ceased. You have seen how orderly, how docile, how tranquil, is the life of the People as it has been ordered by the Sacred College. Alas! I thought that this order, this sheep-like freedom from Thought, was going to be henceforth universal and undisturbed. Our prisoners made no opposition. John Lax, the Porter, bearing his halberd of office, marched beside them. We closed in behind them, and in this order we led them to the strong room over the South Porch, which is provided with bars and a lock. It is the sleeping-chamber of John Lax, but for this night he was to remain on the watch below. Then, as Suffragan, I called a Council of Emergency in the Inner House, taking the Presidency in the absence of the Arch Physician. I told my brethren briefly what had happened; how my attention had been called to the fact that a company of the People, headed by the young girl called Christine, had begun to assemble every night in the Museum, there to put on clothes which belonged to the old time, and to masquerade in the manners, language, and amusements (so called) of that time; that this assemblage, which might have been innocent and even laudable if it led, as it should have done, to a detestation of the old times, had proved mischievous, because, strangely enough, it had exactly the opposite effect; that, in fact, everybody in the company had fallen into an ardent yearning after the Past, and that all the bad features of that bad time--the Social inequality, the Poverty, the Injustice--were carefully ignored. Upon this, one of Dr. Linister's Party arose, and begged permission to interrupt the Suffragan. He wished to point out that memory was indestructible; that even if we succeeded in reducing Mankind, as the Suffragan wished, to be a mere breathing and feeding machine--the Ultimate Triumph of Science--any one of these machines might be at any time electrified into a full and exact memory of the Past; that, to the average man, the Emotion of the Past would always be incomparably preferable to the Tranquillity of the Present. What had just been done would be done again. I went on, after this interruption, to narrate how I set myself to watch, and presently saw the Arch Physician himself enter the Museum; how he exchanged his gown for the costume in which the men disfigured themselves, play-acted, pretended, and masqueraded with them; danced with them, no external respect whatever being paid to his rank; and afterwards had certain love passages--actually love passages between the Arch Physician and a Woman of the People!--which I overheard, and repeated as far as I could remember them. The rest my brethren of the College knew already; how I hastily summoned them, and led them into the Inner House just before the arrival of the Criminals. Thereupon, without any attempt of Dr. Linister's friends to the contrary, it was Resolved that the Trial of the Arch Physician and his accomplices should be held in the morning. I next invited their attention to the behavior of the girl Christine. She it was, I told them, who had instigated the whole of the business. A culpable curiosity it was, no doubt, that first led her to consider and study the ways of the ancient world; what should be the ways of the Past to an honest and loyal person, satisfied with the Wisdom which ruled the Present? She read the old books, looked at the old pictures, and lived all day long in the old Museum. There were many things which she could not understand; she wanted to understand these things; and she conceived a violent, unreasoning admiration for the old time, which appeared to this foolish girl to be a continual round of pleasure and excitement. Therefore she gathered together a company of those who had belonged to the richer class in the days when property was permitted. She artfully awakened them out of their contentment, sowed the seeds of dissatisfaction among them, caused them to remember the Past with a vehement longing to reproduce the worst part of it--namely, the manners and customs of the richer class--the people for whom the bulk of mankind toiled, so that the privileged few might have nothing to do but to feast, dance, sing, and make love. I asked the College, therefore, what should be done with such a girl, warning them that one Penalty, and one only, would meet the case and render for the future such outbreaks impossible. Again the Physician who had spoken before rose up and remarked that such outbreaks were inevitable, because the memory is indestructible. "You have here," he said, "a return to the Past, because a young girl, by reading the old books, has been able to stimulate the memory of those who were born in the Past. Other things may bring about the same result; a dream, the talking together of two former friends. Let the girl alone. She has acted as we might have expected a young girl--the only young girl among us--to have acted. She has found that the Past, which some of us have represented as full of woe and horror, had its pleasant side; she asks why that pleasant side could not be reproduced. I, myself, or any of us, might ask the same question. Nay, it is well known that I protest--and always shall protest, my friends and I--against the Theory of the Suffragan. His Triumph of Science we consider horrible to the last degree. I, for one, shall never be satisfied until the Present is wholly abolished, and until we have gone back to the good old system of Individualism, and begun to encourage the People once more to cultivate the old happiness by the old methods of their own exertion." I replied that my own recollection of the old time was perfectly clear, and that there was nothing but unhappiness in it. As a child I lived in the street; I never had enough to eat; I was cuffed and kicked; I could never go to bed at night until my father, who always came home drunk, was asleep; the streets were full of miserable children like myself. Where was the happiness described by my learned brother? Where was the pleasant side? More I said, but it suffices to record that by a clear majority it was Resolved to arrest the girl Christine in the morning, and to try all three prisoners, as soon as the Court could be prepared for them, according to ancient usage. Early in the morning I sought an interview with the Arch Physician. I found him, with the woman Mildred, sitting in the Chamber over the Porch. There was no look of terror, or even of dejection, on the face of either. Rather there was an expression as of exaltation. Yet they were actually going to die--to cease breathing--to lose consciousness! I told the prisoner that I desired to represent my own conduct in its true light. I reminded him that, with him, I was guardian of the Holy Secret. The power and authority of the College, I pointed out, were wholly dependent upon the preservation of that Secret in its own hands. By divulging it to the People he would make them as independent of the Physician as the Great Discovery itself had made them independent of the Priest. The latter had, as he pretended, the Keys of the After Life. The former did actually hold those of the Actual Life. The authority of the Physician gone, the people would proceed to divide among themselves, to split up into factions, to fight and quarrel, to hold private property, and in fact would speedily return to the old times, and all the work that we had accomplished would be destroyed. Every man would have the knowledge of the Secret for himself and his family. They would all begin to fight again--first for the family, next for the Commune, and then for the tribe or nation. All this would have been brought about by his treachery had not I prevented it. "Yes," he said, "doubtless you are quite right, Grout." He spoke quite in the old manner, as if I had been still his servant in the old laboratory. It was not till afterwards that I remembered this, and became enraged to think of his arrogance. "We will not argue the matter. It is not worth while. You acted after your kind, and as I might have expected." Again it was not until afterwards that I considered what he meant and was enraged. "When we allowed gentlehood to be destroyed, gentle manners, honor, dignity, and such old virtues went too. You acted--for yourself--very well, Grout. Have you anything more to say? As for us, we have gone back to the old times, this young lady and I--quite to the old, old times." He took her hand and kissed it, while his eyes met hers, and they were filled with a tenderness which amazed me. "This lady, Grout," he said, "has done me the honor of accepting my hand. You will understand that no greater happiness could have befallen me. The rest that follows is of no importance--none--not the least. My dear, this is Grout, formerly employed in my laboratory. Unfortunately he has no experience of Love, or of any of the Arts or Culture of the good old Time; but a man of great intelligence. You can go, Grout." CHAPTER XI. THE TRIAL AND SENTENCE. I was greatly pleased with the honest zeal shown by John Lax, the Porter, on this occasion. When, after snatching three or four hours' sleep, I repaired to the House, I found that worthy creature polishing at a grindstone nothing less than a great, heavy Execution Axe, which had done service many times in the old, old days on Tower Hill, and had since peacefully reposed in the Museum. "Suffragan," he said, "I am making ready." His feet turned the treadle, and the wheel flew round, and the sparks showered from the blunt old weapon. He tried the edge with his finger. "'Tis not so sharp as a razor," he said, "but 'twill serve." "John Lax, methinks you anticipate the sentence of the Court." "Suffragan, with submission, it is Death to divulge any secret of this House. It is Death even for me, Porter of the House, to tell them outside of any Researches or Experiments that I may observe in my service about the House. And if so great a Penalty is pronounced against one who would reveal such trifles as I could divulge, what of the Great Secret itself?" "Lax, you are a worthy man. Know, therefore, that this Secret once divulged, the Authority of the College would vanish; and we, even the Physicians themselves--to say nothing of the Assistants, the Bedells, and you yourself--would become no better than the Common People. You do well to be zealous." John Lax nodded his head. He was a taciturn man habitually; but now he became loquacious. He stopped the grindstone, laid down the axe, and rammed his hands into his pockets. "When I see them women dressed up like swells--" he began, grinning. "John, this kind of language belongs to the old days, when even speech was unequal." "No matter; you understand it. Lord! Sammy Grout, the brewer's boy--we were both Whitechapel pets; but I was an old 'un of five and thirty, while you were on'y beginning to walk the Waste with a gal on your arm--p'r'aps--and a ha'penny fag in your mouth. Hold on, now. It's like this--" What with the insolence of Dr. Linister, and the sight of the old dresses, and the sound of the old language, I myself was carried away. Yes, I was once more Sam Grout; again I walked upon the pavement of the Whitechapel Road; again I was a boy in the great brewery of Mile End Road. "Go on, John Lax," I said, with condescension. "Revive, if it is possible, something of the Past. I give you full leave. But when you come to the Present, forget not the reverence due to the Suffragan." "Right, guv'nor. Well, then, it's like this. I see them men and women dressed up in the old fallals, and goin' on like I've seen 'em goin' on long ago with their insolence and their haw-haws--damn 'em--and all the old feelings came back to me, and I thought I was spoutin' again on a Sunday mornin', and askin' my fellow-countrymen if they always meant to sit down and be slaves. And the memory came back to me--ah! proper it did--of a speech I made 'em one mornin' all about this French Revolution. 'Less 'ave our own Revolution,' I sez, sez I. 'Less bring out all the Bloomin' Kings and Queens,' I sez, 'the Dukes and Markisses, the fat Bishops and the lazy Parsons. Less do what the French did. Less make 'em shorter by the 'ed,' I sez. That's what I said that mornin'. Some of the people laughed, and some of 'em went away. There never was a lot more difficult to move than them Whitechappellers. They'd listen--and then they'd go away. They'd too much fine speeches give 'em--that was the matter with 'em--too much. Nothing never came of it. That night I was in the Public havin' a drop, and we began to talk. There was a row, and a bit of a fight. But before we was fired out I up and said plain, for everybody to hear, that when it came to choppin' off their noble 'eds I'd be the man to do it--and joyful, I said. Well now, Sammy Grout, you were in that Public Bar among that crowd--maybe you've forgotten it. But I remember you very well. You was standin' there, and you laughed about the choppin'. You've forgotten, Sammy. Think. It was a fine summer evenin': you weren't in Church. Come now--you can't say you ever went to Church, Sammy Grout." "I never did. But go on, John Lax. Recall as much of the Past as you wish, if it makes you love the Present more. I would not say aught to diminish an honest zeal." "Right, guv'nor. Well, I never got that chance. There was no choppin' of 'eds at all. When we had to murder the old people, your Honor would have it done scientifically; and there was as many old working-men killed off as swells, which was a thousand pities, an' made a cove's heart bleed. What I say is this. Here we've got a return to the old Times. Quite unexpected it is. Now we've got such a chance, which will never come again, let 'em just see how the old Times worked. Have a Procession, with the Executioner goin' before the criminals, his axe on his shoulder ready to begin. If you could only be Sammy Grout again--but that can't be, I'm afraid--what a day's outing you would have had to be sure! Suffragan, let us show 'em how the old Times worked. And let me be the Executioner. I'll do it, I promise you, proper. I've got the old spirit upon me--ah! and the old strength, too--just as I had then. Oh! It's too much!" He sat down and hugged the axe. I thought he would have kissed it. "It's too much! To think that the time would ever come when I should execute a swell--and that swell the Arch Physician himself. Damn him! He's always looked as if everybody else was dirt beneath his feet." "I know not," I told him gently, "what may be the decision of the Court. But, John Lax, continue to grind your axe. I would not throw cold water on honest zeal. Your strength, you say, is equal to your spirit. You will not flinch at the last moment. Ah! we have some honest men left." The Court was held that morning in the nave of the House itself. The Judges, who were the whole College of Physicians, sat in a semicircle; whereas the three prisoners stood in a row--the Arch Physician carrying himself with a haughty insolence which did not assist his chances: clinging to his arm, still in her silk dress, with her bracelets and chains, and her hair artfully arranged, was the woman called Mildred. She looked once, hurriedly, at the row of Judges, and then turned with a shudder--she found small comfort in those faces--to her lover, and laid her head upon his shoulder, while he supported her with his arm. The degradation and folly of the Arch Physician, apart from the question of his guilt, as shown in this behavior, were complete. Beside Mildred stood the girl Christine. Her face was flushed; her eyes were bright: she stood with clasped hands, looking steadily at the Judges: she wore, instead of the Regulation Dress, a frock of white stuff, which she had found, I suppose, in the Museum--as if open disobedience of our laws would prove a passport to favor. She had let her long hair fall upon her shoulders and down her back. Perhaps she hoped to conquer her Judges by her beauty--old time phrase! Woman's beauty, indeed, to Judges who know every bone and every muscle in woman's body, and can appreciate the nature of her intellect, as well as of her structure! Woman's Beauty! As if that could ever again move the world! Behind the President's Chair--I was the President--stood John Lax, bearing his halberd of office. The Doors of the House were closed: the usual sounds of Laboratory work were silent: the Assistants, who usually at this hour would have been engaged in Research and Experiment, were crowded outside the Court. I have been told, since, that there were omitted at the Trial many formalities which should have been observed at such a Trial. For instance, there should have been a Clerk or two to make notes of the proceedings: there should have been a Formal Indictment: and there should have been Witnesses. But these are idle forms. The guilt of the Prisoners was proved: we had seen it with our own eyes. We were both Judges and Witnesses. I was once, however, in the old days, charged (and fined) before a magistrate in Bow Street for assaulting a Constable, and therefore I know something of how a Criminal Court should proceed. So, without any unnecessary formalities, I conducted the Trial according to Common Sense. "What is your name?" I asked the Arch Physician. "Harry Linister--once M.D. of Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Society." "What are you by trade?" "Physicist and Arch Physician of the Holy College of the Inner House." "We shall see how long you will be able to describe yourself by those titles. Female Prisoner--you in the middle--what is your name?" "I am the Lady Mildred Carera, daughter of the Earl of Thordisá." "Come--come--none of your Ladyships and Earls here. We are now all equal. You are plain Mildred. And yours--you girl in the white frock? How dare you, either of you, appear before us in open violation of the Rules?" "I am named Christine," she replied. "I have put on the white frock because it is becoming." At this point I was interrupted by a whisper from John Lax. "Christine's friends," he said, "are gathering in the Museum, and they are very noisy. They threaten to give trouble." "When the Trial and Execution are over," I told him, "arrest them every one. Let them all be confined in the Museum. To-morrow, or perhaps this afternoon, we will try them as well." The man grinned with satisfaction. Had he known what a fatal mistake I was making, he would not have grinned. Rather would his face have expressed the most dreadful horror. Then the Trial proceeded. "Dr. Linister," I said, "it is a very singular point in this case that we have not to ask you whether you plead 'guilty' or 'not guilty,' because we have all seen you with our own eyes engaged in the very act with which you are charged. You _are_ guilty." "I am," he replied, calmly. "Your companion is also guilty. I saw her practising upon you those blandishments, or silly arts, by which women formerly lured men. We also saw her on the point of receiving from you the Great Secret, which must never be suffered to leave this Building." "Yes," she said, "if he is guilty, I am guilty as well." "As for you" (I turned to Christine), "you have been so short a time in the world--only nineteen years or so--that to leave it will cause little pain to you. It is not as if you had taken root with all the years of life which the others have enjoyed. Yet the Court would fail in its duty did it not point out the enormity of your offence. You were allowed to grow up undisturbed in the old Museum: you spent your time in developing a morbid curiosity into the Past. You were so curious to see with your own eyes what it was to outward show, that you cast about to find among the tranquil and contented People some whose minds you might disturb and lead back to the restless old times. This was a most guilty breach of confidence. Have you anything to say? Do you confess?" "Yes, I confess." "Next, you, with this woman and a Company who will also be brought to Justice before long, began to assemble together, and to revive, with the assistance of books, pictures, dress, and music, a portion of the Past. But what portion? Was it the portion of the vast majority, full of disease, injustice, and starvation? Did you show how the old Times filled the houses with struggling needlewomen and men who refused to struggle any longer? Did you show the Poor and the Unemployed? Not at all. You showed the life of the Rich and the Idle. And so you revived a longing for what shall never--never--be permitted to return--the Period of Property and the Reign of Individualism. It was your crime to misrepresent the Past, and to set forth the Exception as the Rule. This must be made impossible for the future. What have you to say, Christine?" "Nothing. I told you before. Nothing. I have confessed. Why keep on asking me?" She looked round the Court with no apparent fear. I suppose it was because she was so young, and had not yet felt any apprehension of the Fate which was now so near unto her. "Dr. Linister," I said, "before considering its sentence, the Court will hear what you may have to say." "I have but little to say," he replied. "Everybody in the College knows that I have always been opposed to the methods adopted by the Suffragan and the College. During the last few days, however, I have been enabled to go back once more to the half-forgotten Past, and have experienced once more the Emotions of which you have robbed Life. I have seen once more, after many, many years, the Fighting Passion, the Passion of Private Rights, and"--his voice dropped to a whisper--"I have experienced once more the Passion of Love." He stooped and kissed the woman Mildred on the forehead. "I regret that we did not succeed. Had we not been caught, we should by this time have been beyond your power--the Secret with us, to use or not, as we pleased--with a company strong enough to defy you, and with the old Life again before us, such as we enjoyed before you robbed us of it. We should have welcomed the old Life, even under the old conditions: we welcome, instead of it, the Thing which, only to think of, makes your hearts almost to stop beating with fear and horror." He stopped. That was a speech likely to win indulgence from the Court, was it not? I turned to the woman Mildred. "And you?" I asked. "What have I to say? The Present I loathe--I loathe--I loathe. I would not go back to it if you offered me instant release with that condition. I have found Love. Let me die--let me die--let me die!" She clung to her lover passionately, weeping and sobbing. He soothed her and caressed her. John Lax, behind me, snorted. Then I asked the girl Christine what she wished to say. She laughed--she actually laughed. "Oh!" she said, "in return for the past weeks, there is no punishment which I would not cheerfully endure. We have had--oh! the most delightful time. It has been like a dream. Oh! Cruel, horrid, wicked men! You found such a Life in the old Time, and you destroyed it; and what have you given us in return? You have made us all equal who were born unequal. Go, look at the sad and heavy faces of the People. You have taken away everything, deliberately. You have destroyed all--all. You have left nothing worth living for. Why, I am like Mildred. I would not go back to the Present again if I could! Yes, for one thing I would--to try and raise a Company of Men--not sheep--and hound them on to storm this place, and to kill--yes, to kill"--the girl looked so dangerous that any thought of mercy was impossible--"every one who belongs to this Accursed House of Life!" Here was a pretty outcome of study in the Museum! Here was a firebrand let loose among us straight from the bad old Nineteenth Century! And we had allowed this girl actually to grow up in our very midst. Well, she finished, and stood trembling with rage, cheeks burning, eyes flashing--a very fury. I invited the Court to retire to the Inner House, and took their opinions one by one. They were unanimous on several points--first, that the position of things was most dangerous to the Authority of the College and the safety of the People; next, that the punishment of Death alone would meet the case; thirdly, that, in future, the Museum, with the Library and Picture Galleries, must be incorporated with the College itself, so that this danger of the possible awakening of memory should be removed. Here, however, our unanimity ceased. For the Fellow, of whom I have already spoken as having always followed the Arch Physician, arose and again insisted that what had happened to-day might very well happen again: that nothing was more uncertain in its action, or more indestructible, than human memory: so that, from time to time, we must look for the arising of some Leader or Prophet who would shake up the people and bring them out of their torpor to a state of discontent and yearning after the lost. Wherefore he exhorted us to reconsider our Administration, and to provide some safety-valve for the active spirits. As to the Death of the three criminals, he would not, he could not, oppose it. He proposed, however, that the mode of Death should be optional. So great a light of Science as the Arch Physician had many secrets, and could doubtless procure himself sudden and painless death if he chose. Let him have that choice for himself and his companions; and, as regards the girl, let her be cast into a deep sleep, and then painlessly smothered by gas, without a sentence being pronounced upon her at all. This leniency, he said, was demanded by her youth and her inexperience. In reply, I pointed out that, as regards our Administration, we were not then considering it at all: that as for the mode of punishment, he had not only to consider the criminals, but also the People, and the effect of the Punishment upon them: we were not only to punish, but also to deter. I therefore begged the Court to go back to one of the former methods, and to one of the really horrible and barbarous, yet comparatively painless, methods. I showed that a mere report or announcement, made in the Public Hall, that the Arch Physician had been executed for Treason, would produce little or no effect upon the public mind, even if it were added that the two women, Mildred and Christine, had suffered with him: that our people needed to see the thing itself, in order to feel its true horror and to remember it. If Death alone were wanted, I argued, there were dozens of ways in which Life might be painlessly extinguished. But it was not Death alone that we desired; it was Terror that we wished to establish, in order to prevent another such attempt. "Let them," I concluded, "be taken forth in solemn Procession to the open space before the Public Hall; we ourselves will form part of that Procession. Let them in that place, in the sight of all the People, be publicly decapitated by the Porter of the House, John Lax." There was a good deal of opposition, at first, to this proposition, because it seemed barbarous and cruel; but the danger which had threatened the Authority--nay, the very existence--of the College, caused the opposition to give way. Why, if I had not been on the watch, the Secret would have been gone: the College would have been ruined. It was due to me that my proposals should be accepted. The sentence was agreed upon. I am bound to confess that, on being brought back to receive the sentence of the Court, the Prisoners behaved with unexpected Fortitude. The male criminal turned pale, but only for a moment, and the two women caught each other by the hand. But they offered no prayer for mercy. They were led back to their prison in the South Porch, until the necessary Preparations could be made. CHAPTER XII. THE REBELS. It is useless to regret a thing that is done and over; otherwise one might very bitterly regret two or three steps in these proceedings. At the same time, it may be argued that what happened was the exact opposite of what we had every reason to expect, and therefore we could not blame ourselves with the event. After uncounted years of blind obedience, respect for authority, and unquestioning submission, had we not a full right to expect a continuance of the same spirit? What we did not know or suspect was the violence of the reaction that had set in. Not only had these revolutionaries gone back to the Past, but to the very worst traditions of the Past. They had not only become anxious to restore these old traditions; they had actually become men of violence, and were ready to back up their new convictions by an appeal to arms. We ought to have arrested the conspirators as soon as they assembled; we ought to have locked them up in the Museum and starved them into submission; we ought to have executed our criminals in private; in short, we ought to have done just exactly what we did not do. While the Trial was proceeding, the new Party of Disorder were, as John Lax reported, gathered together in the Museum, considering what was best to be done. They now knew all. When John Lax, in the morning, arrested the girl Christine, by my orders, he told her in plain language what had already happened. "The Arch Physician is a Prisoner," he said. "He has been locked up all night in my room, over the South Porch. I watched below. Ha! If he had tried to escape, my instructions were to knock him on the head, Arch Physician or not. The woman Mildred is a Prisoner, as well. She was locked up with him. They may hold each other's hands and look into each other's eyes, in my room, as much as they please. And now, young woman, it is your turn." "Mine?" "Yours, my gal. So march along o' me." "Why, what have I done that I should be arrested?" "That you shall hear. March, I say. You are my Prisoner. You will stand your Trial--ah!" He smacked his lips to show his satisfaction, and wagged his head. He was a true Child of the People, and could not conceal his gratification at the discomfiture of traitors. "You will hear what the Court has to say--ah!" Again he repeated this sign of satisfaction. "You will be tried, and you will hear the Sentence of the Court--ah, ah! Do you know what it will be? Death!" he whispered. "Death for all! I see the sentence in the Suffragan's face. Oh! he means it." The girl heard without reply; but her cheeks turned pale. "You won't mind much," he went on. "You hardly know what it is to live. You haven't been alive long enough to feel what it means. You're only a chit of a girl. If it wasn't for the example, I dare say they would let you off. But they won't--they won't. Don't try it on. Don't think of going on your knees, or anything else. Don't go weeping or crying. The Court is as hard as nails." The honest fellow said this in his zeal for justice, and in the hope that nothing should be said or done which might avert just punishment. Otherwise, had this girl, who was, after all, young and ignorant, thrown herself fully and frankly upon our mercy, perhaps--I do not say--some of us might have been disposed to spare her. As it was--but you have seen. "We waste time," he said. "March!" She was dressed, as I have already related, in a masquerade white dress of the old time, with I know not what of ribbon round her waist, and wore her hair floating down her back. The old man--her grandfather, as she called him--sat in his arm-chair, looking on and coughing. John Lax paid no attention to him at all. "Good-by, grandad," she said, kissing him. "You will not see me any more, because they are going to kill me. You will find your inhaler in its place; but I am afraid you will have to manage for the future without any help. No one helps anybody in this beautiful Present. They are going to kill me. Do you understand? Poor old man! Good-by!" She kissed him again and walked away with John Lax through the Picture Gallery, and so into the College Gardens, and by the north postern into the House of Life. * * * * * When she was gone the old man looked about him feebly. Then he began to understand what had happened. His grandchild, the nurse and stay of his feebleness, was gone from him. She was going to be killed. He was reckoned a very stupid old man always. To keep the cases in the Museum free from dust was all that he could do. But the revival of the Past acted upon him as it had acted upon the others: it took him out of his torpor and quickened his perceptions. "Killed?" he cried. "My grandchild to be killed?" He was not so stupid as not to know that there were possible protectors for her, if he could find them in time. Then he seized his stick and hurried as fast as his tottering limbs would carry him to the nearest field, where he knew the sailor, named John, or Jack, Carera, was employed for the time among the peas and beans. "Jack Carera!" he cried, looking wildly about him and flourishing with his stick. "Jack! they are going to kill her! Jack--Jack Carera!--I say," he repeated. "Where is Jack Carera? Call him, somebody. They are going to kill her! They have taken my child a prisoner to the House of Life. I say Jack--Jack! Where is he? Where is he?" The men were working in gangs. Nobody paid the least heed to the old man. They looked up, saw an old man--his hat blown off, his long white hair waving in the wind--brandishing wildly his stick, and shrieking for Jack. Then they went on with their work; it was no business of theirs. Docile, meek, and unquestioning are the People. By accident, however, Jack was within hearing, and presently ran across the field. "What is it?" he cried. "What has happened?" "They have taken prisoner," the old man gasped, "the--the--Arch Physician--and--Lady Mildred--They are going to try them to-day before the College of Physicians. And now they have taken my girl--my Christine--and they will try her too. They will try them all, and they will kill them all." "That shall be seen," said Jack, a fierce look in his eyes. "Go back to the Museum, old man, and wait for me. Keep quiet, if you can: wait for me." In half an hour he had collected together the whole of the company, men and women, which formed their Party. They were thirty in number, and they came in from work in the Regulation Dress. The sailor briefly related what had happened. "Now," he said, "before we do anything more, let us put on the dress of the nineteenth century. That will help us to remember that our future depends upon ourselves, and will put heart in us." This done, he made them a speech. First, he reminded them how, by the help of one girl alone, the memory of the Past had been restored to them; next, he bade them keep in their minds the whole of that Past--every portion of it--and to brace up their courage with the thought of it--how delightful and desirable it was. And then he exhorted them to think of the Present, which he called loathsome, shameful, vile, and other bad names. "We are in the gravest crisis of our fortunes," he concluded. "On our action this day depends our whole future. Either we emerge from this crisis free men and women, or we sink back into the Present, dull and dismal, without hope and without thought. Nay, there is more. If we do not rescue ourselves, we shall be very speedily finished off by the College. Do you think they will ever forgive us? Not so. As they deal with the Arch Physician and these two ladies, so they will deal with us. Better so. Better a thousand times to suffer Death at once, than to fall back into that wretched condition to which we were reduced. What! You, who have learned once more what is meant by Love, will you give that up? Will you give up these secret assemblies where we revive the glorious Past, and feel again the old thoughts and the old ambitions? Never--swear with me--never! never! never!" They shouted together; they waved their hands; they were resolved. The men's eyes were alive again; in short, they were back again to the Past of their young days. "First," said Jack, "let us arm." He led them to a part of the Museum where certain old weapons stood stacked. Thanks to the Curator and to Christine, they had been kept bright and clear from rust by the application of oil. "Here are swords, lances, rifles--but we have no ammunition--bayonets. Let us take the rifles and bayonets. So. To every man one. Now, the time presses. The Trial is going on. It may be too late in a few minutes to save the prisoners. Let us resolve." Two plans suggested themselves at once. The first of these was to rush before the House of Life, break open the gates, and tear the prisoners from the hands of the Judges. The next was to ascertain, somehow, what was being done. The former counsel prevailed, and the men were already making ready for the attack when the great Bell of the House began to toll solemnly. "What is that?" cried the women, shuddering. It went on tolling, at regular intervals of a quarter of a minute. It was the knell for three persons about to die. Then the doors of the South Porch flew open, and one of the Bedells came forth. "What does that mean?" they asked. The Bedell walked across the great Garden and began to ring the Bell of the Public Hall--the Dinner Bell. Instantly the People began to flock in from the workshops and the fields, from all quarters, in obedience to a summons rarely issued. They flocked in slowly, and without the least animation, showing not the faintest interest in the proceedings. No doubt there was something or other--it mattered not what--ordered by the College. "Go, somebody," cried Jack--"go, Hilda," he turned to one of the girls; "slip on your working dress; run and find out what is being done. Oh! if we are too late, they shall pay--they shall pay! Courage, men! Here are fifteen of us, well-armed and stout. We are equal to the whole of that coward mob. Run, Hilda, run!" Hilda pushed her way through the crowd. "What is it?" she asked the Bedell, eagerly. "What has happened?" "You shall hear," he replied. "The most dreadful thing that can happen--a thing that has not happened since--.... But you will hear." He waited a little longer, until all seemed to be assembled. Then he stood upon a garden-bench and lifted up his voice: "Listen! listen! listen!" he cried. "By order of the Holy College, listen! Know ye all that, for his crimes and treacheries, the Arch Physician has been deposed from his sacred office. Know ye all that he is condemned to die." There was here a slight movement--a shiver--as of a wood, on a still autumn day, at the first breath of the wind. "He is condemned to die. He will be brought out without delay, and will be executed in the sight of the whole People." Here they trembled. "There are also condemned with him, as accomplices in his guilt, two women--named respectively Mildred, or Mildred Carera in the old style, and the girl Christine. Listen! listen! listen! It is forbidden to any either to leave the place during the time of punishment, or to interfere in order to stay punishment, or in any way to move or meddle in the matter. Listen! Listen! Long live the Holy College!" With that he descended and made his way back to the House. But Hilda ran to the Museum with the news. "Why," said Jack, "what could happen better? In the House, no one knows what devilry of electricity and stuff they may have ready to hand. Here, in the open, we can defy them. Nothing remains but to wait until the prisoners are brought out, and then--then," he gasped, "remember what we were. Geoffrey, you wear the old uniform. Let the spirit of your old regiment fire your heart again. Ay, ay, you will do. Now, let us a drill a little and practice fighting together, shoulder to shoulder. Why, we are invincible." Said I not that we might, if we ever regretted anything, regret that we did not lock these conspirators in the Museum before we brought out our prisoners to their death? The great Bell of the House tolled; the People stood about in their quiet way, looking on, apparently unmoved, while the carpenters quickly hammered together a scaffold some six feet high. Well. I confess it. The whole business was a mistake: the People were gone lower down than I had ever hoped: save for the shudder which naturally seized them on mention of the word Death, they showed no sign of concern. If, even then, I had gone forth to see how they took it, I might have reversed the order, and carried out the execution within. They wanted no lesson. Their Past, if it were once revived, would for the most part be a past of such struggling for life, and so much misery, that it was not likely they would care to revive it. Better the daily course, unchanged, unchangeable. Yet we know not. As my colleague in the House said, the memory is perhaps a thing indestructible. At a touch, at a flash of light, the whole of their minds might be lit up again; and the emotions, remembered and restored, might again seem what once they seemed, worth living for. Still the great Bell tolled, and the carpenters hammered, and the scaffold, strong and high, stood waiting for the criminals; and on the scaffold a block, brought from the butcher's shop. But the People said not a single word to each other, waiting, like sheep--only, unlike sheep, they did not huddle together. In the chamber over the Porch the prisoners awaited the completion of the preparations; and in the Museum the fifteen conspirators stood waiting, armed and ready for their Deed of Violence. CHAPTER XIII. THE EXECUTION. As the clock struck two, a messenger brought the news that the Preparations were complete. The College was still sitting in Council. One of the Physicians proposed that before the Execution the Arch Physician should be brought before us to be subjected to a last examination. I saw no use for this measure, but I did not oppose it; and presently John Lax, armed with his sharpened axe, brought the Prisoners before the Conclave of his late brethren. "Dr. Linister," I said, "before we start upon that Procession from which you will not return, have you any communication to make to the College? Your Researches--" "They are all in order, properly drawn up, arranged in columns, and indexed," he replied. "I trust they will prove to advance the Cause of Science--true Science--not the degradation of Humanity." "Such as they are, we shall use them," I replied, "according to the Wisdom of the College. Is there anything else you wish to communicate? Are there ideas in your brain which you would wish to write down before you die? Remember, in a few minutes you will be a senseless lump of clay, rolling round and round the world forever, like all the other lumps which form the crust of the Earth." "I have nothing more to communicate. Perhaps, Suffragan, you are wrong about the senseless lumps of clay. And now, if you please, do not delay the end longer, for the sake of those poor girls waiting in suspense." I could have wished more outward show of horror--prayers for forgiveness. No: Dr. Linister was always, in his own mind, an Aristocrat. The aristocratic spirit! How it survives even after the whole of the Past might have been supposed to be forgotten. Well: he was a tall and manly man, and he looked a born leader--a good many of them in the old days used to have that look. For my own part, I am short and black of face. No one would call me a leader born. But I deposed the Aristocrat. And as for him--what has become of him? "What would you have done for the People?" I asked him, "that would have been better for them than forgetfulness and freedom from pain and anxiety? You have always opposed the Majority. Tell us, at this supreme moment, what you would have done for them." "I know not now," he replied. "A month ago I should have told you that I would have revived the ancient order; I would have given the good things of the world to them who were strong enough to win them in the struggle: hard work, bad food, low condition should have been, as it used to be, the lot of the incompetent. I would have recognized in women their instinct for fine dress; I would have encouraged the revival of Love: I would have restored the Arts. But now--now--" "Now," I said, "that you have begun to make the attempt, you recognize at last that there is nothing better for them all than forgetfulness and freedom from anxiety, struggle, and thought." "Not so," he replied. "Not at all. I understand that unless the Spirit of Man mounts higher continually, the earthly things must grow stale and tedious, and so must perish. Yea: all the things which once we thought so beautiful--Music, Art, Letters, Philosophy, Love, Society--they must all wither and perish, if Life be prolonged, unless the Spirit is borne continually upward. And this we have not tried to effect." "The Spirit of Man? I thought that old superstition was cleared away and done with long ago. I have never found the Spirit in my Laboratory. Have you?" "No, I have not. That is not the place to find it." "Well. Since you have changed your mind--" "With us, the Spirit of Man has been sinking lower and lower, till it is clean forgotten. Man now lives for himself alone. The Triumph of Science, Suffragan, is yours. No more death; no more pain; no more ambition: equality absolute and the ultimate lump of human flesh, incorruptible, breathing, sleeping, absorbing food, living. Science can do no more." "I am glad, even at this last moment, to receive this submission of your opinions." "But," he said, his eye flashing, "remember. The Spirit of Man only sleeps: it doth not die. Such an awakening as you have witnessed among a few of us will some day--by an accident, by a trick of memory--how do I know? by a Dream! fly through the heads of these poor helpless sheep and turn them again into Men and Women, who will rend you. Now take me away." It is pleasant to my self-esteem, I say, to record that one who was so great an inquirer into the Secrets of Nature should at such a moment give way and confess that I was right in my administration of the People. Pity that he should talk the old nonsense. Why, I learned to despise it in the old days when I was a boy and listened to the fiery orators of the Whitechapel Road. The Procession was formed. It was like that of the Daily March to the Public Hall, with certain changes. One of them was that the Arch Physician now walked in the middle instead of at the end; he was no more clothed in the robes of office, but in the strange and unbecoming garb in which he was arrested. Before him walked the two women. They held a book between them, brought out of the Library by Christine, and one of them read aloud. It was, I believe, part of the incantation or fetish worship of the old time: and as they read, the tears rolled down their cheeks; yet they did not seem to be afraid. Before the Prisoners marched John Lax, bearing the dreadful axe, which he had now polished until it was like a mirror or a laboratory tool for brightness. And on his face there still shone the honest satisfaction of one whose heart is joyed to execute punishment upon traitors. He showed this joy in a manner perhaps unseemly to the gravity of the occasion, grinning as he walked and feeling the edge of the axe with his fingers. The way seemed long. I, for one, was anxious to get the business over and done with. I was oppressed by certain fears--or doubts--as if something would happen. Along the way on either side stood the People, ranged in order, silent, dutiful, stupid. I scanned their faces narrowly as I walked. In most there was not a gleam of intelligence. They understood nothing. Here and there a face which showed a spark of uneasiness or terror. For the most part, nothing. I began to understand that we had made a blunder in holding a Public Execution. If it was meant to impress the People, it failed to do so. That was certain, so far. What happened immediately afterwards did, however, impress them as much as they could be impressed. Immediately in front of the Public Hall stood the newly-erected scaffold. It was about six feet high, with a low hand-rail round it, and it was draped in black. The block stood in the middle. It was arranged that the Executioner should first mount the scaffold alone, there to await the criminals. The College of Physicians were to sit in a semicircle of seats arranged for them on one side of it, the Bedells standing behind them; the Assistants of the College were arranged on the opposite side of the scaffold. The first to suffer was to be the girl Christine. The second, the woman Mildred. Last, the greatest criminal of the three, the Arch Physician himself. The first part of the programme was perfectly carried out. John Lax, clothed in red, big and burly, his red face glowing, stood on the scaffold beside the block, leaning on the dreadful axe. The Sacred College were seated in their places; the Bedells stood behind them; the Assistants sat on the other side. The Prisoners stood before the College. So far all went well. Then I rose and read in a loud voice the Crimes which had been committed and the sentence of the Court. When I concluded I looked around. There was a vast sea of heads before me. In the midst I observed some kind of commotion as of people who were pushing to the front. It was in the direction of the Museum. But this I hardly noticed, my mind being full of the Example which was about to be made. As for the immobility of the People's faces, it was something truly wonderful. "Let the woman Christine," I cried, "mount the scaffold and meet her doom!" The girl threw herself into the arms of the other woman, and they kissed each other. Then she tore herself away, and the next moment she would have mounted the steps and knelt before the block, but.... The confusion which had sprung up in the direction of the Museum increased suddenly to a tumult. Right and left the people parted, flying and shrieking. And there came running through the lane thus formed a company of men, dressed in fantastic garments of various colors, armed with ancient weapons, and crying aloud, "To the Rescue! To the Rescue!" Then I sprang to my feet, amazed. Was it possible--could it be possible--that the Holy College of Physicians should be actually defied? It was possible; more, it was exactly what these wretched persons proposed to dare and to do. As for what followed, it took but a moment. The men burst into the circle thus armed and thus determined. We all sprang to our feet and recoiled. But there was one who met them with equal courage and defiance. Had there been--but how could there be?--any more, we should have made a wholesome example of the Rebels. John Lax was this one. He leaped from the scaffold with a roar like a lion, and threw himself upon the men who advanced, swinging his heavy axe around him as if it had been a walking-stick. No wild beast deprived of its prey could have presented such a terrible appearance. Baffled revenge--rage--the thirst for battle--all showed themselves in this giant as he turned a fearless front to his enemies and swung his terrible axe. I thought the rebels would have run. They wavered; they fell back; then at a word from their leader--it was none other than the dangerous man, the sailor called Jack, or John, Carera--they closed in and stood shoulder to shoulder, every man holding his weapon in readiness. They were armed with the ancient weapon called the rifle, with a bayonet thrust in at the end of it. "Close in, my men; stand firm!" shouted the sailor. "Leave John Lax to me. Ho! ho! John Lax, you and I will fight this out. I know you. You were the spy who did the mischief. Come on. Stand firm, my men; and if I fall, make a speedy end of this spy and rescue the Prisoners." He sprang to the front, and for a moment the two men confronted each other. Then John Lax, with another roar, swung his axe. Had it descended upon the sailor's head, there would have been an end of him. But--I know little of fighting; but it is certain that the fellow was a coward. For he actually leaped lightly back and dodged the blow. Then, when the axe had swung round so as to leave his adversary's side in a defenceless position, this disgraceful coward leaped forward and took a shameful advantage of this accident, and drove his bayonet up to the hilt in the unfortunate Executioner's body! John Lax dropped his axe, threw up his arms, and fell heavily backwards. He was dead. He was killed instantaneously. Anything more terrible, more murderous, more cowardly, I never witnessed. I know, I say, little of fighting and war. But this, I must always maintain, was a foul blow. John Lax had aimed his stroke and missed, it is true, owing to the cowardly leap of his enemy out of the way. But in the name of common fairness his adversary should have permitted him to resume his fighting position. As it was, he only waited, cowardly, till the heavy axe swinging round exposed John's side, and then stepped in and took his advantage. This I call murder, and not war. John Lax was quite dead. Our brave and zealous servant was dead. He lay on his back; there was a little pool of blood on the ground: his clothes were stained with blood: his face was already white. Was it possible? Our servant--the sacred servant of the Holy House--was dead! He had been killed! A servant of the Holy College had been killed! What next? What dreadful thing would follow? And the Criminals were rescued! By this time we were all standing bewildered, horrified, in an undignified crowd, Fellows and Assistants together. Then I spoke, but I fear in a trembling voice. "Men!" I said. "Know you what you do? Go back to the place whence you came, and await the punishment due to your crime. Back, I say!" "Form in Square," ordered the murderer, paying no heed at all to my commands. The Rebels arranged themselves--as if they had rehearsed the thing for weeks--every man with his weapon ready: five on a side, forming three sides of a square, of which the scaffold formed the fourth. Within the Square stood the three prisoners. "O Jack!" cried Christine. "We never dreamed of this." "O Harry!" murmured Mildred, falling into the arms of the rescued Dr. Linister. At such a moment, the first thing they thought of was this new-found love. And yet there are some who have maintained that human nature could have been continued by Science on the old lines! Folly at the bottom of everything! Folly and Vanity! "Sir," the Sailor man addressed Dr. Linister, "you are now our Chief. Take this sword and the command." He threw a crimson sash over the shoulders of him who but a minute before was waiting to be executed, and placed in his hands a drawn sword. Then the Chief--I am bound to say that he looked as if he were born to command--mounted the scaffold and looked round with eyes of authority. "Let the poor People be dismissed," he said. "Bid them disperse--go home--go to walk, and to rest or sleep, or anything that is left in the unhappy blank that we call their mind." Then he turned to the College. "There were some among you, my former Brethren," he said, "who in times past were friends of my own. You voted with me against the degradation of the People, but in vain. We have often communed together on the insufficiency of Science and the unwisdom of the modern methods. Come out from the College, my friends, and join us. We have the Great Secret, and we have all the knowledge of Science that there is. Cast in your lot with mine." Five or six of the Fellows stepped forth--they were those who had always voted for the Arch Physician--among them was the man who had spoken on the uncertainty of memory. These were admitted within the line of armed men. Nay, their gowns of office were taken from them and they presently received weapons. About twenty or thirty of the Assistants also fell out and were admitted to the ranks of the Rebels. "There come no more?" asked the Chief. "Well, choose for yourselves. Captain Heron, make the crowd stand back--clear them away with the butt ends of your rifles, if they will not go when they are told. So. Now let the rest of the College return to the House. Captain Carera, take ten men and drive them back. Let the first who stops, or endeavors to make the others stop, or attempts to address the people, be run through, as you despatched the man John Lax. Fellows and Assistants of the College--back to the place whence you came. Back, as quickly as may be, or it will be the worse for you." The ten men stepped out with lowered bayonets. We saw them approaching with murder in their eyes, and we turned and fled. It was not a retreat: it was a helter-skelter run--one over the other. If one fell, the savage Rebels prodded him in fleshy parts and roared with laughter. Fellows, Assistants, and Bedells alike--we fell over each other, elbowing and fighting, until we found ourselves at last--some with bleeding noses, some with black eyes, some with broken ribs, all with torn gowns--within the House of Life. The Rebels stood outside the South Porch, laughing at our discomfiture. "Wardens of the Great Secret," said Captain Carera, "you have no longer any Secret to guard. Meantime, until the pleasure of the Chief, and the Sentence of the Court is pronounced, REMEMBER. He who endeavors to escape from the House will assuredly meet his death. Think of John Lax, and do not dare to resist the authority of the Army." Then he shut the door upon us and locked it, and we heard the footsteps of the men as they marched away in order. This, then, was the result of my most fatal error. Had we, as we might so easily have done, executed our prisoners in the House itself, and locked up the Rebels in the Museum, these evils would not have happened. It is futile to regret the past, which can never be undone. But it is impossible not to regret a blunder which produced such fatal results. CHAPTER XIV. PRISONERS. Thus, then, were the tables turned upon us. We were locked up, prisoners--actually the Sacred College, prisoners--in the House of Life itself, and the Great Secret was probably by this time in the hands of the Rebels, to whom the Arch Traitor had no doubt given it, as he had proposed to do when we arrested him. Lost to us forever! What would become of the College when the Great Mystery was lost to it? Where would be its dignity? Where its authority? The first question--we read it in each other's eyes without asking it--was, however, not what would become of our authority, but of ourselves. What were they going to do with us? They had killed the unfortunate John Lax solely because he stood up manfully for the College. What could we expect? Besides, we had fully intended to kill the Rebels. Now we were penned up like fowls in a coop, altogether at their mercy. Could one have believed that the Holy College, the Source of Health, the Maintainer of Life, would ever have been driven to its House, as to a prison, like a herd of swine to their sty; made to run head over heels, tumbling over one another, without dignity or self-respect; shoved, bundled, cuffed, and kicked into the House of Life, and locked up, with the promise of instant Death to any who should endeavor to escape? But did they mean to kill us? That was the Question before us. Why should they not? We should have killed the Arch Physician, had they suffered it; and now they had all the power. I confess that the thought of this probability filled my mind with so great a terror that the more I thought of it the more my teeth chattered and my knees knocked together. Nay, the very tears--the first since I was a little boy--came into my eyes in thinking that I must abandon my Laboratory and all my Researches, almost at the very moment when the Triumph of Science was well within my grasp, and I was ready--nearly--to present Mankind at his last and best. But at this juncture the Assistants showed by their behavior and their carriage--now greatly wanting in respect--that they looked to us for aid, and I hastily called together the remaining Fellows in the Inner House. We took our places and looked at each other in dismay which could not be concealed. "Brothers," I said, because they looked to me for speech, "it cannot be denied that the Situation is full of Danger. Never before has the College been in danger so imminent. At this very instant they may be sending armed soldiers to murder us." At this moment there happened to be a movement of many feet in the nave, and it seemed as if the thing was actually upon us. I sat down, pale and trembling. The others did the same. It was several minutes before confidence was so far restored that we could speak coherently. "We have lived so long," I said, "and we have known so long the pleasure of Scientific Research, that the mere thought of Death fills us with apprehensions that the common people cannot guess. Our superior nature makes us doubly sensitive. Perhaps--let us hope--they may not kill us--perhaps they may make demands upon us to which we can yield. They will certainly turn us out of the College and House of Life and install themselves, unless we find a way to turn the tables. But we may buy our lives: we may even become their assistants. Our knowledge may be placed at their disposal--" "Yes, yes," they all agreed. "Life before everything. We will yield to any conditions." "The Great Secret has gone out of our keeping," I went on. "Dr. Linister has probably communicated it to all alike. There goes the whole Authority, the whole Mystery, of the College." "We are ruined!" echoed the Fellows in dismay. "Half a dozen of our Fellows have gone over, too. There is not now a Secret, or a Scientific Discovery, or a Process, concerning Life, Food, Health, or Disease, that they do not know as well as ourselves. And they have all the Power. What will they do with it? What can we do to get it out of their hands?" Then began a Babel of suggestions and ideas. Unfortunately every plan proposed involved the necessity of some one risking or losing his life. In the old times, when there were always men risking and losing their lives for some cause or other, I suppose there would have been no difficulty at all. I had been accustomed to laugh at this foolish sacrifice of one's self--since there is but one life--for pay, or for the good of others. Now, however, I confess that we should have found it most convenient if we could have persuaded some to risk--very likely they would not actually have lost--their lives for the sake of the Holy College. For instance, the first plan that occurred to us was this. We numbered, even after the late defections, two hundred strong in the College. This so-called "Army" of the Rebels could not be more than seventy, counting the deserters from the College. Why should we not break open the doors and sally forth, a hundred--two hundred--strong, armed with weapons from the laboratory, provided with bottles of nitric and sulphuric acid, and fall upon the Rebel army suddenly while they were unprepared for us? This plan so far carried me away that I called together the whole of the College--Assistants, Bedells, and all--and laid it before them. I pointed out that the overwhelming nature of the force we could hurl upon the enemy would cause so great a terror to fall upon them that they would instantly drop their arms and fly as fast as they could run, when our men would have nothing more to do but to run after and kill them. The men looked at one another with doubtful eyes. Finally, one impudent rascal said that as the Physicians themselves had most to lose, they should themselves lead the assault. "We will follow the Suffragan and the Fellows," he said. I endeavored to make them understand that the most valuable lives should always be preserved until the last. But in this I failed. The idea, therefore, of a sortie in force had to be abandoned. It was next proposed that we should dig a tunnel under the Public Hall and blow up the Rebels with some of the old explosives. But to dig a tunnel takes time, and then who would risk his life with the explosive? It was further proposed to send out a deputation of two or three, who should preach to the Rebels and point out the terrible consequences of their continued mutiny. But this appeared impracticable, for the simple reason that no one could be found to brave the threat of Captain Carera of death to any who ventured out. Besides, it was pointed out, with some reason, that if our messengers were suffered to reach the Rebels, no one would be moved by the threats of helpless prisoners unable to effect their own release. As for what was proposed to be done with electricity, hand-grenades, dynamite, and so forth, I pass all that over. In a word, we found that we could do nothing. We were prisoners. Then an idea occurred to me. I remembered how, many years before, Dr. Linister, who had always a mind full of resource and ingenuity, made a discovery by means of which one man, armed with a single weapon easy to carry, could annihilate a whole army. If war had continued in the world, this weapon would have put an immediate stop to it. But war ceased, and it was never used. Now, I thought, if I could find that weapon or any account or drawing of its manufacture, I should be able from the commanding height of the Tower, with my own hand, to annihilate Dr. Linister and all his following. I proceeded, with the assistance of the whole College, to hunt among the volumes of Researches and Experiments. There were thousands of them. We spent many days in the search. But we found it not. When we were tired of the search we would climb up into the Tower and look out upon the scene below, which was full of activity and bustle. Oh! if we could only by simply pointing the weapon, only by pressing a knob, see our enemies swiftly and suddenly overwhelmed by Death! But we could not find that Discovery anywhere. There were whole rows of volumes which consisted of nothing but indexes. But we could not find it in any of them. And so this hope failed. They did not kill us. Every day they opened the doors and called for men to come forth and fetch food. But they did not kill us. Yet the danger was ever present in our minds. After a week the College resolved that, since one alone of the body knew the Great Secret, that one being the most likely to be selected for execution if there were any such step taken, it was expedient that the Secret should be revealed to the whole College. I protested, but had to obey. To part with that Secret was like parting with all my power. I was no longer invested with the sanctity of one who held that Secret: the Suffragan became a simple Fellow of the College: he was henceforth only one of those who conducted Researches into Health and Food and the like. This suspense and imprisonment lasted for three weeks. Then the Rebels, as you shall hear, did the most wonderful and most unexpected thing in the world. Why they did it, when they had the House of Life, the College, and all in their own hands, and could have established themselves there and done whatever they pleased with the People, I have never been able to understand. CHAPTER XV. THE RECRUITING SERGEANT. When the College had thus ignominiously been driven into the House and the key turned upon us, the Rebels looked at each other with the greatest satisfaction. "So far," said Jack, "we have succeeded beyond our greatest hopes. The Prisoners are rescued; the only man with any fight in him has been put out of the temptation to fight any more; the Holy College are made Prisoners; ourselves are masters of the field, and certain to remain so; and the People are like lambs--nothing to be feared from them--nothing, apparently, to be hoped." They had been reduced to terror by the violence of the Rebels in pushing through them; they had rushed away, screaming: those of them who witnessed the horrible murder of John Lax were also seized with panic, and fled. But when no more terrifying things befell, they speedily relapsed into their habitual indifference, and crept back again, as if nothing had happened at all, to dawdle away their time in the sunshine and upon the garden benches--every man alone, as usual. That the Holy College were Prisoners--that Rebels had usurped the Authority--affected them not a whit, even if they understood it. My administration had been even too successful. One could no longer look to the People for anything. They were now, even more rapidly than I had thought possible, passing into the last stages of human existence. "Ye Gods!" cried Dr. Linister, swearing in the language of the Past and by the shadows long forgotten. "Ye Gods! How stupid they have become! I knew not that they were so far gone. Can nothing move them? They have seen a victorious Rebellion--a Revolution, not without bloodshed. But they pay no heed. Will nothing move them? Will words? Call some of them together, Jack. Drive them here. Let us try to speak to them. It may be that I shall touch some chord which will recall the Past. It was thus that you--we--were all awakened from that deadly Torpor." Being thus summoned, the People--men and women--flocked about the scaffold, now stripped of its black draperies, and listened while Dr. Linister harangued them. They were told to stand and listen, and they obeyed, without a gleam in their patient, sheep-like faces to show that they understood. * * * * * "I can do no more!" cried Dr. Linister, after three-quarters of an hour. He had drawn a skilful and moving picture of the Past; he had depicted its glories and its joys, compared with the dismal realities of the Present. He dwelt upon their loveless and passionless existence; he showed them how they were gradually sinking lower and lower--that they would soon lose the intelligence necessary even for the daily task. Then he asked them if they would join his friends and himself in the new Life which they were about to begin: it should be full of all the old things--endeavor, struggle, ambition, and Love. They should be alive, not half dead. More he said--a great deal more--but to no purpose. If they showed any intelligence at all, it was terror at the thought of change. Dr. Linister descended. "It is no use," he said. "Will you try, Jack?" "Not by speaking. But I will try another plan." He disappeared, and presently came back again, having visited the cellars behind the Public Halls. After him came servants, rolling barrels and casks at his direction. "I am going to try the effect of a good drink," said Jack. "In the old days they were always getting drunk, and the trades had each their favorite liquor. It is now no one knows how long since these poor fellows have had to become sober, because they could no longer exceed their ration. Let us encourage them to get drunk. I am sure that ought to touch a chord." This disgraceful idea was actually carried out. Drink of all kinds--spirits, beer, and every sort of intoxicating liquor--were brought forth, and the men were invited to sit down and drink freely, after the manner of the old time. When they saw the casks brought out and placed on stands, each ready with its spigot, and, beside the casks, the tables and benches, spread for them--on the benches, pipes and tobacco--gleams of intelligence seemed to steal into their eyes. "Come," said Jack, "sit down, my friends; sit down, all of you. Now then, what will you drink? What shall it be? Call for what you like best. Here is a barrel of beer; here is stout; here are gin, whiskey, rum, Hollands, and brandy. What will you have? Call for what you please. Take your pipes. Why, it is the old time over again." They looked at each other stupidly. The very names of these drinks had been long forgotten by them. But they presently accepted the invitation, and began to drink greedily. At seven o'clock, when the Supper Bell rang, there were at least three hundred men lying about, in various stages of drunkenness. Some were fast asleep, stretched at their full length on the ground; some lay with their heads on the table; some sat, clutching at the pewter mugs; some were vacuously laughing or noisily singing. "What do you make of your experiment?" asked Dr. Linister. "Have you struck your chord?" "Well, they have done once more what they used to do," said Jack, despondently; "and they have done it in the same old way. I don't think there could ever have been any real jolliness about the dogs, who got drunk as fast as ever they could. I expected a more gradual business. I thought the drink would first unloose their tongues, and set them talking. Then I hoped that they would, in this way, be led to remember the Past; and I thought that directly they began to show any recollection at all, I would knock off the supply and carry on the memory. But the experiment has failed, unless"--here a gleam of hope shone in his face--"to-morrow's hot coppers prove a sensation so unusual as to revive the memory of their last experience in the same direction--never mind how many years ago. Hot coppers _may_ produce that result." He ordered the casks to be rolled back to the cellars. That evening the Rebels, headed by Dr. Linister--all dressed in scarlet and gold, with swords--and with them the ladies--(they were called ladies now, nothing less--not women of the People any more)--came to the Public Hall, dressed for the evening in strange garments, with bracelets, necklaces, jewels, gloves, and things which most of the People had never seen. But they seemed to take no heed of these things. "They are hopeless," said Jack. "Nothing moves them. We shall have to begin our new life with our own company of thirty." "Leave them to us," said Mildred. "Remember, it was by dress that Christine aroused us from our stagnant condition; and it was by us that you men were first awakened. Leave them to us." After the evening meal the ladies went about from table to table, talking to the women. Many of these, who had belonged to the working classes in the old Time, and had no recollection at all of fine dress, looked stupidly at the ladies' dainty attire. But there were others whose faces seemed to show possibilities of other things. And to these the ladies addressed themselves. First, they asked them to look at their fine frocks and bangles and things; and next, if any admiration was awakened, they begged them to take off their flat caps and to let down their hair. Some of them consented, and laughed with new-born pride in showing off their long-forgotten beauty. Then the ladies tied ribbons round their necks and waists, put flowers into their hair, and made them look in the glass. Not one of those who laughed and looked in the glass but followed the ladies that evening to the Museum. They came--a company of Recruits fifty strong, all girls. And then the whole evening was devoted to bringing back the Past. It came quickly enough to most. To some, a sad Past, full of hard, underpaid work; to some, a Past of enforced idleness; to some, a Past of work and pay and contentment. They were shopgirls, work-girls, ballet-girls, barmaids--all kinds of girls. To every one was given a pretty and becoming dress; not one but was rejoiced at the prospect of changing the calm and quiet Present for the emotions and the struggles of the Past. But they were not allowed to rest idle. Next day these girls again, with the ladies, went out and tried the effect of their new dress and their newly-restored beauty upon other women first, and the men afterwards. As they went about, lightly and gracefully, singing, laughing, daintily dressed, many of the men began to lift up their sleepy eyes, and to look after them. And when the girls saw these symptoms, they laid siege to such a man, two or three together; or perhaps one alone would undertake the task, if he was more than commonly susceptible. As for those on whom bright eyes, smiles, laughter, and pretty dresses produced no effect, they let them alone altogether. But still Recruits came in fast. Every night they did all in their power to make the Past live again. They played the old Comedies, Melodramas, and Farces in the Public Hall; they sang the old songs; they encouraged the Recruits to sing; they gave the men tobacco and beer; they had dances and music. Every morning the original company of Rebels sat in Council. Every afternoon the Recruits, dressed like soldiers of the Past, were drawn up, drilled, and put through all kinds of bodily exercise. * * * * * We were Prisoners, I said, for three weeks. One morning, at the end of that time, a message came to us from the "Headquarters of the Army." This was now their official style and title. The Chief ordered the immediate attendance of the Suffragan and two Fellows of the College of Physicians. At this terrifying order, I confess that I fell into so violent a trembling--for, indeed, my last hour seemed now at hand--that I could no longer stand upright; and, in this condition of mind, I was carried--being unable to walk, and more dead than alive--out of the House of Life to the Headquarters of the Rebel Army. CHAPTER XVI. A MOST UNEXPECTED CONCLUSION. I confess, I say, that I was borne in a half-fainting condition from the House of Life. "Farewell, Suffragan, farewell!" said my Brethren of the College, gathered within the South Porch, where a guard of armed Rebels waited for us. "Your turn to-day, ours to-morrow! Farewell! Yet if any concessions can be made--" Yes--yes--if any concessions could be made, only to save life, they might be certain that I should make them. The two Fellows of the College upon whom the lot--they drew lots--had fallen, accompanied me, with cheeks as pallid and hearts as full of terror as my own. A company of twenty men, armed, escorted us. I looked on the way for lines of People to witness the Downfall of the College and the Execution of its Heads. I looked for the scaffold which we had erected, and for the executioner whom we had provided. I listened for the Great Bell which we had caused to be rung. Strange! There were no People at all; the way from the House was quite clear; the People were engaged as usual at their work. I saw no scaffold, and no executioner. I heard no Great Bell. Yet the absence of these things did not reassure me in the least. But everything, even in these short three weeks, was changed. Nearly the whole of the open space before the Public Hall was now covered with rows of gay-colored tents, over which flew bright little flags. They were quite small tents, meant, I learned afterwards, for sleeping. Besides these there were great tents open at the sides, and spread, within, with tables and benches, at which sat men smoking tobacco and drinking beer, though it was as yet only the forenoon. Some of them were playing cards, some were reading books, and some--a great many--were eagerly talking. They were all dressed in tunics of scarlet, green, and gray, and wore leathern belts with helmets--the costume seemed familiar to me. Then I remembered; it was the old dress of a soldier. Wonderful! After Science had lavished all her resources in order to suppress and destroy among the People the old passions--at the very first opportunity the Rebels had succeeded in awakening them again in their worst and most odious form! There were also large open spaces upon which, regardless of the flower-beds, some of the men were marching up and down in line, carrying arms, and performing evolutions to the command of an officer. Some of the men, again, lay sprawling about on benches, merely looking on and doing nothing--yet with a lively satisfaction in their faces. They ought to have been in the fields or the workshops. And everywhere among the men, looking on at the drill, sitting in the tents, walking beside them, sitting with them on the benches, were the girls, dressed and adorned after the bad old false style, in which the women pretended to heighten and set off what they are pleased to call their charms by garments fantastically cut, the immodest display of an arm or a neck, hair curiously dressed and adorned, colored ribbons, flowers stuck in their hats, and ornaments tied on wherever it was possible. And such joy and pride in these silly decorations! No one would believe how these girls looked at each other and themselves. But to think that the poor silly men should have fallen into the nets thus clumsily spread for them! And this, after all our demonstrations to show that woman bears in every limb the mark of inferiority, so that contempt, or at least pity, and not admiration at all, to say nothing of the extraordinary foolish passion of Love, should be the feeling of man for woman! However, at this moment I was naturally too much occupied with my own danger to think of these things. One thing, however, one could not avoid remarking. The Rebellion must have spread with astonishing rapidity. It was no longer a company of fifteen or sixteen men--it was a great Army that we saw. And there was no longer any doubt possible as to the movement. The Past was restored. In the faces of the young men and the girls, as we passed through them, I remarked, sick with terror as I was, the old, old expression which I hoped we had abolished forever--the eagerness, the unsatisfied desire, and the Individualism. Yes--the Individualism. I saw on their faces, plain to read, the newly-restored Rights of Property. Why, as I walked through one of the groups, composed of men and women, one of the men suddenly rushed forward and struck another in the face with his fist. "She's my girl!" he cried, hoarsely. "Touch her if you dare." They closed round the pair and led them off. "Going to fight it out," said one of our Guards. To fight it out! What a Fall! To fight it out!--To call a woman--or anything else--your own after all our teaching. And to fight it out! And all this arrived at in three weeks! These things I observed, I say, as one observes things in a dream, and remembers afterwards. My heart failed me altogether, and I nearly fainted, when we stopped at a long tent before which floated a flag on a flagstaff. They carried me within and placed me in a chair. As soon as my eyes recovered the power of sight I saw, sitting at the head of the table, Dr. Linister, dressed in some sort of scarlet coat, with a sash and gold lace. Then, indeed, I gave myself up for lost. It was the Court, and we were called before it to receive sentence. At his side sat half a dozen officers bravely dressed. The tent was filled with others, including many women richly dressed--I observed the woman Mildred, clad in crimson velvet, and the girl Christine, in white, and I thought they regarded me with vindictive eyes. When we were seated, Dr. Linister looked up--his face was always grave, but it was no longer melancholy. There was in it, now, something of Hope or Triumph or Resolution--I know not what. "Brothers," he said, gravely, "once my brothers of the College, I have called you before us in order to make a communication of the greatest importance, and one which will doubtless cause you considerable surprise. What is the matter, Suffragan? Hold him up, somebody. We desire that you should hear from our own lips what we propose to do. "First, will somebody give Dr. Grout a glass of wine or brandy, or something? Pray be reassured, gentlemen. No harm, I promise, shall happen to any of you. First, in a day or two the doors of the House will be thrown open, and you shall be free again to renew your old life--if you still feel disposed to do so. I repeat that no violence is intended towards you. Grout, pull yourself together, man. Sit up, and leave off shaking. You will be able without opposition, I say, to carry on again your Administration of the People on the old lines. I trust, however, that you will consider the situation, and the condition to which you have reduced unfortunate Humanity, very seriously. "In short, though we are absolute masters of the situation, and now command a Force against which it would be absurd for you to contend, we are going to abandon the Field, and leave everything to you." Were we dreaming? "The Present is so odious to our People; the surroundings of this place are so full of the horrible and loathsome Present, that we have resolved to leave it altogether. We find, in fact, that it will be impossible to begin the new Life until all traces of your Administration are removed or lost. And we shall be so much clogged by your Public Halls, your houses, your system, and the miserable lives to which you have reduced most of the men and women, that we must either send them--and you--away, or go away ourselves. On the whole, it will give us less trouble to go away ourselves. Therefore, as soon as our Preparations are ready, we shall go. "We shall carry with us from the Common Stores all that we shall be likely to want in starting our New Community. We shall leave you to work out, undisturbed, the Triumph of Science, as you understand it, upon these poor wretches, already more than half stupefied by your treatment. "We shall take with us all those whom by any means--by the beauty of women, the splendor of arms, the ancient dresses, the ancient music, the ancient dances--we have been able to awaken from their torpor. They amount in all to no more than a thousand or so of young men and as many maidens. As for the rest, they are sunk in a lethargy so deep that we have been unable to rouse them. They are already very near to the condition which you desire. "Yet I know not. These poor dull brains may be swiftly and suddenly fired with some contagion which may at any time ruin your calculations and destroy the boasted Triumph. Do not rely too much upon the Torpor of this apparently helpless herd. You had at the beginning a grand weapon with which to enslave them. You could keep them alive, and you could save them from disease--if only they were obedient. If they once get beyond the recollection or the fear of either, what will you do? "We go"--he paused, and looked round the room, filled with the eager faces which brought the Past back to me--futile eagerness! ever pressing on, gaining nothing, sinking into the grave before there was time to gain anything! That had come back--that! "We go," he repeated--his face had long been so melancholy that one hardly knew him for the same man, so triumphant was it now--"we go to repair the mistakes of many, many years. We go to lead Mankind back into the ancient paths. It was not altogether you, my friends, who destroyed Humanity; it was mainly the unfortunate Discovery of the German Professor. We were working admirably in the right direction; we were making life longer, which was then far too short; we were gradually preventing diseases, which had been beyond the control of our wisest men; we were, by slow degrees, in the only true way--through the Revelation of Nature--feeling our way to Health and Prolongation of Life. Yet, whatever happened, whatever we might discover, the First Law of Life--which we did not understand--was that to all things earthly there must come an End. "Then happened the event by which that End was indefinitely postponed. "Again, I say, I blame not you so much as the current of events which bore you along. It seemed logical that everybody, able or imbecile, weak or strong, healthy or sickly, skilled or incompetent, should alike reap the Fruits of the Great Discovery. If he did so, he was also entitled to his equal share in the world's goods. This was the Right of Man, put forward as if there could be no question at all about it. Every child was to inherit an equal share of everything. It was a false and a mischievous claim. What every child inherited was the right of fighting for his share, without danger of injustice or oppression. And the next step, after the Slaughter of the Old, was the forbidding of more births. What that has done for the world, look round and see for yourselves in the torpor of the women and the apathy of the men. "The People by this time had learned the great lesson that you wished to teach them--that Death and Disease were the only two evils. Then the College of Physicians took the place of the former Priesthood, with its own Mysteries to guard and its gifts to distribute. I do not deny that you--we--have done the work well. The Prevention of the old Diseases is nearly perfect. Yet, at any moment, a new class of Disease may spring up and baffle all your Science." He had often talked in this way before, but never with so much authority. Yet he was going to abandon the whole--all that he and his friends had gained! Were we dreaming? His talk about my Administration affected me not one whit. I knew all his arguments. But the thought that he was going away, that he would actually leave us in Power and Possession, filled me with amazement. The others looked and listened as if he were speaking for them. "The Right of Man to an equal share in everything has been carried out. Look around you, and ask yourselves if the result is satisfactory. I have often asked you that question. You have replied that the Present is only a stage in the Triumph of Science. What is the next stage? To that question also you have a reply. "Well, we give it back to you--the whole of your Present; your People, so stupid, so docile, so sluggish; your House; your College; your Secrecy; your Mystery; your Authority. Take them. You shall have them again, to do with them as seems fit to you." At these words my heart welled over with joy. Would he really--but on what conditions?--would he really give us back the whole? There were no conditions. He meant exactly what he said. He would give everything back to us. Were we dreaming? Were we dreaming? "As for me and my friends," he said, "we shall sally forth to found a new Settlement, and to govern it by the ideas of the Past. No one in our Settlement will be obliged to work; but if he does not, he shall certainly starve. Nobody will inherit any share to anything except what he may win by struggle. There will be no equality at all, but every man shall have what he can honestly get for himself. No women shall be compelled to work; but they may work if they please, and at such things as they please. Many old and long-forgotten things have been already revived; such as Love: we are in love again--we, who actually forgot what love was like for all the years which we have ceased to number or to chronicle. It is impossible to describe to you, my former Brother Suffragan, who never even in the old days felt the passion--the intense joy, the ecstasy--of Love." The other men murmured approval. "But Love is a plant which, while it is hardy to endure many things, withers and dies under certain conditions. It was found to flourish in the old time, through all the changes of life: it survived the time of youth and beauty; it lasted through middle age; flourished through the scenes of old age; it lasted beyond the grave. It endured changes of fortune, decay of health, poverty, sickness, and even helplessness. But one thing kills Love. It cannot endure the dull monotony which has followed the Great Discovery: it cannot live long while the face and form know no change; while the voice never changes; while the dress, the hours of work, the work itself, the food, know no change. These are things which kill the Flower of Love. Now, all things desirable--this is a saying too hard for you, Suffragan--depend upon Love. With Love, they have revived: the courtesy of man to woman; the deference of the stronger to the weaker; the stimulus of work; hope and ambition; self-sacrifice; unselfishness; devotion; the sweet illusions of imagination--all these things have been born again within the last three weeks. They have been born again, and, with them, the necessity of an End. All things earthly most have an end." The Chief looked round him: the men murmured approval, and tears stood in the eyes of the women. "We cannot let them die. And since the First Law of Love is change--and the Certain End--we have resolved, Suffragan, on forgetting the Grand Discovery." Could this be our late Arch Physician? Were we dreaming? "We shall forego any share in it. Only the chiefs here gathered together know as yet what has been resolved. Little by little the truth will get possession of our people that an End is ordained." We made no reply to this extraordinary announcement. What could we say? We only gasped with wonder. "You cannot understand this, Grout. I do not expect that you should. For long years past I have understood that the Great Discovery was the greatest misfortune that ever happened to mankind. For all things must have an End: else all that is worth preserving will wither and die. "I have nearly done. You can go back to your House, and you can carry on your Administration as you please. But there is a warning which we have first to pronounce before we let you go. Your Ultimate Triumph of Science is too great a degradation of Humanity to be endured. In years to come when our successors rule in our place, they shall send an army here to inquire into the conduct of your Trust. If we find the People more brutish, deeper sunk in apathy and torpor, that army will seize the House of Life and the College of Physicians, and will destroy your laboratories, and will suffer all--men and women of the People and Fellows of the Sacred College alike--to die. Never forget this warning. You shall surely die. "One more point, and I have done. I mention it with diffidence, Grout, because I cannot hope for your sympathy. Your own convictions on the subject were arrived at--you have often told us--when you were a boy, and were based upon the arguments of a Sunday-morning Spouter in the Whitechapel Road. I believe that John Lax, deceased, was the Learned Authority who convinced you. Therefore, you will not understand me, Grout, when I tell you that we have found the Soul again--the long-lost Soul. All earthly things must have an End. But there are things beyond that end. Most astonishing things are likely to follow from this discovery. Long thoughts and great hopes have already begun to spring up in our minds. Our people are reading again--the old Literature is full of the Soul: they are reading the great Poets of old, and are beginning to understand what they mean. I cannot make this intelligible to you, Grout. You will not understand all that this discovery brings with it. You will never, never understand that it is a Discovery ten times--a million times--greater and better for mankind than the Great Discovery itself, of which you and I alone held the Secret. "I take that Secret with me because I cannot forget it. But, I repeat, we shall never use it. Soon, very soon, the new active life will make men once more familiar with the old figure who carried a scythe. There will be accidents; new diseases will arise; age will creep slowly on--the Great Discovery will be quietly forgotten in minds which you had made so dull that they could not understand when we rescued them what it meant. But we, the leaders, shall know well that their happiness must have an End. All earthly things," he repeated, for the fifth time, "must have an End. That is all, Grout; but when you hear from me again, unless the Administration is changed indeed, the People--the College--and you, my Suffragan--shall all die together. You shall die, Grout! You and your friends shall die! And so, Farewell. Guard. Take them back to the House." We returned to the House relieved of our terror, but much amazed. I had heard, in the old days, how men would be so blockishly possessed by the thought of a woman--a creature inferior to man--that they would throw away everything in the world for her sake. And now Dr. Linister himself--with all those who followed after him--had given up everything; because if Life goes, what is there left? And for the sake of a woman? What could it mean? How to explain this madness on any scientific theory? We told our Colleagues, and they marvelled; and some suspected a trick. But Dr. Linister was not a man to play tricks. As for the Soul and all that rubbish, if Dr. Linister was so mad as to give up everything for a woman, he might just as well adopt all the old Creeds together. That was no concern of ours. And as for this precious discovery about things earthly coming to an end, what had that to do with the calm and tranquil state of pure existence which we were providing for mankind? Why should that ever have an end? * * * * * That threatened army has never come. For some time the thought of it gave us considerable uneasiness. But it has never come; and I believe, for my own part, that now it never will come. As for the People, there has been no such outbreak of Memory as was prophesied. On the contrary, they have approached more and more, in docility, meekness, mindlessness, and absence of purpose, to the magnificent Ideal which I cherish for them. I know not when it will arrive; but the time is as certain to come as the morrow's sun is to dawn, when the last stage of Humanity will be reached--an inert mass of breathing, feeding, sleeping flesh, kept by the Holy College--the Triumph of Science--free from Decay and Death. They went away in the afternoon, three or four days later. They took with them everything from the Public Stores which they thought would be useful: provisions of all kinds; wine, beer, and cider in casks; stuff for clothing; furniture; everything that they could think of. They took the pictures out of the Gallery, the books from the Library, and nearly everything that was in the Museum. From the laboratory in the House they took a great number of volumes and a quantity of instruments. At the last moment, nearly all the Assistants and the workmen agreed to join them; so that we were left with numbers greatly reduced. It is impossible to enumerate the vast quantities of things which they took with them. The wagons in which they were packed covered a couple of miles of road: the drivers were taken from the People, and ordered to discharge their duty; and, as they never came back, these poor wretches probably perished with the Rebels. They went forth in perfect order: first, an advance guard of mounted men; then a portion of the main body, among whom rode the Chief with his staff. After them came the women, some riding on horseback, among whom were the woman Mildred and the girl Christine, showing in their faces that foolish and excited happiness which is so different from the sweet tranquillity which we have introduced. Indeed, all the women were beyond themselves with this silly happiness. They sang, they laughed, they talked. Some sat in carriages of all kinds, some in wagons; some walked; and, what with their chatter and their dresses, one would have thought them a company of monkeys dressed up. After the women came the wagons, and, lastly, the rest of the men. I forgot to say that they had bands of music with them--drums, fifes, cornets, and all kinds of musical instruments--and that they carried flags, and that the men sang as they marched. Whither they went, or what became of them--whether they carried out the desperate resolve of giving up the Great Discovery--I know not. They marched away, and we returned to our former life. * * * * * One thing more I must relate. We--that is, the College--were seated, reassured as to our safety, watching this great Departure. Five minutes or so after the women had passed, I observed two of my own friends--learned Fellows of the College, who had always followed my lead and voted with me--eagerly whispering each other, and plucking one another by the sleeve. Then they suddenly rose and pulled off their black gowns, and fled swiftly in the direction of the wagons and carriages where the women sat. We have never seen or heard from any of these unfortunate men since. * * * * * I am now myself the Arch Physician. THE END. BY WALTER BESANT. ALL IN A GARDEN FAIR. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN. Illustrated. 4to, Paper, 20 cents; 12mo, Cloth, $1 25. DOROTHY FORSTER. 4to, Paper, 20 cts. FIFTY YEARS AGO. 8vo, Cloth, $2 50. FOR FAITH AND FREEDOM. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth; also, 8vo, Paper. (_In Press._) HERR PAULUS. 8vo, Paper, 35 cents. KATHERINE REGINA. 4to, Paper, 15 cents. LIFE OF COLIGNY. 32mo, Paper, 25 cents; Cloth, 40 cents. SELF OR BEARER. 4to, Paper, 15 cts. "SO THEY WERE MARRIED." Illustrated. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. THE CAPTAIN'S ROOM. 4to, Paper, 10 cents. THE CHILDREN OF GIBEON. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. THE HOLY ROSE. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. THE INNER HOUSE. 8vo, Paper. (_Just Ready._) THE WORLD WENT VERY WELL THEN. Illustrated. 4to, Paper, 25 cents; 12mo, Cloth, $1 25. TO CALL HER MINE. Illustrated. 4to, Paper, 20 cents. UNCLE JACK AND OTHER STORIES. 12mo, Paper, 25 cents. PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. _Any of the above works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price._ 
6903	----	MISS LUDINGTON'S SISTER by EDWARD BELLAMY CHAPTER I. The happiness of some lives is distributed pretty evenly over the whole stretch from the cradle to the grave, while that of others comes all at once, glorifying some particular epoch and leaving the rest in shadow. During one, five, or ten blithe years, as the case may be, all the springs of life send up sweet waters; joy is in the very air we breathe; happiness seems our native element. During this period we know what is the zest of living, as compared with the mere endurance of existence, which is, perhaps, the most we have attained to before or since. With men this culminating epoch comes often in manhood, or even at maturity, especially with men of arduous and successful careers. But with women it comes most frequently perhaps in girlhood and young womanhood. Particularly is this wont to be the fact with women who do not marry, and with whom, as the years glide on, life becomes lonelier and its interests fewer. By the time Miss Ida Ludington was twenty-five years old she recognised that she had done with happiness, and that the pale pleasures of memory were all which remained to her. It was not so much the mere fact that her youth was past, saddening though that might be, which had so embittered her life, but the peculiarly cruel manner in which it had been taken from her. The Ludingtons were one of the old families of Hilton, a little farming village among the hills of Massachusetts. They were not rich, but were well-to-do, lived in the largest house in the place, and were regarded somewhat as local magnates. Miss Ludington's childhood had been an exceptionally happy one, and as a girl she had been the belle of the village. Her beauty, together, with her social position and amiability of disposition, made her the idol of the young men, recognised leader of the girls, and the animating and central figure in the social life of the place. She was about twenty years old, at the height of her beauty and in the full tide of youthful enjoyment, when she fell ill of a dreadful disease, and for a long time lay between life and death. Or, to state the case more accurately, the girl did die--it was a sad and faded woman who rose from that bed of sickness. The ravages of disease had not left a vestige of her beauty--it was hopelessly gone. The luxuriant, shining hair had fallen out and been replaced by a scanty growth of washed-out hue; the lips, but yesterday so full, and red, and tempting, were thin, and drawn, and colourless, and the rose-leaf complexion had given place to an aspect so cruelly pitted, seamed, and scarred that even friends did not recognize her. The fading of youth is always a melancholy experience with women; but in most cases the process is so gradual as to temper the poignancy of regret, and perhaps often to prevent its being experienced at all except as a vague sentiment. But in Miss Ludington's case the transition had been piteously sharp and abrupt. With others, ere youth is fully past its charms are well-nigh forgotten in the engrossments of later years; but with her there had been nothing to temper the bitterness of her loss. During the long period of invalidism which followed her sickness her only solace was a miniature of herself, at the age of seventeen, painted on ivory, the daguerrotype process not having come into use at this time, which was toward the close of the third decade of the present century. Over this picture she brooded hours together when no one was near, studying the bonny, gladsome face through blinding tears, and sometimes murmuring incoherent words of tenderness. Her young friends occasionally came to sit with her, by way of enlivening the weary hours of an invalid's day. At such times she would listen with patient indifference while they sought to interest her with current local gossip, and as soon as possible would turn the conversation back to the old happy days before her sickness. On this topic she was never weary of talking, but it was impossible to induce her to take any interest in the present. She had caused a locket to be made, to contain the ivory miniature of herself as a girl, and always wore it on her bosom. In no way could her visitors give her more pleasure than by asking to see this picture, and expressing their admiration of it. Then her poor, disfigured face would look actually happy, and she would exclaim, "Was she not beautiful?" "I do not think it flattered her, do you?" and with other similar expressions indicate her sympathy with the admiration expressed. The absence of anything like self-consciousness in the delight she took in these tributes to the charms of her girlish self was pathetic in its completeness. It was indeed not as herself, but as another, that she thought of this fair girl, who had vanished from the earth, leaving a picture as her sole memento. How, indeed, could it be otherwise when she looked from the picture to the looking-glass, and contrasted the images? She mourned for her girlish self, which had been so cruelly effaced from the world of life, as for a person, near and precious to her beyond the power of words to express, who had died. From the time that she had first risen from the sick-bed, where she had suffered so sad a transformation, nothing could induce her to put on the brightly coloured gowns, beribboned, and ruffled, and gaily trimmed, which she had worn as a girl; and as soon as she was able she carefully folded and put them away in lavender, like relics of the dead. For herself, she dressed henceforth in drab or black. For three or four years she remained more or less an invalid. At the end of that time she regained a fair measure of health, although she seemed not likely ever to be strong. In the meanwhile her school-mates and friends had pretty much all married, or been given in marriage. She was a stranger to the new set of young people which had come on the stage since her day, while her former companions lived in a world of new interests, with which she had nothing in common. Society, in reorganizing itself, had left her on the outside. The present had moved on, leaving her behind with the past. She asked nothing better. If she was nothing to the present, the present was still less to her. As to society, her sensitiveness to the unpleasant impression made by her personal appearance rendered social gatherings distasteful to her, and she wore a heavy veil when she went to church. She was an only child. Her mother had long been dead, and when about this time her father died she was left without near kin. With no ties of contemporary interest to hold her to the present she fell more and more under the influence of the habit of retrospection. The only brightness of colour which life could ever have for her lay behind in the girlhood which had ended but yesterday, and was yet so completely ended. She found her only happiness in the recollections of that period which she retained. These were the only goods she prized, and it was the grief of her life that, while she had strong boxes for her money, and locks and keys for her silver and her linen, there was no device whereby she could protect her store of memories from the slow wasting of forgetfulness. She lived with a servant quite alone in the old Ludington homestead, which it was her absorbing care to keep in precisely the same condition, even to the arrangement of the furniture, in which it had always been. If she could have insured the same permanence in the village of Hilton, outside the homestead enclosure, she would have been spared the cause of her keenest unhappiness. For the hand of change was making havoc with the village: the railroad had come, shops had been built, and stores and new houses were going up on every side, and the beautiful hamlet, with its score or two of old-fashioned dwellings, which had been the scene of her girlhood, was in a fair way to be transformed into a vile manufacturing village. Miss Ludington, to whom every stick and stone of the place was dear, could not walk abroad without missing some ancient landmark removed since she had passed that way before, perhaps a tree felled, some meadow, that had been a playground of her childhood, dug up for building-lots, or a row of brick tenements going up on the site of a sacred grove. Her neighbours generally had succumbed to the rage for improvement, as they called it. There was a general remodelling and modernizing of houses, and, where nothing more expensive could be afforded, the paint-brush wrought its cheap metamorphosis. "You wouldn't know Hilton was the same place," was the complacent verdict of her neighbours, to which Miss Ludington sorrowfully assented. It would be hard to describe her impotent wrath, her sense of outrage and irreparable loss, as one by one these changes effaced some souvenir of her early life. The past was once dead already; they were killing it a second time. Her feelings at length became so intolerable that she kept her house, pretty much ceasing to walk abroad. At this period, when she was between thirty and thirty-five years old, a distant relative left her a large fortune. She had been well-to-do before, but now she was very rich. As her expenses had never exceeded a few hundred dollars a year, which had procured her everything she needed, it would be hard to imagine a person with less apparent use for a great deal of money. And yet no young rake, in the heyday of youth and the riot of hot blood, could have been more overjoyed at the falling to him of a fortune than was this sad-faced old maid. She became smiling and animated. She no longer kept at home, but walked abroad. Her step was quick and strong; she looked on at the tree-choppers, the builders, and the painters, at their nefarious work, no more in helpless grief and indignation, but with an unmistakable expression of triumph. Presently surveyors appeared in the village, taking exact and careful measurements of the single broad and grassy street which formed the older part of it. Miss Ludington was closeted with a builder, and engrossed with estimates. The next year she left Hilton to the mercy of the vandals, and never returned. But it was to another Hilton that she went. The fortune she had inherited had enabled her to carry out a design which had been a day-dream with her ever since the transformation of the village had begun. Among the pieces of property left her was a large farm on Long Island several miles out of the city of Brooklyn. Here she had rebuilt the Hilton of her girlhood, in facsimile, with every change restored, every landmark replaced. In the midst of this silent village she had built for her residence an exact duplicate of the Ludington homestead, situated in respect to the rest of the village precisely as the original was situated in the real Hilton. The astonishment of the surveyors and builders at the character of the work required of them was probably great, and their bills certainly were, though Miss Ludington would not have grudged the money had they been ten times greater. However, seeing that the part of the village duplicated consisted of but one broad maple-planted street, with not over thirty houses, mostly a story and a half, and that none of the buildings, except the school-house, the little meeting-house, and the homestead, were finished inside, the outlay was not greater than an elaborate plan of landscape gardening would have involved. The furniture and fittings of the Massachusetts homestead, to the least detail, had been used to fit up its Long Island duplicate, and when all was complete and Miss Ludington had settled down to housekeeping, she felt more at home than in ten years past. True, the village which she had restored was empty; but it was not more empty than the other Hilton had been to her these many years, since her old schoolmates had been metamorphosed into staid fathers and mothers. These respectable persons were not the schoolmates and friends of her girlhood, and with no hard feelings toward them, she had still rather resented seeing them about, as tending to blur her recollections of their former selves, in whom alone she was interested. That her new Long Island neighbours considered her mildly insane was to her the least of all concerns. The only neighbours she cared about were the shadowy forms which peopled the village she had rescued from oblivion, whose faces she fancied smiling gratefully at her from the windows of the homes she had restored to them. For she had a notion that the spirits of her old neighbours, long dead, had found out this resurrected Hilton, and were grateful for the opportunity to revisit the unaltered scenes of their passion. If she had grieved over the removal of the old landmarks and the change in the appearance of the village, how much more hopelessly must they have grieved if indeed the dead revisit earth! The living, if their homes are broken up, can make them new ones, which, after a fashion, will serve the purpose; but the dead cannot. They are thenceforth homeless and desolate. No sense of having benefited living persons would have afforded Miss Ludington the pleasure she took in feeling that, by rebuilding ancient Hilton, she had restored homes to these homeless ones. But of all this fabric of the past which she had resurrected, the central figure was the school-girl Ida Ludington. The restored village was the mausoleum of her youth. Over the great old-fashioned fireplace, in the sitting-room of the homestead which she had rebuilt in the midst of the village, she had hung a portrait in oil, by the first portrait-painter then in the country. It was an enlarged copy of the little likeness on ivory which had formerly been so great a solace to her. The portrait was executed with extremely life-like effect, and was fondly believed by Miss Ludington to be a more accurate likeness in some particulars than the ivory picture itself. It represented a very beautiful girl of seventeen or eighteen, although already possessing the ripened charms of a woman. She was dressed in white, with a low bodice, her luxuriant golden hair, of a rare sheen and fineness, falling upon beautifully moulded shoulders. The complexion was of a purity that needed the faint tinge of pink in the cheeks to relieve it of a suspicion of pallor. The eyes were of the deepest, tenderest violet, full of the light of youth, and the lips were smiling. It was, indeed, no wonder that Miss Ludington had mourned the vanishing from earth of this delectable maiden with exceeding bitterness, or that her heart yet yearned after her with an aching tenderness across the gulf of years. How bright, how vivid, how glowing had been the life of that beautiful girl! How real as compared with her own faint and faded personality, which, indeed, had shone these many years only by the light reflected from that young face! And yet that life, in its strength and brightness, had vanished like an exhalation, and its elements might no more be recombined than the hues of yesterday's dawn. Miss Ludington had hung the portraits of her father and mother with immortelles, but the frame of the girl's picture she had wound with deepest crape. Her father and mother she did not mourn as one without hope, believing that she should see them some day in another world; but from the death of change which the girl had died no Messiah had ever promised any resurrection. CHAPTER II. The solitude in which Miss Ludington lived had become, through habit, so endeared to her that when, a few years after she had been settled in her ghostly village, a cousin died in poverty, bequeathing to her with his last breath a motherless infant boy, it was with great reluctance that she accepted the charge. She would have willingly assumed the support of the child, but if it had been possible would have greatly preferred providing for him elsewhere to bringing him home with her. This, however, was impracticable, and so there came to be a baby in the old maid's house. Little Paul De Riemer was two years old when he was brought to live with Miss Ludington--a beautiful child, with loving ways, and deep, dark, thoughtful eyes. When he was first taken into the sitting-room, the picture of the smiling girl over the fireplace instantly attracted his gaze, and, putting out his arms, he cooed to it. This completed the conquest of Miss Ludington, whose womanly heart had gone out to the winsome child at first sight. As the boy grew older his first rational questions were about the pretty lady in the picture, and, he was never so happy as when Miss Ludington took him upon her knee and told him stories about her for hours together. These stories she always related in the third person, for it would only puzzle and grieve the child to intimate to him that there was anything in common between the radiant girl he had been taught to call Ida and the withered woman whom he called Aunty. What, indeed, had they in common but their name? and it had been so long since any one had called her Ida, that Miss Ludington scarcely felt that the name belonged to her present self at all. In their daily walks about the village she would tell the little boy endless stories about incidents which had befallen Ida at this spot or that. She was never weary of telling, or he of listening to, these tales, and it was wonderful how the artless sympathy of the child comforted the lone woman. One day, when he was eight years old, finding himself alone in the sitting-room, the lad, after contemplating Ida's picture for a long time, piled one chair on another, and climbing upon the structure, put up his chubby lips to the painted lips of the portrait and kissed them with right good-will. Just then Miss Ludington came in, and saw what he was doing. Seizing him in her arms, she cried over him and kissed him till he was thoroughly frightened. A year or two later, on his announcing one day his intention to marry Ida when he grew up, Miss Ludington explained to him that she was dead. He was quite overcome with grief at this intelligence, and for a long time refused to be comforted. And so it was, that never straying beyond the confines of the eerie village, and having no companion but Miss Ludington, the boy fell scarcely less than she under the influence of the beautiful girl who was the presiding genius of the place. As he grew older, far from losing its charm, Ida's picture laid upon him a new spell. Her violet eyes lighted his first love-dreams. She became his ideal of feminine loveliness, drawing to herself, as the sun draws mist, all the sentiment and dawning passion of the youth. In a word, he fell in love with her. Of course he knew now who she had been. Long before as soon as he was old enough to understand it, this had been explained to him. But though he was well aware that neither on earth nor in heaven, nor anywhere in the universe, did she any more exist, that knowledge was quite without effect upon the devotion which she had inspired. The matter indeed, presented itself in a very simple way to his mind. "If I had never seen her picture," he said one day to Miss Ludington, "I should never have known that my love was dead, and I should have gone seeking her through all the world, and wondering what was the reason I could not find her." Miss Ludington was over sixty years of age and Paul was twenty-two when he finished his course at college. She had naturally supposed that, on going out into the world, mixing with young men and meeting young women, he would outgrow his romantic fancy concerning Ida; but the event was very different. As year after year he returned home to spend his vacations, it was evident that his visionary passion was strengthening rather than losing its hold upon him. But the strangest thing of all was the very peculiar manner in which, during the last vacation preceding his graduation, he began to allude to Ida in his conversations with Miss Ludington. It was, indeed, so peculiar that when, after his return to college, she recalled the impression left upon her mind, she was constrained to think that she had, somehow, totally misunderstood him; for he had certainly seemed to talk as if Ida, instead of being that most utterly, pathetically dead of all dead things--the past self of a living person--were possibly not dead at all: as if, in fact she might have a spiritual existence, like that ascribed to the souls of those other dead whose bodies are laid in the grave. Decidedly, she must have misunderstood him. Some months later, on one of the last days of June, he graduated. Miss Ludington would have attended the graduation exercises but for the fact that her long seclusion from society made the idea of going away from home and mingling with strangers intolerable. She had expected him home the morning after his graduation. When, however, she came downstairs, expecting to greet him at the breakfast-table, she found instead a letter from him, which, to her further astonishment, consisted of several closely written sheets. What could have possessed him to write her this laborious letter on the very day of his return? The letter began by telling her that he had accepted an invitation from a class-mate, and should not be home for a couple of days. "But this is only an excuse," he went on; "the true reason that I do not at once return is that you may have a day or two to think over the contents of this letter before you see me; for what I have to say will seem very startling to you at first. I was trying to prepare you for it when I talked, as you evidently thought, so strangely, about Ida, the last time I was at home; but you were only mystified, and I was not ready to explain. A certain timidity held me back. It was so great a matter that I was afraid to broach it by word of mouth lest I might fail to put it in just the best way before your mind, and its strangeness might terrify you before you could be led to consider its reasonableness. But, now that I am coming home to stay, I should not be able to keep it from you, and it has seemed to me better to write you in this way, so that you may have time fully to debate the matter with your own heart before you see me. Do you remember the last evening that I was at home, my asking you if you did not sometimes have a sense of Ida's presence? You looked at me as if you thought I were losing my wits. What did I mean, you asked, by speaking of her as a living person? But I was not ready to speak, and I put you off. "I am going to answer your question now. I am going to tell you how and why I believe that she is neither lost nor dead, but a living and immortal spirit. For this, nothing less than this, is my absolute assurance, the conviction which I ask you to share. "But stop, let us go back. Let us assume nothing. Let us reason it all out carefully from the beginning. Let me forget that I am her lover. Let me be stiff; and slow, and formal as a logician, while I prove that my darling lives for ever. And you, follow me carefully, to see if I slip. Forget what ineffable thing she is to you; forget what it is to you that she lives. Do not let your eyes fill; do not let your brain swim. It would be madness to believe it if it is not true. Listen, then:-- You know that men speak of human beings, taken singly, as individuals. It is taken for granted in the common speech that the individual is the unit of humanity, not to be subdivided. That is, indeed, what the etymology of the word means. Nevertheless, the slightest reflection will cause any one to see that this assumption is a most mistaken one. The individual is no more the unit of humanity than is the tribe or family; but, like them, is a collective noun, and stands for a number of distinct persons, related one to another in a particular way, and having certain features of resemblance. The persons composing a family are related both collaterally and by succession or descent, while the persons composing an individual are related by succession only. They are called infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, maturity, age, and dotage. "These persons are very unlike one another. Striking physical, mental, and moral differences exist between them. Infancy and childhood are incomprehensible to manhood, and manhood not less so to them. The youth looks forward with disgust to the old age which is to follow him, and the old man has far more in common with other old men, his own contemporaries, than with the youth who preceded him. How frequently do we see the youth vicious and depraved, and the man who follows him upright and virtuous, hating iniquity! How often, on the other hand, is a pure and innocent girlhood succeeded by a dissolute and shameless womanhood! In many cases age looks back upon youth with inexpressible longing and tenderness, and quite as often with shame and remorse; but in all cases with the same consciousness of profound contrast, and of a great gulf fixed between. "If the series of persons which constitutes an individual could by any magic be brought together and these persons confronted with one another, in how many cases would the result be mutual misunderstanding, disgust, and even animosity? Suppose, for instance, that Saul, the persecutor of the disciples of Jesus, who held the garments of them that stoned Stephen, should be confronted with his later self, Paul the apostle, would there not be reason to anticipate a stormy interview? For there is no more ground to suppose that Saul would be converted to Paul's view than the reverse. Each was fully persuaded in his own mind as to what he did. "But for the fact that each one of the persons who together constitute an individual is well off the field before his successor comes upon it, we should not infrequently see the man collaring his own youth, handing him over to the authorities, and prefering charges against him as a rascally fellow. "Not by any means are the successive persons of an individual always thus out of harmony with one another. In many, perhaps in a majority, of cases, the same general principles and ideals are recognized by the man which were adopted by the boy, and as much sympathy exists between them as is possible in view of the different aspects which the world necessarily presents to youth and age. In such cases, no doubt, could the series of persons constituting the individual be brought together, a scene of inexpressibly tender and intimate communion would ensue. "But, though no magic may bring back our past selves to earth, may we not hope to meet them hereafter in some other world? Nay, must we not expect so to meet them if we believe in the immortality of human souls? For if our past selves, who were dead before we were alive, had no souls, then why suppose our present selves have any? Childhood, youth, and manhood are the sweetest, the fairest, the noblest, the strongest of the persons who together constitute an individual. Are they soulless? Do they go down in darkness to oblivion while immortality is reserved for the withered soul of age? If we must believe that there is but one soul to all the persons of an individual it would be easier to believe that it belongs to youth or manhood, and that age is soulless. For if youth, strong-winged and ardent, full of fire and power, perish, leaving nothing behind save a few traces in the memory, how shall the flickering spirit of age have strength to survive the blast of death? "The individual, in its career of seventy years, has not one body, but many, each wholly new. It is a commonplace of physiology that there is not a particle in the body to-day that was in it a few years ago. Shall we say that none of these bodies has a soul except the last, merely because the last decays more suddenly than the others? "Or is it maintained that, although there is such utter diversity-- physical, mental, moral--between infancy and manhood, youth and age, nevertheless, there is a certain essence common to them all, and persisting unchanged through them all, and that this is the soul of the individual? But such an essence as should be the same in the babe and the man, the youth and the dotard, could be nothing more than a colourless abstraction, without distinctive qualities of any kind--a mere principle of life like the fabled jelly protoplasm. Such a fancy reduces the hope of immortality to an absurdity. "No! no! It is not any such grotesque or fragmentary immortality that God has given us. The Creator does not administer the universe on so niggardly a plan. Either there is no immortality for us which is intelligible or satisfying, or childhood, youth, manhood, age, and all the other persons who make up an individual, live for ever, and one day will meet and be together in God's eternal present; and when the several souls of an individual are in harmony no doubt He will perfect their felicity by joining them with a tie that shall be incomparably more tender and intimate than any earthly union ever dreamed of, constituting a life one yet manifold--a harp of many strings, not struck successively as here on earth, but blending in rich accord. "And now I beg you not to suppose that what I have tried to demonstrate is any hasty or ill-considered fancy. It was, indeed, at first but a dream with which the eyes of my sweet mistress inspired me, but from a dream it has grown into a belief, and in these last months into a conviction which I am sure nothing can shake. If you can share it the long mourning of your life will be at an end. For my own part I could never return to the old way of thinking without relapsing into unutterable despair. To do so would be virtually to give up faith in any immortality at all worth speaking of. For it is the long procession of our past selves, each with its own peculiar charm and incommunicable quality, slipping away from us as we pass on, and not the last self of all whom the grave entraps, which constitutes our chief contribution to mortality. What shall it avail for the grave to give up its handful if there be no immortality for this great multitude? God would not mock us thus. He has power not only over the grave, but over the viewless sepulchre of the past, and not one of the souls to which he has ever given life will be found wanting on the day when he makes up his jewels." CHAPTER III. To understand the impression which Paul's letter produced upon Miss Ludington imagine, in the days before the resurrection of the dead was preached, with what effect the convincing announcement of that doctrine would have fallen on the ears of one who had devoted her life to hopeless regrets over the ashes of a friend. And yet at no time have men been wholly without belief in some form of survival beyond the grave, and such a bereaved woman of antiquity would merely have received a more clear and positive assurance of what she had vaguely imagined before. But that there was any resurrection for her former self--that the bright youth which she had so yearned after and lamented could anywhere still exist, in a mode however shadowy, Miss Ludington had never so much as dreamed. There might be immortality for all things else; the birds and beasts, and even the lowest forms of life, might, under some form, in some world, live again; but no priest had ever promised, nor any poet ever dreamed, that the title of a man's past selves to a life immortal is as indefeasible as that of his present self. It did not occur to her to doubt, to quibble, or to question, concerning the grounds of this great hope. From the first moment that she comprehended the purport of Paul's argument, she had accepted its conclusion as an indubitable revelation, and only wondered that she had never thought of it herself, so natural, so inevitable, so incontrovertible did it seem. And as a sunburst in an instant transforms the sad fields of November into a bright and cheerful landscape, so did this revelation suddenly illumine her sombre life. All day she went about the house and the village like one in a dream, smiling and weeping, and reading Paul's letter over and over, through eyes swimming with a joy unutterable. In the afternoon, with tender, tremulous fingers, she removed the crape from the frame of Ida's picture, which it had draped for so many years. As she was performing this symbolic act, it seemed to the old lady that the fair young face smiled upon her. "Forgive me!" she murmured. "How could I have ever thought you dead!" It was not till evening that her servants reminded her that she had not eaten that day, and induced her to take food. The next afternoon Paul arrived. He had not been without very serious doubt as to the manner in which his argument for the immortality of past selves might impress Miss Ludington. A mild melancholy such as hers sometimes becomes sweet by long indulgence. She might not welcome opinions which revolutionized the fixed ideas of her life, even though they should promise a more cheerful philosophy. If she did not accept his belief, but found it chimerical and visionary, the effect of its announcement upon her mind could only be unpleasantly disturbing. It was, therefore, not without some anxiety that he approached the house. But his first glimpse of her, as she stood in the door awaiting him, dissipated his apprehensions. She wore a smiling face, and the deep black in which she always dressed was set off, for the first time since his knowledge of her, with a bit or two of bright colour. She said not a word, but, taking him by the hand, led him into the sitting-room. That morning she had sent into Brooklyn for immortelles, and had spent the day in festooning them about Ida's picture, so that now the sweet girlish face seemed smiling upon them out of a veritable bower of the white flowers of immortality. In the days that followed, Miss Ludington seemed a changed woman, such blitheness did the new faith she had found bring into her life. The conviction that the past was deathless, and her bright girlhood immortal, took all the melancholy out of retrospection. Nay, more than that, it turned retrospection into anticipation. She no longer viewed her youth-time through the pensive haze of memory, but the rosy mist of hope. She should see it again, for was it not safe with God? Her pains to guard the memory of the beautiful past, to preserve it from the second death of forgetfulness, were now all needless; she could trust it with God, to be restored to her in his eternal present, its lustre undimmed, and no trait missing. The laying aside of her mourning garb was but one indication of the change that had come over her. The whole household, from scullion to coachman, caught the inspiration of her brighter mood. The servants laughed aloud about the house. The children of the gardener, ever before banished to other parts of the grounds, played unrebuked in the sacred street of the silent village. As for Paul, since the revelation had come to him that the lady of his love was no mere dream of a life for ever vanished, but was herself alive for evermore, and that he should one day meet her, his love had assumed a colour and a reality it had never possessed before. To him this meant all it would have meant to the lover of a material maiden, to be admitted to her immediate society. The sense of her presence in the village imparted to the very air a fine quality of intoxication. The place was her shrine, and he lived in it as in a sanctuary. It was not as if he should have to wait many years, till death, before he should see her. As soon as he gave place to the later self which was to succeed him, he should be with her. Already his boyish self had no doubt greeted her, and she had taken in her arms the baby Paul who had held his little arms out to her picture twenty years before. To be in love with the spirit of a girl, however beautiful she might have been when on earth, would doubtless seem to most young men a very chimerical sort of passion; but Paul, on the other hand, looked upon the species of attraction which they called love as scarcely more than a gross appetite. During his absence from home he had seen no woman's face that for a moment rivalled Ida's portrait. Shy and fastidious, he had found no pleasure in ladies' society, and had listened to his classmates' talk of flirtations and conquests with secret contempt. What did they know of love? What had their coarse and sensuous ideas in common with the rare and delicate passion to which his heart was dedicated--a love asking and hoping for no reward, but sufficient to itself? He had spent but a few weeks at home when Miss Ludington began to talk quite seriously to him about studying for some profession. He was rather surprised at this, for he had supposed she would be glad to have him at home, for a while at lease, now that he had done with college. To Paul, at this time, the idea of any pursuit which would take him away from the village was extremely distasteful, and he had no difficulty in finding excuses enough for procrastinating a step for which, indeed, no sort of urgency could be pretended. He was to be Miss Ludington's heir, and any profession which he might adopt would be purely ornamental at most. Finding that he showed no disposition to consider a profession she dropped that point and proposed that he should take six months of foreign travel, as a sort of rounding off of his college course. To the advantages of this project he was, however, equally insensible. When she urged it on him, he said, "Why, aunty, one would say you were anxious to get rid of me. Don't we get on well together? Have you taken a dislike to me? I'm sure I'm very comfortable here. I don't want to do anything different, or to go off anywhere. Why won't you let me stay with you?" And so she had to let the matter drop. The truth was she had become anxious to get him away; but it was on his account, not hers. In putting his room to rights one day since his return from college she had come upon a scrap of paper containing some verses addressed "To Ida." Paul had rather a pretty knack at turning rhymes, and the tears came to Miss Ludington's eyes as she read these lines. They were an attempt at a love sonnet, throbbing with passion, and yet so mystical in some of the allusions that nothing but her knowledge of Paul's devotion to Ida would have given her a clue to his meaning. She was filled with apprehension as she considered the effect which this infatuation, if it should continue to gain strength, might have upon one of Paul's dreamy temperament and excessive ideality. That she had devoted her own lonely and useless life to the cult of the past did not greatly matter, although in the light of her present happier faith she saw and regretted her mistake; but as for permitting Paul's life to be overshadowed by the same influence she could not consent to it. Something must be done to get him away from home, or at least to divert the current of his thought. The failure of her efforts to induce him to consider any scheme that involved his leaving the village threw her into a state of great uneasiness. CHAPTER IV. At about this time it chanced that Miss Ludington drove into Brooklyn one morning to do some shopping. She was standing at a counter in a large store, examining goods, when she became aware that a lady standing at another counter was attentively regarding her. The lady in question was of about her own height and age, her hair being nearly white, like Miss Ludington's; but it was evident from the hard lines of her face and her almost shabby dress that life had by no means gone so easily with her as with the lady she was regarding so curiously. As Miss Ludington looked up she smiled, and, crossing the store, held out her hand. "Ida Ludington! don't you know me?" Miss Ludington scanned her face a moment, and then, clasping her outstretched hand, exclaimed, delightedly, "Why, Sarah Cobb, where did you come from?" and for the next quarter of an hour the two ladies, quite oblivious of the clerks who were waiting on them, and the customers who were jostling them, stood absorbed in the most animated conversation. They had been school-girls together in Hilton forty-five years before, and, not having met since Miss Ludington's removal from the village, had naturally a great deal to say. "It is thirty years since I have seen any one from Hilton," said Miss Ludington at last, "and I'm not going to let you escape me. You must come out with me to my house and stay overnight, and we will talk old times over. I would not have missed you for anything." Sarah Cobb, who had said that her name was now Mrs. Slater, and that she lived in New York, having removed there from Hilton only a few years previous, seemed nothing loth to accept her friend's invitation, and it was arranged that Miss Ludington should send her carriage to meet her at one of the Brooklyn ferries the day following. Miss Ludington wanted to send the carriage to Mrs. Slater's residence in New York, but the latter said that it would be quite as convenient for her to take it at the ferry. After repeated injunctions not to fail of her appointment, Miss Ludington finally bade her old school-mate good-by and drove home in a state of pleased expectancy. She entertained Paul at the tea-table with an account of her adventure, and gave him an animated history of the Cobb family in general and Sarah in particular. She had known Sarah ever since they both could walk, and during the latter part of their school life they had been inseparable. The scholars had even christened them "The Twins," because they were so much together and looked so much alike. Their secrets were always joint property. The next afternoon Miss Ludington went herself in the carriage to fetch her friend from the ferry. She wanted to be with her and enjoy her surprise when she first saw the restored Hilton on entering the grounds. In this respect her anticipations were fully justified. The arrangement of the grounds was such that a high board fence protected the interior from inquisitive passers-by on the highway, and the gate was set in a corner, so that no considerable part of the enclosure was visible from it. The gravelled driveway, immediately after entering the grounds, took a sharp turn round the corner of the gardener's cottage, which answered for a gatekeeper's lodge. The moment, however, it was out of sight from the highway it became transformed into a country road, with wide, grassy borders and footpaths close to the rail fences, while just ahead lay the silent village, with the small, brown, one-storey, one-roomed school-house on one side of the green, and the little white box of a meeting-house, with its gilt weathercock, on the other. As this scene burst upon Mrs. Slater's view, her bewilderment was amusing to witness. Her appearance for a moment was really as if she believed herself the victim of some sort of magic, and suspected her friend of being a sorceress. Reassured on this point by Miss Ludington's smiling explanation, her astonishment gave place to the liveliest interest and curiosity. The carriage was forthwith stopped and sent around to the stables, while the two friends went on foot through the village. Every house, every fence-corner, every lilac-bush or clump of hollyhocks, or row of currant-bushes in the gardens, suggested some reminiscence, and the two old ladies were presently laughing and crying at once. At every dwelling they lingered long, and went on reluctantly with many backward glances, and all their speech was but a repetition of, "Don't you remember this?" and "Do you remember that?" Mrs Slater, having left Hilton but recently, was able to explain just what had been removed, replaced, or altered subsequent to Miss Ludington's flight. The general appearance of the old street, Mrs. Slater said, remained much the same, despite the changes which had driven Miss Ludington away; but new streets had been opened up, and the population of the village had trebled, and become largely foreign. In their slow progress they came at last to the school-house. The door was ajar, and they entered on tiptoe, like tardy scholars. With a glance of mutual intelligence they hung their hats, each on the one of the row of wooden pegs in the entry, which had been hers as a school-girl, and through the open door entered the silent school-room and sat down in the self-same seats in which two maidens, so unlike them, yet linked to them by so strangely tender a tie, had reigned as school-room belles nearly half a century before. In hushed voices, with moist eyes; and faces shining with the light of other days, those grey-haired women talked together of the scenes which that homely old room had witnessed, the long-silent laughter, and the voices, no more heard on earth, with which it had once echoed. There in the corner stood a great wrought-iron stove, the counterpart of the one around whose red-hot sides they had shivered, in their short dresses, on cold winter mornings. On the walls hung the quaint maps of that period whence they had received geographical impressions, strangely antiquated now. Along one side of the room ran a black-board, on which they had been wont to demonstrate their ignorance of algebra and geometry to the complete satisfaction of the master, while behind them as they sat was a row of recitation benches, associated with so many a trying ordeal of school-girl existence. "Do you ever think where the girls are in whose seats we are sitting?" said Mrs. Slater, musingly. "I can remember myself as a girl, more or less distinctly, and can even be sentimental about her; but it doesn't seem to me that I am the same person at all; I can't realize it." "Of course you can't realize it. Why should you expect to realize what is not true?" replied Miss Ludington. "But I am the same person," responded Mrs. Slater. Miss Ludington regarded her with a smile. "You have kept your looks remarkably, my dear," she said. "You did not lose them all at once, as I did; but isn't it a little audacious to try to pass yourself off as a school-girl of seventeen?" Mrs. Slater laughed. "But I once was she, if I am not now," she said. "You won't deny that." "I certainly shall deny it, with your permission," replied Ludington. "I remember her very well, and she was no more an old woman like you than you are a young girl like her." Mrs. Slater laughed again. "How sharp you are getting, my dear!" she said. "Since you are so close after me, I shall have to admit that I have changed slightly in appearance in the forty odd years since we went to school at Hilton, and I'll admit that my heart is even less like a girl's than my face; but, though I have changed so much, I am still the same person, I suppose." "Which do you mean?" inquired Miss Ludington. "You say in one breath that you are a changed person, and that you are the same person. If you are a changed person you can't be the same, and if you are the same you can't have changed." "I should really like to know what you are driving at," said Mrs. Slater, calmly. "It seems to me that we are disputing about words." "Oh, no, not about words! It is a great deal more than a question of words," exclaimed Miss Ludington. "You say that we old women and the girls who sat here forty years and more ago are the same persons, notwithstanding we are so completely transformed without and within. I say we are not the same, and thank God, for their sweet sakes, that we are not. Surely that is not a mere dispute about words." "But, if we are not those girls, then what has become of them?" asked Mrs. Slater. "You might better ask what had become of them if you had to seek them in us; but I will tell you what has become of them, Sarah. It is what will become of us when we, in our turn, vanish from earth, and the places that know us now shall know us no more. They are immortal with God, and we shall one day meet them over there." "What a very odd idea!" exclaimed Mrs. Slater, regarding her friend with astonishment. Miss Ludington flushed slightly as she replied, "I don't think it half so odd, and not nearly so repulsive, as your notion, that we old women are the mummies of the girls who came before us. It is easier, as well as far sweeter, for me to believe that our youth is somewhere immortal, than that it has been withered, shrivelled, desiccated into our old age. Oh, no, my dear, Paradise is not merely a garden of withered flowers! We shall find the rose and lily of our life blooming there." The hours had slipped away unnoticed as the friends talked together, and now the lengthening shadows on the school-room floor recalled Miss Ludington to the present, and to the duties of a hostess. As they walked slowly across the green toward the homestead, she told her friend more fully of this belief in the immortality of past selves which had so recently come to her, and especially how it had quite taken away the melancholy with which she had all her life before looked back upon her youth. Mrs. Slater listened in silence. "Where on earth did you get that portrait?" she exclaimed, as Miss Ludington, after taking her on a tour through the house before tea, brought her into the sitting-room. "Whom does it remind you of?" asked Miss Ludington. "I know whom it reminds me of," replied Mrs. Slater; "but how it ever got here is what puzzles me." "I thought you would recognize it," said Miss Ludington, with a pleased smile. "I suppose you think it odd you should never have seen it, considering whom it is of?" "I do, certainly," replied Mrs. Slater. "You see," explained Miss Ludington, "I did not have it painted till after I left Hilton. You remember that little ivory portrait of myself at seventeen, which I thought so much of after I lost my looks? Well, this portrait I had enlarged from that. I have always believed that it was very like, but you don't know what a reassurance it is to me to have you recognize it so instantly." At the tea-table Paul appeared, and was introduced to Mrs. Slater, who regarded him with considerable interest. Miss Ludington had informed her that he was her cousin and heir, and had told her something of his romantic devotion to the Ida of the picture. Paul, who from Miss Ludington had learned all there was to be known about the persons and places of old Hilton, entered with much interest into the conversation of the ladies on the subject, and after tea accompanied them in their stroll through that part of the village which they had not inspected before. When they returned to the house it was quite dark, and they had lights in the sitting-room, and refreshments were served. Mrs. Slater's eyes were frequently drawn toward the picture over the fireplace, and some reference of hers to the immortelles in which it was framed, turned the conversation upon the subject that Miss Ludington and she had been discussing in the school-house. Mrs. Slater, whose conversation showed her to be a woman of no great culture, but unusual force of character and intelligence, expressed herself as interested in the idea of the immortality of past selves, but decidedly sceptical. Paul grew eloquent in maintaining its truth and reasonableness, and, indeed, that it was the only intelligible theory of immortality that was possible. The idea that the same soul successively animated infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, and maturity, was, he argued, but a modification of the curious East Indian dream of metempsychosis, according to which every soul is supposed to inhabit in turn innumerable bodies. "You almost persuade me," said Mrs. Slater, at last. "But I never heard of the spirit of anybody's past self appearing to them. If there are such spirits, why have they never manifested themselves? Nobody every heard of the spirit of one's past self appearing at a spiritualist séance, for instance." "There is one evidence among others," replied Paul. "that spiritualism is a fraud. The mediums merely follow the vulgar superstition in the kind of spirits that they claim to produce." "Very likely you are right," said Mrs. Slater. "In fact, I presume you are quite right. And yet, if I really believed as you do, do you know what I would do? I would go to some of the spirit mediums over in New York, of whom the papers are giving such wonderful accounts, and let them try to materialize for me the spirit of my youth. Probably they couldn't do it, but possibly they might; and a mighty little sight, Mr. De Riemer, is more convincing than all the belief in the world. If I could see the spirit of my youth face to face, I should believe that it had a separate existence from my own. Otherwise, I don't believe I ever could." "But the mediums are a set of humbugs!" exclaimed Paul; and then he added, "I beg your pardon. Perhaps you are a spiritualist?" "You need not beg my pardon," said Mrs. Slater, good-humouredly. "I am not a spiritualist beyond thinking--and that is only lately--that there may possibly be something in it, after all. Perhaps there may be, for example, one part of truth to a hundred parts of fraud. I really don't believe there is more. Now, as you think the mediums humbugs, and I am sure most of them are, their failure to accomplish anything would not shake your faith in your theory, and you would only have lost an evening and the fee you paid the medium. On the other hand, there is a bare possibility--mind you, I think it is no more than that--a bare possibility, say the smallest possible chance, but a chance--that you would see--her," and Mrs. Slater glanced at the portrait. Paul turned pale. Miss Ludington, with much agitation, exclaimed, "If I thought there was any possibility of that, do you suppose, Sarah, that I would consider time or money?" "I don't suppose you would," replied Mrs. Slater. "You would not need to; but the money is something which I should have to consider, if it were my case. The best materializing mediums charge pretty well. Mrs. Legrand, who I believe is considered the leading light just now, charges fifty dollars for a private séance. Now, fifty dollars, I suppose, does not seem a large sum to you, but it would be a great deal for a poor woman like me to spend. And yet if I believed this wonderful thing that you believe, and I thought there was one chance in a million that this woman could demonstrate it to me by the assurance of sight, I would live on crusts from the gutter till I had earned the money to go to her." Paul rose from his chair, and, after walking across the floor once or twice, stood leaning his arm on the mantelpiece. He cleared his throat, and said: "Have you ever seen this Mrs. Legrand yourself? I mean, have you ever been present at one of her séances?" "Not on my own account," replied Mrs. Slater. "It was a mere accident my chancing to know anything about her. I have a friend, a Mrs. Rhinehart, who has recently lost her husband, and she got in a way of going to this Mrs. Legrand's séances to see him, and once she took me with her." Miss Ludington and Paul waited a moment, and then, perceiving that she was not going to say anything more, exclaimed in the same breath, "Did you see anything?" "We saw the figure of a fine-looking man," replied Mrs. Slater. "We could distinguish his features and expression very plainly, and he seemed to recognize my friend. She said that it was her husband. Of course I know nothing about that. I had never seen him alive. It may all have been a humbug, as I was prepared to believe it; but I assure you it was a curious business, and I haven't got over the impression which it made on me, yet. I'm not given to believing in things that claim to be supernatural, but I will admit that what I saw that night was very strange. Humbug or no humbug, what she saw seemed to comfort my poor friend more than all the religions or philosophies ever revealed or invented could have done. You see, these are so vague, even when we try to believe them, and that was so plain." A silence followed Mrs. Slater's words, during which she sat with an absent expression of countenance and a faraway look, as if recalling in fancy the scene which she had described. Miss Ludington's hands trembled as they lay together in her lap, and she was regarding the picture of the girl over the fireplace with a fixed and intense gaze, apparently oblivious of all else. Paul broke the silence. "I am going to see this woman," he said, quietly. "You need not think of going with me, aunty, unless you care to. I will go alone." "Do you think I shall let you go alone?" replied Miss Ludington, in a voice which she steadied with difficulty. "Am I not as much concerned as you are, Paul?" "Where does this Mrs. Legrand live?" Paul asked Mrs. Slater. "I really can't tell you that, Mr. De Riemer," she said. "It was sometime ago that I attended the séance I spoke of, and all I recall is that it was somewhere in the lower part of the city, on the east side of the Broadway, if I am not mistaken." "Perhaps you could ascertain her address from the friend of whom you spoke, if it would not be too much trouble?" suggested Miss Ludington. "I might do that," assented Mrs. Slater. "If she still goes to the séances she would know it. But these mediums don't generally stay long in one place, and it is quite possible that this Mrs. Legrand may not be in the city now, But if I can get her address for you I will. And now, my dear, as I am rather tired after our walk about the village, and probably you are too, will I go to my room." CHAPTER V. Mrs. Slater went away the next morning. On the following day but one Miss Ludington received a letter from her. She told her friend how glad she was that she had not postponed her visit to her, for if she had set it for a single day later she could not have made it at all. When she returned home she found that her husband had received an offer of a lucrative business position in Cincinnati, contingent on his immediate removal there. They had been in a whirl of packing ever since, and were to take that night's train for Cincinnati, and whether they ever again came East to live was very doubtful. In a postscript, written crosswise, she said: "I have been in such a rush ever since I came home that I declare I had clean forgotten till this moment about my promise to hunt up Mrs. Legrand's address for you. Very likely you have also forgotten by this time our talk about her, and if so it will not matter. But it vexes me to fail in a promise, and, if possible, I will snatch a moment before we leave to send a note to the friend I spoke of, and ask her to look the woman up for you." Instead of being disappointed, Miss Ludington was, on the whole, relieved to get this letter, and inclined to hope that Mrs. Slater had failed to find the time to write her friend. In that case this extraordinary project of visiting a spiritualist medium would quietly fall through, which was the best thing that could happen. The fact is, after sleeping on it, she had seen clearly that such a proceeding for a person of her position and antecedents would not only be preposterous, but almost disreputable. She was astonished at herself to think that her feelings could have been so wrought upon as to cause her seriously to contemplate such a step. All her life she had held the conviction, which she supposed to be shared by all persons of culture and respectability, that spiritualism was a low and immoral superstition, invariably implying fraud in its professors, and folly in its dupes: something, in fact, quite below the notice of persons of intelligence or good taste. As for the idea that this medium could show her the spirit of her former self, or any other real spirit, it was simply imbecile to entertain it for a moment. If, however, Miss Ludington was relieved by Mrs. Slater's letter, Paul was keenly disappointed. His prejudice against spiritualism was by no means so deeply rooted as hers. In a general way he had always believed mediums to be frauds, and their shows mere shams, but he had been ready to allow with Mrs. Slater, that, mixed up in all this fraud, there might be a very little truth. His mind admitted a bare possibility that this Mrs. Legrand might be able to show him the living face and form of his spirit-love. That possibility once admitted had completely dominated his imagination, and it made little difference whether it was one chance in a thousand or one in a million. He was like the victim of the lottery mania, whose absorption in contemplating the possibility of drawing the prize renders him quite oblivious of the nine hundred and ninety-nine blank tickets. Previous to Mrs. Slater's visit he had been quite content in his devotion to an ideal mistress, for the reason that any nearer approach to her had not occurred to him as a possibility. But now the suggestion that he might see her face to face had so inflamed his imagination that it was out of the question for him to regain his former serenity. He resolved that, in case they should fail to hear from Mrs. Slater's friend, he would set about finding Mrs. Legrand himself, or, failing that, would go to some other medium. There would be no solace for the fever that had now got into his blood, until experiment should justify his daring hope, or prove it baseless. However, the third day after Mrs. Slater's letter there came one from her friend, Mrs. Rhinehart. She said that she had received a note from Mrs. Slater, who had suddenly been called to Cincinnati, telling that Miss Ludington desired the address of Mrs. Legrand, with a view to securing a private séance. She could have sent the address at once, as she had it; but Mrs. Legrand was so overrun with business that an application to her by letter, especially from a stranger like Miss Ludington, might not have any result. And so Mrs. Rhinehart, who had been only too happy to oblige any friend of Mrs. Slater's, had called personally upon Mrs. Legrand to arrange for the séance. The medium had told her at first that she was full of previous engagements for a month ahead, and that it would be impossible to give Miss Ludington a séance. When, however, Mrs. Rhinehart told her that Miss Ludington's purpose in asking for the séance was to test the question whether our past selves have immortal souls distinct from our present selves, Mrs. Legrand became greatly interested, and at once said that she would cancel a previous appointment, and give Miss Ludington a séance the following evening, at her parlours, No. -- East Tenth Street, at nine o'clock. Mrs. Legrand had said that while she had never heard a belief in the immortality of past selves avowed, there had not been lacking in her relations with the spirit-world some mysterious experiences that seemed to confirm it. She should, therefore, look forward to the issue of the experiment the following evening with nearly as much confidence, and quite as much interest, as Miss Ludington herself. Mrs. Rhinehart hoped that the following evening would be convenient for Miss Ludington. She had assumed the responsibility of making the engagement positive, as she might have failed in securing a séance altogether had she waited to communicate with Miss Ludington. Hoping that "the conditions would be favourable," she remained, &c. &c. When Miss Ludington had read this letter to Paul, she intimated, though rather faintly, that it was still not too late to withdraw from the enterprise; they could send Mrs. Legrand her fee, say that it was not convenient for them to come on the evening fixed, and so let the matter drop. Paul stared at her in astonishment, and said that, if she did not feel like going, he would go alone, as he had at first proposed. Upon this Miss Ludington once more declared that they would go together, and said nothing further about sacrificing the appointment. The fact is she did not really wish to sacrifice it. She was experiencing a revulsion of feeling; Mrs. Rhinehart's letter had affected her almost as strongly as Mrs. Slater's talk. The fact that Mrs. Legrand had at once seen the reasonableness and probability of the belief in the immortality of past selves made it difficult for Miss Ludington to think of her as a mere vulgar impostor. The vague hint of the medium's as to strange experiences with the spirit world, confirmatory of this belief, appealed to her imagination in a powerful manner. Of what description might the mysterious monitions be, which, coming to this woman in the dim between-world where she groped, had prepared her to accept as true, on its first statement, a belief that to others seemed so hard to credit? What clutchings of spirit fingers in the dark! What moanings of souls whom no one recognised! The confidence which Mrs. Legrand had expressed that the séance would prove a success affected Miss Ludington very powerfully. It impressed her as the judgment of an expert; it compelled her to recognize not only as possible, but even as probable, that, on the evening of the following day, she should behold the beautiful girl whom once, so many years before, she had called herself; for so at best would words express this wonder. With a trembling ecstasy, which in vain she tried to reason down, she began to prepare herself for the presence of one fresh from the face of God and the awful precincts of eternity. As for Paul, there was no conflict of feeling with prejudice in his case; he gave himself wholly up to a delirious expectation. How would his immortal mistress look? How would she move? What would be her stature--what her bearing? How would she gaze upon him? If not with love he should die at her feet. If with love how should he bear it? Mrs. Rhinehart's letter had been received in the morning, and during the rest of the day Miss Ludington and Paul seemed quite to forget each other in their absorption in the thoughts suggested by the approaching event. They sat abstracted and silent at table, and, on rising, went each their own way. In the exalted state of their imaginations the enterprise they had in hand would not bear talking over. When she retired to bed Miss Ludington found that sleep was out of the question. About two o'clock in the morning she heard Paul leave his room and go downstairs. Putting on dressing-gown and slippers she softly followed him. There was a light in the sitting-room and the door was ajar. Stepping noiselessly to it she looked in. Paul was standing before, the fireplace, leaning on the mantelpiece, and looking up into the eyes of the girl above, smiling and talking softly to her, Miss Ludington entered the room and laid her hand gently on his arm. Her appearance did not seem to startle him in the least. "Paul, my dear boy!" she said, "you had better go to bed." "It's no use," he said; "I can't sleep, and I had to come down here and look at her. Think, just think, aunty, that to-morrow we shall see her." The young fellow's nervous excitement culminated in a burst of ecstatic tears, and soon afterwards Miss Ludington induced him to go to bed. How much more he loved the girl than even she did! She was filled with dread as she thought of the effect which a disappointment of the hope he had given himself up to might produce. And what folly, after all, it was to expect anything but disappointment! The spectacle of Paul's fatuous confidence had taken hers away. CHAPTER VI As the drive over to East Tenth Street was a long one, the carriage had been ordered at seven o'clock, and soon after tea, of which neither Miss Ludington nor Paul had been able to take a mouthful, they set out. "I am afraid we are doing something very wrong and foolish," said Miss Ludington, feebly, as the carriage rolled down the village street. During the drive of nearly two hours not another word was said. The carriage at length drew up before the house in Tenth Street. It stood in a brick block, and there was no sign of the business pursued within, except a small white card on the door bearing the words, "Mrs. Legrand. Materializing, Business, and Test Medium. Clairvoyant." An old-looking little girl of ten or twelve years of age opened the door. The child's big black eyes, and long snaky locks falling about a pale face, gave her an elfish look quite in keeping with the character of the house. She at once ushered the callers into the front parlour, where a lady and gentleman were sitting, who proved to be Mrs. Legrand and her manager and man of business, Dr. Hull. The latter was a tall person, of highly respectable and even imposing appearance, to which a high forehead, a pair of gold-bowed spectacles, and a long white beard considerably added. He looked like a scholar, and his speech was that of a man of education. Mrs. Legrand was a large woman, with black hair sprinkled with grey and worn short like a man's. She had a swarthy complexion, and her eyes were surrounded by noticeably large dark rings, giving an appearance of wretched ill-health. Her manner was extremely languid, as of a person suffering from nervous exhaustion. She kept her eyes half shut, and spoke as if with an effort. "Did Mrs. Rhinehart tell you," she said to Miss Ludington, "of the interest which I feel in your theory, that the souls of our past selves exist in spirit-land? If my séance to-night realizes your expectations, spirit science will have taken a great step forward." "My conviction will remain the same whatever the result may be to night," said Miss Ludington. "I am glad to hear you say so," replied Mrs. Legrand languidly; "but I feel that we shall be successful, and my intuitions rarely deceive me." A trembling came over Paul at these words. There was a little more general conversation, and the silence which followed was interrupted by Dr. Hull. "I suppose there is no reason why the séance should not proceed, Mrs. Legrand?" "I know of none," assented that lady in lifeless tones. "Please show our friends the cabinet." Dr. Hull rose. "It is usual," he said, "for those who attend our séances to be asked to satisfy themselves that deception is impossible by an examination of the apartment which Mrs. Legrand occupies during her trance, and from which the materialized spirit appears. Will you kindly step this way?" The room in which they sat was a long apartment, divided by double sliding-doors into a front and back parlour, the former of which had been the scene of the preceding conversation. Dr. Hull now conducted the two visitors into the back parlour, which proved to be of similar size and appearance to the front parlour, except that it contained no furniture whatever. There was only one window in the back parlour, and this was firmly closed by inside blinds. It was also uncurtained, and in plain view from the front parlour. Besides the connection with the front parlour, there was but one door in the back parlour. This opened into a small apartment, about six feet by five, which had been taken out of the right-hand rear corner of the back parlour, and was separated from it by a partition reaching to the ceiling. This was the cabinet. It had neither window nor door, except the one into the back parlour. A sofa was its only article of furniture, and this was of wicker-work, so that nothing could be concealed beneath it. "Mrs. Legrand lies upon this sofa while in a state of trance, during which the spirit is materialized, and appears to us," explained Dr. Hull. A rug lay on the floor of the cabinet, the walls were of hard-finished white plaster, quite bare, and the ceiling, like that of the parlours, was plain white, without ornament. There seemed no possibility of introducing any person into the cabinet or the back parlour without the knowledge of those in the front parlour. But Dr. Hull insisted upon making assurance doubly sure by pounding upon the walls and pulling up the rug in the cabinet, to prove that no sliding panel or trap-door trick was possible. There was something calculated to make an unbeliever very uneasy in the quiet confidence of these people, and the business-like way in which they went to work to make it impossible to account for any phenomenon that might appear, on any other but a supernatural theory. No doubt whatever now remained in the mind of Miss Ludington or Paul that the wonderful mystery which they had hardly dared to dream of was about to be enacted before them. They followed Dr. Hull on his tour of inspection as if they were in a dream, mechanically observing what he pointed out, but replying at random to his remarks, and, indeed, barely aware of what they were doing. The sense of the unspeakably awful and tender scene so soon to pass before their eyes absorbed every susceptibility of their minds. Nor indeed would this detective work have had any interest for them in any case. They would have been willing to concede the medium all the machinery she desired. There was no danger that they could be deceived as to the reality of the face and form that for so many years had been enshrined in their memories. There might be as many side entrances to the cabinet as desired, but she whom they looked for could come only from the spirit-land. The front parlour, too, having been investigated, to show the impossibility of any person's being concealed there, Dr. Hull proceeded to close and lock the hall-door, that being the only exit connecting this suite of rooms with the rest of the house. Having placed a heavy chair against the locked door for further security, he gave the key to Paul. Mrs. Legrand now rose, and without a word to any one passed through the back parlour and disappeared in the cabinet. As she did so a wild desire to fly from the room and the house came over Miss Ludington. Not that she did not long inexpressibly to see the vision that was drawing near, whose beautiful feet might even now be on the threshold, but the sense of its awfulness overcame her. She felt that she was not fit, not ready, for it now. If she could only have more time to prepare herself, and then could come again. But it was too late to draw back. Dr. Hull had arranged three chairs across the broad doorway between the back and front parlours, and facing the former. He asked Miss Ludington to occupy the middle chair, and, trembling in every limb, she did so. Paul took the chair by her side, the other being apparently for Dr. Hull. The elfish little girl, whom they called Alta, and who appeared to be the daughter of Mrs. Legrand, meanwhile took her place at a piano standing in the front parlour. All being now ready, Dr. Hull proceeded to turn the gas in the two parlours very low. The jets in both rooms were controlled by a stop-cock in the wall by the side of the doorway between them. There were two jets in the back parlour, fastened to the wall dividing it from the front parlour, one on each side of the door, so as to throw light on any figure coming out of the cabinet. The light they diffused, after being turned down; was enough to render forms and faces sufficiently visible for the recognition of acquaintances, though a close study of features would have been difficult. It now appeared that the glass shades of the jets in the back parlour were of a bluish tint, which lent a peculiarly weird effect to the illumination. Dr. Hull now took the remaining chair by Miss Ludington's side, and a perfect silence of some moments ensued, during which she could perfectly hear the beating of Paul's heart. Then Alta began, with a wonderfully soft touch, to play a succession of low, dreamy chords, rather than any set composition--music that thrilled the listeners with vague suggestions of the unfathomable mystery and unutterable sadness of human life. She played on and on. It seemed to two of the hearers that she played for hours, although it was probably but a few minutes. At last the music flowed slower, trickled, fell in drops, and ceased. They had a sensation of being breathed upon by a faint, cool draught of air, and then appeared in the door-way of the cabinet the figure of a beautiful girl, which, after standing still a moment, glided forth, by an imperceptible motion, into the room. The light, which had before seemed so faint, now proved sufficient to bring out every line of her face and form. Or was it that the figure itself was luminous by some light from within? Paul heard Miss Ludington gasp; but if he had known that she was dying he could not have taken his eyes from the apparition. For it was Ida who stood before him; no counterfeit of the painter now, but radiant with life. Her costume was exactly that of her picture, white, with a low bodice; but how utterly had the artist failed to reproduce the ravishing contours of her young form, the enchanting sweetness of her expression. The golden hair fell in luxuriant tresses about the face and down the dazzling shoulders. The lips were parted in a pleased smile as, with a gliding motion, she approached the rapt watchers. Her eyes rested on Miss Ludington with a look full of recognition and a tenderness that seemed beyond the power of mortal eyes to express. Then she looked at Paul. Her smile was no longer the smile of an angel, but of a woman. The light of her violet eyes burned like delicious flame to the marrow of his bones. She was so near him that he could have touched her. Her beauty overcame his senses. Forgetting all else, in an agony of love, he was about to clasp her in his arms, but she drew back with a gentle gesture of denial. Then a sudden and indescribable wavering passed over her face, like the passing of the wind over a field of rye, and slowly, as if reluctantly obeying an unseen attraction, she retreated, still facing them, across the room, and disappeared within the cabinet. Instantly Alta touched the piano, playing the same slow, heavy chords as before. But this time she played but a few moments, and when she ceased, Mrs. Legrand's voice was heard faintly calling her. She glided between the chairs in the door-way and entered the cabinet, drawing a _portière_ across its door behind her. As she did so, Dr. Hull touched the stopcock in the wall by his side, turning on the gas in both parlours, and proceeded to unlock and open the hall-door. "It was the most successful séance I have ever witnessed," he said. "The conditions must have been unusually favourable. How were you pleased, Miss Ludington?" The abrupt transition from the shadows of the between-world to the glare of gas-light, from the communion of spirits to the brisk business-like tones of Dr. Hull, was quite too much for the poor lady, and with a piteous gesture, she buried her face in her hands. Alta now came out of the cabinet, and said that her mother would like them to examine it once more. Miss Ludington took no notice of the request, but Paul, who had continued to sit staring into vacancy, as if for him the séance were still going on, sprang up at Alta's invitation and accepted it with alacrity. The eagerness with which he peered into the corner of the cabinet, and the disappointment which his face showed when he perceived no trace of any person there save Mrs. Legrand and Alta, might naturally have suggested to them that he suspected fraud; but the fact was very different. His conduct was merely the result of a confused hope that he might gain another glimpse of Ida by following her to the place within which she had vanished. When Paul looked into the cabinet, Mrs. Legrand was lying upon the lounge, and Alta was administering smelling salts to her. As he turned away disappointed, the medium rose, and leaning on her daughter, returned to the front parlour. She looked completely overcome. Her face was deathly pale, and the dark rings around her eyes were larger and darker than ever. She leaned back in her chair, which had a special rest for her head, and closed her eyes. As neither Dr. Hull nor Alta showed any surprise at her condition, it was apparently the ordinary result of a séance. To her faint inquiry whether the materialization had been satisfactory to Miss Ludington, the latter replied that it had been all, and more than all, she had dared dream of. Dr. Hull, in a very enthusiastic manner, went on to describe the manifestation more particularly. He declared that the present evening a new world of spirit-life had been revealed, and a new era in spiritualism had opened. "I have been devoted to the study of spiritualism for thirty years," he exclaimed; "but I have never been present at so wonderful a séance as this. I grow dizzy when I think of the field of speculation which it opens up. The spirits of our past selves--? And yet why not, why not? Like all great discoveries it seems most simple when once brought to light. It accounts, no doubt, for the throng of unknown spirits of which mediums are so often conscious, and for the many materializations and communications which no one recognizes." Meanwhile the wretched appearance of the medium aroused Miss Ludington's sympathies, in spite of the distracted condition of her mind. "Is Mrs. Legrand always prostrated in this manner after a séance?" she asked. Dr. Hull answered for the medium. "Not generally quite so much so," he said; "the strain on her vitality is always very trying, but it is especially so when a new spirit materializes, as to-night. Out of her being, somehow, and just how, I know no better than you, is woven the veil of seeming flesh, yes, and even the clothing which the spirit assumes in order to appear. The fact that Mrs. Legrand suffers from heart disease makes séances not only more exhausting for her than for other mediums, but really dangerous. I have told her, as a physician, and other physicians have told her, that she is liable at any time to die in a trance." Paul now spoke for the first time since the conclusion of the séance. "What do you fancy would be the effect on the spirit if a medium should die during a materialization, as you have supposed?" he inquired. "That can only be a matter of theory," replied Dr. Hull; "the accident has never happened." "But it might happen." "Yes, it might happen." "Is not the spirit as much dependent on the medium for dematerializing and resuming the spirit-form, as for materializing?" asked Paul. "I see what you mean," said Dr. Hull. "You think that in case the medium should die during a materialization, the spirit might be left in a materialized state. How does it strike you, Mrs. Legrand?" "I don't know," replied that lady, with her eyes closed. "Spirits require our aid as much to lay aside their bodies as to assume them. If the medium died meantime, I should think that the spirit might find some trouble in dematerializing." "Is it not possible," said Paul, "that it might be unable to dematerialize at all? Would not the medium's death close against it the only door by which it could return to the spirit-world, shutting it out in this life with us henceforth? More than that: would not the already materialized spirit be in a position to succeed to the physical life which the medium relinquished? Already possessed of a part of the medium's vitality, would not the remainder naturally flow to it when given up in death, and thus complete its materialization?" "And give it an earthly body like ours?" exclaimed Miss Ludington. "Yes, like ours," replied Paul. "I suppose it would simply take up its former life on earth where it had been left off, ceasing to possess a spirit's powers, and knowing only what and whom it knew at the point when its first life on earth had ceased." "After what I have seen to-night, nothing will ever seem impossible to me again," said Miss Ludington. "As Miss Ludington suggests," observed Dr. Hull, "in spiritualism one soon ceases to consider whether a thing be wonderful or not, but only if it be true. And so as to this matter. Now, if the death of a medium should be absolutely instantaneous, the spirit might, indeed, be unable to dematerialize, and might even succeed to the medium's earth life, as you suggest. The trouble with the theory--and it seems to me a fatal one--is, that death is almost never, if indeed it is ever, absolutely instantaneous but only comparatively so; and it seems to me that the least possible interval of time would be sufficient to enable the spirit to dematerialize. Consequently, it strikes me, that while the result you suppose is theoretically possible, it could, practically, never occur. Still, the subject is one of mere conjecture at most, and one opinion is, perhaps, as good as another." "I think you are probably right," said Paul; "it was only a fancy I had." "Why does Mrs. Legrand persist in giving séances if she is not in a fit condition?" said Miss Ludington. "Well," replied Dr. Hull, "you see we spiritualists do not regard death as so serious a matter as do many others. Our mediums, especially, who stand with one hand clasped by spirits and the other by mortals, are almost indifferent which way they are drawn; besides, you see, she is recognized as the most fully developed medium in the United States to-day, and many spirits, which cannot materialize through other mediums, are dependent upon her; she feels that she has a duty to discharge towards the spirit-world, at whatever risk to herself. I doubt if to-night's séance, for example, would have been successful with any other medium." Immediately after this conversation Miss Ludington and Paul took their departure. Dr. Hull went, out with them to the carriage, and was obliged to remind them of the little matter of Mrs. Legrand's fee, which they had entirely forgotten. CHAPTER VII. Now, before she ever had heard of Mrs. Legrand, Miss Ludington had fully believed that her former self had an immortal existence, apart and distinct from her present self, and Paul, to whom she was indebted for this belief, held it even more firmly than she. But there is a great difference between the strongest form of faith and the absolute assurance of sight. The effect of the vision which they had witnessed in Mrs. Legrand's parlours was almost as startling as if they had not expected to see it. Very little was said in the carriage going home, but, as they were crossing the ferry, Miss Ludington exclaimed, in an awestruck voice, "O Paul! was it not strange!" "Strange? Strange?" he echoed, in strong, exultant tones. "How oddly you use the word, aunty! You might well say how strange, if we mortals were isolated here on this little island of time, with no communication with the mainland of eternity; but how can you call it strange when you find out that we are not isolated? Surely it is not strange, but supremely reasonable, right, and natural." "I suppose it is so," said Miss Ludington, "but if I had let you go alone to-night, and stayed at home, I could never have fully believed you when you told me what you had seen any more than I shall ever expect any one to believe me. Think, Paul, if I had not gone, if I had not seen her, if she had not given me that look! I knew, of course, if she appeared that I should recognize her, but I did not dare to be sure that she would recognize me. I remember her, but she never saw me on earth." "It was as a spirit that she knew you, and that is the way she knew me, and knew that I loved her," said Paul, with a sudden huskiness in his voice. "Surely that makes it clear," said Miss Ludington, "that the spirits of our past selves love us who follow them, as we, in looking back, yearn after them, and not merely await us at the end, but are permitted to watch over us as we complete the journey which they began. I am sure that if people knew this they would never feel lonely or forlorn again." It was a relief to Paul when they reached home and he could be alone. In an ecstasy of happiness that was like a delicious pain, he sat till morning in his unlighted chamber, gazing into the darkness with a set smile, motionless, and breathing only by deep, infrequent inhalations. What were the joys of mortal love to the transports that were his? What were the smoky fires of earthly passion to his pure, keen flame, almost too strong for a heart of flesh to bear? As he strove to realize what it was to be beloved by an immortal, the veil between time and eternity was melted by the hot breath of his passion, and the confines of the natural and the supernatural were confounded. As the east grew light he began to feel the weariness of the intense mental strain which had led up to, and culminated in, the transcendent experience of the previous evening. A tranquil happiness succeeded his exalted mood, and, lying down, he slept soundly till noon, when he went downstairs to find Miss Ludington anxiously waiting for him to reassure her that her recollection of the last night was not altogether a dream, as she had half convinced herself since waking. Paul had to go into Brooklyn to do some business for Miss Ludington that day, but the men he dealt with seemed to him shadows. After finishing with them he went over to New York, and presently found himself on East Tenth Street. He had not intended to go there. His feet had borne him involuntarily to the spot. He could not resist the temptation of drawing near to the place where she had been only a few hours before. He walked to and fro before Mrs. Legrand's house for an hour, and then stood a long time on the opposite side, looking at the closed windows of the front parlour, quite unconscious that he had become an object of curiosity to numerous persons in adjoining houses, and of marked suspicion to the policeman at the corner. Finally he crossed the street, mounted the steps, and rang the bell. The door was opened, after a considerable interval, by Alta, the elfish little girl. Paul asked for Mrs. Legrand. Alta said that her mother was ill to-day, and not able to see any one. Paul then asked for Dr. Hull. He was not in. "I wanted to arrange for another séance," he said. "Will you write, or will you call to-morrow?" asked Alta, in a business-like manner. Paul said he would call. Then he hesitated. "Excuse me," he said, "but may I ask you if there is any one now in the parlour where we were last night?" "No one is there," replied the little girl. "Could you let me just go in and see where she was?" asked Paul, humbly. "I would not keep you a moment." Alta, in her character of door-keeper to this house of mystery, was, doubtless, in the habit of seeing queer people, bent on queer errands. She merely asked him to step within the hall, saying that she would speak to her mother. Presently she returned with the desired permission, and, producing a key, unlocked the parlour door, and ushered Paul in. It was late in the afternoon, and the heavy curtains and blinds left the rooms almost dark. There was barely light enough to see that all was just as it had been the night before. The sounds of the street penetrated the closed apartments but faintly. With the step of one on holy ground, Paul advanced to the spot where he had been seated when the vision appeared to him the night before. Aided by the darkness, the silence, and by the identity of the surroundings, the memory of that vision returned to him as he stood there with a vividness which, in the overwrought condition of his nerves, it was impossible for him to distinguish from reality. Once more a radiant figure glided noiselessly from the cabinet, which was darkly outlined in the corner of the room, and stood before him. Once more her eyes burned on his, until, forgetting all but her beauty, he put forth his arms to clasp her. A startled exclamation from Alta banished the vision, and he perceived that he was smiling upon the empty air. He went away from the house ecstatically happy. He believed that he had really seen her. He had no doubt that, aided by the mediumship of love, she had actually appeared to him a second time in a form only a little less material than the night before. Of this experience he did not tell Miss Ludington. This interview, which Ida had granted to him alone, he kept as a precious secret. The next day, as he had promised, Paul called at Mrs. Legrand's and saw Dr. Hull. That gentleman was unable to promise him anything definite about a séance, on account of Mrs. Legrand's continued illness. "Is she seriously sick?" asked Paul, with a new terror. "I think not," said Dr. Hull; "but her trouble is of the heart, the result of the nervous crises which a trance medium is necessarily subject to, and a disease of the heart may at any time take an unexpected turn." "Has she the best advice?" asked Paul. "Excuse me; but if she has not, and if her pecuniary means do not enable her to afford it, I beg you will let me secure it for her." Dr. Hull thanked him, but said that he was a physician himself, and that, on account of his acquaintance with her constitutional peculiarities, Mrs. Legrand considered him, and he considered himself, better able to treat her than any strange physician. "You seem to be very much interested in her case," added the doctor, with a slight intonation of surprise. "Can you wonder?" replied Paul. "Is she not door-keeper between this world and the world of spirits where my love is? Don't think me brutal if I confess to you that what I think of most is that her death might close that door." "I do not think you brutal," replied Dr. Hull; "what you feel is very natural." "Is it not strange--is it not hard to bear," cried Paul, giving way to his feelings, "that the key of the gate between the world of spirits and of men should be intrusted to a weak and sickly woman?" "It is hard to bear, no doubt," replied Dr. Hull; "but it is not strange. It is in accordance with the laws by which this world has always been conducted. From the beginning has not the power of calling spirits out of the unknown into this earth life been intrusted to weak and sickly women? What the world loosely calls spiritualism is no isolated phenomenon or set of phenomena. The universe is spiritual. Much as we claim for our mediums, the mediumship of motherhood is far more marvellous. Our mediums can enable spirits already alive, and able by their own wills to cooperate, to pass before our eyes for a moment. To hold them longer in our view exceeds their power. But these other women, these mothers, call souls out of nothingness, and clothe them with bodies, so that they speak, walk, work, love, and hate, some forty, some fifty, some seventy years." "You are right," said Paul bowing his head. "It is not strange though it is hard to bear." The effect of the séance at Mrs. Legrand's upon Miss Ludington had been far less disturbing than upon Paul. To her it had been a lofty spiritual consolation, setting the seal of absolute assurance upon a faith that had been before too great, too strange, too beautiful for her to fully realize. When Paul brought word that Mrs. Legrand was sick and might die, and that if she died that first vision of Ida might also prove the last to be vouchsafed them on earth, although she was deeply grieved, yet the thought did not seem so intolerable to her as to him. She had, indeed, hoped that from time to time she should see Ida again; still, her life was mostly past, and it was chiefly upon the communion they would enjoy in heaven, not momentary and imperfect as here, but perennial and complete, that her heart was set. Very different was it with Paul. He was young; heaven was very far off, and the way thither, unless cheered by occasional visitations of his radiant mistress, seemed inexpressibly long and dreary. The nature of his sentiment for Ida had changed since he had seen her clothed in a living form, from the worship of a sweet but dim ideal to the passion which a living woman inspires. He thought of her no more as a spirit, lofty and serene, but as a beautiful maiden with the love-light in her eyes. He was not able to find his former inspiration in the picture above the fireplace. Its still enchantment was gone. The set smile, that had ever before seemed so sweet, palled upon him. The eyes, that had always been so tender, now lacked expression. The lips that the boy had climbed up to kiss, how had the artist failed to intimate their exquisite curves! The whole picture had suffered a subtle deterioration, and looked hard, wooden, lifeless, and almost, unlike. The living woman had eclipsed the portrait. Fortunate it is for the fame of painters that their originals do not oftener return to earth. If Mrs. Legrand had been his own mother Paul could not have been more assiduous in his calls and inquiries as to her condition, nor could his relief have been greater when, a few days later, Dr. Hull told him that the case had taken a favourable turn, and according to her previous experience with such attacks, she would probably be as well as usual by the following day. Dr. Hull said that she had heard of Paul's frequent inquiries for her, and while she did not flatter herself that his interest in her was wholly on her own account, she was, nevertheless, so far grateful that she would give him the first séance which she was able to hold, and that would be, if she continued to improve, on the following evening. CHAPTER VIII. If Miss Ludington's desire for another glimpse of Ida had lacked the passionate intensity of Paul's, she had, notwithstanding, longed for it very ardently, and when at nine o'clock the next night the carriage drew up before Mrs. Legrand's door, she was in a transport of sweet anticipation. As for Paul he had dressed himself with extreme care for the occasion, and looked to his best advantage. He had said to himself, "Shall I not show her as much observance as I would pay to a living woman?" And who can say--for very odd, sometimes, are the inarticulate processes of the mind--that there was not at the bottom of his thoughts something of the universal lover's willingness to let his mistress see him at his best? They found the front parlour occupied as before by Mrs. Legrand and Dr. Hull, when Alta showed them in. The medium was, as previously, the picture of ill-health, and if she did not look noticeably worse than before her sickness, it was merely because she had looked as badly as possible then. In response to inquiries about her health she admitted that she did not really feel equal to resuming her séances quite so soon, and but for disliking to disappoint them would have postponed this evening's appointment. Dr. Hull had, indeed, urged her to do so. "You must not think of giving a séance if there is any risk of injury to your health," said Miss Ludington, though not without being sensible of a pang of disappointment. "We could not think of letting you do that, could we, Paul?" Paul's reply to this humane suggestion was not so prompt as it should have been. In his heart he felt at that moment that he was as bad as a murderer. He knew that he was willing this woman should risk not only her health, but even her life, rather than that he should fail to see Ida. He was striving to repress this feeling, so far at least as to say that he would not insist upon going on with the séance, when Mrs. Legrand, with a glance through her half-shut eyelids, intimating that she perfectly understood his thoughts, said, in a tone which put an end to the discussion, "Excuse me, but I shall certainly give the séance. I am much obliged for your interest in me; but I am rather notional about keeping my promises, and it is a peculiarity in which my friends have to indulge in. I daresay I shall be none the worse for the exertion." "Doctor," she added, "will you allow our friends to inspect the cabinet?" "That is quite needless," said Paul. "Our friends are often willing to waive an inspection," replied Dr. Hull. "We are grateful for the confidence shown, but, in justice to ourselves, as well as for their own more absolute assurance, we always insist upon it. Otherwise, suspicions of fraud not entertained, perhaps, at the time, might afterwards occur to the mind, or be suggested by others, to which they would have no conclusive answer." Upon this Miss Ludington and Paul permitted themselves to be conducted upon the same tour of inspection that they had made the former evening. They found everything precisely as it had been on that occasion. There was no possibility of concealing any person in the cabinet or the back parlour, and no apparent or conceivable means by which any person could reach those apartments, except through the front parlour. On their return to the latter apartment the proceedings followed the order observed at the previous séance. Mrs. Legrand rose from her chair and walked feebly through the back parlour into the cabinet. Dr. Hull then locked and braced a chair against the door opening into the hall, giving the key to Paul. Then, having arranged the three chairs as before, across the double door between the parlours, he seated Miss Ludington and Paul, and, having turned the gas down, took the third chair. All being ready, Alta, who was at the piano, struck the opening chords of the same soft, low music that she had played at the previous séance. It seemed to Miss Ludington that she played much longer than before, and she began to think that either there was to be some failure in the séance, or that something had happened to Mrs. Legrand. Perhaps she was dead. This horrible thought, added to the strain of expectancy, affected her nerves so that in another moment she must have screamed out, when, as before, she felt a faint, cool air fan her forehead, and a few seconds later Ida appeared at the door of the cabinet and glided into the room. She was dressed as at her former appearance, in white, with her shoulders bare, and the wealth of her golden hair falling to her waist behind. From the moment that she emerged from the shadows of the cabinet Paul's eyes were glued to her face with an intensity quite beyond any ordinary terms of description. Fancy having not over a minute in which to photograph upon the mind a form the recollection of which is to furnish the consolation of a lifetime. The difficulties of securing this second séance, and the doubt that involved the obtaining of another, had deeply impressed him. He might never again see Ida on earth, and upon the fidelity with which his memory retained every feature of her face, every line of her figure, his thoughts by day, and his dreams by night, might have to depend for their texture until he should meet her in another world. The lingering looks that are the lover's luxury were not for these fleeting seconds. His gaze burned upon her face and played around her form like lightning. He grudged the instantaneous muscles of the eye the time they took to make the circuit of her figure. But when, as on that other night, she came close up to him and smiled upon him, time and circumstance were instantly forgotten, and he fell into a state of enchantment in which will and thought were inert. He was aroused from it by an extraordinary change that came over her. She started and shivered slightly in every limb. The recognition faded out of her eyes and gave place to a blank bewilderment. Then came a turning of her head from side to side, while, with dilated eyes, she explored the dim recesses of the room with the startled expression of an awakened sleep-walker. She half turned toward the cabinet and made an undecided movement in that direction, and then, as if the invisible cord that drew her thither had broken, she wavered, stopped, and seemed to drift toward the opposite corner of the room. At that moment there was a gasp from the cabinet. Dr. Hull leaped to his feet and sprang toward it, at the same time, by a turn of the stopcock by his side, setting the gas in both rooms at full blaze. Alta, with a loud scream, rushed after him, and Miss Ludington and Paul followed them. The pupils of their eyes had been dilated to the utmost in order to follow the movements of the apparition in the nearly complete darkness, and the first effect of the sudden blaze of gaslight was to dazzle them so completely that they had actually to grope their way to the cabinet. The scene in the little apartment of the medium was a heartrending one. Mrs. Legrand's body and lower limbs lay on the sofa, which was the only article of furniture, and Dr. Hull was in the act of lifting her head from the floor to which it had fallen. Her eyes were half open, and the black rings around them showed with ghastly plainness against the awful pallor which the rest of her face had taken on. One hand was clenched. The other was clutching her bodice, as if in the act of tearing it open. A little foam flecked the blue lips. Alta threw herself upon her mother's body, sobbing, "Oh, mamma, wake up! do! do!" "Is she dead?" asked Miss Ludington, in horrified accents. "I don't know; I fear so. I warned her; I told her it would come. But she would do it," cried the doctor incoherently, as he tried to feel her pulse with one hand while he tore at the fastenings of her dress with the other. He set Paul at work chafing the hands of the unconscious woman, while Miss Ludington sprinkled her face and chest with ice-water from a small pitcher that stood in a corner of the cabinet, and the doctor himself endeavoured in vain to force some of the contents of a vial through her clenched teeth. "It is of no use," he said, finally; "she is past help--she is dead!" At this Miss Ludington and Paul stood aside, and Alta, throwing herself upon her mother's form, burst into an agony of tears. "She was all I had," she sobbed. "Had Mrs. Legrand friends?" asked Miss Ludington, conscience-stricken with the thought that she had indirectly been in part responsible for this terrible event. "She had friends who will look after Alta," said Dr. Hull. Their assistance being no longer needed, Miss Ludington and Paul turned from the sad scene and stepped forth from the cabinet into the back parlour. The tragedy which they had just witnessed had to a great extent driven from their thoughts the events of the séance which it had broken off so abruptly. The impression left on their minds was that the spirit-form of Ida had vanished in the blinding flood of gas-light through which they had groped their way to the cabinet on hearing the death-rattle of the medium. But now in the remotest corner of the room, towards which they had last seen the form of the spirit drifting, there stood a young girl. She was bending forward, shielding her eyes with her right hand from the flaring gas, as she peered curiously about the room, her whole attitude expressive of complete bewilderment. It was Ida; but what a change had passed upon her! This was no pale spirit, counterfeiting for a few brief moments, with the aid of darkness, the semblance of mortal flesh, but an unmistakable daughter of earth. Her bosom was palpitating with agitation, and, instead of the lofty serenity of a spirit, her eyes expressed the trouble of a perplexed girl who is fast becoming frightened. As Paul and Miss Ludington stepped forth from the cabinet she fixed upon them a pair of questioning eyes. There was not a particle of recognition in their expression. Presently she spoke. Her voice was a mezzo-soprano, low and sweet, but just now sharpened by an accent of apprehension. "Where am I?" she asked. After a moment, during which their brains reeled with an amazement so utter that they doubted the evidence of their senses--doubted even their own existence and identities, there had simultaneously flashed over the minds of Paul and Miss Ludington the explanation of what they beheld. The prodigy, the theoretical possibility of which they had discussed after the séance of the week before, and scarcely thought of since, had come to pass. Dr. Hull had proved wrong, and Paul had proved right. A medium had died during a materialization, and the materialized spirit had succeeded to her vitality, and was alive as one of them. It was no longer the spirit of Ida, knowing them by a spirit's intuition, which was before them, but the girl Ida Ludington, whose curious, unrecognizing glance testified to her ignorance of aught which the Hilton school-girl of forty years ago had not known. It was with an inexpressible throb of exultation, after the stupor of their first momentary astonishment, that they comprehended the miracle by which in the moment when the hope of ever beholding Ida again had seemed taken from them, had restored her not only to their eyes, but to life. But how should they accost her, how make themselves known to her, how go about even to answer the question she had asked without terrifying her with new and deeper mysteries? While they stood dumb, with hearts yearning toward her, but powerless to think of words with which to address her, Dr. Hull, hearing the sound of her voice, stepped out from the cabinet. At the sight of Ida he started back astounded, and Paul heard him exclaim under his breath, "I never thought of this" Then he laid his hand on Paul's arm and said, in an agitated whisper, "You were right. It has happened as you said. My God, what can we say to her?" Meanwhile, Ida was evidently becoming much alarmed at the strange looks bent upon her. "Perhaps, sir," she said, addressing Dr. Hull, with an appealing accent, "you will tell me how I came in this place?" Then ensued an extraordinary scene of explanation, in which, seconding one another's efforts, striving to hit upon simpler analogies, plainer terms, Paul the doctor, and Miss Ludington sought to make clear to this waif from eternity, so strangely stranded on the shores of Time, the conditions and circumstances under which she had resumed an earthly existence. For a while she only grew more terrified at their explanations, appearing to find them totally unintelligible, and, though her fears were gradually dissipated by the tenderness of their demeanour, her bewilderment seemed to increase. For a long time she continued to turn her face, with a pathetic expression of mental endeavour, from one to another, as they addressed her, only to shake her head slowly and sadly at last. "I seem to have lost myself," she said, pressing her hand to her forehead. "I do not understand anything you say." "It is a hard matter to understand," replied Dr. Hull. "Understanding will come later. Meanwhile, look in at the door of this room and you will see the body of the woman to whose life you have succeeded. Then you will believe us though you do not understand us." As he spoke he indicated the door of the cabinet. Ida stepped thither and looked in, recoiling with a sharp cry of horror. The terror in her face was piteous, and in a moment Miss Ludington was at her side, supporting and soothing her. Sobbing and trembling Ida submitted unresistingly to her ministrations, and even rested her head on Miss Ludington's shoulder. The golden hair brushed the grey locks; the full bosom heaved against the shrunken breast of age; the wrinkled, scarred, and sallow face of the old woman touched the rounded cheek of the girl. Fully as Paul believed that he had realized the essential and eternal distinction between the successive persons who constitute an individuality, he grew dizzy with the sheer wonder of the spectacle as he saw age thus consoling youth, and reflected upon the relation of these two persons to each other. Presently Ida raised her head and said, "It may be as you say. My mind is all confused. I cannot think now. Perhaps I shall understand it better after a while." "If you will come home with me now," said Miss Ludington, "before you sleep I will convince you what we are to each other. Will you come with me?" "Oh, yes!" exclaimed the girl. "Let us go. Let us leave this awful place;" and she glanced with a shudder at the door of the cabinet. A few moments later the house of death had been left behind, and Miss Ludington's carriage, with its three passengers was rolling homewards. Before leaving, Miss Ludington had told Dr. Hull that he might command her so far as any pecuniary assistance should be needed either with reference to the funeral or in connection with providing for Alta. She said that it would be a relief to her to be allowed to do anything she could. Dr. Hull thanked her and said that, as Mrs. Legrand had friends in the city, it would probably be unnecessary to trouble her. If for no other purpose, however, he said that he should possibly communicate with her hereafter with a view to informing himself as to the future of the young lady who had that night assumed the earth-life which his dear friend, Mrs. Legrand, had laid aside. It was an incident of this extraordinary situation that Miss Ludington found herself at disadvantage even in expressing the formal condolence she proffered. With Ida before her eyes it was impossible that she should honestly profess to deplore the event, however tragical, which had brought her back to earth. As for Paul he said nothing at all. The rattling of the wheels on the stony pavement was enough of itself to make conversation difficult in the carriage; even if it would otherwise have flowed easily in a company so strangely assorted. As the light of the street lamps from time to time flashed in at the windows Paul saw that Ida's face continued to wear the look of helpless daze which it had assumed from the moment that the sight of the dead woman in the cabinet had convinced her that she could not trust her own knowledge as to the relations of those about her. But when at last the carriage rolled through the gates of Miss Ludington's estate, and the houses of the mimic village began to glance by, her manner instantly changed. With an exclamation of joyful surprise, she put her head out at the window, and then looking back at them, cried, delightedly, "Why it's Hilton! You have brought me home! There's our house!" No sooner had she alighted than she ran up the walk to the door, and tried to open it. Paul, hurrying after, unlocked it, and she burst in, while he and Miss Ludington followed her, wondering. The servants had gone to bed, leaving the lower part of the house dimly lighted. Ida hurried on ahead from room to room with the confident step of one whose feet knew every turning. It was evident that she needed no one to introduce her there. When Miss Ludington and Paul followed her into the sitting-room, she was standing before her own picture in an attitude of utter astonishment. "Where did they get that picture of me?" she demanded. "I never had a picture painted." For a few moments there was no reply. Those she addressed were engrossed in comparing the portrait with its original. The resemblance was striking enough, but it was no wonder that after once seeing the living Ida, Paul had found the canvas stiff and hard and lifeless. "No," said Miss Ludington, "you never had a picture painted. It was not till many years after you had left the world that this picture was painted. It was enlarged from this portrait of you. Do you remember it?" and taking the locket containing the ivory portrait of Ida from her neck where she had worn it so many years, she opened and gave it to the girl. "Why, it is my ivory portrait!" exclaimed Ida. "How did you come by it? What do you mean about my leaving the world? Something strange has happened to me, I know, but did I die? I don't remember dying. Oh, can't somebody explain what has happened to me?" The dazed look which had disappeared from her face since her recognition of the village and the homestead had come back, and her last words were a bitter cry that went to the hearts of the listeners. Now, all the time they had been in the carriage, Paul had been trying to think of some mode of setting her relationship to Miss Ludington in a light so clear that she must comprehend it, for it was evident that the confused explanations at Mrs. Legrand's had availed little, if anything, to that end. Unless this could be done she seemed likely to remain indefinitely in this dazed mental state, which must be so exquisitely painful to her, and was scarcely less so to them. "If you will listen to me patiently," he said, "I will try to explain. You know that some strange thing has happened to you, and you must expect to find the explanation as strange as the thing itself; but it is not hard to understand." Ida's eyes were fixed on him with the expression of one listening for her life. "Do you remember being a little girl of nine or ten years old?" he asked. "Oh, yes!" she answered. "I remember that perfectly well." "You are now a young woman," he went on. "Where is that little girl whom you remember? What has become of her?" "Why, I don't know," replied Ida. "I suppose she is somewhere in me." "But you don't look like a little girl, or think or act or feel like one. How can she be in you?" "Where else could she be?" replied Ida. "Oh, there is no lack of room for her," said Paul; "the universe is big enough for all the souls that ever lived in it. Suppose, now, you believed her to be still alive as a spirit, just as she was, still alive somewhere in the land of spirits, not transformed into the young lady that you are at all, you understand, for that would only be another way of saying that she was dead, but just as she was, a child, with a child's loves, a child's thoughts, a child's feelings, and a child's face--can you suppose such a thing, just as an effort of imagination?" "Oh, yes!" said Ida; "I can suppose that." "Well, then," said Paul, "suppose also that you remembered this little girl very tenderly, and longed to look on her face again, although knowing that she was a spirit now. Suppose that you went to a woman having a mysterious power to call up the spirits of the departed, and suppose that she called up the spirit of this child-self of yours, and that you recognized it, and suppose that just at that moment the woman died, and her earthly life was transferred to the spirit of the child, so that instead of being a spirit, she became again a living child, but unable to recognize you who loved her so well, because when she lived on earth, you, of course, had not yet come into existence. Suppose you brought this child home with you----" "What do you mean?" interrupted Ida, with dilating eyes. "Am I----" "You are to that woman," broke in Paul, indicating Miss Ludington, "what the child would have been to you. You are bound to her by the same tie by which that little girl would have been bound to you. She remembers and loves you as you would remember and love that child; but you do not know her any more than that child would know you. You both share the name of Ida Ludington, according to the usage of men as to names; but I think there is no danger of your being confounded with each other, either in your own eyes or those of lookers-on." Ida had at last comprehended. The piercing look, expressive of mingled attraction and repulsion, which she fixed upon Miss Ludington, left no doubt of that. It implied alarm, mistrust, and something that was almost defiance, yet with hints of a possible tenderness. It was such a look as a daughter, stolen from her cradle and grown to maidenhood among strangers, might fix upon the woman claiming to be her mother, except that not only was Miss Ludington a stranger to Ida, but the relation which she claimed to sustain to her was one that had never before been realized between living persons on earth, however it might be, in heaven. "Do you understand?" said Paul. "I--think--I--do. But how--strange--it is!" she replied, in lingering tones, her gaze continuing to rest, as if fascinated, upon Miss Ludington. The latter's face expressed a great elation, an impassioned tenderness held in check through fear of terrifying its object. "I do not wonder it seems strange," she said, very softly. "You have yet no evidence as to who I am. I remember you--oh, how well!--but you cannot remember me, nor is there any instinct answering to memory by which you can recognize me. You have a right to require that I should prove that I am what I claim to be; that I am also Ida Ludington; that I am your later self. Do not fear, my darling. I shall be able to convince you very soon." She made Ida sit down, and then went to an ancient secretary, that stood in a corner of the room, and unlocked a drawer, the key to which she always carried on her person. Paul remembered from the time he was a little boy seeing her open this drawer on Sunday afternoons and cry over the keepsakes which it contained. She took out now a bundle of letters, a piece of ribbon, a locket, a bunch of faded flowers, and a few other trifles, and brought them to Ida. Paul left the room on tiptoe. This was a scene where a third person, one might almost say a second person, would be an interloper. When, a long time after, he returned, Miss Ludington was sitting in the chair where Ida had been sitting, smiling and crying, and the girl, with eyes that shone like stars, was bending over her, and kissing the tears away. The night was now almost spent, and the early dawn of midsummer, peering through the windows, and already dimming the lights, warned them that the day would soon be at hand. "You shall have your own bedroom," said Miss Ludington. The face of the old lady was flushed, and her high-pitched and tremulous voice betrayed an exhilaration like that of intoxication. "You will excuse me for having cluttered it up with my things; to-morrow I will take them away. You see I had not dared hope you would come back to me. I had expected to go to you." "I and you--you and I." The girl repeated the words after her, slowly, as if trying to grasp their full meaning as she uttered them. Then a sudden terror leaped into her eyes, and she cried shudderingly: "Oh, how strange it is!" "You do not doubt it? You do not doubt it still?" exclaimed Miss Ludington, in anguished tones. "No, no!" said the girl, recovering herself with an evident effort. "I cannot doubt it. I do not," and she threw her aims about Miss Ludington's neck in an embrace in which, nevertheless, a subtle shrinking still mingled with the impulse of tenderness which had overcome it. When presently Miss Ludington and Ida went upstairs together, the latter, with eager, unhesitating step, led the way through a complexity of roundabout passages, and past many other doors, to that of the chamber which had been the common possession of the girl and the woman. Miss Ludington followed her, wondering, yet not wondering. "It seems so strange to see you so familiar with this house," she said, with a little hysterical laugh, "and yet, of course, I know it is not strange." "No," replied the girl, looking at her with a certain astonishment, "I should think not. It would be strange, indeed, if I were not familiar here. The only strange thing is to feel that I am not at home here, that I am a guest in this house." "You are not a guest," exclaimed Miss Ludington, hurriedly, for she saw the dazed look coming again into the girl's eyes. "You shall be mistress here. Paul and I ask nothing better than to be your servants." To pass from the waking to the dreaming state is in general to exchange a prosaic and matter-of-fact world for one of fantastic improbabilities; but it is safe to assume that the three persons who fell asleep beneath Miss Ludington's roof that morning, just as the birds began to twitter, encountered in dreamland no experiences so strange as those which they had passed through with their eyes open the previous evening. CHAPTER IX. The day following, Paul was downstairs before either Ida or Miss Ludington. He was sitting on the piazza, which was connected with the sitting-room by low windows opening like doors, when he heard a scream, and Ellen, the housemaid, who had been busy in the sitting-room, ran out upon the piazza with a face like a sheet. "What's the matter?" he demanded. "Sure I saw a ghost!" gasped Ellen. "I was on a chair dusting the picture, as I always does mornings, an' I looked up, an' there in the door stood the very same girl that's in the picture, kind of smiling like. And so I give a yell an' run." As she spoke Ida stepped out upon the piazza, and precipitately sheltering herself behind Paul, Ellen whispered, "Sure there she is now!" On seeing that, instead of sharing her terror, he cordially greeted the ghost, the girl's face showed such comical bewilderment that Ida smiled and Paul laughed outright. "This is no ghost, Ellen. This lady is Miss Ida Ludington, a relative of Miss Ludington's, who came to live here last night." "I hope ye'll not mind me takin' ye for a ghost, miss," said Ellen, confusedly; "but sure ye are the livin' image of the picture, and me not knowin' anybody was in the house more than the family;" and she disappeared to tell her story in the kitchen. Ida's appearance was noticeably calmer than the night before. There was, indeed, no indication of excitement in her manner. Paul inquired how she had slept. "I should think you might have had strange dreams," he said. "I did not dream at all. I slept soundly," she replied. "But this morning when I woke up and recognized the familiar features of the room I have always slept in--the same books, the same pictures, the furniture just as ever--I had to sit down a long time to collect my thoughts and remember what had happened. I could remember it well enough, but to realize it was very hard. And then, when I went to the window and looked out and saw the meeting-house and the school-house and the neighbours' houses, just where I have seen them from that window all my life since I was a baby, I had to sit down and think it all over, again before I could believe that I was not in Hilton, and last night all a dream." She spoke in a low, even tone, which was so evidently the result of an effort at self-control, that it impressed Paul more than any display of mental perturbation would have done. At this moment Miss Ludington appeared on the piazza with a white, excited face, which, however, as soon as she saw Ida, became all smiles. She had scarcely slept at all. The thought had kept her awake that Ida might vanish as mysteriously as she had come, and be gone at morning. From sheer weariness, however, she had at last fallen into a doze. On awaking she had gone to call Ida, and finding her chamber empty, had hurried downstairs full of apprehension. Immediately after breakfast, Miss Ludington, to whom Ellen's mistake, if mistake it could be called, had been related, took Ida upstairs, and made her exchange her white dress of the fashion of half a century before for one of her own, in order that her appearance might excite less remark among the servants pending the obtaining of a suitable wardrobe from the city. There was another consideration which made the change of costume not only desirable, but necessary. Ida's dress, which had not seemed the night before, to casual examination, to differ from other cloth, had begun to crumble away in a very curious manner. The texture seemed strangely brittle and strengthless. It fell apart at a touch, and was reduced to a fine powder under the pressure of the fingers. She could not possibly have worn it even one day. The dress of Miss Ludington's, for which she exchanged it, had been made for that lady when considerably stouter than at present, but was with difficulty enlarged sufficiently for the full figure of the girl. Like all but the latest of Miss Ludington's dresses, it was of deepest black, and, strikingly beautiful as Ida had been in white, the funereal hue set off the delicacy of her complexion, the pure expression of her face, and the golden lustre of her hair, like fresh revelations. Paul was left pretty much to himself during the day. A large part of it was spent by the ladies in an upstairs chamber, which Miss Ludington had devoted to a collection of mementoes of the successive periods of her life from infancy. "Come," she had said to Ida, "I want to introduce you to the rest of the family. I want to make you acquainted with the other Miss Ludingtons who have borne the name between your time and mine." Having been an only child, Miss Ludington's garments, toys, school-books, and other belongings had not been handed down to younger brothers and sisters, and eventually to destruction. It had been an easy matter to preserve them, and, consequently, the collection was large and curious, including samples of the wardrobe appertaining to every epoch, from the swaddling-clothes of the infant to a black gown of the last year. After the period of youth, however, which Ida represented, the number and interest of the mementoes rapidly decreased, and for many years had consisted of nothing more than a few dresses and a collection of photographs, one or two for each year, arranged in order. They numbered not less than fifty in all and covered thirty-seven years, from a daguerreotype of Miss Ludington at the age of twenty-five to a photograph taken the last month. Between these two pictures there was not enough resemblance to suggest to a casual observer that they were pictures of the same individual. To trace the gradual process of change from year to year during the intervening period, was an employment which never lost its pensive fascination for Miss Ludington. For each of these faces, with their so various expressions, represented a person possessing a peculiar identity and certain incommunicable qualities--a person a little different from any one of those who came before or after her, and from any other person who ever lived on earth. As now the grey head and the golden head bent together over one picture after another, Miss Ludington related all she could remember of the history and personal peculiarities of the original. "There is, really, not much to say about them," she said. "They lived very quiet, uneventful lives, and to anybody but us would, doubtless, seem entirely uninteresting persons. All wore black dresses, and had sad faces, and all found in their thoughts of you the source at once of their only consolation and their keenest sorrow. For they fully believed--think of it!--fully and unquestionably believed that you were dead; more hopelessly dead than if you were in your grave, dead, with no possibility of resurrection." "This is the one," she said, presently, as she took up the picture of a woman of thirty-five, "who had the fortune left to her, which has come down to me. I want you to like her. Next to you I think more of her than I do of any of the rest. It was she who cut loose from the old life at Hilton which had become so sour and sad, and built this new Hilton here, where life has been so much calmer, and, on the whole, happier, than it had got to be at home. It was she who had the portrait of you painted which is downstairs." Ida took up a picture of the Miss Ludington of twenty-six or seven. "Tell me something about her," she said. "What kind of a person was she?" The elder woman's manner, when she saw what picture it was that Ida had taken up, betrayed a marked embarrassment, and first she made no reply. Noticing her confusion and hesitation, Ida said, softly, "Don't tell me if it is anything you don't like to speak of. I do not care to know it." "I will tell you," replied Miss Ludington, with determination. "You have as good a right to know as I have. She cannot blame me for telling you. She knows your secrets as I do, and you have a right to know hers. She had a little escapade. You must not be too hard on her. It was the outcome of the desperate dulness and life-weariness that came over her with the knowledge that youth and its joys were past, leaving nothing in their place. The calm and resignation to a lonely existence, empty of all that human hearts desire, which came in after-years, she could not yet command. Oh, if you could imagine, as I remember, the bitterness of that period, you would not be too hard upon her for anything she might have done! But, really, it was nothing very bad. People would not call it so, even if it had ever become known." And then, with blushing cheeks and shamed eyes, Miss Ludington poured into Ida's ears a story that would have disappointed any one expectant of a highly sensational disclosure, but which stood out in her memory as the one indiscretion of an otherwise blameless life. That she imparted it to Ida was the most striking evidence she could have given of the absolute community of interests which she recognized as existing between them. She was greatly comforted when Ida, instead of appearing shocked, declared that she sympathized with the culprit more than she blamed her, and that her misconduct was venial. "I suppose," said Miss Ludington, "every one, in looking back upon their past selves, sees some whom they condemn, and, perhaps, despise, and others whom they admire and sympathize with. And I confess I sympathize with this poor girl. Those I don't like are some whom I remember to have lacked softness of heart, to have been sour and ungenerous; these, for instance," indicating certain pictures. "But it is hardly fair," she added, laughing, "for us two to get together and abuse the rest of the family, who, no doubt, if they were present, would have something to say for themselves, and some criticisms to offer on us--that is, on me. None of them would criticize you. You were the darling and pride of us all." "If I do say it," Miss Ludington presently resumed, "we have been a very respectable lot on the whole. The Ida Ludingtons have been good babies, good children, good girls, good women, and, I hope, will prove to have been respectable old women. In the spirit land, when we all meet together, there will be no black sheep among us, nor even anybody that we shall need to send to Coventry: But I do not see why special affinities should not assert themselves there as here, and cliques form among us. You will belong to them all, of course, but next to you I know that I shall be fondest of that poor girl I told you about, of her and of the Ida Ludington who built this new Hilton thirty years ago." "And now," she said, as they finished looking over the pictures and talking about them, "I have introduced you to all who have borne our name from your day to mine. As to those who came before you, the baby Ida and the child Ida, you remember them even better than I do, no doubt. I would give anything if I had their pictures, but the blessed art of photography was not then invented. These keepsakes are all I have of them." And taking Ida over to another part of the room, she showed her a cradle, several battered dolls, fragments of a child's pewter tea-set, and a miscellaneous collection of toys. They took up and handled tenderly pairs of little shoes, socks nearly as long as one's fingers, and baby dresses scarcely bigger than a man's mittens. Lying near were the shoes, and gowns, and hoods, now grown a little larger, of the child, with the coral necklace, and first precious ornaments, the dog's-eared spelling-books, and the rewards of merit, testifying of early school-days. "I can barely remember the baby and this little girl," said Miss Ludington, "but I fancy they will be the pets of all the rest of us up there, don't you?" After Miss Ludington had shown Ida all the contents of the room, and they were about to leave it, she said to the girl, "And now what do you think of us other Ida Ludingtons, who have followed you, present company not excepted? Confess that you think the acquaintances I have introduced to you were scarcely worth the making. You need not hesitate to say so; it is quite my own opinion. We have amounted to very little, taken altogether." "Oh, no!" said Ida, quietly; "I do not think that; I would not say that; but your lives have all been so different from what I have always dreamed my life as a woman would be." "You have a right to be disappointed in us," said Miss Ludington. "We have, indeed, not turned out as you expected--as you had a right to expect." But Ida would not admit in any derogatory sense that she was disappointed. "You are sweeter, and kinder, and gentler, than I supposed I ever could be," she said; "but you see, I thought, of course, I should be married, and have children, and that all would be so different from what it has been; but not that I should ever be better than you are, or nearly so sweet. Oh, no!" "Thank you, my darling!" said the old lady, kissing Ida's hand, as if she were a queen who had conferred an order of merit upon her. "I think that to have to confess to their youthful selves their failures to fulfil their expectations must be the hardest part of the Day of Judgment for old folks who have wasted their lives. All will not find so gentle a judge as mine." Her eyes were full of happy tears. In the latter part of the afternoon they took a walk in the village, and Ida pressed her companion with a multitude of inquiries about the members of the families which had occupied the houses, forty and fifty years before, and what had since become of them; to reply to which taxed Miss Ludington's memory not a little. As they came to the schoolhouse Ida ran on ahead, and when her companion entered, was already seated in Miss Ludington's old seat. Nothing, perhaps, could have brought home to the latter more strongly the nature of her relationship to Ida than to stand beside her as she sat in that seat. As they fell to talking of the scholars who had sat here and there, Miss Ludington began gently to banter Ida about this and that boyish sweetheart, and divers episodes connected with such topics. "This is unfair," said the girl, smiling. "It is a very one-sided arrangement that you should remember all my secrets while I know none of yours. It is as if you had stolen my private journal." A subtle coyness, an air of constraint, and of shy, curious observance, which had marked Ida's manner toward Miss Ludington in the early part of the day, had noticeably given way under the influence of the latter's blithe affectionateness, and it was with arms about each other's waists that the two sauntered back to the house, in the twilight. "I scarcely know what to call you," said Ida. "For me to call you Ida, as you call me, would be and, besides, you are so much older than I it would seem hardly fitting." Miss Ludington laughed softly. "On the score of respect, my darling, you need not hesitate," she said, "for it is you who are the elder Miss Ludington, and I the younger, in spite of my white hair. You are forty years older than I. It is I who owe you the respect due to years. You are right, however; it would be confusing for us to call each other by the same name, and still there is no word in human language that truly describes our relationship." "It seems to me it is more like that of sisters than any other," suggested Ida, with a certain timidity. Miss Ludington reflected a moment, and then exclaimed, delightedly: "Yes, we will call each other sister, for our relation is certainly a kind of sisterhood. We are, like sisters, not connected directly, but indirectly, though our relation to our common individuality, as if we were fruit borne by the same tree in different seasons. To be sure," she added regarding her blooming companion with a smile of tender admiration, "we can scarcely be said to look as much alike as sisters commonly do, but that is because there is not often a difference of more than forty years in the ages of sisters." And so it was agreed that they should call each other sister. Although it was but one day that these two had been known to each other, yet so naturally had Ida seemed drawn towards Miss Ludington, and so spontaneous had been the outflow of the latter's long-stored tenderness toward the girl, that they were already like persons who have been bosom friends and confidants for years. In this wonderfully rapid growth of a close and tender intimacy, Miss Ludington exultingly recognized the heart's testimony to the reality of the mystic tie between them. So fit and natural had the presence of Ida under her roof already come to seem, that she found herself half-forgetting, at times, the astounding and tragic circumstances to which it was due. Absorbed in the wonder and happiness of her own experience, Miss Ludington had barely given a thought to Paul during the day. Having been constantly with Ida she had not, indeed, seen him, save at table, and had failed to take note of his wobegone appearance. At any other time it would have aroused her solicitude; but it was not strange that on this day she should have had no thought save for herself and her other self. It had, indeed, been a day of strangely mingled emotions for Paul. Supposing a lover were separated from his mistress, and that the privilege of being with her, and spending his days in sight of her, were offered him by some fairy, but only on condition that all memory of him should be blotted from her mind, and that she should see in him merely a stranger--is it probable, however great might be the desire of such a lover to behold his mistress, that he would consent to gratify it on these terms? But it was with Paul as if he had done just this. That the sight of his idol should have fallen to his lot on earth; that he should hear the sound of her voice, and breathe the same air with her, was, on the one hand, a felicity so undreamed of, a fortune so amazing, that he sometimes wondered how he could enjoy it, and still retain his senses. But when he met her, and she returned his impassioned look with a mere smile of civil recognition; when he spoke to her, and she answered him in a tone of conventional politeness--he found it more than he could bear. The eyes of her picture were kinder than hers. He had, at least, been able to comfort himself with the belief that, as a spirit, she had known of his love, and accepted it. Now, by her incarnation, while his eyes had gained their desire, his heart had lost its consolation. His condition of mind rapidly became desperate. He could not bear to be in Ida's presence. Her friendly, formal accent was unendurable to him. Their blank, unrecognizing expression, as they rested on him in mere kindliness, made her lovely eyes awful to him as a Gorgon's. In the early evening he found Miss Ludington alone, and broke out to her: "For God's sake, can't you help me? I shall go mad if you don't!" "Why, what do you mean?" she exclaimed, in astonishment. "Don't you see?" he cried. "She does not know me. I have lost her instead of finding her. I, who have loved her ever since I was a baby, am no more than a stranger to her. Can't you see how she looks at me? She has learned to know you, but I am a stranger to her." "But how could she know you, Paul? She did not know me till it was explained to her." "I know," he said. "I don't blame her, but at the same time I cannot stand it. Can't you help me with her? Can't you tell her how I have loved her, so that she may understand that at least?" "Poor Paul!" said Miss Ludington, soothingly. "In my own happiness I had almost forgotten you. But I can see how hard it must be for you. I will help you. I will tell her all the story. Oh, Paul! is she not beautiful? She will love you, I know she will love you when she hears it, and how happy you will be--happier than any man ever was! I will go to her now." And, leaving Paul vaguely encouraged by her confidence, she went to find Ida. She came upon her in the sitting-room, intently pondering the picture above the fireplace. "I want to tell you a love story, my sister," she said. "Whose love story?" asked Ida. "Your own." "But I never had a love story or a lover. Nobody can possibly know that better than you do." "I will show you that you are mistaken," said Miss Ludington, smiling. "No one ever had so fond or faithful a lover as yours. Sit down and I will tell you your own love story, for the strangest thing of all is that you do not know it yet." Beginning with Paul's baby fondness for her picture, she related to Ida the whole story of his love for her, which had grown with his growth, and, from a boyish sentiment, become the ruling passion of the man, blinding him to the charms of living women, and making him a monk for her sake. She described the effect upon him of the first suggestion that it might be possible to communicate with her spirit, and how her presence on earth was due to the enthusiasm with which he had insisted upon making the attempt. Then she asked Ida to imagine what must be the anguish of such a lover on finding that she did not know him--that he was nothing more than a stranger to her. She told her how, in his desperation, he had appealed to her to plead his case and to relate his story, that his mistress might at least know his love, though she might not be able to return it. Ida had listened at first in sheer wonder, but as Miss Ludington went on describing this great love, which all unseen she had inspired, to find awaiting her full-grown on her return to earth, her cheek began to flush, a soft smile played about her lips, and her eyes were fixed in tender reverie. "Tell him to come to me," she said, gently, as Miss Ludington finished. When Paul entered, Ida was alone, standing in the centre of the room. He threw himself at her feet, and lifted the hem of her dress to his lips. "Paul, my lover," she said softly. At this he seized her hand and covered it with kisses. She gently drew him to his feet. He heard her say, "Forgive me, Paul; I did not know." Her warm breath mingled with his, and she kissed him on the lips. CHAPTER X. In the days that followed, Ida was the object of a devotion on the part of Miss Ludington and Paul which it would be inadequate to describe as anything less than sheer idolatry. Her experience was such as a goddess's might be who should descend from heaven and take up her abode in bodily form among her worshippers, accepting in person the devotion previously lavished on her effigy. With Miss Ludington this devotion was the more intense as it was but a sublimed form of selfishness, like that of the mother's to her child, whom she feels to be a part, and the choicest part, of her own life. The instinct of maternity, never gratified in her by the possession of children, asserted itself toward this radiant girl, whose being was so much closer to hers than even a child's could be, whose life was so wonderfully her own and yet not her own, that, in loving her, self-love became transfigured and adorable. She could not have told whether the sense of their identity or their difference were the sweeter. Her delight in the girl's loveliness was a transcendent blending of a woman's pleasure in her own beauty and a lover's admiration of it. She had transferred to Ida all sense of personal identity excepting just enough to taste the joy of loving, admiring, and serving her. To wait upon her was her greatest happiness. There was no service so menial that she would not have been glad to perform it for her, and which she did not grudge the servants the privilege of rendering. The happiness which flooded her heart at this time was beyond description. It was not such a happiness as enabled her to imagine what that of heaven might be, but it was the happiness of heaven itself. As might be expected, the semi-sacredness attaching to Ida, as a being something more than earthly in the circumstances of her advent, lent a rare strain to Paul's passion. There is nothing sweeter to a lover than to feel that his mistress is of a higher nature and a finer quality than himself. With many lovers, no doubt, this feeling is but the delusion of a fond fancy, having no basis in any real superiority on the part of the loved one. But the mystery surrounding Ida would have tinged the devotion of the most prosaic lover with an unusual sentiment of awe. Paul compared himself with those fortunate youths of antiquity who were beloved by the goddesses of Olympus, and in whose hearts religious adoration and the passion of love blended in one emotion. Ever since that night when her heart had been melted by the story of his love, Ida had treated him with the graciousness which a maiden accords to an accepted lover. But far from claiming the privileges which he might apparently have enjoyed, it seemed to him presumption enough and happiness enough to kiss her dress, her sleeve, a tress of her hair, or, at most, her hand, and to dream of her lips. The dazed appearance, as of one doubtful of herself and all about her, which Ida had worn the night when she was brought home, had now wholly passed away. But a certain pensiveness remained. Her smiles were the smiles of affection not of gaiety, and there was always a shadow in her eyes. It was as if the recollection of the mystery from which her life had emerged were never absent from her mind. Still she took so much pleasure in her daily drives with Miss Ludington that the latter ordered a pony chaise for her special use, and when Paul arranged a croquet set on the village green, she permitted him to teach her the game, and even showed some interest in it. When the first dresses which had been ordered for her came home, she was delighted as any girl must have been, for they were the richest and most beautiful fabrics that money could buy; but Miss Ludington seemed, of the two, far the more pleased. For herself she had cared nothing for dress. In forty years she had not given a thought to personal adornment, but Ida's toilet became her most absorbing preoccupation. On her account she became a close student of the fashion-papers, and but for the girl's protests would have bought her a new dress at least every day. She would have liked Ida to change her costume a dozen times between morning and evening, and asked no better than to serve as her dressing-maid. To brush and braid her shining hair, stealthily kissing it the while; to array her in sheeny satins and airy muslins; to hang jewels upon her neck, and clasp bracelets upon her wrists, and to admire and caress the completed work of her hands, constituted an occupation which she would have liked to make perpetual. When Miss Ludington's mother had died she had left to her daughter, then a young girl, all her jewels, including a rather flue set of diamonds. When one day Miss Ludington took the gems from the box in which they had been hidden away for half a lifetime, and hung them upon Ida, saying, "These are yours, my sister," the girl protested, albeit with scintillating eyes, against the greatness of the gift. "Why, my darling, they are yours," replied Miss Ludington. "I am not making you a gift. It was to you that mother gave them. I only return you your own. When you left the world I inherited them from you, and now that you have come back I return them to you." And so the girl was fain to keep them. Thus it had come about that before Ida had been in the house a week it was no longer as a mystery, or, at least, as an awe-inspiring mystery, but as an ineffably dear and precious reality, that her presence was felt. Had a stranger chanced to come there on a visit, at that time, he would doubtless have been struck with the fact that a young girl was the central figure of the household, around whom its other members revolved; but it is probable that this fact, in itself not unparalleled in American households, would have seemed to such an observer sufficiently explained by the unusual gentleness and beauty of the girl herself. The necessity of a supernatural explanation certainly would not have occurred to him. The servants had been merely informed that Ida was a relative of Miss Ludington's, and though they were very curious as to what connection she might be, their speculations did not extend beyond the commonly recognized modes of relationship. The housekeeper, indeed, who had been in Miss Ludington's employ many years, and supposed she knew all about the family, thought it strange that she could recall no young lady relative answering to Ida's description. But as she found that her most ingenious efforts entirely failed to extract any information on the subject from Miss Ludington, Paul, or Ida herself, she was obliged, like the rest, to accept the bare fact that the new-comer was Miss Ida Ludington, and that she was somehow related to Miss Ludington; a fact speedily supplemented by the discovery that to please Miss Ida was the surest way to the favour of Miss Ludington and Mr. Paul. On that score, however, there was no need of any special inducement, Ida's sweet face, and gracious, considerate ways, having already made her a favourite with all who were attached to the household. It was ten days or a fortnight after Ida had been in the house that Miss Ludington received a letter from Dr. Hull, in which that gentleman said that he should do himself the honour of calling on her the following day. He said she might be interested to know that he had already received several communications from Mrs. Legrand, through mediums, in which she had declared herself well content to have died in demonstrating so great a truth as that immortality is not individual, but personal. She considered herself to be most fortunate in that her death had not been a barren one, as most deaths are; but that in dying, she had been permitted to become the second mother of another, and far brighter life than hers had been. She felt that she had made a grand barter for her own earthly existence, which had been so sick and weary. The bulk of Dr. Hull's letter, which was quite a long one, consisted of further quotations from Mrs. Legrand's communications. She said that she had been welcomed by a great multitude of spirits, who to her had owed the beginning of their recognition on earth, and that their joy over this discovery, which should bring consolation to many mournful mortals, as well as to themselves, was only equalled by their wonder that it had not been made years before. It appeared that, since intercourse between the two worlds had first begun, it had been the constant effort of the spirits to teach this truth to men; but the stupid refusal of the latter to comprehend had till now baffled every attempt. How it had been possible that men who had reached the point of believing in immortality at all should be content to rest in the inadequate and preposterous conception that it only attached to the latest phase of the individual, was the standing wonder of the spirit world. It was as if one should throw away the contents of a cup of wine, and carefully preserve the dregs in the bottom. That so loose an association of personalities as the individual, and those personalities so utterly diverse, no two of them even alive at the same time, should have impressed even the most casual observer as a unit of being--a single person--was accounted a marvel by the angels. If men had believed all the members of a family to have but one soul among them, their mistake would have been more excusable, for the members of a family are, at least, alive at the same time, while the persons of an individual are not even that. Dr. Hull said that he had gathered from Mrs. Legrand's communications that she had seen many things which would teach mortals not to grieve for their departed friends, as for shades exiled to a world of strangers. To such mourners she sent word that their own past selves, who have likewise vanished from the earth, are keeping their dear dead company in heaven. And far more congenial company to them are these past selves than their present selves would be, who, through years and changes since their separation, have often grown out of sympathy with the departed, as they will find when they shall meet them. The aged husband, who has mourned all his life the bride taken from him in girlhood, will find himself well-nigh a stranger to her, and his mourning to have been superfluous; for all these years his own former self, the husband of her youth, has borne her company. Dr. Hull said, in closing, that, as probably Miss Ludington would presume, his particular motive in making bold to break in upon her privacy was a desire, which he was sure she would not confound with vulgar curiosity, to see again the young lady who had succeeded to his friend's earthly life in so wonderful a manner, and to learn, what, if any, were the later developments in her case. He was preparing a book upon the subject, in which, of course without giving the true names, he intended to make the facts of the case known in the world. Its publication, he felt assured, would mark a new departure in spiritualism. Miss Ludington read the letter aloud to Ida and Paul, as all three sat together in the gloaming on the piazza. As Paul from time to time, during the reading, glanced at Ida he noticed that she kept her face averted. "I am glad," said Miss Ludington, as she finished the letter, "that Mrs. Legrand is happy. It is so hard to realize that about the dead. The feeling that, our happiness was purchased by her death has been the only cloud upon it. And yet it would be strange indeed if she were not happy. As she says, she did not die a barren death, but in giving birth. And it was no tiny infant's existence, of doubtful value, that she exchanged her life for, but a woman's in the fulness of her youth and beauty. Such a destiny as hers never fell to a mother before." "Never before," echoed Paul, rising to his feet in an access of enthusiasm; "but who shall say that it may not often fall to the lot of women in the ages to come, as the relations between the worlds of men and of spirits, become more fully known? The dark and unknown path that Ida trod that night back to our world will, doubtless, in future times, become a beaten and lighted way. This woman through whom she lives again did not die of her own choice; but I do not find it incredible that many women will hereafter be found willing and eager to die as she did, to bring back to earth the good, the wise, the heroic, and beloved. The world will never need to lose its heroes then, for there will never lack ardent and devoted women to contend for such crowns of motherhood." He stopped abruptly, for he had observed that Ida's face betrayed acute distress. "Forgive me," he said. "You do not like us to talk of this." "I think I do not," she replied, in a low voice, without looking up. "It affects me very strangely to think about it much. I would like to forget it if I could and feel that I am like other people." She had, in fact, shown a marked and increasing indisposition almost from the first to discuss the events of that wonderful night at Mrs. Legrand's. After having had the circumstances once fully explained to her, she had never since referred to them of her own accord. She apparently had the shrinking which any person, and especially a woman, would naturally have from the idea of being regarded as something abnormal and uncanny, and mingled with this was, perhaps, a certain sacred shamefacedness, at the thought that this most intimate and vital mystery of her second birth had been witnessed and was the subject of curious speculations. CHAPTER XI. The ladies were out driving, the following afternoon, when Dr. Hull arrived, but Paul was at home. He brought out some cigars, and they made themselves comfortable on the piazza. Dr. Hull was full of questions about Ida? how she appeared; what relations had established themselves between Miss Ludington and her; whether she showed any memory whatever of her disembodied state; whether the knowledge of the mystery involving her seemed in any way to affect her spirits or temper, or to set her apart in her own estimation from others, with many other acute and carefully considered queries calculated to elicit the facts of her mental and spiritual condition? "There is one point," said the doctor, "about which I am particularly curious. How is it with her memory of her former life on earth? Does it break off suddenly, as if on some particular day or hour her spirit had made way for its successor, and passed away from earth?" "On the contrary," said Paul, "she has intimated, in talking over the past with Miss Ludington, that the memory of her life on earth is clear and precise during its earlier portions, but that toward the last it grows hazy and indistinct." "Exactly," broke in the doctor. "Just as if her personality had a little overlapped and melted at the edge into that which followed it. Yes, it is as I thought it might be. Youth, or childhood, or infancy, or any other epoch of life, does not abruptly cease and give place to another. Their souls are gradually withdrawn as the light is withdrawn from the sky at evening, and a space of twilight renders the transition from one to the other perceptible only in the result, not in the process. This I think is a view of the matter, that is corroborated by the testimony of our own consciousness, don't you, Mr. De Riemer?" "On the whole, yes," replied Paul. "And still, if she had said that the severing of her personality from that which succeeded it was sharp and clearly defined, so that up to a certain day, or even hour, her memory was full and distinct, and then became a blank, there are passages in my own experience, and I think in that of many persons, which her statement would have made comprehensible. I think that to many, perhaps to all persons of reflective turn of mind, there come days, even hours, when they feel that they have suddenly passed from one epoch of life into another. A voice says in their hearts with unmistakable clearness, 'Yesterday I was young; to day I am young no longer.' There is also sometimes a day, I think, when the middle-aged man becomes suddenly aware that he is old. Who shall deny the truth of these intuitions, or say that it is not in that very day and hour that the spirit of youth or of maturity takes its flight?" "By the way," said Dr. Hull, "have you ever speculated on the probable number of the souls of an individual? It is an interesting question." "I suppose that the number may greatly differ in different individuals," replied Paul. "In individuals of many-sided minds and versatile dispositions, there are, perhaps, more distinct personalities than constitute an individual of less complex character. But how many in either case only God can tell. Who can say? It may be that with every breath which I expire a soul or spiritual impression of myself is sent forth. The universe is large enough even for that. Such may at least be the case in moments of special intensity, when we live, as we say, a year in an hour." They smoked on awhile in silence. Presently Paul said, "When the world comes to recognize the composite character of the individual, that it is composed of not one, but many persons, a new department will be added to ethics, relating to the duties of the successive selves of an individual to one another. It will be recognized, on the one hand, that it is the duty of a man to fulfil all reasonable obligations incurred by his past selves, on the same principle that a pious son fulfils the equitable obligations incurred by a parent. This duty is, indeed, recognized to-day, although not on the correct basis. As regards the ethical relation of a man to the selves who succeed him, a wholly new idea will be introduced. It will be seen that the duty of a man to lead a wise life, to be prudent, to make the most of his powers, to maintain a good name, is not a duty to himself, merely an enlightened selfishness, as it is now called, but a genuine form of altruism, a duty to others, as truly as if those others bore different names instead of succeeding to his name. It will be seen that a man's duty to his later selves is like the duty of a father to his helpless children: to provide for their inheritance, to see that he leaves them a sound body and a good name, if nothing more. It will be perceived that the man who is charitably called 'his own worst enemy,' is not only no better, but worse, than if he were the enemy of his neighbours, because he is blasting coming lives that have a far nearer claim upon him than any neighbour can have. "There will arise, also, in that day, I fancy," said Paul, "some rather delicate questions, as to how far a man may properly bind his future selves by pledges and engagements which he has no means of knowing will meet with their approval, and which may quite possibly prove intolerable yokes to them." "Ah!" exclaimed the doctor, "that is indeed an interesting point. And, meanwhile, I should say the intelligible discussion of these questions will involve a modification in grammatical usage. If we believe that our present selves are distinct persons from our past selves, it is manifestly improper to use the first person in speaking of our past selves. Either the third person must be used, or some new grammatical form invented." "Yes," said Paul. "If entire accuracy is sought the first person cannot be properly employed by any one in referring either to his past or his future selves, to what has been done or to what will be done by them." At this moment the carriage drew up before the house, and Paul helped the ladies out. Miss Ludington greeted Dr. Hull cordially, and stopped upon the piazza in hat and shawl to talk with him. But Ida merely bowed stiffly, with lowered eyes, and passed within. Before they were called to tea Paul found an opportunity to tell the doctor how sensitive Ida was to any discussion of the mystery connected with her, and to suggest that at table any direct reference to the subject should be avoided. The expression of disappointment on Dr. Hull's countenance seemed to indicate that he had anticipated thoroughly cross-questioning her in the interest of spiritual science; but he said that he would regard Paul's suggestion, and even admitted that it was, perhaps, natural she should feel as she did, although he had not anticipated it. At the table, therefore, Ida was spared any direct reference to herself as a phenomenon, and although Dr. Hull talked of nothing but spiritualism and the immortality of past selves, it was in their broad and general aspects that the subjects were discussed. "Your nephew," he said to Miss Ludington, "has evidently given much time and profound thought to these matters; and although I am an old man, and have been more interested in the spiritual than the material universe for these many years, I was glad of an opportunity to sit at his feet this afternoon." Turning to Paul, he added, "What you were saying about the possibility that souls, or, at least, spiritual impressions, destined to eternity, are given forth by us constantly, as if at every breath, is wonderfully borne out in a passage from a communication I had from Mrs. Legrand yesterday, to which I meant to have alluded at the time you were speaking. She said that those who supposed that the spirit-land contained only one soul for every individual that had ever lived had no conception of its vastness, and that the stream of souls constantly ascending is like a thick mist rising from all the earth. The phrase struck me as strangely strong, but I can conceive now how she might have come to use it. "What is your conjecture, or have you none at all," he added, after a moment's thought, still addressing Paul, "as to the relation which will exist in the spirit-land among the several souls of the same individual?" "It seems to me," said Paul, "that the souls of an individual, being contemporaneous over there, and all together in the eternal present, will be capable of blending in a unity which here on earth, where one is gone before another comes, is impossible. The result of such a blending would be a being which, in stead of shining with the single ray of a soul on earth, would blaze from a hundred facets simultaneously. The word 'individual,' as applied here on earth, is a misuse of language. It is absurd to call that an individual which every hour divides. The, earthly stage of human life is so small that there is room for but one of the persons of an individual upon it at one time. The past and future selves have to wait in the side scenes. But over there the stage is larger. There will be room for all at once. The idea of an individual, all whose personalities are contemporaneous, may there be realized, and such an individual would be, by any earthly measurement, a god. "But there are many individuals," he pursued after a pause, "of which we cannot imagine a blending of the successive persons to be possible. There, for instance, are cases where there exist radical and bitter oppositions and differences of character, and propensity between the youth and the manhood of the individual. In the case of such ill-assorted personalities a divorce _ex vinculo individui_ may be the only remedy; and, possibly, the parties to it may be sent back to earth, to take their chances of finding more congenial companions." Ida had not said a word during the time they had sat at table. She had, indeed, scarcely lifted her eyes from her plate. As they rose she challenged Paul to a game at croquet, for which the twilight left ample opportunity. Miss Ludington and Dr. Hull sat upon the piazza in full view of the players. "What do you call her?" he asked, abruptly, after a pause in their conversation. "Why, we call her Ida, of course," replied Miss Ludington, with some surprise. "What else could we call her? Is not her name Ida Ludington?" "On my own account," said Dr. Hull, "I should not have needed to ask you, because I am acquainted with the circumstances of the reassumption of her earthly life and name, but how would you introduce her to one who was not so acquainted--to any one, in fact, besides yourself, your nephew, and myself?" "In the same way, I suppose," replied Miss Ludington. "Precisely," said the doctor "but if they were acquainted with your family, or if they took any special interest in her, would they not want to know what was the nature of her relationship to you? She could not be your daughter. They would ask what was her connection with your family. To tell them the truth would be of no use at all, for no one on earth would believe what we know to be true, nor could I blame them, for I, myself, would not have believed it if I had not been a witness." Miss Ludington was silent a while. Then she said: "It does not matter; we see few, I may say no strangers, or even acquaintances; we live alone. It is enough that we know her." "Yes," replied the doctor. "It is, indeed, quite another thing to what it would be if you had a large circle of acquaintances. So long as you live, it is not important, and I presume that your health is good." "What is it that is not important?" demanded Miss Ludington. "Why that she should have a name," replied the doctor, lifting his eyebrows with an expression of slight surprise. "Unfortunately, the courts do not recognize such a relation as exists between you and this young lady. You are the only Miss Ludington in the eye of the law, and she is non-existent, or, at least, an anonymous person. She has not so much as a name sign on a hotel-register. But so long as you live to look after her she is not likely to suffer." "But I may die!" exclaimed Miss Ludington. "In that case it would be rather awkward for her," said the doctor. "She would die with you in the eye of the law" and here he branched off into rather a fantastical discourse on the oddities and quiddities of the law and lawyers, against whom he seemed to have a great grudge. "But, Dr. Hull, what can I do about it?" said Miss Ludington, as he quieted down. "Excuse me. About what?" "How can I give her a name in the eye of the law?" "Oh--ah--exactly? Well, that's easy enough; there are two ways. You can adopt her, or some young fellow can marry her, and if I were a young man--if you'll excuse an old gentleman for the remark--it would not be my fault if she were not provided with a legal title very soon." Declining Miss Ludington's proposal to send him to the ferry in her carriage, the doctor, soon after, took his leave. He paused as he passed the croquet-ground and stood watching the players. It came Ida's turn, and he waited to see her play. It was a very easy shot which she had to make; she missed it badly. He bade them good-evening, and went on. CHAPTER XII. It was but a few days after Dr. Hull's visit that Miss Ludington had a sudden illness, lasting several days, which, during its crisis, caused much alarm. Ida turned all the servants out of the sick-room and constituted herself nurse, watcher, and chambermaid, if she lay down at all it was only after leaving a substitute charged to call her upon the slightest occasion. Light and quick of step, strong and gentle of hand, patient, tireless, and tender, she showed herself an angel of the sick-room. There was, indeed, something almost eager in the manner in which she seized upon this opportunity of devoting herself to Miss Ludington, and the zeal with which she made the most of every possibility of rendering her a service. She seemed, in fact, almost sorry when the patient had no further need of her especial attendance. To Miss Ludington the revelation that she was so dear to Ida was profoundly affecting. It was natural that she should adore Ida, but that Ida should be correspondingly devoted to her touched her in proportion to its unexpectedness. "I should be glad to be sick always, with you to nurse me, my sister," she said. Whenever she addressed Ida by this title of sister her voice lingered upon the syllables as if she were striving to realize all the mysterious closeness and tenderness of the relation between them which its use implied. The period of convalescence, during which Miss Ludington sat in her room, lasted several days, and one evening she sent for Paul. She was alone when he came in, and after he had inquired after her condition, she motioned him to a chair. "Sit down, Paul," she said; "I want to have a little talk with you." He sat down and she went on: "I find that I have been greatly enfeebled by this attack, and though the doctor tells me I may regain reasonable health, he warns me that I shall not live for ever, and that when I die I may die without much warning." Expressions of mingled grief, surprise, and incredulity from Paul interrupted her at this point, but she presently went on:-- "It is really nothing to distress yourself over, my dear child. He does not say that I may not live on indefinitely, but only that when death comes he is likely to enter without knocking, and I'm sure any sensible person would much rather have it so. It was of Ida that I wanted to speak to you. Since I have been sick, and especially since what the doctor told me, I have been thinking what would become of her if I should die. Did you ever consider, Paul, that she has not even a name? The world does not recognize the way by which she came back into it, and in the eye of the law she has no right to the name of Ida Ludington, or to any other." "I suppose not," said Paul. "It does not matter while I live," pursued Miss Ludington; "but what if I should die?" "Let us not talk of that," replied Paul, "or think of it. Yet even in that event I should be here to protect her." Miss Ludington regarded the young man for some moments without speaking, and then, as a slight colour tinged her cheek she said, "Paul, do you love her?" "Do you need to ask me that?" he answered. "No, I do not," she replied; and then as she cast down her eyes, and the colour in her cheek grew deeper, she went on: "You know, Paul, that, as society is constituted, there is but one way in which a young man can protect a young girl who is not his relative, and that is by marrying her. Have you thought of that?" Paul's face flushed a deep crimson, and his forehead reddened to the roots of the hair; after which the colour receded, and he became quite pale; and then he flushed again deeper than before, till his eyes became congested, and he saw Miss Ludington sitting there before him, with downcast eyes and a spot of colour in either cheek, as through a fiery mist. Yes, he had thought of it. The idea that, being of mystery though she was, Ida was still a woman, and that he might one day possess her as other men possess their wives, had come to him, but it had caused such an ungovernable ferment in his blood, and savoured withal of such temerity, that he had been fairly afraid to indulge it. In the horizon of his mind it had hovered as a dream of unimaginable felicity which might some day in the far future come to pass; but that was all. Finally he said, in a husky voice, "I love her." "I know you do," replied Miss Ludington. "No one but myself knows how you have loved her. You are the only man in the world worthy of her, but you are worthy even of her." "But she would not marry me," said Paul. "She is very good to me, but she has never thought of such a thing. It is I that love her, and she is very good to let me; but she does not love me. How should she?" "I think she does," said Miss Ludington, with a tone of quiet assurance. "I have never said anything to her about it; but I have observed her. A woman can generally read a woman in that particular, and it would be especially strange if I could not read her. I do not think that you need to be afraid of her answer. I shall not urge her by a word; but if she is willing to be your wife, it will be by far the best way her future could be provided for. Then, however soon I might die, she would not miss me." Paul had heard distinctly only her first words, in which she had stated her belief that Ida loved him and would probably be his wife. This intimation had set up such a turmoil in his brain that he had not been able to follow what she had subsequently said. There was a roaring in his ears. Her voice seemed to come from very far away, nor did he remember how long afterwards it was that he left her. As he went downstairs the door of the sitting-room stood open, and he looked in. Ida sat there reading. The weather was very warm, and her dress was some gauzy stuff of a pale-green tint which set off her yellow hair and bare arms and throat with sumptuous effect. She was a ravishing symphony in white, pale green, and gold. She had not heard his approach, and was unconscious of his gaze. As he thought of her as the woman who might be his wife, he grew so faint with love, so intimidated with a sense of his presumption in hoping to possess this glorious creature, that, not daring to enter, he fled out into the darkness to compose himself. No experience of miscellaneous flirtations, or more or less innocent dalliance, had ever weakened the witchery of woman's charms to him, or dulled the keenness of his sensibility to the heaven she can bestow. For an hour he wandered about the dark and silent village street, waiting for the tumult of his emotions to subside sufficiently to leave him in some degree master of himself. When at last he returned to the house, his nerves strung with the resolution to put his fortune to the test, Ida was still in the sitting-room where he had left her. Miss Ludington's conversation with Paul had left her in a mood scarcely less agitated than his. The sensation with which she had watched his devotion to Ida during the past weeks had been a sort of double-consciousness as if it were herself whom Paul was wooing, although at the same time she was a spectator. The thoughts and emotions which she ascribed to Ida agitated her almost as if they had been experienced in her proper person. It was a fancy of hers that between herself and Ida there existed a species of clairvoyance, which enabled her to know what was passing in the latter's mind--a completeness of rapport never realized between any other two minds, but nothing more than might be expected to attend such a relationship as theirs, being a foretaste of the tie that joins the several souls of an individual in heaven. She had never had a serious love affair in her life, but now, in her old age, she was passing through a genuine experience of the tender passion through her sympathetic identification with Ida. As she sat in her chamber after Paul had gone, fancying herself in Ida's place, imagining what she would hear him say, what would be her feelings, and what she would answer, her cheeks flushed, her breath came quickly, and there was a dew like that of dreaming girlhood in her faded eyes. She was still flushing and trembling when there came a soft knock on her door, and Paul and Ida stood before her. Ida was blushing deeply, with downcast face, and the long lashes hid her eyes. She stood slightly bending forward, her long beautifully moulded arms hanging straight down before her. She looked like a beautiful captive, and Paul, as he clasped her waist with his arm, and held one of her hands in his, looked the proudest of conquerors. "I did not know but I might be dreaming it," he said, "and so I brought her for you to see. She says she will be my wife" CHAPTER XIII. Paul's courtship of Ida really began the night when he took her in his arms as his promised wife, for although she had called him her lover before, his devotion, while impassioned enough, had been too distant and wholly reverential to be called a wooing. But the night of their betrothal his love had caught from her lips a fire that was of earth, and it was no longer as a semi-spiritual being that he worshipped her, but as a woman whom it was no sacrilege to kiss a thousand times a day, not upon her hand, her sleeve, or the hem of her dress, but full upon the soft warm mouth. This transformation of the devotee into the lover on his part was attended by a corresponding change in Ida's manner toward him. A model relieved from a strained pose could not show more evident relief than she did in stepping down from the pedestal of a tutelary saint, where he had placed her, to be loved and caressed like an ordinary woman, for if the love had at first been all on his side, it certainly was not now. "I'm so glad," she said one day, "that you have done with worshipping me. Think of your humbling yourself before me, you who are a hundred thousand times better, and wiser, and greater than I. Oh, Paul it is I who ought to worship you, and who am not good enough to kiss you," and before he could prevent her she had caught his hand, and, bowing her face over it, had kissed it. As he drew it away he felt that there were tears upon it. It was evening, and he could not see her face distinctly. "Darling," he exclaimed, "what is the trouble?" "Oh, nothing at all!" she replied. "It is because I am in love, I suppose." Whether it was because she was in love or not it is certain that she took to crying very often during these days. Her manner with her lover, too, was often strangely moody. Sometimes she would display a gaiety that was almost feverish, and shortly after, perhaps, he would surprise her in tears. But she always declared that she was not unhappy; and, unable to conceive of any reason why she should be, Paul was fain to conceive that she was merely nervous. The absorption of the lovers in each other's society naturally left Miss Ludington more often alone than before; but Ida was very far from neglecting her for her lover. Her care for her since her sickness was such as a daughter might give to a beloved and invalid mother. It was an attention such as the lonely old lady had never enjoyed in her life, or looked for, and would have been most grateful to have had from any one, but how much more from Ida! The village street was a rarely romantic promenade on moonlight evenings, and the twanging of Paul's guitar was often heard till after midnight from the meeting-house steps, which were a favourite resort with the lovers. Those steps, in the Hilton of Miss Ludington's girlhood, had been a very popular locality with sentimental couples, and she well remembered certain short-lived romances of Ida's first life on earth with which they had been associated. One night, when the young people had lingered there later than usual, Miss Ludington put on her shawl and stepped across the green to warn them that it was time for even lovers to be abed. As she approached, Paul was seated on the lower step, touching his guitar, and facing Ida, who sat on the step above leaning back against a pillar. A blotch of moonlight fell upon her dreamy, upturned face. One hand lay in her lap, and the fingers of the other were idly playing with a tress of hair that had fallen over her bosom. How well Miss Ludington remembered that attitude, and even the habit of playing with her hair which Ida had in the days so long gone by. She stood in the shadow watching her till Paul ceased playing. Then she advanced and spoke to them. "I have been standing here looking at you, my sister," she said. "I have been trying to imagine how strangely it must come over you that forty years ago you sat here as you sit here now, just as young and beautiful then as now, and Paul not then born, even his parents children at that time." Ida bent down her head and replied, in scarcely audible tones, "I do not like to think of those days." "And I don't like to think of them," echoed Paul, with a curious sensation of jealousy, not the first of the kind that he had experienced in imagining the former life of his darling. "I do not like to think who may have sat at her feet then. I, too, would like to forget these days." Ida bent her head still lower and said nothing. It was Miss Ludington who spoke. "You have no ground to feel so," she said. "I can bear her witness--and what better witness could you have?--that till now she never knew what it is to love. It is true she sat here then as now, and there were others at her feet, drawn by the same beauty that has drawn you, but their voices never touched her heart. She had to come back again to earth to learn what love is." Paul bent contritely, and kissed Ida's feet as she sat above him, murmuring, "Forgive me!" Her hand sought his and pressed it with convulsive strength. They walked home in silence, gentle Miss Ludington inwardly reproaching herself for the embarrassment her words had seemed to cause Ida. She examined her memory afresh. It was very long ago; she was growing old, and it was natural to suppose that her memory might be losing in distinctness. Perhaps some, of the sweethearts of that far away time had been a little nearer, a little dearer, to Ida than to her own fading memory they seemed to have been. Perhaps she had done a stupid thing in referring to those days. Meanwhile, despite of circumstances that would seem peculiarly favourable to a young girl's happiness, Ida's tendency to melancholy was increasing upon her at a rate which began to cause Miss Ludington as well as Paul serious anxiety. She had indeed been pensive from the first, but the expression of her face, when in repose, had of late become one of profound dejection. The shadow which they had never been able to banish from her eyes had deepened into a look of habitual sadness. Coming upon her unexpectedly, both Miss Ludington and Paul had several times found her in tears, which she would not or could not explain. Not infrequently, when she was alone with her lover, and they had been silent awhile, he had looked up to find her eyes fixed upon him and brimming with tears, and at other times, when he was in the very act of caressing her, she would burst out crying, and sob in his arms. But her unaccountable reluctance to consent to any definite arrangement for her marriage with the man she tenderly loved, and had promised to wed, was the most marked symptom of something hysterical in her condition. Some three weeks had elapsed since she had given her word to be Paul's wife, but though he had repeatedly begged her to name a day for their wedding, he had entirely failed to obtain any satisfactory reply. When he grew importunate, the only effect was to set her to crying, as if her heart would break. He was completely perplexed. If she did not love him her conduct would be readily explainable; but that she was in love with him, and very much in love with him, he had increasing evidence every day. She gave nothing that could be called a reason for refusing to say when she would marry him, though she talked feebly of its being so soon, and of not being ready; but when he reminded her of the special considerations that made delay inexpedient, of her own peculiarly unprotected condition, and of Miss Ludington's uncertain health, and desire to see them married as soon as possible, she attempted no reply, but took refuge in tears, leaving him no choice but to relinquish the question, and devote himself to soothing her. When, finally, Miss Ludington asked Paul what were their plans, and he told her of Ida's strange behaviour, they took troubled counsel together concerning her. It was evident that she was in a state of high nervous tension, and her conduct must be attributed to that. Nor was it strange that the experiences through which she had passed in the last month or two, supplemented by the agitations of so extraordinary a love affair, should have left her in a condition of abnormal excitability. "She must not be hurried," said Miss Ludington. "She has promised to be your wife, and you know that she loves you; that ought to be enough to give you patience to wait. Why, Paul, you loved her all your life up to the last month without even seeing her, and did not think the time long." "You forget," he replied, "that it is seeing her which makes it so hard to wait." A day or two later, when she chanced to be sitting alone with her in the afternoon, Miss Ludington said: "When are you and Paul to be married?" "It is not decided yet," Ida replied, falteringly. "Has not Paul spoken to you about it?" "Oh, yes!" "I had hoped that you would have been married before this," said Miss Ludington, after a pause. "You know why I am so anxious that there should be no delay in assuring your position. The time is short I know, but the reasons against postponement are strong, and if you love him I cannot see why you should hesitate. Perhaps you are not quite sure that you do love him. A girl ought to be sure of that." "Oh, I am quite sure of that! I love him with all my heart," exclaimed Ida, and began to cry. Miss Ludington sat down beside her, and, drawing the girl's head to her shoulder, tried to soothe her; but her gentleness only made Ida sob more vehemently. Presently the elder lady said, "You are nervous, my little sister, don't cry, now. We won't talk about it any more. I did not intend to say a word to urge you against your wishes, but only to find out what they were. You shall wait as long as you please before marrying him, and he shall not tease you. Meanwhile I will see to it that, if I should die, you will be left secure and well provided for, even if you never marry any one." "What do you mean?" asked Ida, raising her head and manifesting a sudden interest. "I will adopt you as my daughter," said Miss Ludington, cheerily. "Won't it be odd, pretending that you are my daughter, and that instead of coming into the world before me you came in after me? But it is the only way by which I can give you a legal title to the name of Ida Ludington, although it is yours already by a claim prior to mine. I would rather see you Paul's wife, and under his protection, but this arrangement will secure your safety. You see, until you have a legal name I cannot make you my heir, or even leave you a dollar." "Do you mean that you want to make me your heir?" exclaimed Ida. "Of course," said Miss Ludington. "What else could I think of doing? Even if you had married Paul, do you suppose I would have wished to have you dependent on him? I should then have left you a fortune under the name of Mrs. De Riemer. As it is, I shall leave it to my adopted daughter, Ida Ludington. That is the only difference." "But, Paul?" "Don't fret about Paul," replied Miss Ludington. "I shall not neglect him. I have a great deal of money, and am able to provide abundantly for you both." "Oh, do not do this thing! I beg you will not," cried Ida, seizing Miss Ludington's hands, and looking into her face with an almost frenzied expression of appeal. "I do not want your money. Don't give it to me. I can't bear to have you. You have given me so much, and you are so good to me!--and that I should rob Paul, too! Oh, no I you must not do it; I will never let you." "But, my darling," said Miss Ludington, soothingly, "think what you are to me, and what I am to you. Of course you cannot be conscious of our relation, in the absolute way I am; through the memory I have of you. I can only prove what I am to you by argument and evidence, but surely I have fully proved it, and you must not let yourself doubt it; that would be most cruel. To whom should I leave my money if not to you? Are we not nearer kin than two persons ever were on earth before? What have been the claims of all other heirs since property was inherited compared with yours? Have I not inherited from you all I am--my very personality--and should not you be my heir? "And remember," she went on, "it is not only as my heir that you have a claim on me; your claim would be almost as great if you were neither near nor dear to me. It was through my action that you were called back, without any will of your own, to resume the life which you had once finished on earth. I did not intend or anticipate that result, to be sure, but I am not the less responsible for it and being thus responsible, though you had been a stranger to me instead of my other self, I should be under the most solemn obligation to guard and protect the life I had imposed on you." While Miss Ludington was speaking Ida's tears had ceased to flow, and she had become quite calm. She seemed to have been impressed by what Miss Ludington had said. At least she offered no further opposition to the plan proposed. "I am very anxious to lose no time," said Miss Ludington, presently, "and I think we had better drive into Brooklyn the first thing to-morrow morning, and see my lawyer about the necessary legal proceedings." "Just as you please," said Ida, and presently, pleading a nervous headache, she went to her room and remained there the rest of the afternoon. Meanwhile Paul had seen Miss Ludington, and she had told him of her talk with Ida, and its result. The young man was beside himself with chagrin, humiliation, and baffled love. The fact that Ida had consented to the plan of adoption showed beyond doubt that she had given up all idea of being his wife, at least for the present, and possibly of ever marrying him at all. Why had she dealt with him so strangely? Why had she used him with such cruel caprice? Was ever a man treated so perversely by a woman who loved him? Miss Ludington could only shake her head as he poured out his complaints to her. Ida's contradictory behaviour was as much a puzzle to her as to him, and she deplored it scarcely less. But she insisted that he should not trouble the girl by demanding explanations of her, as that, by vexing her, would only make matters worse. If, indeed, Paul had any disposition to take the attitude of an aggrieved person, it vanished when he met Ida at the tea-table. The sight of her swollen eyes and red lids, and the piteous looks, of deprecating tenderness which from time to time she bent on him, left room for nothing in his heart but a great love and compassion. Whatever might be the secret of this strange caprice it was evidently no mere piece of wantonness. She was suffering from it as much as he. He tried to get a chance to talk with her; but Miss Ludington, feeling slightly ill, went to her room directly after tea, and Ida accompanied her to see that she was properly cared for, and got comfortably to bed. After waiting a long while for her to come downstairs, Paul concluded that she did not intend to appear again, and went off for a walk, in the hope thereby of regaining something of his equanimity. It was about ten o'clock when he returned home. As he came in sight of the house he saw by the light reflected from the sitting-room windows that there was some one upon the piazza. As he came nearer he perceived that it was Ida. She was sitting sidewise upon a long, cane-bottomed settee, and her arms were thrown upon the back of it to form a sort of pillow on which her head rested. His tread upon the turf was inaudible, and she neither saw nor heard him as he approached, nor when, softly mounting the steps, he stood over her. She was indeed sobbing with such violence that she could not have been easily sensible of anything external. Paul had never heard such piteous weeping. He had never seen much of women's crying, and he did not know what abandonment of grief their tender frames can sustain--grief that seemingly would kill a man if he could feel it. Long, gurgling sobs followed one another as the waves of the sea sweep over the head of a straggling swimmer. Every now and then they were interrupted by sharp cries of exquisite anguish, such as might be wrung out by the sudden twist of a rack, and then would come a low, shrill crooning sound, almost musical, beyond which it seemed grief could not go. The violence of the paroxysm would pass, and she would grow calmer, drawing long, shuddering breaths as she struggled back to self-control. Then a quick panting would begin and grow faster and faster, till another burst of sobs shook her like a leaf in the storm. In very awe of such great grief Paul stood awhile silently over her, the tears filling his own eyes and running down his cheeks unheeded. She had wept something like this, though nothing like so long or so bitterly, on former occasions, when he had urged her with special vehemence to fix a day when she would fulfil her promise to be his wife. Now, as he pondered the piteous spectacle before him, the thought came over him that his first reverential instinct concerning her, that despite her resumption of a mortal form she was something more than mortal, was true, and that he had done wrong in so far forgetting it as to urge her to be his wife as if she were merely a woman like others. She herself did not know it, but surely this exceeding cruel crying was nothing else but the conflict between the love of the woman which went out to her earthly lover, and would fain make him happy, and the nature of the inhabitant of heaven, where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. This was the key to her inexplicable sorrow during the past weeks. This explained why, though she loved him so tenderly, the thought of becoming his wife was so intolerable to her. So be it. Her nature could not sink to his, but his should rise to hers. This brief dream of earthly passion must pass. Better a thousand times that he should be disappointed in all that is dear to the heart of a man, than that he should grieve her thus. In that moment it did not seem hard to him to sacrifice the hopes of the man to the devotion of the lover. By one great effort he rose again to the level of the ascetic passion that had glorified his life up to these last delirious weeks. She had brought heaven to earth for him, but it should still be heaven, since her happiness demanded it. And having reasoned thus, at last, for there seemed no end of her weeping, or any diminution of its bitterness, he touched her. She started, and turned her streaming eyes to him, then, seeing who it was, threw her arms around his neck, and, as he sat beside her, laid her head on his shoulder clinging to him convulsively. "You don't believe I love you, Paul; and I can't blame you for it, I can't blame you," she sobbed; "but I do, oh, I do!" "I do believe it. I know it," he said. "Don't think that I doubt it, and don't cry now, for after this your love shall be enough for me. I will not trouble you any more with importunings to be my wife. I have been very cruel to you." "It is because I love you that I will not marry you," she sobbed. "Promise me you will never doubt that. Don't ask me to explain to you why it is; only believe me." "I think I understand why it is already," he replied, gently. "I was very dull not to know before. If I had known, I should not have caused you so much grief." She raised her head from his shoulder. "What is it that you know?" she asked, quickly. He thereupon proceeded to tell her, in tenderest words of reverence, what, in his opinion, was the mystical cause, unsuspected, perhaps, even by herself, of her unconquerable repugnance to the idea of being his wife, truly as he knew she loved him. He blamed himself that he had not recognized the sacred instinct which had held her back, but in his selfish blindness had gone on urging her to do violence to her nature. Now that his eyes were opened he would not grieve her any more. Her love alone should satisfy and bless him. Earthly passion should no more vex her serenity. When he first began to speak she had regarded him with evident astonishment. As the meaning of his words became clear to her she had turned her face away from him and covered it with both her hands, as a person does under an overpowering sense of shame. She did not remove them until he had finished, when she rose abruptly. Light enough came from the windows behind them for him to see that her cheeks and forehead were crimson. "I think I may as well go now," she said. "Good-bye." And in another moment he found himself alone, not a little astonished at the suddenness of her departure. CHAPTER XIV. Ida passed with a quick step through the sitting-room and upstairs to her bedroom, where she locked the door and threw herself upon the bed in a paroxysm of tearless sobbing. "I believe I have no more tears left," she whispered, as at last she raised herself and arranged her dishevelled hair. She sat awhile in woful reverie upon the edge of the bed, and then crossed the room to a beautiful writing-desk which Miss Ludington had given her. She opened it, and, taking out several sheets of paper, prepared to write. "If I had not run upstairs that moment," she murmured, "I must have told him the whole horrible story. But it is better this way. I believe it would have killed me to see the look on his face. Oh, my darling, my darling! what will you think of me when you know?" and then she sat down to write. She stopped so many times to cry over it that it was midnight when the writing was finished. It was a letter, and the superscription read as follows:-- "To my lover, Paul, who will never love me any mere after he reads this, but whom I shall love for ever:-- "This letter will explain to you why my room is empty this morning. I could stand it no longer: to be loved and almost worshipped, by those whom I was basely deceiving. And so I have fled. You will never see me or hear from me again, and you will never want to after you have read this letter. All the jewellery and dresses, and everything that Miss Ludington has given me, I have left behind, except the clothes I had to have to go away in, and these I will return as soon as I get where I am going. Oh, my poor Paul! I am no more Ida Ludington than you are. How could you ever believe such a thing? But let me tell my shameful story in order. Perhaps it was not so strange that you were deceived. I think any one might have been who held the belief you did at the outset. "I am Ida Slater, Mrs. Slater's daughter, whom she named after Miss Ludington, because she thought her name so pretty when they went to school together as children in Hilton. I was born in Hilton twenty-three years ago, several years after Miss Ludington left the village. My father is Mr. Slater, of course, but he is the person you know as Dr. Hull, which is an assumed name. Mrs. Legrand, who is no more dead than you are, is a sister of my father. Her husband is dead, and father acts as her manager, and mother helps about the séances, and does what she can in any way to bring a little money. We have always been very poor, and it has been very, very hard for us to get a living. Father is a man of education, and had tried many things before we came to this, but nothing succeeded. We grew poorer and poorer, and when this business came in our way he had to take up with it or send us to the almshouse. It is not an honest business, at least as we conducted it; but, oh, Paul! none of you that are rich understand that to a very poor man the duty of supporting his family seems sometimes as if it were the only duty in the world. "Well, when mother came to visit Miss Ludington, and saw that picture which is so much like me, and so little, mother says, like what Miss Ludington ever was, and when she found out about your belief in the immortality of past selves, the idea first came to her of deceiving you. "That story of mother's going to Cincinnati was a lie, to prevent your suspecting that she had anything to do with the business. Mrs. Rhinehart is an imaginary person. At first, the idea was only to get you interested in the séances, for the profit of the fees; but when they saw how entirely deceived you were by my resemblance to the picture, the scheme of getting me into this house occurred to them. "Or rather it did not occur to them at all. It was you, Paul, yourself, who suggested it, when you said that night after the first séance, that if a medium died in a trance, you believed the materialized spirit could not dematerialize but would return to earth. But for that the idea would never have occurred to them. "It seemed a daring plot, but many things favoured it. I had lived in Hilton up to within a few years, and knew every stick and stone of the old as well as the new part of the village. I had wandered all over the old Ludington homestead time and again. Mother knew as much about Miss Ludington's early life as she did herself, and could post me on the subject, and there was my wonderful resemblance to the picture, which, of itself, would be almost enough to carry me through. "It was for my sake entirely that they proposed this scheme. My father and mother may be looked down upon by the world as a very poor kind of people, but they have always been very good to me. I will not have you blame them except as you blame me with them. They thought that in this way I could be rescued from the hard and questionable life which they were living, and in which they did not wish me to grow up. If the plan succeeded, and you were deceived and took me here, thinking me the true Ida, they believed that I would be secured a life of happiness and luxury. They had seen, too, how you were in love with the true Ida, and made no question that you would love me and marry me. "It was that more than all, Paul, that decided me to do it. I had fallen in love with you that night of the first séance when I stood before you and you looked at me with such boundless, adoring love. I think it would have turned almost any girl's head to be looked at in that way. And then, Paul, you are very handsome. "I always had a taste for acting. They used to say I would have done well on the stage, and the idea of playing a role so fine and so bold as this took my fancy from the start. It was that, Paul, that, and the notion of your making love to me, more than any thought of the wealth and luxury I might get a share in, which made me consent to the plan. "That sickness of Mrs. Legrand's between the séances--I am telling you all, Paul--was only a sham, so that we might see how much in earnest you were, and to get time for me to learn by heart all mother could teach me about the Hilton of forty years ago and Miss Ludington's girlhood. There were so many lists of names to be kept in mind, and school-room incidents, picnics, and flirtations; but it was as interesting as a romance, and being a Hilton girl, it did not take me long to make myself as much at home with the last generation as with my own. Sometimes mother would say to me, 'Ida, if I did not know that you are a good girl, and would be good to Miss Ludington, I would not betray my old friend this way. I would not do it for any one but you, and if I did not believe that in deceiving her you would make her very happy--far happier than now.' "I think, in spite of all, she was very fond of Miss Ludington, for she made me promise, again and again, that I would be very good to her, as if I could have helped being good to such a gentle, tender-hearted person as she. "You see, in our business, we had shown to so many sad people what they believed to be the forms and faces of their dead friends, and had sent them away comforted, that we had come to feel our frauds condoned by the happiness they caused, and that we were, after all, doing good. "As for you, Paul, mother had no scruples. She said that I was a good girl, and any man was lucky to get me. I was not sure of that, but I knew that any girl would be fortunate whom you loved. She had a dress cut for me in the exact pattern of that in the picture--a very old-fashioned pattern, but very becoming to me--and all was ready. You know the rest. "I forgot to say that the reason the dress all fell to pieces the day after I came here was that it had been treated with a chemical preparation, which had completely rotted the texture of the cloth. Indeed I had trouble to keep it together that first night. Father saw to this part. He understands chemistry, and indeed, everything else except how to make a living. "There was no trap-door in the floor in Tenth Street, but the whole ceiling of the cabinet was a trap-door, the edges hidden by the breadth of the boards forming the partition which enclosed it. It rose on oiled hinges, with a pulley and a counter-weight, at a touch of a finger, and the person who was to appear, unless it was a part that the medium herself could take, descended in an instant by letting down a short light ladder, wrapped in cloth, so as to make no sound. The draught of air just before the appearance, which Miss Ludington had spoken of in her talks with me, was something that we never thought of, and was caused, I suppose, by the drawing of the air up through the raised ceiling. "It was all so easy, so easy; we need not have taken half the precautions we did; you were so absolutely convinced from the first moment that I was the Ida of the picture. From the time I came home with you that night till now there has been no question of my proving who I was, but only of Miss Ludington's proving, and of your proving, to me, that you were the persons you claimed to be. It was not whether I was related to her, but only that she was related to me, which Miss Ludington thought in any need of demonstration. "And as for you, Paul, it is not your fault that I was not your wife weeks ago. "And so I should have been, and Miss Ludington's heir besides, but for two particulars in which our plot was fatally defective. It provided for all contingencies, but made no allowance for the possibilities that I might prove capable of gratitude towards Miss Ludington, and that I might fall in love with you. Both these things have happened to me, and there is no choice left me but to fly in the night. Of course I had expected you to fall in love with me, and had fancied you so much, after seeing you the first time, as to feel that it would be very fine to have you for a lover, and even for a husband. But that was not really love at all. I think if you could understand even a little what dismay came over me when I first realized that my heart was yours, you would almost pity me. After that, to deceive you was torture to me, and yet, to tell you the truth would have been to make you loathe me like a snake. Oh, Paul! think of what I have suffered these past weeks, and pity me a little! "You will understand now why it was that I could not bear to have the circumstances of the fraud we had practised on you alluded to in my presence, and why, after the first few days, I never spoke of them myself. "When father, whom you know as Dr. Hull, came that day to see how the plot was succeeding, I thought I should die with shame. He tried to catch my eye, and to get a chance to speak with me, but I avoided him. He must have gone away very much puzzled by my conduct, for it had been arranged between us that he should come. By that time, you see, I had become heart-sick of the part I was playing. "But, Paul, you must not think that it was mere sham, father's drawing you out so much to talk at the table that night, and pretending to be so much taken up with what you said. He is great for being taken up with new ideas, and I think his interest was quite genuine. I knew before I left home that he half believed you to be right about the immortality of past selves. For my part, I believe it wholly, and that I have abused not only Miss Ludington and you, but the spirit of her whom I have personated. "If Miss Ludington had not so loaded me with kindness I could have borne it, better, but to have that sweet old lady fairly worshipping the ground one trod on, and covering one with gifts, and dresses, and jewels, would have been too much, I think, for the conscience of the worst person in the world. "I should have fled from the house before I had been here a week but for you, Paul. I could not bear to leave you. If I had only gone then I should have saved myself much; for what would it have been to leave you then to what it is now! "It was very wrong in me to promise to marry you that night when you came to me; for I knew then as well as now that I never could. But I loved you so, I had no strength. Oh, these last happy weeks! I wonder if you have been so happy as I--so happy or so miserable, I don't know which to say; for all the time there was a deadly sickness at my heart, and every night I cried myself to sleep, and woke up crying; and yet I loved you so I could not but be happy in being where you were. Remember always, Paul, that if I had not loved you so, I should have let you marry an adventuress; for that is what I suppose you will call me now--you, who could not find words tender enough for me. Yes, if I had loved you less, I would have been your wife, and I would have made you very happy, just as we made so many poor people happy at our séances--by deceiving them. But I could not deceive you. "It is true that I have been meanwhile deceiving you, but it has only been from day to day. I knew it was not to last, and I lacked strength to end it sooner. Think how dear your kisses must have been to me, that I could endure them with the knowledge all the while that if you knew whom you were kissing, you would spurn me with your foot. "As soon as you began to urge me to name a day for our marriage I knew that the end was near. You wondered why I cried so whenever you spoke of it. You know now. To-day Miss Ludington told me that she intended to adopt me and leave me her fortune, so that I need feel under no necessity to marry you if I did not wish to. Think of that, Paul! Can you conceive of any one so low, so base, as to be capable of taking advantage of such a heart? As she was talking to me, I made up my mind that I must go to-night. "This evening, when I was helping her to bed (I have been so glad to do all I could for her; it took away a little of my shame to see how happy I made her) she seemed so troubled because I could not keep my tears from falling. When you read her this she will think her sympathy wasted. And yet she will not think hard of me. She could not think hard of any one, and I am sure I love her dearly, and always shall. "Oh, Paul, my darling, do not despise me utterly! My love was pure; it was as pure as any one's could be, though I have been so bad. I think my heart was breaking when you found me crying on the piazza to-night. It was not only that I must leave you, and never look on your face again, but that I must give over my memory to your scorn and loathing. When you took me in your arms and comforted me, my resolution all gave way, and I felt that I would not, could not, go. I think I was on the point of throwing myself at your feet and confessing all, and begging to be taken as the lowest servant in the house, so that I might be near you. "And then it was that you began to explain to me that, although I might not be aware of it, the reason that I would not be your wife was that, having come from heaven, my nature was purer than that of earthly women, and shrank from marriage as a sacrilege. "Think of your saying that to me! "When I comprehended you, and saw that you actually believed what you said, I realized the folly of imagining that you could ever pardon me for what I had done, or that the gulf between what I was and what you thought me to be could ever be bridged. So it was that you yourself gave me back the resolution and the strength to leave you, which went from me when I was in your arms. I was overcome with such shame and self-contempt that I could not even kiss you as I left you for ever. "I have told you my whole story, Paul, that you may know not alone how black my deception was, but how bitterly I have expiated it. I came into this house a frivolous girl; I leave it a broken-hearted woman. Do not blame me too harshly. It is myself that I have injured most. I leave you as well off as before you saw me; free to return to your spirit-love. She will forgive you. It is my only consolation that she is but a spirit-love. If she were a woman I could never have given you up to her. Never! Oh, Paul! If I could only hope that you would not wholly despise me, that you, would think sometimes a little pitifully of "IDA SLATER." She next wrote a note to Miss Ludington, full of contrition and tenderness, and referring her to Paul's letter for the whole story. It was after two o'clock in the morning when she finished the second letter, and laid it in plain view beside the other. She next removed her jewels and exchanged her rich costume for the simplest in her wardrobe, and having donned cloak and hat, extinguished the light, and softly unlocking the door, stepped into the hall. Perfect silence reigned in the house. As she stood listening the clock in the sitting-room struck three. There was no time to lose. The early summer dawn would soon arrive, and, before the first servants of neighbours were stirring she must be outside the grounds and well on her way. There was a late risen moon, and enough light penetrated the house to enable her to make her way without difficulty. As she passed Paul's door she stopped and stood leaning her forehead against the casement for some minutes. At last she knelt and pressed her lips to the threshold, and, choking down a sob, went on downstairs. As she passed through the sitting-room she paused a moment before the picture. "Forgive me," she whispered, looking up at the dimly visible face of Ida Ludington, and passed on. Unfastening a window that opened upon the piazza, she stepped forth and closed it behind her. At the first light sound of her feet upon the walk, the mastiff that guarded the house bounded up to her, and seeing who it was, licked her hand. The big beast had fallen in love with her on her first arrival, and been her devoted attendant ever since. She sat down on the edge of the walk and put her arms around his neck, wetting his shaggy coat with her tears. Here was a friend who would know no difference between Ida Slater and Ida Ludington. Here was one who loved her for herself. Presently she rose, dried her eyes, and went on down the street, the dog trotting contentedly behind her. As she came to a point beyond which the trees cut off the view of the house, she stood still, gazing back at it for a long time. Finally, with a gesture of renunciation, she turned and passed swiftly out of sight. CHAPTER XV. It was Miss Ludington herself who, stirring unusually early, discovered Ida's flight on going to her room. Paul opened his eyes a few minutes later to see her standing by his bedside, the picture of consternation. "She is gone!" she exclaimed. "Who is gone?" he asked, rubbing his eyes. "Ida has gone. Her room is empty." Hastily dressing, he rejoined her in Ida's chamber, and together they went over the letters she had left. If the revelation which they contained had been made when she had been in the house a shorter time, its effect might have been very different. But it had come too late to produce the revulsion of feeling it might then have caused. True, it was under a false name that she had first won their confidence, but it was the girl herself they had learned to love. If her name proved to be Ida Slater, why it was Ida Slater whom they loved. It was the person, not the name. "Oh, why did she leave us!" cried Miss Ludington, with streaming eyes, as she finished Ida's letter to Paul. "Why did she not come to us and tell us! We would have forgiven her. She was not so much to blame as her parents. How can we blame her when we think how happy she has made us! Oh, Paul! we must find her. We must bring her back." He pressed her hand in silence. His darling, his heart's love, had gone away from him, out into the world, and he knew not where to find her, and yet it would be hard to say whether there was not more of exultation than of despair in the mingled emotions which just then deprived him of the power of speech. He had comprehended perfectly well her confession of the deception which she had practised on them, but the portion of her letter which had chiefly affected him had been the impassioned avowal of her love for him. After his recent trying ordeal in striving to subject an earthly love to spiritual conditions, culminating the night before in the renunciation of the hope of ever marrying her at all, there was an intoxicating happiness in the discovery that she was every whit as earthly as he, and loved him with a passion as ardent as his own. He was a Pygmalion, whose statue had become a woman. For the first time he now realized how far his heart had travelled from the spirit-love which once had been enough for it, and how impossible it was that it should ever again find satisfaction in the dim and nebulous emotion in which it had so long rested. With a sense of recreancy that was wholly shameless, he realized that it was no longer Ida Ludington, but Ida Slater, whom he loved. Little did the forlorn girl, in her self-imposed exile, imagine what a welcome would have met her if, moved by some intuition, she had retraced her steps that morning to the chamber which a few hours before she had deserted. Repentance often is so fine that in the moral balance it quite outweighs the fault repented of, and so it was in her case. Such repentance is as if the black stalk of sin had blossomed and put forth a fragrant flower. These two persons, whom she had expected to loathe her as soon as they should know the truth, had from the first reading of her story been more impressed with the chivalrous instinct which had driven her to abandon her role of fraud when it was about to be crowned with dazzling success, than with her original offence in entering upon it. The effect of her story was in this respect a curious one for a confession to produce: it had added to the affection which they had previously entertained for her, an appreciation of the nobility of her character which they had not then possessed. Paul's heart yearned after its mistress in her self-humiliation and voluntary banishment as never before. This impassioned and most human woman, who had shown herself capable of wrong, and, also, of most generous renunciation, had struck a deeper chord in his breast than had ever vibrated to the touch of the flawless seraph he had supposed her to be. Having canvassed all possible methods of reaching Ida in her flight, it was decided by Paul and his aunt to begin by advertising, and that same day the following notice was inserted in all the daily papers of Brooklyn and New York;-- "IDA S----R.--All is forgiven; only come back. We cannot live without you. For pity's sake at least write to us. "Miss L---- AND PAUL." This advertisement was to remain in the papers till forbidden. If Ida was anywhere in the two cities or vicinity, the chances were that it would fall under the notice of herself or some of her family. Before inserting the advertisement Paul had visited Mrs. Legrand's house in East Tenth Street; but, as he had expected, he found that the family had moved away long previously, probably with a view to avoid detection, and to enable Mrs. Legrand to obtain business elsewhere. A week passed without any response to the advertisement. Paul spent his days walking the streets of New York and Brooklyn at random, for the sake of the chance, about one in ten billions, that he might meet Ida. Anything was more endurable than sitting at home waiting, and by dint of tramping all day long he was so dead tired when he reached home at night that he could sleep, which otherwise would have been out of the question. About the middle of the week a bundle arrived, containing the dress Ida had worn away, with her hat and cloak, but without a word of writing; Paul devoured them with kisses. A study of the express markings showed that the package must have been sent from Brooklyn, which went to show that Ida was in that city. Believing that she did not intend to respond to the advertisement, Paul had determined, if he did not hear from her within a few days, to employ a prominent New York detective firm to search for her. If he could but once see her face to face, he was sure that he could bring her back. A week from the day on which she had fled he was starting out as usual, early in the morning, for another day of hopeless, weary tramping in the city, when the postman handed him a letter addressed in her handwriting. It was to him like a voice from the grave, and read as follows:-- "I have seen your advertisement for me. I cannot believe that you have forgiven me. You could not do it. It is impossible. Even if I could believe it, I do not think I should ever have the courage to face you after what you know of me. I should die of shame. Oh, Paul! if you could see how my cheeks burn as I write this, and know that you will see it. But I cannot deny myself the happiness of writing to you. There is no reason why we should not write sometimes, is there? though we never see each other. Does Miss Ludington really forgive me, or does she merely consent to have me return because you still care for me? If you do still care for me--Oh, Paul! I cannot believe it--do you forget what I have done? Read over again the letter I left for you when I came away. You must have forgotten it. Read it carefully. Think it all over. Oh, no, you cannot love me still! "IDA SLATER." Paul replied with the first love-letter he had ever written, and one that any woman who loved him must have found irresistible. He enclosed a note from Miss Ludington, assuring Ida of the unhappiness which her flight had caused them, the undiminished tenderness which they cherished for her; and the cruelty she would be guilty of if she refused to return. In response to these letters there came a note saying simply, "I will come." On the evening of the day this note was received, as Paul and Miss Ludington were together in the sitting-room talking as usual of Ida, and wondering on what day she would return, there was a light step at, the open door, and she glided into the room, and, throwing herself on her knees before Miss Ludington, hid her face in her lap. It was an hour before she would raise her head, replying the while only with sobs to the kisses and caresses showered upon her, and the assurances of love and welcome poured into her ears. When at last she lifted her face her embarrassment was so distressing that in pity Miss Ludington told Paul he might take her out for a walk in the dark. When they came back her cheeks were flushed as redly as when she went out; but, despite her shame, she looked very happy. "She is to be my wife in two weeks from to-day," said Paul, exultantly. "I ought not to let him marry me. I know I ought not. I am not fit for him," faltered Ida; "but I cannot refuse him anything, and I love him so!" "You are quite fit for him," said Miss Ludington, kissing her, "and I can well believe he loves you. It would be strange, indeed, if he did not. You are a noble and a tender woman, and he will be very happy." In the days that followed, Ida was at first much puzzled to account not only for the evident genuineness of the esteem which her friends cherished for her, but for the fact that it seemed to have been enhanced rather than diminished by the recent events. Instead of regarding her repentance as at most offsetting her offence, they apparently looked upon it as a positive virtue redounding wholly to her credit. It was quite as if she had made amends for another person a sin, in contrast with whose conduct her own nobility stood out in fine relief. And that, in fact, is exactly the way they did look at it. Their habit of distinguishing between the successive phases of an individual life as distinct persons, made it impossible for them to take any other view of the matter. In their eyes the past was good or bad for itself, and the present good or bad for itself, and an evil past could no more shadow a virtuous present than a virtuous present could retroact to brighten or redeem an ugly past. It is the soul that repents which is ennobled by repentance. The soul that did the deed repented of is past forgiving. There was no affectation on the part of Paul or Miss Ludington of ignoring the fraud which Ida had practised, or pretending to forget it. This was not necessary out of any consideration for her feelings, for they did not hold that it was she who was guilty of that fraud, but another person. As gradually she comprehended the way in which they looked upon her, and came to perceive that they unquestioningly held that she had no responsibility for her past self, but was a new being, she was filled with a great exhilaration, the precise like of which was, perhaps, never before known to a repentant wrong-doer. As they believed, so would she believe. With a great joy she put the shameful past behind her and took up her new life. "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." If she had loved Paul before, if she had before felt tenderly toward Miss Ludington, a passion of gratitude now intensified her love, her tenderness, a thousand-fold. Miss Ludington's failing health was the only shadow on the perfect happiness of the lovers during those two weeks of courtship. Compared with the intoxicating reality of these golden days Paul looked back on his wooing of the supposed Ida Ludington as a vague and unsatisfying dream. Now that Ida was no longer playing a part, he was really just becoming acquainted with her, and finding out what manner of maiden it was to whom he had lost his heart. Each day, almost each hour, discovered to him some new trait, some unsuspected grace of mind or heart, till, in this glowing girl, so bright, so blithe, so piquant, he had difficulty in recognizing any likeness, save of face and form, to the moody, freakish, melancholy, hysterical, and altogether eerie Ida Ludington. "I am so glad," Miss Ludington said to her one day, "that you are Ida Slater, and not my Ida." "Why are you glad?" Ida asked. "Would you not have been happier if you had gone on believing me to be your girlish self?" "I should have grown very sad by this time if I had continued to think that you were she?" replied Miss Ludington. "I have not long to live, and it is far more important to me that she should be there to welcome me when I go over than that I should have her here with me for a few days before I go. If she were here on earth the thought of so soon leaving her behind would sadden me as much as the hope of meeting her now gladdens me." Miss Ludington neither talked herself nor permitted others to talk in a melancholy tone of the probable nearness of her end. "Death may seem dreadful," she said to Ida one day, "to the foolish people who fancy that an individual dies but once, forgetting that their present selves are but the last of many selves already dead. The death which may now be near me is no sadder, no more important, than the deaths of my past selves, and no different, save in the single respect that this time no later self will follow me. This house of our individuality, which has sheltered us in turn, having become incapable of being repaired for the use of subsequent tenants, is to be pulled down. That is all." Another time she said, "It is very strange to see people who dread death always looking for it instead of backward. In their fear of dying once they quite forget that they have died already many times. It is the most foolish of all things to imagine that by prolonging the career of the individual, death is kept at bay. The present self must die in any case by the inevitable process of time, whether the body be kept in repair for later selves or not. The death of the body is but the end of the daily dying that makes up earthly life." They were married in the sitting-room before the picture that had exerted so strong an influence upon their lives. The servants were invited in, but there was no company. Ida wore a white satin with a low corsage, and as she stood directly below the picture, the resemblance impressed the beholders very strikingly. It was as if the girl had stepped down from the picture to be married. Ida had demurred a little to standing just there, which had been the suggestion of Miss Ludington. She was not without a vague superstition that the spirit of the girl whose lover she had stolen away would not wish her well. But when she hinted this, Miss Ludington replied, "You must not think of it that way. What has a spirit like her to do with earthly passions? Your love has saved Paul from a dream as vain as it was beautiful, and which, had it gone on, might have gained a morbid strength and blighted his life. I like to fancy, and I know it is Paul's belief, that the spirit of my Ida influenced you to come to us just as you came, that under her form Paul might fall in love with you. In no other way but just this do I believe he could have been cured of his infatuation." Owing to the precarious condition of Miss Ludington's health, Paul and Ida would not consent to leave home for any bridal trip. It was but a week after the wedding that, on going into Miss Ludington's room as usual the first thing in the morning, Ida found her dead. She must have expired very quietly, if not, indeed, in her sleep, for her room adjoined that of the bridal couple, and she could have summoned Ida with the touch of a bell. Her features were relaxed in a smile of joyous recognition. * * * * * * Paul took his wife to Europe directly after the funeral. One night, during their absence, a fire, probably set by tramps, broke out in one of the empty houses of the village, and, the wind being high and no help near, all the buildings on the place, including the homestead, were completely destroyed. The latter being shut up, nothing even of the furniture could be saved, and the entire contents, including the picture in the sitting-room, were consumed. The tourists were much shocked by the receipt of the intelligence, but Paul expressed the inmost conviction of both when he finally said, "Now that she is gone, perhaps it is as well. Ashes to ashes! The past has claimed its own." They never rebuilt the village or the homestead, but on their return to this country took up their residence in New York. The site of the mimic Hilton is once more tilled as a farm. It is scarcely necessary to add that Ida made such provision for her family as enabled them to retire from the medium business. Paul insisted that this provision should be at the most generous nature, for was he not indebted to them for the happiness of his life? He never would admit that Mrs. Legrand was a fraud, but always maintained that none but a truly great medium could have materialized the vaguest of love-dreams into the sweetest of wives. As for Dr. Hull, or, rather, Mr. Slater, he became in time quite a crony of Paul's, and the book on which the latter is engaged, setting forth the argument for the immortality of past selves, will owe not a little to the suggestions of the old gentleman. 
14636	----	Proofreading Team TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO translator, J.E. CRAWFORD FLITCH DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC New York This Dover edition, first published in 1954, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the English translation originally published by Macmillan and Company, Ltd., in 1921. This edition is published by special arrangement with Macmillan and Company, Ltd. The publisher is grateful to the Library of the University of Pennsylvania for supplying a copy of this work for the purpose of reproduction. _Standard Book Number: 486-20257-7 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 54-4730_ Manufactured in the United States of America Dover Publications, Inc. 180 Varick Street New York, N.Y. 10014 CONTENTS PAGES INTRODUCTORY ESSAY xi-xxxii AUTHOR'S PREFACE xxxiii-xxxv I THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE Philosophy and the concrete man--The man Kant, the man Butler, and the man Spinoza--Unity and continuity of the person--Man an end not a means--Intellectual necessities and necessities of the heart and the will--Tragic sense of life in men and in peoples 1-18 II THE STARTING-POINT Tragedy of Paradise--Disease an element of progress--Necessity of knowing in order to live--Instinct of preservation and instinct of perpetuation--The sensible world and the ideal world--Practical starting-point of all philosophy--Knowledge an end in itself?--The man Descartes--The longing not to die 19-37 III THE HUNGER OF IMMORTALITY Thirst of being--Cult of immortality--Plato's "glorious risk"--Materialism--Paul's discourse to the Athenians--Intolerance of the intellectuals--Craving for fame--Struggle for survival 38-57 IV THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM Immortality and resurrection--Development of idea of immortality in Judaic and Hellenic religions--Paul and the dogma of the resurrection--Athanasius--Sacrament of the Eucharist--Lutheranism--Modernism--The Catholic ethic--Scholasticism--The Catholic solution 58-78 V THE RATIONALIST DISSOLUTION Materialism--Concept of substance--Substantiality of the soul--Berkeley--Myers--Spencer--Combat of life with reason--Theological advocacy--_Odium anti-theologicum_--The rationalist attitude--Spinoza--Nietzsche--Truth and consolation 79-105 VI IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS Passionate doubt and Cartesian doubt--Irrationality of the problem of immortality--Will and intelligence--Vitalism and rationalism--Uncertainty as basis of faith--The ethic of despair--Pragmatical justification of despair--Summary of preceding criticism 106-131 VII LOVE, SUFFERING, PITY, AND PERSONALITY Sexual love--Spiritual love--Tragic love--Love and pity--Personalizing faculty of love--God the Personalization of the All--Anthropomorphic tendency--Consciousness of the Universe--What is Truth?--Finality of the Universe 132-155 VIII FROM GOD TO GOD Concept and feeling of Divinity--Pantheism--Monotheism--The rational God--Proofs of God's existence--Law of necessity--Argument from _Consensus gentium_--The living God--Individuality and personality--God a multiplicity--The God of Reason--The God of Love--Existence of God 156-185 IX FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY Personal element in faith--Creative power of faith--Wishing that God may exist--Hope the form of faith--Love and suffering--The suffering God--Consciousness revealed through suffering--Spiritualization of matter 186-215 X RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND, AND THE APOCATASTASIS What is religion?--The longing for immortality--Concrete representation of a future life--Beatific vision--St. Teresa--Delight requisite for happiness--Degradation of energy--Apocatastasis--Climax of the tragedy--Mystery of the Beyond 216-259 XI THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM Conflict as basis of conduct--Injustice of annihilation--Making ourselves irreplaceable--Religious value of the civil occupation--Business of religion and religion of business--Ethic of domination--Ethic of the cloister--Passion and culture--The Spanish soul 260-296 CONCLUSION DON QUIXOTE IN THE CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN TRAGI-COMEDY Culture--Faust--The modern Inquisition--Spain and the scientific spirit--Cultural achievement of Spain--Thought and language--Don Quixote the hero of Spanish thought--Religion a transcendental economy--Tragic ridicule--Quixotesque philosophy--Mission of Don Quixote to-day 297-330 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY DON MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO I sat, several years ago, at the Welsh National Eisteddfod, under the vast tent in which the Bard of Wales was being crowned. After the small golden crown had been placed in unsteady equilibrium on the head of a clever-looking pressman, several Welsh bards came on the platform and recited little epigrams. A Welsh bard is, if young, a pressman, and if of maturer years, a divine. In this case, as England was at war, they were all of the maturer kind, and, while I listened to the music of their ditties--the sense thereof being, alas! beyond my reach--I was struck by the fact that all of them, though different, closely resembled Don Miguel de Unamuno. It is not my purpose to enter into the wasp-nest of racial disquisitions. If there is a race in the world over which more sense and more nonsense can be freely said for lack of definite information than the Welsh, it is surely this ancient Basque people, whose greatest contemporary figure is perhaps Don Miguel de Unamuno. I am merely setting down that intuitional fact for what it may be worth, though I do not hide my opinion that such promptings of the inner, untutored man are worth more than cavefuls of bones and tombfuls of undecipherable papers. This reminiscence, moreover, which springs up into the light of my memory every time I think of Don Miguel de Unamuno, has to my mind a further value in that in it the image of Don Miguel does not appear as evoked by one man, but by many, though many of one species, many who in depth are but one man, one type, the Welsh divine. Now, this unity underlying a multiplicity, these many faces, moods, and movements, traceable to one only type, I find deeply connected in my mind with Unamuno's person and with what he signifies in Spanish life and letters. And when I further delve into my impression, I first realize an undoubtedly physical relation between the many-one Welsh divines and the many-one Unamuno. A tall, broad-shouldered, bony man, with high cheeks, a beak-like nose, pointed grey beard, and a complexion the colour of the red hematites on which Bilbao, his native town, is built, and which Bilbao ruthlessly plucks from its very body to exchange for gold in the markets of England--and in the deep sockets under the high aggressive forehead prolonged by short iron-grey hair, two eyes like gimlets eagerly watching the world through spectacles which seem to be purposely pointed at the object like microscopes; a fighting expression, but of noble fighting, above the prizes of the passing world, the contempt for which is shown in a peculiar attire whose blackness invades even that little triangle of white which worldly men leave on their breast for the necktie of frivolity and the decorations of vanity, and, blinding it, leaves but the thinnest rim of white collar to emphasize, rather than relieve, the priestly effect of the whole. Such is Don Miguel de Unamuno. Such is, rather, his photograph. For Unamuno himself is ever changing. A talker, as all good Spaniards are nowadays, but a talker in earnest and with his heart in it, he is varied, like the subjects of his conversation, and, still more, like the passions which they awake in him. And here I find an unsought reason in intellectual support of that intuitional observation which I noted down in starting--that Unamuno resembles the Welsh in that he is not ashamed of showing his passions--a thing which he has often to do, for he is very much alive and feels therefore plenty of them. But a word of caution may here be necessary, since that term, "passion," having been diminished--that is, made meaner--by the world, an erroneous impression might be conveyed by what precedes, of the life and ways of Unamuno. So that it may not be superfluous to say that Don Miguel de Unamuno is a Professor of Greek in the University of Salamanca, an ex-Rector of it who left behind the reputation of being a strong ruler; a father of a numerous family, and a man who has sung the quiet and deep joys of married life with a restraint, a vigour, and a nobility which it would be difficult to match in any literature. _Yet_ a passionate man--or, as he would perhaps prefer to say, _therefore_ a passionate man. But in a major, not in a minor key; of strong, not of weak passions. The difference between the two lies perhaps in that the man with strong passions lives them, while the man with weak passions is lived by them, so that while weak passions paralyze the will, strong passions urge man to action. It is such an urge towards life, such a vitality ever awake, which inspires Unamuno's multifarious activities in the realm of the mind. The duties of his chair of Greek are the first claim upon his time. But then, his reading is prodigious, as any reader of this book will realize for himself. Not only is he familiar with the stock-in-trade of every intellectual worker--the Biblical, Greek, Roman, and Italian cultures--but there is hardly anything worth reading in Europe and America which he has not read, and, but for the Slav languages, in the original. Though never out of Spain, and seldom out of Salamanca, he has succeeded in establishing direct connections with most of the intellectual leaders of the world, and in gathering an astonishingly accurate knowledge of the spirit and literature of foreign peoples. It was in his library at Salamanca that he once explained to an Englishman the meaning of a particular Scotticism in Robert Burns; and it was there that he congratulated another Englishman on his having read _Rural Rides_, "the hall-mark," he said, "of the man of letters who is no mere man of letters, but also a man." From that corner of Castile, he has poured out his spirit in essays, poetry, criticism, novels, philosophy, lectures, and public meetings, and that daily toil of press article writing which is the duty rather than the privilege of most present-day writers in Spain. Such are the many faces, moods, and movements in which Unamuno appears before Spain and the world. And yet, despite this multiplicity and this dispersion, the dominant impression which his personality leaves behind is that of a vigorous unity, an unswerving concentration both of mind and purpose. Bagaria, the national caricaturist, a genius of rhythm and character which the war revealed, but who was too good not to be overshadowed by the facile art of Raemaekers (imagine Goya overshadowed by Reynolds!), once represented Unamuno as an owl. A marvellous thrust at the heart of Unamuno's character. For all this vitality and ever-moving activity of mind is shot through by the absolute immobility of two owlish eyes piercing the darkness of spiritual night. And this intense gaze into the mystery is the steel axis round which his spirit revolves and revolves in desperation; the unity under his multiplicity; the one fire under his passions and the inspiration of his whole work and life. * * * * * It was Unamuno himself who once said that the Basque is the alkaloid of the Spaniard. The saying is true, so far as it goes. But it would be more accurate to say "one of the two alkaloids." It is probable that if the Spanish character were analyzed--always provided that the Mediterranean aspect of it be left aside as a thing apart--two main principles would be recognized in it--_i.e._, the Basque, richer in concentration, substance, strength; and the Andalusian, more given to observation, grace, form. The two types are to this day socially opposed. The Andalusian is a people which has lived down many civilizations, and in which even illiterate peasants possess a kind of innate education. The Basques are a primitive people of mountaineers and fishermen, in which even scholars have a peasant-like roughness not unlike the roughness of Scotch tweeds--or character. It is the even balancing of these two elements--the force of the Northerner with the grace of the Southerner--which gives the Castilian his admirable poise and explains the graceful virility of men such as Fray Luis de León and the feminine strength of women such as Queen Isabel and Santa Teresa. We are therefore led to expect in so forcible a representative of the Basque race as Unamuno the more substantial and earnest features of the Spanish spirit. Our expectation is not disappointed. And to begin with it appears in that very concentration of his mind and soul on the mystery of man's destiny on earth. Unamuno is in earnest, in dead earnest, as to this matter. This earnestness is a distinct Spanish, nay, Basque feature in him. There is something of the stern attitude of Loyola about his "tragic sense of life," and on this subject--under one form or another, his only subject--he admits no joke, no flippancy, no subterfuge. A true heir of those great Spanish saints and mystics whose lifework was devoted to the exploration of the kingdoms of faith, he is more human than they in that he has lost hold of the firm ground where they had stuck their anchor. Yet, though loose in the modern world, he refuses to be drawn away from the main business of the Christian, the saving of his soul, which, in his interpretation, means the conquest of his immortality, his own immortality. An individualist. Certainly. And he proudly claims the title. Nothing more refreshing in these days of hoggish communistic cant than this great voice asserting the divine, the eternal rights of the individual. But it is not with political rights that he is concerned. Political individualism, when not a mere blind for the unlimited freedom of civil privateering, is but the outcome of that abstract idea of man which he so energetically condemns as pedantic--that is, inhuman. His opposition of the individual to society is not that of a puerile anarchist to a no less puerile socialist. There is nothing childish about Unamuno. His assertion that society is for the individual, not the individual for society, is made on a transcendental plane. It is not the argument of liberty against authority--which can be easily answered on the rationalistic plane by showing that authority is in its turn the liberty of the social or collective being, a higher, more complex, and longer-living "individual" than the individual pure and simple. It is rather the unanswerable argument of eternity against duration. Now that argument must rest on a religious basis. And it is on a religious basis that Unamuno founds his individualism. Hence the true Spanish flavour of his social theory, which will not allow itself to be set down and analyzed into principles of ethics and politics, with their inevitable tendency to degenerate into mere economics, but remains free and fluid and absolute, like the spirit. Such an individualism has therefore none of the features of that childish half-thinking which inspires most anarchists. It is, on the contrary, based on high thinking, the highest of all, that which refuses to dwell on anything less than man's origin and destination. We are here confronted with that humanistic tendency of the Spanish mind which can be observed as the dominant feature of her arts and literature. All races are of course predominantly concerned with man. But they all manifest their concern with a difference. Man is in Spain a concrete being, the man of flesh and bones, and the whole man. He is neither subtilized into an idea by pure thinking nor civilized into a gentleman by social laws and prejudices. Spanish art and letters deal with concrete, tangible persons. Now, there is no more concrete, no more tangible person for every one of us than ourself. Unamuno is therefore right in the line of Spanish tradition in dealing predominantly--one might almost say always--with his own person. The feeling of the awareness of one's own personality has seldom been more forcibly expressed than by Unamuno. This is primarily due to the fact that he is himself obsessed by it. But in his expression of it Unamuno derives also some strength from his own sense of matter and the material--again a typically Spanish element of his character. Thus his human beings are as much body as soul, or rather body and soul all in one, a union which he admirably renders by bold mixtures of physical and spiritual metaphors, as in _gozarse uno la carne del alma_ (to enjoy the flesh of one's own soul). In fact, Unamuno, as a true Spaniard which he is, refuses to surrender life to ideas, and that is why he runs shy of abstractions, in which he sees but shrouds wherewith we cover dead thoughts. He is solely concerned with his own life, nothing but his life, and the whole of his life. An egotistical position? Perhaps. Unamuno, however, can and does answer the charge. We can only know and feel humanity in the one human being which we have at hand. It is by penetrating deep into ourselves that we find our brothers in us--branches of the same trunk which can only touch each other by seeking their common origin. This searching within, Unamuno has undertaken with a sincerity, a fearlessness which cannot be excelled. Nowhere will the reader find the inner contradictions of a modern human being, who is at the same time healthy and capable of thought set down with a greater respect for truth. Here the uncompromising tendency of the Spanish race, whose eyes never turn away from nature, however unwelcome the sight, is strengthened by that passion for life which burns in Unamuno. The suppression of the slightest thought or feeling for the sake of intellectual order would appear to him as a despicable worldly trick. Thus it is precisely because he does sincerely feel a passionate love of his own life that he thinks out with such scrupulous accuracy every argument which he finds in his mind--his own mind, a part of his life--against the possibility of life after death; but it is also because he feels that, despite such conclusive arguments, his will to live perseveres, that he refuses to his intellect the power to kill his faith. A knight-errant of the spirit, as he himself calls the Spanish mystics, he starts for his adventures after having, like Hernán Cortés, burnt his ships. But, is it necessary to enhance his figure by literary comparison? He is what he wants to be, a man--in the striking expression which he chose as a title for one of his short stories, _nothing less than a whole man_. Not a mere thinking machine, set to prove a theory, nor an actor on the world stage, singing a well-built poem, well built at the price of many a compromise; but a whole man, with all his affirmations and all his negations, all the pitiless thoughts of a penetrating mind that denies, and all the desperate self-assertions of a soul that yearns for eternal life. This strife between enemy truths, the truth thought and the truth felt, or, as he himself puts it, between veracity and sincerity, is Unamuno's _raison d'être_. And it is because the "_Tragic Sense of Life_" is the most direct expression of it that this book is his masterpiece. The conflict is here seen as reflected in the person of the author. The book opens by a definition of the Spanish man, the "man of flesh and bones," illustrated by the consideration of the real living men who stood behind the bookish figures of great philosophers and consciously or unconsciously shaped and misshaped their doctrines in order to satisfy their own vital yearnings. This is followed by the statement of the will to live or hunger for immortality, in the course of which the usual subterfuges with which this all-important issue is evaded in philosophy, theology, or mystic literature, are exposed and the real, concrete, "flesh and bones" character of the immortality which men desire is reaffirmed. The Catholic position is then explained as the _vital_ attitude in the matter, summed up in Tertullian's _Credo quia absurdum_, and this is opposed to the critical attitude which denies the possibility of individual survival in the sense previously defined. Thus Unamuno leads us to his inner deadlock: his reason can rise no higher than scepticism, and, unable to become vital, dies sterile; his faith, exacting anti-rational affirmations and unable therefore to be apprehended by the logical mind, remains incommunicable. From the bottom of this abyss Unamuno builds up his theory of life. But is it a theory? Unamuno does not claim for it such an intellectual dignity. He knows too well that in the constructive part of his book his vital self takes the leading part and repeatedly warns his reader of the fact, lest critical objections might be raised against this or that assumption or self-contradiction. It is on the survival of his will to live, after all the onslaughts of his critical intellect, that he finds the basis for his belief--or rather for his effort to believe. Self-compassion leads to self-love, and this self-love, founded as it is on a universal conflict, widens into love of all that lives and therefore wants to survive. So, by an act of love, springing from our own hunger for immortality, we are led to give a conscience to the Universe--that is, to create God. Such is the process by which Unamuno, from the transcendental pessimism of his inner contradiction, extracts an everyday optimism founded on love. His symbol of this attitude is the figure of Don Quixote, of whom he truly says that his creed "can hardly be called idealism, since he did not fight for ideas: it was spiritualism, for he fought for the spirit." Thus he opposes a synthetical to an analytical attitude; a religious to an ethico-scientific ideal; Spain, his Spain--_i.e._, the spiritual manifestation of the Spanish race--to Europe, his Europe--_i.e._, the intellectual manifestation of the white race, which he sees in Franco-Germany; and heroic love, even when comically unpractical, to culture, which, in this book, written in 1912, is already prophetically spelt Kultura. This courageous work is written in a style which is the man--for Buffon's saying, seldom true, applies here to the letter. It is written as Carlyle wrote, not merely with the brain, but with the whole soul and the whole body of the man, and in such a vivid manner that one can without much effort imagine the eager gesticulation which now and then underlines, interprets, despises, argues, denies, and above all asserts. In his absolute subservience to the matter in hand this manner of writing has its great precedent in Santa Teresa. The differences, and they are considerable, are not of art, absent in either case, but of nature. They are such deep and obvious differences as obtain between the devout, ignorant, graceful nun of sixteenth-century Avila and the free-thinking, learned, wilful professor of twentieth-century Salamanca. In the one case, as in the other, the language is the most direct and simple required. It is also the least literary and the most popular. Unamuno, who lives in close touch with the people, has enriched the Spanish literary language by returning to it many a popular term. His vocabulary abounds in racy words of the soil, and his writings gain from them an almost peasant-like pith and directness which suits his own Basque primitive nature. His expression occurs simultaneously with the thoughts and feelings to be expressed, the flow of which, but loosely controlled by the critical mind, often breaks through the meshes of established diction and gives birth to new forms created under the pressure of the moment. This feature Unamuno has also in common with Santa Teresa, but what in the Saint was a self-ignorant charm becomes in Unamuno a deliberate manner inspired, partly by an acute sense of the symbolical and psychological value of word-connections, partly by that genuine need for expansion of the language which all true original thinkers or "feelers" must experience, but partly also by an acquired habit of juggling with words which is but natural in a philologist endowed with a vigorous imagination. Unamuno revels in words. He positively enjoys stretching them beyond their usual meaning, twisting them, composing, opposing, and transposing them in all sorts of possible ways. This game--not wholly unrewarded now and then by striking intellectual finds--seems to be the only relaxation which he allows his usually austere mind. It certainly is the only light feature of a style the merit of which lies in its being the close-fitting expression of a great mind earnestly concentrated on a great idea. * * * * * The earnestness, the intensity, and the oneness of his predominant passion are the main cause of the strength of Unamuno's philosophic work. They remain his main asset, yet become also the principal cause of his weakness, as a creative artist. Great art can only flourish in the temperate zone of the passions, on the return journey from the torrid. Unamuno, as a creator, has none of the failings of those artists who have never felt deeply. But he does show the limitations of those artists who cannot cool down. And the most striking of them is that at bottom he is seldom able to put himself in a purely esthetical mood. In this, as in many other features, Unamuno curiously resembles Wordsworth--whom, by the way, he is one of the few Spaniards to read and appreciate.[1] Like him, Unamuno is an essentially purposeful and utilitarian mind. Of the two qualities which the work of art requires for its inception--earnestness and detachment--both Unamuno and Wordsworth possess the first; both are deficient in the second. Their interest in their respective leading thought--survival in the first, virtue in the second--is too direct, too pressing, to allow them the "distance" necessary for artistic work. Both are urged to work by a lofty utilitarianism--the search for God through the individual soul in Unamuno, the search for God through the social soul in Wordsworth--so that their thoughts and sensations are polarized and their spirit loses that impartial transparence for nature's lights without which no great art is possible. Once suggested, this parallel is too rich in sidelights to be lightly dropped. This single-mindedness which distinguishes them explains that both should have consciously or unconsciously chosen a life of semi-seclusion, for Unamuno lives in Salamanca very much as Wordsworth lived in the Lake District-- in a still retreat Sheltered, but not to social duties lost, hence in both a certain proclivity towards ploughing a solitary furrow and becoming self-centred. There are no doubt important differences. The Englishman's sense of nature is both keener and more concrete; while the Spaniard's knowledge of human nature is not barred by the subtle inhibitions and innate limitations which tend to blind its more unpleasant aspects to the eye of the Englishman. There is more courage and passion in the Spaniard; more harmony and goodwill in the Englishman; the one is more like fire, the other like light. For Wordsworth, a poem is above all an essay, a means for conveying a lesson in forcible and easily remembered terms to those who are in need of improvement. For Unamuno, a poem or a novel (and he holds that a novel is but a poem) is the outpouring of a man's passion, the overflow of the heart which cannot help itself and lets go. And it may be that the essential difference between the two is to be found in this difference between their respective purposes: Unamuno's purpose is more intimately personal and individual; Wordsworth's is more social and objective. Thus both miss the temperate zone, where emotion takes shape into the moulds of art; but while Wordsworth is driven by his ideal of social service this side of it, into the cold light of both moral and intellectual self-control, Unamuno remains beyond, where the molten metal is too near the fire of passion, and cannot cool down into shape. Unamuno is therefore not unlike Wordsworth in the insufficiency of his sense of form. We have just seen the essential cause of this insufficiency to lie in the nonesthetical attitude of his mind, and we have tried to show one of the roots of such an attitude in the very loftiness and earnestness of his purpose. Yet, there are others, for living nature is many-rooted as it is many-branched. It cannot be doubted that a certain refractoriness to form is a typical feature of the Basque character. The sense of form is closely in sympathy with the feminine element in human nature, and the Basque race is strongly masculine. The predominance of the masculine element--strength without grace--is as typical of Unamuno as it is of Wordsworth. The literary gifts which might for the sake of synthesis be symbolized in a smile are absent in both. There is as little humour in the one as in the other. Humour, however, sometimes occurs in Unamuno, but only in his ill-humoured moments, and then with a curious bite of its own which adds an unconscious element to its comic effect. Grace only visits them in moments of inspiration, and then it is of a noble character, enhanced as it is by the ever-present gift of strength. And as for the sense for rhythm and music, both Unamuno and Wordsworth seem to be limited to the most vigorous and masculine gaits. This feature is particularly pronounced in Unamuno, for while Wordsworth is painstaking, all-observant, and too good a "teacher" to underestimate the importance of pleasure in man's progress, Unamuno knows no compromise. His aim is not to please but to strike, and he deliberately seeks the naked, the forceful, even the brutal word for truth. There is in him, however, a cause of formlessness from which Wordsworth is free--namely, an eagerness for sincerity and veracity which brushes aside all preparation, ordering or planning of ideas as suspect of "dishing up," intellectual trickery, and juggling with spontaneous truths. * * * * * Such qualities--both the positive and the negative--are apparent in his poetry. In it, the appeal of force and sincerity is usually stronger than that of art. This is particularly the case in his first volume (_Poesías_, 1907), in which a lofty inspiration, a noble attitude of mind, a rich and racy vocabulary, a keen insight into the spirit of places, and above all the overflowing vitality of a strong man in the force of ripeness, contend against the still awkward gait of the Basque and a certain rebelliousness of rhyme. The dough of the poetic language is here seen heavily pounded by a powerful hand, bent on reducing its angularities and on improving its plasticity. Nor do we need to wait for further works in order to enjoy the reward of such efforts, for it is attained in this very volume more than once, as for instance in _Muere en el mar el ave que voló del nido_, a beautiful poem in which emotion and thought are happily blended into exquisite form. In his last poem, _El Cristo de Velázquez_ (1920), Unamuno undertakes the task of giving a poetical rendering of his tragic sense of life, in the form of a meditation on the Christ of Velázquez, the beautiful and pathetic picture in the Prado. Why Velázquez's and not Christ himself? The fact is that, though in his references to actual forms, Unamuno closely follows Velázquez's picture, the spiritual interpretation of it which he develops as the poem unfolds itself is wholly personal. It would be difficult to find two great Spaniards wider apart than Unamuno and Velázquez, for if Unamuno is the very incarnation of the masculine spirit of the North--all strength and substance--Velázquez is the image of the feminine spirit of the South--all grace and form. Velázquez is a limpid mirror, with a human depth, yet a mirror. That Unamuno has departed from the image of Christ which the great Sevillian reflected on his immortal canvas was therefore to be expected. But then Unamuno has, while speaking of Don Quixote, whom he has also freely and personally interpreted,[2] taken great care to point out that a work of art is, for each of us, all that we see in it. And, moreover, Unamuno has not so much departed from Velázquez's image of Christ as delved into its depths, expanded, enlarged it, or, if you prefer, seen in its limpid surface the immense figure of his own inner Christ. However free and unorthodox in its wide scope of images and ideas, the poem is in its form a regular meditation in the manner approved by the Catholic Church, and it is therefore meet that it should rise from a concrete, tangible object as it is recommended to the faithful. To this concrete character of its origin, the poem owes much of its suggestiveness, as witness the following passage quoted here, with a translation sadly unworthy of the original, as being the clearest link between the poetical meditation and the main thought that underlies all the work and the life of Unamuno. NUBE NEGRA O es que una nube negra de los cielos ese negror le dió a tu cabellera de nazareno, cual de mustio sauce de una noche sin luna sobre el río? ¿Es la sombra del ala sin perfiles del ángel de la nada negadora, de Luzbel, que en su caída inacabable --fondo no puede dar--su eterna cuita clava en tu frente, en tu razón? ¿Se vela, el claro Verbo en Ti con esa nube, negra cual de Luzbel las negras alas, mientras brilla el Amor, todo desnudo, con tu desnudo pecho por cendal? BLACK CLOUD Or was it then that a black cloud from heaven Such blackness gave to your Nazarene's hair, As of a languid willow o'er the river Brooding in moonless night? Is it the shadow Of the profileless wing of Luzbel, the Angel Of denying nothingness, endlessly falling-- Bottom he ne'er can touch--whose grief eternal He nails on to Thy forehead, to Thy reason? Is the clear Word in Thee with that cloud veiled --A cloud as black as the black wings of Luzbel-- While Love shines naked within Thy naked breast? The poem, despite its length, easily maintains this lofty level throughout, and if he had written nothing else Unamuno would still remain as having given to Spanish letters the noblest and most sustained lyrical flight in the language. It abounds in passages of ample beauty and often strikes a note of primitive strength in the true Old Testament style. It is most distinctively a poem in a major key, in a group with _Paradise Lost_ and _The Excursion_, but in a tone halfway between the two; and, as coming from the most Northern-minded and substantial poet that Spain ever had, wholly free from that tendency towards grandiloquence and Ciceronian drapery which blighted previous similar efforts in Spain. Its weakness lies in a certain monotony due to the interplay of Unamuno's two main limitations as an artist: the absolute surrender to one dominant thought and a certain deficiency of form bordering here on contempt. The plan is but a loose sequence of meditations on successive aspects of Christ as suggested by images or advocations of His divine person, or even of parts of His human body: Lion, Bull, Lily, Sword, Crown, Head, Knees. Each meditation is treated in a period of blank verse, usually of a beautiful texture, the splendour of which is due less to actual images than to the inner vigour of ideas and the eagerness with which even the simplest facts are interpreted into significant symbols. Yet, sometimes, this blank verse becomes hard and stony under the stubborn hammering of a too insistent mind, and the device of ending each meditation with a line accented on its last syllable tends but to increase the monotony of the whole. Blank verse is never the best medium for poets of a strong masculine inspiration, for it does not sufficiently correct their usual deficiency in form. Such poets are usually at their best when they bind themselves to the discipline of existing forms and particularly when they limit the movements of their muse to the "sonnet's scanty plot of ground." Unamuno's best poetry, as Wordsworth's, is in his sonnets. His _Rosario de Sonetos Líricos_, published in 1911, contains some of the finest sonnets in the Spanish language. There is variety in this volume--more at least than is usual in Unamuno: from comments on events of local politics (sonnet lii.) which savour of the more prosaic side of Wordsworth, to meditations on space and time such as that sonnet xxxvii., so reminiscent of Shelley's _Ozymandias of Egypt_; from a suggestive homily to a "Don Juan of Ideas" whose thirst for knowledge is "not love of truth, but intellectual lust," and whose "thought is therefore sterile" (sonnet cvii.), to an exquisitely rendered moonlight love scene (sonnet civ.). The author's main theme itself, which of course occupies a prominent part in the series, appears treated under many different lights and in genuinely poetical moods which truly do justice to the inherent wealth of poetical inspiration which it contains. Many a sonnet might be quoted here, and in particular that sombre and fateful poem _Nihil Novum sub Sole_ (cxxiii.), which defeats its own theme by the striking originality of its inspiration. So active, so positive is the inspiration of this poetry that the question of outside influences does not even arise. Unamuno is probably the Spanish contemporary poet whose manner owes least, if anything at all, to modern developments of poetry such as those which take their source in Baudelaire and Verlaine. These over-sensitive and over-refined artists have no doubt enriched the sensuous, the formal, the sentimental, even the intellectual aspects of verse with an admirable variety of exquisite shades, lacking which most poetry seems old-fashioned to the fastidious palate of modern men. Unamuno is too genuine a representative of the spiritual and masculine variety of Spanish genius, ever impervious to French, and generally, to intellectual, influences, to be affected by the esthetic excellence of this art. Yet, for all his disregard of the modern resources which it adds to the poetic craft, Unamuno loses none of his modernity. He is indeed more than modern. When, as he often does, he strikes the true poetic note, he is outside time. His appeal is not in complexity but in strength. He is not refined: he is final. * * * * * In the Preface to his _Tres Novelas Ejemplares y un Prólogo_ (1921) Unamuno says: " ... novelist--that is, poet ... a novel--that is, a poem." Thus, with characteristic decision, he sides with the lyrical conception of the novel. There is of course an infinite variety of types of novels. But they can probably all be reduced to two classes--_i.e._, the dramatic or objective, and the lyrical or subjective, according to the mood or inspiration which predominates in them. The present trend of the world points towards the dramatic or objective type. This type is more in tune with the detached and scientific character of the age. The novel is often nowadays considered as a document, a "slice of life," a piece of information, a literary photograph representing places and people which purse or time prevents us from seeing with our own eyes. It is obvious, given what we now know of him, that such a view of the novel cannot appeal to Unamuno. He is a utilitarian, but not of worldly utilities. His utilitarianism transcends our daily wants and seeks to provide for our eternal ones. He is, moreover, a mind whose workings turn in spiral form towards a central idea and therefore feels an instinctive antagonism to the dispersive habits of thought and sensation which such detailed observation of life usually entails. For at bottom the opposition between the lyrical and the dramatic novel may be reduced to that between the poet and the dramatist. Both the dramatist and the poet create in order to link up their soul and the world in one complete circle of experience, but this circle is travelled in opposite directions. The poet goes inwards first, then out to nature full of his inner experience, and back home. The dramatist goes outwards first, then comes back to himself, his harvest of wisdom gathered in reality. It is the recognition of his own lyrical inward-looking nature which makes Unamuno pronounce the identity of the novel and the poem. Whatever we may think of it as a general theory, there is little doubt that this opinion is in the main sound in so far as it refers to Unamuno's own work. His novels are created within. They are--and their author is the first to declare it so--novels which happen in the kingdom of the spirit. Outward points of reference in time and space are sparingly given--in fact, reduced to a bare minimum. In some of them, as for instance _Niebla_ (1914), the name of the town in which the action takes place is not given, and such scanty references to the topography and general features as are supplied would equally apply to any other provincial town of Spain. Action, in the current sense of the word, is correspondingly simplified, since the material and local elements on which it usually exerts itself are schematized, and in their turn made, as it were, spiritual. Thus a street, a river of colour for some, for others a series of accurately described shops and dwellings, becomes in Unamuno (see _Niebla_) a loom where the passions and desires of men and women cross and recross each other and weave the cloth of daily life. Even the physical description of characters is reduced to a standard of utmost simplicity. So that, in fine, Unamuno's novels, by eliminating all other material, appear, if the boldness of the metaphor be permitted, as the spiritual skeletons of novels, conflicts between souls. Nor is this the last stage in his deepening and narrowing of the creative furrow. For these souls are in their turn concentrated so that the whole of their vitality burns into one passion. If a somewhat fanciful comparison from another art may throw any light on this feature of his work we might say that his characters are to those of Galdós, for instance, as counterpoint music to the complex modern symphony. Joaquín Monegro, the true hero of his _Abel Sánchez_ (1917), is the personification of hatred. Raquel in _Dos Madres_[1] and Catalina in _El Marqués de Lumbría_[1] are two widely different but vigorous, almost barbarous, "maternities." Alejandro, the hero of his powerful _Nada Menos que Todo un Hombre_,[3] is masculine will, pure and unconquerable, save by death. Further still, in most if not all of his main characters, we can trace the dominant passion which is their whole being to a mere variety of the one and only passion which obsesses Unamuno himself, the hunger for life, a full life, here and after. Here is, for instance, _Abel Sánchez_, a sombre study of hatred, a modern paraphrase of the story of Cain. Joaquín Monegro, the Cain of the novel, has been reading Byron's poem, and writes in his diary: "It was when I read how Lucifer declared to Cain that he, Cain, was immortal, that I began in terror to wonder whether I also was immortal and whether in me would be also immortal my hatred. 'Have I a soul?' I said to myself then. 'Is this my hatred soul?' And I came to think that it could not be otherwise, that such a hatred cannot be the function of a body.... A corruptible organism could not hate as I hated." Thus Joaquín Monegro, like every other main character in his work, appears preoccupied by the same central preoccupation of Unamuno. In one word, all Unamuno's characters are but incarnations of himself. But that is what we expected to find in a lyrical novelist. There are critics who conclude from this observation that these characters do not exist, that they are mere arguments on legs, personified ideas. Here and there, in Unamuno's novels, there are passages which lend some colour of plausibility to this view. Yet, it is in my opinion mistaken. Unamuno's characters may be schematized, stripped of their complexities, reduced to the mainspring of their nature; they may, moreover, reveal mainsprings made of the same steel. But that they are alive no one could deny who has a sense for life. The very restraint in the use of physical details which Unamuno has made a feature of his creative work may have led his critics to forget the intensity of those--admirably chosen--which are given. It is significant that the eyes play an important part in his description of characters and in his narrative too. His sense of the interpenetration of body and soul is so deep that he does not for one moment let us forget how bodily his "souls" are, and how pregnant with spiritual significance is every one of their words and gestures. No. These characters are not arguments on legs. They truly are men and women of "flesh and bones," human, terribly human. In thus emphasizing a particular feature in their nature, Unamuno imparts to his creations a certain deformity which savours of romantic days. Yet Unamuno is not a romanticist, mainly because Romanticism was an esthetic attitude, and his attitude is seldom purely esthetic. For all their show of passion, true Romanticists seldom gave their real selves to their art. They created a stage double of their own selves for public exhibitions. They sought the picturesque. Their form was lyrical, but their substance was dramatic. Unamuno, on the contrary, even though he often seeks expression in dramatic form, is essentially lyrical. And if he is always intense, he never is exuberant. He follows the Spanish tradition for restraint--for there is one, along its opposite tradition for grandiloquence--and, true to the spirit of it, he seeks the maximum of effect through the minimum of means. Then, he never shouts. Here is an example of his quiet method, the rhythmical beauty of which is unfortunately almost untranslatable: "Y así pasaron días de llanto y de negrura hasta que las lágrimas fueron yéndose hacia adentro y la casa fué derritiendo los negrores" (_Niebla_) (And thus, days of weeping and mourning went by, till the tears began to flow inward and the blackness to melt in the home). * * * * * Miguel de Unamuno is to-day the greatest literary figure of Spain. Baroja may surpass him in variety of external experience, Azorín in delicate art, Ortega y Gasset in philosophical subtlety, Ayala in intellectual elegance, Valle Inclán in rhythmical grace. Even in vitality he may have to yield the first place to that over-whelming athlete of literature, Blasco Ibáñez. But Unamuno is head and shoulders above them all in the highness of his purpose and in the earnestness and loyalty with which, Quixote-like, he has served all through his life his unattainable Dulcinea. Then there is another and most important reason which explains his position as first, _princeps_, of Spanish letters, and it is that Unamuno, by the cross which he has chosen to bear, incarnates the spirit of modern Spain. His eternal conflict between faith and reason, between life and thought, between spirit and intellect, between heaven and civilization, is the conflict of Spain herself. A border country, like Russia, in which East and West mix their spiritual waters, Spain wavers between two life-philosophies and cannot rest. In Russia, this conflict emerges in literature during the nineteenth century, when Dostoievsky and Tolstoy stand for the East while Turgeniev becomes the West's advocate. In Spain, a country less articulate, and, moreover, a country in which the blending of East and West is more intimate, for both found a common solvent in centuries of Latin civilization, the conflict is less clear, less on the surface. To-day Ortega y Gasset is our Turgeniev--not without mixture. Unamuno is our Dostoievsky, but painfully aware of the strength of the other side within him, and full of misgivings. Nor is it sure that when we speak of East in this connection we really mean East. There is a third country in Europe in which the "Eastern" view is as forcibly put and as deeply understood as the "Western," a third border country--England. England, particularly in those of her racial elements conventionally named Celtic, is closely in sympathy with the "East." Ireland is almost purely "Eastern" in this respect. That is perhaps why Unamuno feels so strong an attraction for the English language and its literature, and why, even to this day, he follows so closely the movements of English thought.[4] For his own nature, of a human being astride two enemy ideals, draws him instinctively towards minds equally placed in opposition, yet a co-operating opposition, to progress. Thus Unamuno, whose literary qualities and defects make him a genuine representative of the more masculine variety of the Spanish genius, becomes in his spiritual life the true living symbol of his country and his time. And that he is great enough to bear this incarnation is a sufficient measure of his greatness. S. DE MADARIAGA. FOOTNOTES: [1] In what follows, I confess to refer not so much to the generally admitted opinion on Wordsworth as to my own views on him and his poetry, which I tried to explain in my essay: "The Case of Wordsworth" (_Shelley and Calderón, and other Essays_, Constable and Co., 1920). [2] _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, explicada y comentada_, por M. de Unamuno: Madrid, Fernando Fé, 1905. [3] These three novels appeared together as _Tres Novelas y un Prólogo_ Calpe, Madrid, 1921. [4] "Me va interesando ese Dean Inge," he wrote to me last year. AUTHOR'S PREFACE I intended at first to write a short Prologue to this English translation of my _Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida_, which has been undertaken by my friend Mr. J.E. Crawford Flitch. But upon further consideration I have abandoned the idea, for I reflected that after all I wrote this book not for Spaniards only, but for all civilized and Christian men--Christian in particular, whether consciously so or not--of whatever country they may be. Furthermore, if I were to set about writing an Introduction in the light of all that we see and feel now, after the Great War, and, still more, of what we foresee and forefeel, I should be led into writing yet another book. And that is a thing to be done with deliberation and only after having better digested this terrible peace, which is nothing else but the war's painful convalescence. As for many years my spirit has been nourished upon the very core of English literature--evidence of which the reader may discover in the following pages--the translator, in putting my _Sentimiento Trágico_ into English, has merely converted not a few of the thoughts and feelings therein expressed back into their original form of expression. Or retranslated them, perhaps. Whereby they emerge other than they originally were, for an idea does not pass from one language to another without change. The fact that this English translation has been carefully revised here, in my house in this ancient city of Salamanca, by the translator and myself, implies not merely some guarantee of exactitude, but also something more--namely, a correction, in certain respects, of the original. The truth is that, being an incorrigible Spaniard, I am naturally given to a kind of extemporization and to neglectfulness of a filed niceness in my works. For this reason my original work--and likewise the Italian and French translations of it--issued from the press with a certain number of errors, obscurities, and faulty references. The labour which my friend Mr. J.E. Crawford Flitch fortunately imposed upon me in making me revise his translation obliged me to correct these errors, to clarify some obscurities, and to give greater exactitude to certain quotations from foreign writers. Hence this English translation of my _Sentimiento Trágico_ presents in some ways a more purged and correct text than that of the original Spanish. This perhaps compensates for what it may lose in the spontaneity of my Spanish thought, which at times, I believe, is scarcely translatable. It would advantage me greatly if this translation, in opening up to me a public of English-speaking readers, should some day lead to my writing something addressed to and concerned with this public. For just as a new friend enriches our spirit, not so much by what he gives us of himself, as by what he causes us to discover in our own selves, something which, if we had never known him, would have lain in us undeveloped, so it is with a new public. Perhaps there may be regions in my own Spanish spirit--my Basque spirit, and therefore doubly Spanish--unexplored by myself, some corner hitherto uncultivated, which I should have to cultivate in order to offer the flowers and fruits of it to the peoples of English speech. And now, no more. God give my English readers that inextinguishable thirst for truth which I desire for myself. MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO. SALAMANCA, _April, 1921._ * * * * * TRANSLATOR'S NOTE Footnotes added by the Translator, other than those which merely supplement references to writers or their works mentioned in the text, are distinguished by his initials. I THE MAN OF FLESH AND BONE _Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto_, said the Latin playwright. And I would rather say, _Nullum hominem a me alienum puto_: I am a man; no other man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjective _humanus_ is no less suspect than its abstract substantive _humanitas_, humanity. Neither "the human" nor "humanity," neither the simple adjective nor the substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive--man. The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother. For there is another thing which is also called man, and he is the subject of not a few lucubrations, more or less scientific. He is the legendary featherless biped, the _zôon politikhon_ of Aristotle, the social contractor of Rousseau, the _homo economicus_ of the Manchester school, the _homo sapiens_ of Linnæus, or, if you like, the vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief, merely an idea. That is to say, a no-man. The man we have to do with is the man of flesh and bone--I, you, reader of mine, the other man yonder, all of us who walk solidly on the earth. And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain self-styled philosophers like it or not. In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems are presented to us as if growing out of one another spontaneously, and their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inner biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a secondary place. And yet it is precisely this inner biography that explains for us most things. It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry than to science. All philosophic systems which have been constructed as a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have in every age possessed much less consistency and life than those which expressed the integral spiritual yearning of their authors. And, though they concern us so greatly, and are, indeed, indispensable for our life and thought, the sciences are in a certain sense more foreign to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective end--that is to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are fundamentally a matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the kind called theoretical, is, like a mechanical discovery--that of the steam-engine, the telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane--a thing which is useful for something else. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in enabling us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But she, wherefore is she useful to us? A man takes an electric tram to go to hear an opera, and asks himself, Which, in this case, is the more useful, the tram or the opera? Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this conception, a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to outward action. But the fact is that this feeling, instead of being a consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our philosophy--that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the world and life--springs from our feeling towards life itself. And life, like everything affective, has roots in subconsciousness, perhaps in unconsciousness. It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas. Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly--but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree. And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man. Take Kant, the man Immanuel Kant, who was born and lived at Königsberg, in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. In the philosophy of this man Kant, a man of heart and head--that is to say, a man--there is a significant somersault, as Kierkegaard, another man--and what a man!--would have said, the somersault from the _Critique of Pure Reason_ to the _Critique of Practical Reason_. He reconstructs in the latter what he destroyed in the former, in spite of what those may say who do not see the man himself. After having examined and pulverized with his analysis the traditional proofs of the existence of God, of the Aristotelian God, who is the God corresponding to the _zôon politikon_, the abstract God, the unmoved prime Mover, he reconstructs God anew; but the God of the conscience, the Author of the moral order--the Lutheran God, in short. This transition of Kant exists already in embryo in the Lutheran notion of faith. The first God, the rational God, is the projection to the outward infinite of man as he is by definition--that is to say, of the abstract man, of the man no-man; the other God, the God of feeling and volition, is the projection to the inward infinite of man as he is by life, of the concrete man, the man of flesh and bone. Kant reconstructed with the heart that which with the head he had overthrown. And we know, from the testimony of those who knew him and from his testimony in his letters and private declarations, that the man Kant, the more or less selfish old bachelor who professed philosophy at Königsberg at the end of the century of the Encyclopedia and the goddess of Reason, was a man much preoccupied with the problem--I mean with the only real vital problem, the problem that strikes at the very root of our being, the problem of our individual and personal destiny, of the immortality of the soul. The man Kant was not resigned to die utterly. And because he was not resigned to die utterly he made that leap, that immortal somersault,[5] from the one Critique to the other. Whosoever reads the _Critique of Practical Reason_ carefully and without blinkers will see that, in strict fact, the existence of God is therein deduced from the immortality of the soul, and not the immortality of the soul from the existence of God. The categorical imperative leads us to a moral postulate which necessitates in its turn, in the teleological or rather eschatological order, the immortality of the soul, and in order to sustain this immortality God is introduced. All the rest is the jugglery of the professional of philosophy. The man Kant felt that morality was the basis of eschatology, but the professor of philosophy inverted the terms. Another professor, the professor and man William James, has somewhere said that for the generality of men God is the provider of immortality. Yes, for the generality of men, including the man Kant, the man James, and the man who writes these lines which you, reader, are reading. Talking to a peasant one day, I proposed to him the hypothesis that there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a Consciousness[6] of the Universe, but that for all that the soul of every man may not be immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. He replied: "Then wherefore God?" So answered, in the secret tribunal of their consciousness, the man Kant and the man James. Only in their capacity as professors they were compelled to justify rationally an attitude in itself so little rational. Which does not mean, of course, that the attitude is absurd. Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel, continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe, like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a hole and enclosing it with steel. Another man, the man Joseph Butler, the Anglican bishop who lived at the beginning of the eighteenth century and whom Cardinal Newman declared to be the greatest man in the Anglican Church, wrote, at the conclusion of the first chapter of his great work, _The Analogy of Religion_, the chapter which treats of a future life, these pregnant words: "This credibility of a future life, which has been here insisted upon, how little soever it may satisfy our curiosity, seems to answer all the purposes of religion, in like manner as a demonstrative proof would. Indeed a proof, even a demonstrative one, of a future life, would not be a proof of religion. For, that we are to live hereafter, is just as reconcilable with the scheme of atheism, and as well to be accounted for by it, as that we are now alive is: and therefore nothing can be more absurd than to argue from that scheme that there can be no future state." The man Butler, whose works were perhaps known to the man Kant, wished to save the belief in the immortality of the soul, and with this object he made it independent of belief in God. The first chapter of his _Analogy_ treats, as I have said, of the future life, and the second of the government of God by rewards and punishments. And the fact is that, fundamentally, the good Anglican bishop deduces the existence of God from the immortality of the soul. And as this deduction was the good Anglican bishop's starting-point, he had not to make that somersault which at the close of the same century the good Lutheran philosopher had to make. Butler, the bishop, was one man and Kant, the professor, another man. To be a man is to be something concrete, unitary, and substantive; it is to be a thing--_res_. Now we know what another man, the man Benedict Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew who was born and lived in Holland in the middle of the seventeenth century, wrote about the nature of things. The sixth proposition of Part III. of his _Ethic_ states: _unaquoeque res, quatenus in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur_--that is, Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being. Everything in so far as it is in itself--that is to say, in so far as it is substance, for according to him substance is _id quod in se est et per se concipitur_--that which is in itself and is conceived by itself. And in the following proposition, the seventh, of the same part, he adds: _conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est proeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam_--that is, the endeavour wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself. This means that your essence, reader, mine, that of the man Spinoza, that of the man Butler, of the man Kant, and of every man who is a man, is nothing but the endeavour, the effort, which he makes to continue to be a man, not to die. And the other proposition which follows these two, the eighth, says: _conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nullum tempus finitum, sed indefinitum involvit_--that is, The endeavour whereby each individual thing endeavours to persist involves no finite time but indefinite time. That is to say that you, I, and Spinoza wish never to die and that this longing of ours never to die is our actual essence. Nevertheless, this poor Portuguese Jew, exiled in the mists of Holland, could never attain to believing in his own personal immortality, and all his philosophy was but a consolation which he contrived for his lack of faith. Just as other men have a pain in hand or foot, heart-ache or head-ache, so he had God-ache. Unhappy man! And unhappy fellow-men! And man, this thing, is he a thing? How absurd soever the question may appear, there are some who have propounded it. Not long ago there went abroad a certain doctrine called Positivism, which did much good and much ill. And among other ills that it wrought was the introduction of a method of analysis whereby facts were pulverized, reduced to a dust of facts. Most of the facts labelled as such by Positivism were really only fragments of facts. In psychology its action was harmful. There were even scholastics meddling in literature--I will not say philosophers meddling in poetry, because poet and philosopher are twin brothers, if not even one and the same--who carried this Positivist psychological analysis into the novel and the drama, where the main business is to give act and motion to concrete men, men of flesh and bone, and by dint of studying states of consciousness, consciousness itself disappeared. The same thing happened to them which is said often to happen in the examination and testing of certain complicated, organic, living chemical compounds, when the reagents destroy the very body which it was proposed to examine and all that is obtained is the products of its decomposition. Taking as their starting-point the evident fact that contradictory states pass through our consciousness, they did not succeed in envisaging consciousness itself, the "I." To ask a man about his "I" is like asking him about his body. And note that in speaking of the "I," I speak of the concrete and personal "I," not of the "I" of Fichte, but of Fichte himself, the man Fichte. That which determines a man, that which makes him one man, one and not another, the man he is and not the man he is not, is a principle of unity and a principle of continuity. A principle of unity firstly in space, thanks to the body, and next in action and intention. When we walk, one foot does not go forward and the other backward, nor, when we look, if we are normal, does one eye look towards the north and the other towards the south. In each moment of our life we entertain some purpose, and to this purpose the synergy of our actions is directed. Notwithstanding the next moment we may change our purpose. And in a certain sense a man is so much the more a man the more unitary his action. Some there are who throughout their whole life follow but one single purpose, be it what it may. Also a principle of continuity in time. Without entering upon a discussion--an unprofitable discussion--as to whether I am or am not he who I was twenty years ago, it appears to me to be indisputable that he who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future. All this, I know well, is sheer platitude; but in going about in the world one meets men who seem to have no feeling of their own personality. One of my best friends with whom I have walked and talked every day for many years, whenever I spoke to him of this sense of one's own personality, used to say: "But I have no sense of myself; I don't know what that is." On a certain occasion this friend remarked to me: "I should like to be So-and-so" (naming someone), and I said: "That is what I shall never be able to understand--that one should want to be someone else. (To want to be someone else is to want to cease to be he who one is.) I understand that one should wish to have what someone else has, his wealth or his knowledge; but to be someone else, that is a thing I cannot comprehend." It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their normality in their misfortune--that is to say, when they endeavour to persist in their own being--prefer misfortune to non-existence. For myself I can say that as a youth, and even as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics has put it.[7] To propose to a man that he should be someone else, that he should become someone else, is to propose to him that he should cease to be himself. Everyone defends his own personality, and only consents to a change in his mode of thinking or of feeling in so far as this change is able to enter into the unity of his spirit and become involved in its continuity; in so far as this change can harmonize and integrate itself with all the rest of his mode of being, thinking and feeling, and can at the same time knit itself with his memories. Neither of a man nor of a people--which is, in a certain sense, also a man--can a change be demanded which breaks the unity and continuity of the person. A man can change greatly, almost completely even, but the change must take place within his continuity. It is true that in certain individuals there occur what are called changes of personality; but these are pathological cases, and as such are studied by alienists. In these changes of personality, memory, the basis of consciousness, is completely destroyed, and all that is left to the sufferer as the substratum of his individual continuity, which has now ceased to be personal, is the physical organism. For the subject who suffers it, such an infirmity is equivalent to death--it is not equivalent to death only for those who expect to inherit his fortune, if he possesses one! And this infirmity is nothing less than a revolution, a veritable revolution. A disease is, in a certain sense, an organic dissociation; it is a rebellion of some element or organ of the living body which breaks the vital synergy and seeks an end distinct from that which the other elements co-ordinated with it seek. Its end, considered in itself--that is to say, in the abstract--may be more elevated, more noble, more anything you like; but it is different. To fly and breathe in the air may be better than to swim and breathe in the water; but if the fins of a fish aimed at converting themselves into wings, the fish, as a fish, would perish. And it is useless to say that it would end by becoming a bird, if in this becoming there was not a process of continuity. I do not precisely know, but perhaps it may be possible for a fish to engender a bird, or another fish more akin to a bird than itself; but a fish, this fish, cannot itself and during its own lifetime become a bird. Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself. Every individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as a part of that people. What if some other people is better than our own? Very possibly, although perhaps we do not clearly understand what is meant by better or worse. Richer? Granted. More cultured? Granted likewise. Happier? Well, happiness ... but still, let it pass! A conquering people (or what is called conquering) while we are conquered? Well and good. All this is good--but it is something different. And that is enough. Because for me the becoming other than I am, the breaking of the unity and continuity of my life, is to cease to be he who I am--that is to say, it is simply to cease to be. And that--no! Anything rather than that! Another, you say, might play the part that I play as well or better? Another might fulfil my function in society? Yes, but it would not be I. "I, I, I, always I!" some reader will exclaim; "and who are you?" I might reply in the words of Obermann, that tremendous man Obermann: "For the universe, nothing--for myself, everything"; but no, I would rather remind him of a doctrine of the man Kant--to wit, that we ought to think of our fellow-men not as means but as ends. For the question does not touch me alone, it touches you also, grumbling reader, it touches each and all. Singular judgments have the value of universal judgments, the logicians say. The singular is not particular, it is universal. Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses itself to man, to each man, to each I. What is that idol, call it Humanity or call it what you like, to which all men and each individual man must be sacrificed? For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my fellow-countrymen, for my children, and these sacrifice themselves in their turn for theirs, and theirs again for those that come after them, and so on in a never-ending series of generations. And who receives the fruit of this sacrifice? Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live. What is this right to live? They tell me I am here to realize I know not what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here to realize myself, to live. Yes, yes, I see it all!--an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums, and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist--for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man? "Why!" the reader will exclaim again, "we are coming back to what the Catechism says: '_Q_. For whom did God create the world? _A_. For man.'" Well, why not?--so ought the man who is a man to reply. The ant, if it took account of these matters and were a person, would reply "For the ant," and it would reply rightly. The world is made for consciousness, for each consciousness. A human soul is worth all the universe, someone--I know not whom--has said and said magnificently. A human soul, mind you! Not a human life. Not this life. And it happens that the less a man believes in the soul--that is to say in his conscious immortality, personal and concrete--the more he will exaggerate the worth of this poor transitory life. This is the source from which springs all that effeminate, sentimental ebullition against war. True, a man ought not to wish to die, but the death to be renounced is the death of the soul. "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it," says the Gospel; but it does not say "whosoever will save his soul," the immortal soul--or, at any rate, which we believe and wish to be immortal. And what all the objectivists do not see, or rather do not wish to see, is that when a man affirms his "I," his personal consciousness, he affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true humanism--the humanism of man, not of the things of man--and in affirming man he affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of which we have consciousness is that of man. The world is for consciousness. Or rather this _for_, this notion of finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling, is born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are fundamentally the same thing. If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no doubt, that it lived in order to give light to the worlds; but it would also and above all think that the worlds existed in order that it might give them light and enjoy itself in giving them light and so live. And it would think well. And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this immortal craving for immortality which caused the man Kant to make that immortal leap of which I have spoken, all this is simply a fight for consciousness. If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence. Some may espy a fundamental contradiction in everything that I am saying, now expressing a longing for unending life, now affirming that this earthly life does not possess the value that is given to it. Contradiction? To be sure! The contradiction of my heart that says Yes and of my head that says No! Of course there is contradiction. Who does not recollect those words of the Gospel, "Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief"? Contradiction! Of course! Since we only live in and by contradictions, since life is tragedy and the tragedy is perpetual struggle, without victory or the hope of victory, life is contradiction. The values we are discussing are, as you see, values of the heart, and against values of the heart reasons do not avail. For reasons are only reasons--that is to say, they are not even truths. There is a class of pedantic label-mongers, pedants by nature and by grace, who remind me of that man who, purposing to console a father whose son has suddenly died in the flower of his years, says to him, "Patience, my friend, we all must die!" Would you think it strange if this father were offended at such an impertinence? For it is an impertinence. There are times when even an axiom can become an impertinence. How many times may it not be said-- _Para pensar cual tú, sólo es preciso no tener nada mas que inteligencia_.[8] There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought. And you know what a professional is? You know what a product of the differentiation of labour is? Take a professional boxer. He has learnt to hit with such economy of effort that, while concentrating all his strength in the blow, he only brings into play just those muscles that are required for the immediate and definite object of his action--to knock out his opponent. A blow given by a non-professional will not have so much immediate, objective efficiency; but it will more greatly vitalize the striker, causing him to bring into play almost the whole of his body. The one is the blow of a boxer, the other that of a man. And it is notorious that the Hercules of the circus, the athletes of the ring, are not, as a rule, healthy. They knock out their opponents, they lift enormous weights, but they die of phthisis or dyspepsia. If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. The cultivation of any branch of science--of chemistry, of physics, of geometry, of philology--may be a work of differentiated specialization, and even so only within very narrow limits and restrictions; but philosophy, like poetry, is a work of integration and synthesis, or else it is merely pseudo-philosophical erudition. All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the question. We learn something either for an immediate practical end, or in order to complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the knowledge that appears to us to be most theoretical--that is to say, of least immediate application to the non-intellectual necessities of life--answers to a necessity which is no less real because it is intellectual, to a reason of economy in thinking, to a principle of unity and continuity of consciousness. But just as a scientific fact has its finality in the rest of knowledge, so the philosophy that we would make our own has also its extrinsic object--it refers to our whole destiny, to our attitude in face of life and the universe. And the most tragic problem of philosophy is to reconcile intellectual necessities with the necessities of the heart and the will. For it is on this rock that every philosophy that pretends to resolve the eternal and tragic contradiction, the basis of our existence, breaks to pieces. But do all men face this contradiction squarely? Little can be hoped from a ruler, for example, who has not at some time or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first beginning and the ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny. And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely rational, it must involve the heart. It is not enough to think about our destiny: it must be felt. And the would-be leader of men who affirms and proclaims that he pays no heed to the things of the spirit, is not worthy to lead them. By which I do not mean, of course, that any ready-made solution is to be required of him. Solution? Is there indeed any? So far as I am concerned, I will never willingly yield myself, nor entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who is not penetrated with the feeling that he who orders a people orders men, men of flesh and bone, men who are born, suffer, and, although they do not wish to die, die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who must be themselves and not others; men, in fine, who seek that which we call happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of men to the generation which follows, without having any feeling for the destiny of those who are sacrificed, without having any regard, not for their memory, not for their names, but for them themselves. All this talk of a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as regards the feelings and even morally imbecile. There have been instances. These clever-witted, affectively stupid persons are wont to say that it is useless to seek to delve in the unknowable or to kick against the pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has had to be amputated that it does not help him at all to think about it. And we all lack something; only some of us feel the lack and others do not. Or they pretend not to feel the lack, and then they are hypocrites. A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, "Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?" And the sage answered him, "Precisely for that reason--because it does not avail." It is manifest that weeping avails something, even if only the alleviation of distress; but the deep sense of Solon's reply to the impertinent questioner is plainly seen. And I am convinced that we should solve many things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling upon God. And this, even though God should hear us not; but He would hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common. A _miserere_ sung in common by a multitude tormented by destiny has as much value as a philosophy. It is not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it. Yes, we must learn to weep! Perhaps that is the supreme wisdom. Why? Ask Solon. There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples. And this sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though afterwards, as is manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it. Sometimes it may originate in a chance illness--dyspepsia, for example; but at other times it is constitutional. And it is useless to speak, as we shall see, of men who are healthy and men who are not healthy. Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease. Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, _René, Obermann_, Thomson,[9] Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard--men burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge. And there are, I believe, peoples who possess this tragic sense of life also. It is to this that we must now turn our attention, beginning with this matter of health and disease. FOOTNOTES: [5] "_Salto inmortal_." There is a play here upon the term _salto mortal_, used to denote the dangerous aerial somersault of the acrobat, which cannot be rendered in English.--J.E.C.F. [6] "_Conciencia_." The same word is used in Spanish to denote both consciousness and conscience. If the latter is specifically intended, the qualifying adjective "_moral_" or "_religiosa_" is commonly added.--J.E.C.F. [7] San Juan de los Angeles. [8] To be lacking in everything but intelligence is the necessary qualification for thinking like you. [9] James Thomson, author of _The City of Dreadful Night_. II. THE STARTING-POINT To some, perhaps, the foregoing reflections may seem to possess a certain morbid character. Morbid? But what is disease precisely? And what is health? May not disease itself possibly be the essential condition of that which we call progress and progress itself a disease? Who does not know the mythical tragedy of Paradise? Therein dwelt our first parents in a state of perfect health and perfect innocence, and Jahwé gave them to eat of the tree of life and created all things for them; but he commanded them not to taste of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But they, tempted by the serpent--Christ's type of prudence--tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and became subject to all diseases, and to death, which is their crown and consummation, and to labour and to progress. For progress, according to this legend, springs from original sin. And thus it was the curiosity of Eve, of woman, of her who is most thrall to the organic necessities of life and of the conservation of life, that occasioned the Fall and with the Fall the Redemption, and it was the Redemption that set our feet on the way to God and made it possible for us to attain to Him and to be in Him. Do you want another version of our origin? Very well then. According to this account, man is, strictly speaking, merely a species of gorilla, orang-outang, chimpanzee, or the like, more or less hydrocephalous. Once on a time an anthropoid monkey had a diseased offspring--diseased from the strictly animal or zoological point of view, really diseased; and this disease, although a source of weakness, resulted in a positive gain in the struggle for survival. The only vertical mammal at last succeeded in standing erect--man. The upright position freed him from the necessity of using his hands as means of support in walking; he was able, therefore, to oppose the thumb to the other four fingers, to seize hold of objects and to fashion tools; and it is well known that the hands are great promoters of the intelligence. This same position gave to the lungs, trachea, larynx, and mouth an aptness for the production of articulate speech, and speech is intelligence. Moreover, this position, causing the head to weigh vertically upon the trunk, facilitated its development and increase of weight, and the head is the seat of the mind. But as this necessitated greater strength and resistance in the bones of the pelvis than in those of species whose head and trunk rest upon all four extremities, the burden fell upon woman, the author of the Fall according to Genesis, of bringing forth larger-headed offspring through a harder framework of bone. And Jahwé condemned her, for having sinned, to bring forth her children in sorrow. The gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-outang, and their kind, must look upon man as a feeble and infirm animal, whose strange custom it is to store up his dead. Wherefore? And this primary disease and all subsequent diseases--are they not perhaps the capital element of progress? Arthritis, for example, infects the blood and introduces into it scoriæ, a kind of refuse, of an imperfect organic combustion; but may not this very impurity happen to make the blood more stimulative? May not this impure blood promote a more active cerebration precisely because it is impure? Water that is chemically pure is undrinkable. And may not also blood that is physiologically pure be unfit for the brain of the vertical mammal that has to live by thought? The history of medicine, moreover, teaches us that progress consists not so much in expelling the germs of disease, or rather diseases themselves, as in accommodating them to our organism and so perhaps enriching it, in dissolving them in our blood. What but this is the meaning of vaccination and all the serums, and immunity from infection through lapse of time? If this notion of absolute health were not an abstract category, something which does not strictly exist, we might say that a perfectly healthy man would be no longer a man, but an irrational animal. Irrational, because of the lack of some disease to set a spark to his reason. And this disease which gives us the appetite of knowing for the sole pleasure of knowing, for the delight of tasting of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, is a real disease and a tragic one. _Pantes anthrôpoi ton eidenai oregontai phusei_, "all men naturally desire to know." Thus Aristotle begins his Metaphysic, and it has been repeated a thousand times since then that curiosity or the desire to know, which according to Genesis led our first mother to sin, is the origin of knowledge. But it is necessary to distinguish here between the desire or appetite for knowing, apparently and at first sight for the love of knowledge itself, between the eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and the necessity of knowing for the sake of living. The latter, which gives us direct and immediate knowledge, and which in a certain sense might be called, if it does not seem too paradoxical, unconscious knowledge, is common both to men and animals, while that which distinguishes us from them is reflective knowledge, the knowing that we know. Man has debated at length and will continue to debate at length--the world having been assigned as a theatre for his debates--concerning the origin of knowledge; but, apart from the question as to what the real truth about this origin may be, which we will leave until later, it is a certainly ascertained fact that in the apparential order of things, in the life of beings who are endowed with a certain more or less cloudy faculty of knowing and perceiving, or who at any rate appear to act as if they were so endowed, knowledge is exhibited to us as bound up with the necessity of living and of procuring the wherewithal to maintain life. It is a consequence of that very essence of being, which according to Spinoza consists in the effort to persist indefinitely in its own being. Speaking in terms in which concreteness verges upon grossness, it may be said that the brain, in so far as its function is concerned, depends upon the stomach. In beings which rank in the lowest scale of life, those actions which present the characteristics of will, those which appear to be connected with a more or less clear consciousness, are actions designed to procure nourishment for the being performing them. Such then is what we may call the historical origin of knowledge, whatever may be its origin from another point of view. Beings which appear to be endowed with perception, perceive in order to be able to live, and only perceive in so far as they require to do so in order to live. But perhaps this stored-up knowledge, the utility in which it had its origin being exhausted, has come to constitute a fund of knowledge far exceeding that required for the bare necessities of living. Thus we have, first, the necessity of knowing in order to live, and next, arising out of this, that other knowledge which we might call superfluous knowledge or knowledge _de luxe_, which may in its turn come to constitute a new necessity. Curiosity, the so-called innate desire of knowing, only awakes and becomes operative after the necessity of knowing for the sake of living is satisfied; and although sometimes in the conditions under which the human race is actually living it may not so befall, but curiosity may prevail over necessity and knowledge over hunger, nevertheless the primordial fact is that curiosity sprang from the necessity of knowing in order to live, and this is the dead weight and gross matter carried in the matrix of science. Aspiring to be knowledge for the sake of knowledge, to know the truth for the sake of the truth itself, science is forced by the necessities of life to turn aside and put it itself at their service. While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth. The variations of science depend upon the variations of human needs, and men of science are wont to work, willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or unwittingly, in the service of the powerful or in that of a people that demands from them the confirmation of its own desires. But is this really a dead weight that impedes the progress of science, or is it not rather its innermost redeeming essence? It is in fact the latter, and it is a gross stupidity to presume to rebel against the very condition of life. Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. This necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches, tastes, and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or the loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch, and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common sense. Man, then, in his quality of an isolated individual, only sees, hears, touches, tastes, and smells in so far as is necessary for living and self-preservation. If he does not perceive colours below red or above violet, the reason perhaps is that the colours which he does perceive suffice for the purposes of self-preservation. And the senses themselves are simplifying apparati which eliminate from objective reality everything that it is not necessary to know in order to utilize objects for the purpose of preserving life. In complete darkness an animal, if it does not perish, ends by becoming blind. Parasites which live in the intestines of other animals upon the nutritive juices which they find ready prepared for them by these animals, as they do not need either to see or hear, do in fact neither see nor hear; they simply adhere, a kind of receptive bag, to the being upon whom they live. For these parasites the visible and audible world does not exist. It is enough for them that the animals, in whose intestines they live, see and hear. Knowledge, then, is primarily at the service of the instinct of self-preservation, which is indeed, as we have said with Spinoza, its very essence. And thus it may be said that it is the instinct of self-preservation that makes perceptible for us the reality and truth of the world; for it is this instinct that cuts out and separates that which exists for us from the unfathomable and illimitable region of the possible. In effect, that which has existence for us is precisely that which, in one way or another, we need to know in order to exist ourselves; objective existence, as we know it, is a dependence of our own personal existence. And nobody can deny that there may not exist, and perhaps do exist, aspects of reality unknown to us, to-day at any rate, and perhaps unknowable, because they are in no way necessary to us for the preservation of our own actual existence. But man does not live alone; he is not an isolated individual, but a member of society. There is not a little truth in the saying that the individual, like the atom, is an abstraction. Yes, the atom apart from the universe is as much an abstraction as the universe apart from the atom. And if the individual maintains his existence by the instinct of self-preservation, society owes its being and maintenance to the individual's instinct of perpetuation. And from this instinct, or rather from society, springs reason. Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the distinguishing mark of man, is a social product. It owes its origin, perhaps, to language. We think articulately--_i.e._, reflectively--thanks to articulate language, and this language arose out of the need of communicating our thought to our neighbours. To think is to talk with oneself, and each one of us talks with himself, thanks to our having had to talk with one another. In everyday life it frequently happens that we hit upon an idea that we were seeking and succeed in giving it form--that is to say, we obtain the idea, drawing it forth from the mist of dim perceptions which it represents, thanks to the efforts which we make to present it to others. Thought is inward language, and the inward language originates in the outward. Hence it results that reason is social and common. A fact pregnant with consequences, as we shall have occasion to see. Now if there is a reality which, in so far as we have knowledge of it, is the creation of the instinct of personal preservation and of the senses at the service of this instinct, must there not be another reality, not less real than the former, the creation, in so far as we have knowledge of it, of the instinct of perpetuation, the instinct of the species, and of the senses at the service of this instinct? The instinct of preservation, hunger, is the foundation of the human individual; the instinct of perpetuation, love, in its most rudimentary and physiological form, is the foundation of human society. And just as man knows that which he needs to know in order that he may preserve his existence, so society, or man in so far as he is a social being, knows that which he needs to know in order that he may perpetuate himself in society. There is a world, the sensible world, that is the child of hunger, and there is another world, the ideal world, that is the child of love. And just as there are senses employed in the service of the knowledge of the sensible world, so there are also senses, at present for the most part dormant, for social consciousness has scarcely awakened, employed in the service of the knowledge of the ideal world. And why must we deny objective reality to the creations of love, of the instinct of perpetuation, since we allow it to the creations of hunger or the instinct of preservation? For if it be said that the former creations are only the creations of our imagination, without objective value, may it not equally be said of the latter that they are only the creations of our senses? Who can assert that there is not an invisible and intangible world, perceived by the inward sense that lives in the service of the instinct of perpetuation? Human society, as a society, possesses senses which the individual, but for his existence in society, would lack, just as the individual, man, who is in his turn a kind of society, possesses senses lacking in the cells of which he is composed. The blind cells of hearing, in their dim consciousness, must of necessity be unaware of the existence of the visible world, and if they should hear it spoken of they would perhaps deem it to be the arbitrary creation of the deaf cells of sight, while the latter in their turn would consider as illusion the audible world which the hearing cells create. We have remarked before that the parasites which live in the intestines of higher animals, feeding upon the nutritive juices which these animals supply, do not need either to see or hear, and therefore for them the visible and audible world does not exist. And if they possessed a certain degree of consciousness and took account of the fact that the animal at whose expense they live believed in a world of sight and hearing, they would perhaps deem such belief to be due merely to the extravagance of its imagination. And similarly there are social parasites, as Mr. A.J. Balfour admirably observes,[10] who, receiving from the society in which they live the motives of their moral conduct, deny that belief in God and the other life is a necessary foundation for good conduct and for a tolerable life, society having prepared for them the spiritual nutriment by which they live. An isolated individual can endure life and live it well and even heroically without in any sort believing either in the immortality of the soul or in God, but he lives the life of a spiritual parasite. What we call the sense of honour is, even in non-Christians, a Christian product. And I will say further, that if there exists in a man faith in God joined to a life of purity and moral elevation, it is not so much the believing in God that makes him good, as the being good, thanks to God, that makes him believe in Him. Goodness is the best source of spiritual clear-sightedness. I am well aware that it may be objected that all this talk of man creating the sensible world and love the ideal world, of the blind cells of hearing and the deaf cells of sight, of spiritual parasites, etc., is merely metaphor. So it is, and I do not claim to discuss otherwise than by metaphor. And it is true that this social sense, the creature of love, the creator of language, of reason, and of the ideal world that springs from it, is at bottom nothing other than what we call fancy or imagination. Out of fancy springs reason. And if by imagination is understood a faculty which fashions images capriciously, I will ask: What is caprice? And in any case the senses and reason are also fallible. We shall have to enquire what is this inner social faculty, the imagination which personalizes everything, and which, employed in the service of the instinct of perpetuation, reveals to us God and the immortality of the soul--God being thus a social product. But this we will reserve till later. And now, why does man philosophize?--that is to say, why does he investigate the first causes and ultimate ends of things? Why does he seek the disinterested truth? For to say that all men have a natural tendency to know is true; but wherefore? Philosophers seek a theoretic or ideal starting-point for their human work, the work of philosophizing; but they are not usually concerned to seek the practical and real starting-point, the purpose. What is the object in making philosophy, in thinking it and then expounding it to one's fellows? What does the philosopher seek in it and with it? The truth for the truth's own sake? The truth, in order that we may subject our conduct to it and determine our spiritual attitude towards life and the universe comformably with it? Philosophy is a product of the humanity of each philosopher, and each philosopher is a man of flesh and bone who addresses himself to other men of flesh and bone like himself. And, let him do what he will, he philosophizes not with the reason only, but with the will, with the feelings, with the flesh and with the bones, with the whole soul and the whole body. It is the man that philosophizes. I do not wish here to use the word "I" in connection with philosophizing, lest the impersonal "I" should be understood in place of the man that philosophizes; for this concrete, circumscribed "I," this "I" of flesh and bone, that suffers from tooth-ache and finds life insupportable if death is the annihilation of the personal consciousness, must not be confounded with that other counterfeit "I," the theoretical "I" which Fichte smuggled into philosophy, nor yet with the Unique, also theoretical, of Max Stirner. It is better to say "we," understanding, however, the "we" who are circumscribed in space. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth's sake! This is inhuman. And if we say that theoretical philosophy addresses itself to practical philosophy, truth to goodness, science to ethics, I will ask: And to what end is goodness? Is it, perhaps, an end in itself? Good is simply that which contributes to the preservation, perpetuation, and enrichment of consciousness. Goodness addresses itself to man, to the maintenance and perfection of human society which is composed of men. And to what end is this? "So act that your action may be a pattern to all men," Kant tells us. That is well, but wherefore? We must needs seek for a wherefore. In the starting-point of all philosophy, in the real starting-point, the practical not the theoretical, there is a wherefore. The philosopher philosophizes for something more than for the sake of philosophizing. _Primum vivere, deinde philosophari_, says the old Latin adage; and as the philosopher is a man before he is a philosopher, he must needs live before he can philosophize, and, in fact, he philosophizes in order to live. And usually he philosophizes either in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement. A good illustration of this last case is to be found in that terrible Athenian ironist, Socrates, of whom Xenophon relates in his _Memorabilia_ that he discovered to Theodata, the courtesan, the wiles that she ought to make use of in order to lure lovers to her house so aptly, that she begged him to act as her companion in the chase, _sunthêratês_, her pimp, in a word. And philosophy is wont, in fact, not infrequently to convert itself into a kind of art of spiritual pimping. And sometimes into an opiate for lulling sorrows to sleep. I take at random a book of metaphysics, the first that comes to my hand, _Time and Space, a Metaphysical Essay_, by Shadworth H. Hodgson. I open it, and in the fifth paragraph of the first chapter of the first part I read: "Metaphysics is, properly speaking, not a science but a philosophy--that is, it is a science whose end is in itself, in the gratification and education of the minds which carry it on, not in external purpose, such as the founding of any art conducive to the welfare of life." Let us examine this. We see that metaphysics is not, properly speaking, a science--that is, it is a science whose end is in itself. And this science, which, properly speaking, is not a science, has its end in itself, in the gratification and education of the minds that cultivate it. But what are we to understand? Is its end in itself or is it to gratify and educate the minds that cultivate it? Either the one or the other! Hodgson afterwards adds that the end of metaphysics is not any external purpose, such as that of founding an art conducive to the welfare of life. But is not the gratification of the mind of him who cultivates philosophy part of the well-being of his life? Let the reader consider this passage of the English metaphysician and tell me if it is not a tissue of contradictions. Such a contradiction is inevitable when an attempt is made to define humanly this theory of science, of knowledge, whose end is in itself, of knowing for the sake of knowing, of attaining truth for the sake of truth. Science exists only in personal consciousness and thanks to it; astronomy, mathematics, have no other reality than that which they possess as knowledge in the minds of those who study and cultivate them. And if some day all personal consciousness must come to an end on the earth; if some day the human spirit must return to the nothingness--that is to say, to the absolute unconsciousness--from whence it sprang; and if there shall no more be any spirit that can avail itself of all our accumulated knowledge--then to what end is this knowledge? For we must not lose sight of the fact that the problem of the personal immortality of the soul involves the future of the whole human species. This series of contradictions into which the Englishman falls in his desire to explain the theory of a science whose end is in itself, is easily understood when it is remembered that it is an Englishman who speaks, and that the Englishman is before everything else a man. Perhaps a German specialist, a philosopher who had made philosophy his speciality, who had first murdered his humanity and then buried it in his philosophy, would be better able to explain this theory of a science whose end is in itself and of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Take the man Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland; read his _Ethic_ as a despairing elegiac poem, which in fact it is, and tell me if you do not hear, beneath the disemburdened and seemingly serene propositions _more geometrico_, the lugubrious echo of the prophetic psalms. It is not the philosophy of resignation but of despair. And when he wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and that his wisdom consists in meditating not on death but on life--homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat et eius sapientia non mortis, sed vitæ meditatio est (_Ethic_, Part IV., Prop. LXVII.)--when he wrote that, he felt, as we all feel, that we are slaves, and he did in fact think about death, and he wrote it in a vain endeavour to free himself from this thought. Nor in writing Proposition XLII. of Part V., that "happiness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself," did he feel, one may be sure, what he wrote. For this is usually the reason why men philosophize--in order to convince themselves, even though they fail in the attempt. And this desire of convincing oneself--that is to say, this desire of doing violence to one's own human nature--is the real starting-point of not a few philosophies. Whence do I come and whence comes the world in which and by which I live? Whither do I go and whither goes everything that environs me? What does it all mean? Such are the questions that man asks as soon as he frees himself from the brutalizing necessity of labouring for his material sustenance. And if we look closely, we shall see that beneath these questions lies the wish to know not so much the "why" as the "wherefore," not the cause but the end. Cicero's definition of philosophy is well known--"the knowledge of things divine and human and of the causes in which these things are contained," _rerum divinarum et humanarum, causarumque quibus hæ res continentur_; but in reality these causes are, for us, ends. And what is the Supreme Cause, God, but the Supreme End? The "why" interests us only in view of the "wherefore." We wish to know whence we came only in order the better to be able to ascertain whither we are going. This Ciceronian definition, which is the Stoic definition, is also found in that formidable intellectualist, Clement of Alexandria, who was canonized by the Catholic Church, and he expounds it in the fifth chapter of the first of his _Stromata_. But this same Christian philosopher--Christian?--in the twenty-second chapter of his fourth _Stroma_ tells us that for the gnostic--that is to say, the intellectual--knowledge, _gnosis_, ought to suffice, and he adds: "I will dare aver that it is not because he wishes to be saved that he, who devotes himself to knowledge for the sake of the divine science itself, chooses knowledge. For the exertion of the intellect by exercise is prolonged to a perpetual exertion. And the perpetual exertion of the intellect is the essence of an intelligent being, which results from an uninterrupted process of admixture, and remains eternal contemplation, a living substance. Could we, then, suppose anyone proposing to the gnostic whether he would choose the knowledge of God or everlasting salvation, and if these, which are entirely identical, were separable, he would without the least hesitation choose the knowledge of God?" May He, may God Himself, whom we long to enjoy and possess eternally, deliver us from this Clementine gnosticism or intellectualism! Why do I wish to know whence I come and whither I go, whence comes and whither goes everything that environs me, and what is the meaning of it all? For I do not wish to die utterly, and I wish to know whether I am to die or not definitely. If I do not die, what is my destiny? and if I die, then nothing has any meaning for me. And there are three solutions: (_a_) I know that I shall die utterly, and then irremediable despair, or (_b_) I know that I shall not die utterly, and then resignation, or (_c_) I cannot know either one or the other, and then resignation in despair or despair in resignation, a desperate resignation or a resigned despair, and hence conflict. "It is best," some reader will say, "not to concern yourself with what cannot be known." But is it possible? In his very beautiful poem, _The Ancient Sage_, Tennyson said: Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in, Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, Thou canst not prove that thou art spirit alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one: Nor canst thou prove thou art immortal, no, Nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son, Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee, Am not thyself in converse with thyself, For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise, Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, Cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith! Yes, perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy proving can be proven, nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which may conduce to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge, as the Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life. The defect of Descartes' _Discourse of Method_ lies not in the antecedent methodical doubt; not in his beginning by resolving to doubt everything, a merely intellectual device; but in his resolution to begin by emptying himself of himself, of Descartes, of the real man, the man of flesh and bone, the man who does not want to die, in order that he might be a mere thinker--that is, an abstraction. But the real man returned and thrust himself into the philosophy. "_Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée_." Thus begins the _Discourse of Method_, and this good sense saved him. He continues talking about himself, about the man Descartes, telling us among other things that he greatly esteemed eloquence and loved poetry; that he delighted above all in mathematics because of the evidence and certainty of its reasons, and that he revered our theology and claimed as much as any to attain to heaven--_et prétendais autant qu'aucun autre à gagner le ciel_. And this pretension--a very laudable one, I think, and above all very natural--was what prevented him from deducing all the consequences of his methodical doubt. The man Descartes claimed, as much as any other, to attain to heaven, "but having learned as a thing very sure that the way to it is not less open to the most ignorant than to the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead thither are beyond our intelligence, I did not dare submit them to my feeble reasonings, and I thought that to undertake to examine them and to succeed therein, I should want some extraordinary help from heaven and need to be more than man." And here we have the man. Here we have the man who "did not feel obliged, thank God, to make a profession (_métier_) of science in order to increase his means, and who did not pretend to play the cynic and despise glory." And afterwards he tells us how he was compelled to make a sojourn in Germany, and there, shut up in a stove (_poêle_) he began to philosophize his method. But in Germany, shut up in a stove! And such his discourse is, a stove-discourse, and the stove a German one, although the philosopher shut up in it was a Frenchman who proposed to himself to attain to heaven. And he arrives at the _cogito ergo sum_, which St. Augustine had already anticipated; but the _ego_ implicit in this enthymeme, _ego cogito, ergo ego sum_, is an unreal--that is, an ideal--_ego_ or I, and its _sum_, its existence, something unreal also. "I think, therefore I am," can only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of the "I am," which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek to join in wedlock life and reason! The truth is _sum, ergo cogito_--I am, therefore I think, although not everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness of self, without personality? Can there exist pure knowledge without feeling, without that species of materiality which feeling lends to it? Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the stove have said: "I feel, therefore I am"? or "I will, therefore I am"? And to feel oneself, is it not perhaps to feel oneself imperishable? To will oneself, is it not to wish oneself eternal--that is to say, not to wish to die? What the sorrowful Jew of Amsterdam called the essence of the thing, the effort that it makes to persist indefinitely in its own being, self-love, the longing for immortality, is it not perhaps the primal and fundamental condition of all reflective or human knowledge? And is it not therefore the true base, the real starting-point, of all philosophy, although the philosophers, perverted by intellectualism, may not recognize it? And, moreover, it was the _cogito_ that introduced a distinction which, although fruitful of truths, has been fruitful also of confusions, and this distinction is that between object, _cogito_, and subject, _sum_. There is scarcely any distinction that does not also lead to confusion. But we will return to this later. For the present let us remain keenly suspecting that the longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortality, the effort whereby we tend to persist indefinitely in our own being, which is, according to the tragic Jew, our very essence, that this is the affective basis of all knowledge and the personal inward starting-point of all human philosophy, wrought by a man and for men. And we shall see how the solution of this inward affective problem, a solution which may be but the despairing renunciation of the attempt at a solution, is that which colours all the rest of philosophy. Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge there is simply this human feeling, just as underlying the enquiry into the "why," the cause, there is simply the search for the "wherefore," the end. All the rest is either to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive others; and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself. And this personal and affective starting-point of all philosophy and all religion is the tragic sense of life. Let us now proceed to consider this. FOOTNOTE: [10] _The Foundations of Belief, being Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology_, by the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour London, 1895: "So it is with those persons who claim to show by their example that naturalism is practically consistent with the maintenance of ethical ideals with which naturalism has no natural affinity. Their spiritual life is parasitic: it is sheltered by convictions which belong, not to them, but to the society of which they form a part; it is nourished by processes in which they take no share. And when those convictions decay, and those processes come to an end, the alien life which they have maintained can scarce be expected to outlast them" (Chap. iv.). III THE HUNGER OF IMMORTALITY Let us pause to consider this immortal yearning for immortality--even though the gnostics or intellectuals may be able to say that what follows is not philosophy but rhetoric. Moreover, the divine Plato, when he discussed the immortality of the soul in his _Phædo_, said that it was proper to clothe it in legend, _muthologein_. First of all let us recall once again--and it will not be for the last time--that saying of Spinoza that every being endeavours to persist in itself, and that this endeavour is its actual essence, and implies indefinite time, and that the soul, in fine, sometimes with a clear and distinct idea, sometimes confusedly, tends to persist in its being with indefinite duration, and is aware of its persistency (_Ethic_, Part III., Props. VI.-X.). It is impossible for us, in effect, to conceive of ourselves as not existing, and no effort is capable of enabling consciousness to realize absolute unconsciousness, its own annihilation. Try, reader, to imagine to yourself, when you are wide awake, the condition of your soul when you are in a deep sleep; try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive ourselves as not existing. The visible universe, the universe that is created by the instinct of self-preservation, becomes all too narrow for me. It is like a cramped cell, against the bars of which my soul beats its wings in vain. Its lack of air stifles me. More, more, and always more! I want to be myself, and yet without ceasing to be myself to be others as well, to merge myself into the totality of things visible and invisible, to extend myself into the illimitable of space and to prolong myself into the infinite of time. Not to be all and for ever is as if not to be--at least, let me be my whole self, and be so for ever and ever. And to be the whole of myself is to be everybody else. Either all or nothing! All or nothing! And what other meaning can the Shakespearean "To be or not to be" have, or that passage in _Coriolanus_ where it is said of Marcius "He wants nothing of a god but eternity"? Eternity, eternity!--that is the supreme desire! The thirst of eternity is what is called love among men, and whosoever loves another wishes to eternalize himself in him. Nothing is real that is not eternal. From the poets of all ages and from the depths of their souls this tremendous vision of the flowing away of life like water has wrung bitter cries--from Pindar's "dream of a shadow," _skias onar_, to Calderón's "life is a dream" and Shakespeare's "we are such stuff as dreams are made on," this last a yet more tragic sentence than Calderón's, for whereas the Castilian only declares that our life is a dream, but not that we ourselves are the dreamers of it, the Englishman makes us ourselves a dream, a dream that dreams. The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it. In appearance at any rate, for in reality.... And love, above all when it struggles against destiny, overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is overcome and liberty is law. Everything passes! Such is the refrain of those who have drunk, lips to the spring, of the fountain of life, of those who have tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To be, to be for ever, to be without ending! thirst of being, thirst of being more! hunger of God! thirst of love eternalizing and eternal! to be for ever! to be God! "Ye shall be as gods!" we are told in Genesis that the serpent said to the first pair of lovers (Gen. iii. 5). "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable," wrote the Apostle (1 Cor. xv. 19); and all religion has sprung historically from the cult of the dead--that is to say, from the cult of immortality. The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death; but this free man is a dead man, free from the impulse of life, for want of love, the slave of his liberty. This thought that I must die and the enigma of what will come after death is the very palpitation of my consciousness. When I contemplate the green serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depths of my spirit with the blood of divinity. Like Pascal, I do not understand those who assert that they care not a farthing for these things, and this indifference "in a matter that touches themselves, their eternity, their all, exasperates me rather than moves me to compassion, astonishes and shocks me," and he who feels thus "is for me," as for Pascal, whose are the words just quoted, "a monster." It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand books that ancestor-worship is for the most part the source of primitive religions, and it may be strictly said that what most distinguishes man from the other animals is that, in one form or another, he guards his dead and does not give them over to the neglect of teeming mother earth; he is an animal that guards its dead. And from what does he thus guard them? From what does he so futilely protect them? The wretched consciousness shrinks from its own annihilation, and, just as an animal spirit, newly severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs desire to possess another life than that of the world itself. And so the earth would run the risk of becoming a vast cemetery before the dead themselves should die again. When mud huts or straw shelters, incapable of resisting the inclemency of the weather, sufficed for the living, tumuli were raised for the dead, and stone was used for sepulchres before it was used for houses. It is the strong-builded houses of the dead that have withstood the ages, not the houses of the living; not the temporary lodgings but the permanent habitations. This cult, not of death but of immortality, originates and preserves religions. In the midst of the delirium of destruction, Robespierre induced the Convention to declare the existence of the Supreme Being and "the consolatory principle of the immortality of the soul," the Incorruptible being dismayed at the idea of having himself one day to turn to corruption. A disease? Perhaps; but he who pays no heed to his disease is heedless of his health, and man is an animal essentially and substantially diseased. A disease? Perhaps it may be, like life itself to which it is thrall, and perhaps the only health possible may be death; but this disease is the fount of all vigorous health. From the depth of this anguish, from the abyss of the feeling of our mortality, we emerge into the light of another heaven, as from the depth of Hell Dante emerged to behold the stars once again-- _e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle._ Although this meditation upon mortality may soon induce in us a sense of anguish, it fortifies us in the end. Retire, reader, into yourself and imagine a slow dissolution of yourself--the light dimming about you--all things becoming dumb and soundless, enveloping you in silence--the objects that you handle crumbling away between your hands--the ground slipping from under your feet--your very memory vanishing as if in a swoon--everything melting away from you into nothingness and you yourself also melting away--the very consciousness of nothingness, merely as the phantom harbourage of a shadow, not even remaining to you. I have heard it related of a poor harvester who died in a hospital bed, that when the priest went to anoint his hands with the oil of extreme unction, he refused to open his right hand, which clutched a few dirty coins, not considering that very soon neither his hand nor he himself would be his own any more. And so we close and clench, not our hand, but our heart, seeking to clutch the world in it. A friend confessed to me that, foreseeing while in the full vigour of physical health the near approach of a violent death, he proposed to concentrate his life and spend the few days which he calculated still remained to him in writing a book. Vanity of vanities! If at the death of the body which sustains me, and which I call mine to distinguish it from the self that is I, my consciousness returns to the absolute unconsciousness from which it sprang, and if a like fate befalls all my brothers in humanity, then is our toil-worn human race nothing but a fatidical procession of phantoms, going from nothingness to nothingness, and humanitarianism the most inhuman thing known. And the remedy is not that suggested in the quatrain that runs-- _Cada vez que considero que me tengo de morir, tiendo la capa en el suelo y no me harto de dormir._[11] No! The remedy is to consider our mortal destiny without flinching, to fasten our gaze upon the gaze of the Sphinx, for it is thus that the malevolence of its spell is discharmed. If we all die utterly, wherefore does everything exist? Wherefore? It is the Wherefore of the Sphinx; it is the Wherefore that corrodes the marrow of the soul; it is the begetter of that anguish which gives us the love of hope. Among the poetic laments of the unhappy Cowper there are some lines written under the oppression of delirium, in which, believing himself to be the mark of the Divine vengeance, he exclaims-- Hell might afford my miseries a shelter. This is the Puritan sentiment, the preoccupation with sin and predestination; but read the much more terrible words of Sénancour, expressive of the Catholic, not the Protestant, despair, when he makes his Obermann say, "L'homme est périssable. Il se peut; mais périssons en résistant, et, si le néant nous est réservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice." And I must confess, painful though the confession be, that in the days of the simple faith of my childhood, descriptions of the tortures of hell, however terrible, never made me tremble, for I always felt that nothingness was much more terrifying. He who suffers lives, and he who lives suffering, even though over the portal of his abode is written "Abandon all hope!" loves and hopes. It is better to live in pain than to cease to be in peace. The truth is that I could not believe in this atrocity of Hell, of an eternity of punishment, nor did I see any more real hell than nothingness and the prospect of it. And I continue in the belief that if we all believed in our salvation from nothingness we should all be better. What is this _joie de vivre_ that they talk about nowadays? Our hunger for God, our thirst of immortality, of survival, will always stifle in us this pitiful enjoyment of the life that passes and abides not. It is the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life to be unending, that most often urges us to long for death. "If it is true that I am to die utterly," we say to ourselves, "then once I am annihilated the world has ended so far as I am concerned--it is finished. Why, then, should it not end forthwith, so that no new consciousnesses, doomed to suffer the tormenting illusion of a transient and apparential existence, may come into being? If, the illusion of living being shattered, living for the mere sake of living or for the sake of others who are likewise doomed to die, does not satisfy the soul, what is the good of living? Our best remedy is death." And thus it is that we chant the praises of the never-ending rest because of our dread of it, and speak of liberating death. Leopardi, the poet of sorrow, of annihilation, having lost the ultimate illusion, that of believing in his immortality-- _Peri l'inganno estremo ch'eterno io mi credei_, spoke to his heart of _l'infinita vanitá del tutto_, and perceived how close is the kinship between love and death, and how "when love is born deep down in the heart, simultaneously a languid and weary desire to die is felt in the breast." The greater part of those who seek death at their own hand are moved thereto by love; it is the supreme longing for life, for more life, the longing to prolong and perpetuate life, that urges them to death, once they are persuaded of the vanity of this longing. The problem is tragic and eternal, and the more we seek to escape from it, the more it thrusts itself upon us. Four-and-twenty centuries ago, in his dialogue on the immortality of the soul, the serene Plato--but was he serene?--spoke of the uncertainty of our dream of being immortal and of the _risk_ that the dream might be vain, and from his own soul there escaped this profound cry--Glorious is the risk!--_kalos gar o kindunos_, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our souls never dying--a sentence that was the germ of Pascal's famous argument of the wager. Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression upon me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die--no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this "I" to live--this poor "I" that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me. I am the centre of my universe, the centre of the universe, and in my supreme anguish I cry with Michelet, "Mon moi, ils m'arrachent mon moi!" What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? (Matt. xvi. 26). Egoism, you say? There is nothing more universal than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of all. Each man is worth more than the whole of humanity, nor will it do to sacrifice each to all save in so far as all sacrifice themselves to each. That which we call egoism is the principle of psychic gravity, the necessary postulate. "Love thy neighbour as thyself," we are told, the presupposition being that each man loves himself; and it is not said "Love thyself." And, nevertheless, we do not know how to love ourselves. Put aside the persistence of your own self and ponder what they tell you. Sacrifice yourself to your children! And sacrifice yourself to them because they are yours, part and prolongation of yourself, and they in their turn will sacrifice themselves to their children, and these children to theirs, and so it will go on without end, a sterile sacrifice by which nobody profits. I came into the world to create my self, and what is to become of all our selves? Live for the True, the Good, the Beautiful! We shall see presently the supreme vanity and the supreme insincerity of this hypocritical attitude. "That art thou!" they tell me with the Upanishads. And I answer: Yes, I am that, if that is I and all is mine, and mine the totality of things. As mine I love the All, and I love my neighbour because he lives in me and is part of my consciousness, because he is like me, because he is mine. Oh, to prolong this blissful moment, to sleep, to eternalize oneself in it! Here and now, in this discreet and diffused light, in this lake of quietude, the storm of the heart appeased and stilled the echoes of the world! Insatiable desire now sleeps and does not even dream; use and wont, blessed use and wont, are the rule of my eternity; my disillusions have died with my memories, and with my hopes my fears. And they come seeking to deceive us with a deceit of deceits, telling us that nothing is lost, that everything is transformed, shifts and changes, that not the least particle of matter is annihilated, not the least impulse of energy is lost, and there are some who pretend to console us with this! Futile consolation! It is not my matter or my energy that is the cause of my disquiet, for they are not mine if I myself am not mine--that is, if I am not eternal. No, my longing is not to be submerged in the vast All, in an infinite and eternal Matter or Energy, or in God; not to be possessed by God, but to possess Him, to become myself God, yet without ceasing to be I myself, I who am now speaking to you. Tricks of monism avail us nothing; we crave the substance and not the shadow of immortality. Materialism, you say? Materialism? Without doubt; but either our spirit is likewise some kind of matter or it is nothing. I dread the idea of having to tear myself away from my flesh; I dread still more the idea of having to tear myself away from everything sensible and material, from all substance. Yes, perhaps this merits the name of materialism; and if I grapple myself to God with all my powers and all my senses, it is that He may carry me in His arms beyond death, looking into these eyes of mine with the light of His heaven when the light of earth is dimming in them for ever. Self-illusion? Talk not to me of illusion--let me live! They also call this pride--"stinking pride" Leopardi called it--and they ask us who are we, vile earthworms, to pretend to immortality; in virtue of what? wherefore? by what right? "In virtue of what?" you ask; and I reply, In virtue of what do we now live? "Wherefore?"--and wherefore do we now exist? "By what right?"--and by what right are we? To exist is just as gratuitous as to go on existing for ever. Do not let us talk of merit or of right or of the wherefore of our longing, which is an end in itself, or we shall lose our reason in a vortex of absurdities. I do not claim any right or merit; it is only a necessity; I need it in order to live. And you, who are you? you ask me; and I reply with Obermann, "For the universe, nothing; for myself, everything!" Pride? Is it pride to want to be immortal? Unhappy men that we are! 'Tis a tragic fate, without a doubt, to have to base the affirmation of immortality upon the insecure and slippery foundation of the desire for immortality; but to condemn this desire on the ground that we believe it to have been proved to be unattainable, without undertaking the proof, is merely supine. I am dreaming ...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really believe in it ...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me, wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the principle. But these are things which it is impossible to discuss. It is related in the book of the Acts of the Apostles how wherever Paul went the Jews, moved with envy, were stirred up to persecute him. They stoned him in Iconium and Lystra, cities of Lycaonia, in spite of the wonders that he worked therein; they scourged him in Philippi of Macedonia and persecuted his brethren in Thessalonica and Berea. He arrived at Athens, however, the noble city of the intellectuals, over which brooded the sublime spirit of Plato--the Plato of the gloriousness of the risk of immortality; and there Paul disputed with Epicureans and Stoics. And some said of him, "What doth this babbler (_spermologos_) mean?" and others, "He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods" (Acts xvii. 18), "and they took him and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is? for thou bringest certain strange things to our ears; we would know, therefore, what these things mean" (verses 19-20). And then follows that wonderful characterization of those Athenians of the decadence, those dainty connoisseurs of the curious, "for all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing" (verse 21). A wonderful stroke which depicts for us the condition of mind of those who had learned from the _Odyssey_ that the gods plot and achieve the destruction of mortals in order that their posterity may have something to narrate! Here Paul stands, then, before the subtle Athenians, before the _græuli_, men of culture and tolerance, who are ready to welcome and examine every doctrine, who neither stone nor scourge nor imprison any man for professing these or those doctrines--here he stands where liberty of conscience is respected and every opinion is given an attentive hearing. And he raises his voice in the midst of the Areopagus and speaks to them as it was fitting to speak to the cultured citizens of Athens, and all listen to him, agog to hear the latest novelty. But when he begins to speak to them of the resurrection of the dead their stock of patience and tolerance comes to an end, and some mock him, and others say: "We will hear thee again of this matter!" intending not to hear him. And a similar thing happened to him at Cæsarea when he came before the Roman prætor Felix, likewise a broad-minded and cultured man, who mitigated the hardships of his imprisonment, and wished to hear and did hear him discourse of righteousness and of temperance; but when he spoke of the judgement to come, Felix said, terrified (_emphobos genomenos_): "Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season I will call for thee" (Acts xxiv. 22-25). And in his audience before King Agrippa, when Festus the governor heard him speak of the resurrection of the dead, he exclaimed: "Thou art mad, Paul; much learning hath made thee mad" (Acts xxvi. 24). Whatever of truth there may have been in Paul's discourse in the Areopagus, and even if there were none, it is certain that this admirable account plainly shows how far Attic tolerance goes and where the patience of the intellectuals ends. They all listen to you, calmly and smilingly, and at times they encourage you, saying: "That's strange!" or, "He has brains!" or "That's suggestive," or "How fine!" or "Pity that a thing so beautiful should not be true!" or "this makes one think!" But as soon as you speak to them of resurrection and life after death, they lose their patience and cut short your remarks and exclaim, "Enough of this! we will talk about this another day!" And it is about this, my poor Athenians, my intolerant intellectuals, it is about this that I am going to talk to you here. And even if this belief be absurd, why is its exposition less tolerated than that of others much more absurd? Why this manifest hostility to such a belief? Is it fear? Is it, perhaps, spite provoked by inability to share it? And sensible men, those who do not intend to let themselves be deceived, keep on dinning into our ears the refrain that it is no use giving way to folly and kicking against the pricks, for what cannot be is impossible. The manly attitude, they say, is to resign oneself to fate; since we are not immortal, do not let us want to be so; let us submit ourselves to reason without tormenting ourselves about what is irremediable, and so making life more gloomy and miserable. This obsession, they add, is a disease. Disease, madness, reason ... the everlasting refrain! Very well then--No! I do not submit to reason, and I rebel against it, and I persist in creating by the energy of faith my immortalizing God, and in forcing by my will the stars out of their courses, for if we had faith as a grain of mustard seed we should say to that mountain, "Remove hence," and it would remove, and nothing would be impossible to us (Matt. xvii. 20). There you have that "thief of energies," as he[12] so obtusely called Christ who sought to wed nihilism with the struggle for existence, and he talks to you about courage. His heart craved the eternal all while his head convinced him of nothingness, and, desperate and mad to defend himself from himself, he cursed that which he most loved. Because he could not be Christ, he blasphemed against Christ. Bursting with his own self, he wished himself unending and dreamed his theory of eternal recurrence, a sorry counterfeit of immortality, and, full of pity for himself, he abominated all pity. And there are some who say that his is the philosophy of strong men! No, it is not. My health and my strength urge me to perpetuate myself. His is the doctrine of weaklings who aspire to be strong, but not of the strong who are strong. Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death. Before this terrible mystery of mortality, face to face with the Sphinx, man adopts different attitudes and seeks in various ways to console himself for having been born. And now it occurs to him to take it as a diversion, and he says to himself with Renan that this universe is a spectacle that God presents to Himself, and that it behoves us to carry out the intentions of the great Stage-Manager and contribute to make the spectacle the most brilliant and the most varied that may be. And they have made a religion of art, a cure for the metaphysical evil, and invented the meaningless phrase of art for art's sake. And it does not suffice them. If the man who tells you that he writes, paints, sculptures, or sings for his own amusement, gives his work to the public, he lies; he lies if he puts his name to his writing, painting, statue, or song. He wishes, at the least, to leave behind a shadow of his spirit, something that may survive him. If the _Imitation of Christ_ is anonymous, it is because its author sought the eternity of the soul and did not trouble himself about that of the name. The man of letters who shall tell you that he despises fame is a lying rascal. Of Dante, the author of those three-and-thirty vigorous verses (_Purg._ xi. 85-117) on the vanity of worldly glory, Boccaccio says that he relished honours and pomps more perhaps than suited with his conspicuous virtue. The keenest desire of his condemned souls is that they may be remembered and talked of here on earth, and this is the chief solace that lightens the darkness of his Inferno. And he himself confessed that his aim in expounding the concept of Monarchy was not merely that he might be of service to others, but that he might win for his own glory the palm of so great prize (_De Monarchia_, lib. i., cap. i.). What more? Even of that holy man, seemingly the most indifferent to worldly vanity, the Poor Little One of Assisi, it is related in the _Legenda Trium Sociorum_ that he said: _Adhuc adorabor per totum mundum!_--You will see how I shall yet be adored by all the world! (II. _Celano_, i. 1). And even of God Himself the theologians say that He created the world for the manifestation of His glory. When doubts invade us and cloud our faith in the immortality of the soul, a vigorous and painful impulse is given to the anxiety to perpetuate our name and fame, to grasp at least a shadow of immortality. And hence this tremendous struggle to singularize ourselves, to survive in some way in the memory of others and of posterity. It is this struggle, a thousand times more terrible than the struggle for life, that gives its tone, colour, and character to our society, in which the medieval faith in the immortal soul is passing away. Each one seeks to affirm himself, if only in appearance. Once the needs of hunger are satisfied--and they are soon satisfied--the vanity, the necessity--for it is a necessity--arises of imposing ourselves upon and surviving in others. Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity. He boasts even of his weaknesses and his misfortunes, for want of anything better to boast of, and is like a child who, in order to attract attention, struts about with a bandaged finger. And vanity, what is it but eagerness for survival? The vain man is in like case with the avaricious--he takes the means for the end; forgetting the end he pursues the means for its own sake and goes no further. The seeming to be something, conducive to being it, ends by forming our objective. We need that others should believe in our superiority to them in order that we may believe in it ourselves, and upon their belief base our faith in our own persistence, or at least in the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to him who congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are to him who recognizes the truth or the goodness of the cause itself. A rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius than hit the mark with the crowd. Rousseau has said in his _Émile_ (book iv.): "Even though philosophers should be in a position to discover the truth, which of them would take any interest in it? Each one knows well that his system is not better founded than the others, but he supports it because it is his. There is not a single one of them who, if he came to know the true and the false, would not prefer the falsehood that he had found to the truth discovered by another. Where is the philosopher who would not willingly deceive mankind for his own glory? Where is he who in the secret of his heart does not propose to himself any other object than to distinguish himself? Provided that he lifts himself above the vulgar, provided that he outshines the brilliance of his competitors, what does he demand more? The essential thing is to think differently from others. With believers he is an atheist; with atheists he would be a believer." How much substantial truth there is in these gloomy confessions of this man of painful sincerity! This violent struggle for the perpetuation of our name extends backwards into the past, just as it aspires to conquer the future; we contend with the dead because we, the living, are obscured beneath their shadow. We are jealous of the geniuses of former times, whose names, standing out like the landmarks of history, rescue the ages from oblivion. The heaven of fame is not very large, and the more there are who enter it the less is the share of each. The great names of the past rob us of our place in it; the space which they fill in the popular memory they usurp from us who aspire to occupy it. And so we rise up in revolt against them, and hence the bitterness with which all those who seek after fame in the world of letters judge those who have already attained it and are in enjoyment of it. If additions continue to be made to the wealth of literature, there will come a day of sifting, and each one fears lest he be caught in the meshes of the sieve. In attacking the masters, irreverent youth is only defending itself; the iconoclast or image-breaker is a Stylite who erects himself as an image, an _icon_. "Comparisons are odious," says the familiar adage, and the reason is that we wish to be unique. Do not tell Fernandez that he is one of the most talented Spaniards of the younger generation, for though he will affect to be gratified by the eulogy he is really annoyed by it; if, however, you tell him that he is the most talented man in Spain--well and good! But even that is not sufficient: one of the worldwide reputations would be more to his liking, but he is only fully satisfied with being esteemed the first in all countries and all ages. The more alone, the nearer to that unsubstantial immortality, the immortality of the name, for great names diminish one another. What is the meaning of that irritation which we feel when we believe that we are robbed of a phrase, or a thought, or an image, which we believed to be our own, when we are plagiarized? Robbed? Can it indeed be ours once we have given it to the public? Only because it is ours we prize it; and we are fonder of the false money that preserves our impress than of the coin of pure gold from which our effigy and our legend has been effaced. It very commonly happens that it is when the name of a writer is no longer in men's mouths that he most influences his public, his mind being then disseminated and infused in the minds of those who have read him, whereas he was quoted chiefly when his thoughts and sayings, clashing with those generally received, needed the guarantee of a name. What was his now belongs to all, and he lives in all. But for him the garlands have faded, and he believes himself to have failed. He hears no more either the applause or the silent tremor of the heart of those who go on reading him. Ask any sincere artist which he would prefer, whether that his work should perish and his memory survive, or that his work should survive and his memory perish, and you will see what he will tell you, if he is really sincere. When a man does not work merely in order to live and carry on, he works in order to survive. To work for the work's sake is not work but play. And play? We will talk about that later on. A tremendous passion is this longing that our memory may be rescued, if it is possible, from the oblivion which overtakes others. From it springs envy, the cause, according to the biblical narrative, of the crime with which human history opened: the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. It was not a struggle for bread--it was a struggle to survive in God, in the divine memory. Envy is a thousand times more terrible than hunger, for it is spiritual hunger. If what we call the problem of life, the problem of bread, were once solved, the earth would be turned into a hell by the emergence in a more violent form of the struggle for survival. For the sake of a name man is ready to sacrifice not only life but happiness--life as a matter of course. "Let me die, but let my fame live!" exclaimed Rodrigo Arias in _Las Mocedades del Cid_ when he fell mortally wounded by Don Ordóñez de Lara. "Courage, Girolamo, for you will long be remembered; death is bitter, but fame eternal!" cried Girolamo Olgiati, the disciple of Cola Montano and the murderer, together with his fellow-conspirators Lampugnani and Visconti, of Galeazzo Sforza, tyrant of Milan. And there are some who covet even the gallows for the sake of acquiring fame, even though it be an infamous fame: _avidus malæ famæ_, as Tacitus says. And this erostratism, what is it at bottom but the longing for immortality, if not for substantial and concrete immortality, at any rate for the shadowy immortality of the name? And in this there are degrees. If a man despises the applause of the crowd of to-day, it is because he seeks to survive in renewed minorities for generations. "Posterity is an accumulation of minorities," said Gounod. He wishes to prolong himself in time rather than in space. The crowd soon overthrows its own idols and the statue lies broken at the foot of the pedestal without anyone heeding it; but those who win the hearts of the elect will long be the objects of a fervent worship in some shrine, small and secluded no doubt, but capable of preserving them from the flood of oblivion. The artist sacrifices the extensiveness of his fame to its duration; he is anxious rather to endure for ever in some little corner than to occupy a brilliant second place in the whole universe; he prefers to be an atom, eternal and conscious of himself, rather than to be for a brief moment the consciousness of the whole universe; he sacrifices infinitude to eternity. And they keep on wearying our ears with this chorus of Pride! stinking Pride! Pride, to wish to leave an ineffaceable name? Pride? It is like calling the thirst for riches a thirst for pleasure. No, it is not so much the longing for pleasure that drives us poor folk to seek money as the terror of poverty, just as it was not the desire for glory but the terror of hell that drove men in the Middle Ages to the cloister with its _acedia_. Neither is this wish to leave a name pride, but terror of extinction. We aim at being all because in that we see the only means of escaping from being nothing. We wish to save our memory--at any rate, our memory. How long will it last? At most as long as the human race lasts. And what if we shall save our memory in God? Unhappy, I know well, are these confessions; but from the depth of unhappiness springs new life, and only by draining the lees of spiritual sorrow can we at last taste the honey that lies at the bottom of the cup of life. Anguish leads us to consolation. This thirst for eternal life is appeased by many, especially by the simple, at the fountain of religious faith; but to drink of this is not given to all. The institution whose primordial end is to protect this faith in the personal immortality of the soul is Catholicism; but Catholicism has sought to rationalize this faith by converting religion into theology, by offering a philosophy, and a philosophy of the thirteenth century, as a basis for vital belief. This and its consequences we will now proceed to examine. FOOTNOTES: [11] Each time that I consider that it is my lot to die, I spread my cloak upon the ground and am never surfeited with sleeping. [12] Nietzsche. IV THE ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM Let us now approach the Christian, Catholic, Pauline, or Athanasian solution of our inward vital problem, the hunger of immortality. Christianity sprang from the confluence of two mighty spiritual streams--the one Judaic, the other Hellenic--each of which had already influenced the other, and Rome finally gave it a practical stamp and social permanence. It has been asserted, perhaps somewhat precipitately, that primitive Christianity was an-eschatological, that faith in another life after death is not clearly manifested in it, but rather a belief in the proximate end of the world and establishment of the kingdom of God, a belief known as chiliasm. But were they not fundamentally one and the same thing? Faith in the immortality of the soul, the nature of which was not perhaps very precisely defined, may be said to be a kind of tacit understanding or supposition underlying the whole of the Gospel; and it is the mental orientation of many of those who read it to-day, an orientation contrary to that of the Christians from among whom the Gospel sprang, that prevents them from seeing this. Without doubt all that about the second coming of Christ, when he shall come among the clouds, clothed with majesty and great power, to judge the quick and the dead, to open to some the kingdom of heaven and to cast others into Gehenna, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, may be understood in a chiliastic sense; and it is even said of Christ in the Gospel (Mark ix. I), that there were with him some who should not taste of death till they had seen the kingdom of God--that is, that the kingdom should come during their generation. And in the same chapter, verse 10, it is said of Peter and James and John, who went up with Jesus to the Mount of Transfiguration and heard him say that he would rise again from the dead, that "they kept that saying within themselves, questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean." And at all events the Gospel was written when this belief, the basis and _raison d'être_ of Christianity, was in process of formation. See Matt. xxii. 29-32; Mark xii. 24-27; Luke xvi. 22-31; xx. 34-37; John v. 24-29; vi. 40, 54, 58; viii. 51; xi. 25, 56; xiv. 2, 19. And, above all, that passage in Matt. xxvii. 52, which tells how at the resurrection of Christ "many bodies of the saints which slept arose." And this was not a natural resurrection. No; the Christian faith was born of the faith that Jesus did not remain dead, but that God raised him up again, and that this resurrection was a fact; but this did not presuppose a mere immortality of the soul in the philosophical sense (see Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, Prolegomena, v. 4). For the first Fathers of the Church themselves the immortality of the soul was not a thing pertaining to the natural order; the teaching of the Divine Scriptures, as Nimesius said, sufficed for its demonstration, and it was, according to Lactantius, a gift--and as such gratuitous--of God. But more of this later. Christianity sprang, as we have said, from two great spiritual streams--the Judaic and the Hellenic--each one of which had arrived on its account, if not at a precise definition of, at any rate at a definite yearning for, another life. Among the Jews faith in another life was neither general nor clear; but they were led to it by faith in a personal and living God, the formation of which faith comprises all their spiritual history. Jahwé, the Judaic God, began by being one god among many others--the God of the people of Israel, revealed among the thunders of the tempest on Mount Sinai. But he was so jealous that he demanded that worship should be paid to him alone, and it was by way of monocultism that the Jews arrived at monotheism. He was adored as a living force, not as a metaphysical entity, and he was the god of battles. But this God of social and martial origin, to whose genesis we shall have to return later, became more inward and personal in the prophets, and in becoming more inward and personal he thereby became more individual and more universal. He is the Jahwé who, instead of loving Israel because Israel is his son, takes Israel for a son because he loves him (Hosea xi. 1). And faith in the personal God, in the Father of men, carries with it faith in the eternalization of the individual man--a faith which had already dawned in Pharisaism even before Christ. Hellenic culture, on its side, ended by discovering death; and to discover death is to discover the hunger of immortality. This longing does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not initial, but final, in their character, marking not the start but the close of a civilization. They indicate the transition from the old religion of Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo--of redemption. But the popular and inward religion of the Eleusinian mysteries, the worship of souls and ancestors, always persisted underneath. "In so far as it is possible to speak of a Delphic theology, among its more important elements must be counted the belief in the continuation of the life of souls after death in its popular forms, and in the worship of the souls of the dead."[13] There were the Titanic and the Dionysiac elements, and it was the duty of man, according to the Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the body, in which the soul was like a captive in a prison (see Rohde, _Psyche_, "Die Orphiker," 4). The Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic idea. But the idea of the immortality of the soul was not a philosophical principle. The attempt of Empedocles to harmonize a hylozoistic system with spiritualism proved that a philosophical natural science cannot by itself lead to a corroboration of the axiom of the perpetuity of the individual soul; it could only serve as a support to a theological speculation. It was by a contradiction that the first Greek philosophers affirmed immortality, by abandoning natural philosophy and intruding into theology, by formulating not an Apollonian but a Dionysiac and Orphic dogma. But "an immortality of the soul as such, in virtue of its own nature and condition as an imperishable divine force in the mortal body, was never an object of popular Hellenic belief" (Rohde, _op. cit._). Recall the _Phædo_ of Plato and the neo-platonic lucubrations. In them the yearning for personal immortality already shows itself--a yearning which, as it was left totally unsatisfied by reason, produced the Hellenic pessimism. For, as Pfleiderer very well observes (_Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtliche Grundlage_, 3. Berlin, 1896), "no people ever came upon the earth so serene and sunny as the Greeks in the youthful days of their historical existence ... but no people changed so completely their idea of the value of life. The Hellenism which ended in the religious speculations of neo-pythagorism and neo-platonism viewed this world, which had once appeared to it so joyous and radiant, as an abode of darkness and error, and earthly existence as a period of trial which could never be too quickly traversed." Nirvana is an Hellenic idea. Thus Jews and Greeks each arrived independently at the real discovery of death--a discovery which occasions, in peoples as in men, the entrance into spiritual puberty, the realization of the tragic sense of life, and it is then that the living God is begotten by humanity. The discovery of death is that which reveals God to us, and the death of the perfect man, Christ, was the supreme revelation of death, being the death of the man who ought not to have died yet did die. Such a discovery--that of immortality--prepared as it was by the Judaic and Hellenic religious processes, was a specifically Christian discovery. And its full achievement was due above all to Paul of Tarsus, the hellenizing Jew and Pharisee. Paul had not personally known Jesus, and hence he discovered him as Christ. "It may be said that the theology of the Apostle Paul is, in general, the first Christian theology. For him it was a necessity; it was, in a certain sense, his substitution for the lack of a personal knowledge of Jesus," says Weizsäcker (_Das apostolische Zeitalter der christlichen Kirche_. Freiburg-i.-B., 1892). He did not know Jesus, but he felt him born again in himself, and thus he could say, "Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."[14] And he preached the Cross, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness (I Cor. i. 23), and the central doctrine for the converted Apostle was that of the resurrection of Christ. The important thing for him was that Christ had been made man and had died and had risen again, and not what he did in his life--not his ethical work as a teacher, but his religious work as a giver of immortality. And he it was who wrote those immortal words: "Now if Christ be preached that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection from the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.... Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (I Cor. xv. 12-19). And it is possible to affirm that thenceforward he who does not believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ may be Christophile but cannot be specifically Christian. It is true that a Justin Martyr could say that "all those are Christians who live in accordance with reason, even though they may be deemed to be atheists, as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and other such"; but this martyr, is he a martyr--that is to say a witness--of Christianity? No. And it was around this dogma, inwardly experienced by Paul, the dogma of the resurrection and immortality of Christ, the guarantee of the resurrection and immortality of each believer, that the whole of Christology was built up. The God-man, the incarnate Word, came in order that man, according to his mode, might be made God--that is, immortal. And the Christian God, the Father of Christ, a God necessarily anthropomorphic, is He who--as the Catechism of Christian Doctrine which we were made to learn by heart at school says--created the world for man, for each man. And the end of redemption, in spite of appearances due to an ethical deflection of a dogma properly religious, was to save us from death rather than from sin, or from sin in so far as sin implies death. And Christ died, or rather rose again, for _me_, for each one of us. And a certain solidarity was established between God and His creature. Malebranche said that the first man fell _in order that_ Christ might redeem us, rather than that Christ redeemed us _because_ man had fallen. After the death of Paul years passed, and generations of Christianity wrought upon this central dogma and its consequences in order to safeguard faith in the immortality of the individual soul, and the Council of Nicæa came, and with it the formidable Athanasius, whose name is still a battle-cry, an incarnation of the popular faith. Athanasius was a man of little learning but of great faith, and above all of popular faith, devoured by the hunger of immortality. And he opposed Arianism, which, like Unitarian and Socinian Protestantism, threatened, although unknowingly and unintentionally, the foundation of that belief. For the Arians, Christ was first and foremost a teacher--a teacher of morality, the wholly perfect man, and therefore the guarantee that we may all attain to supreme perfection; but Athanasius felt that Christ cannot make us gods if he has not first made himself God; if his Divinity had been communicated, he could not have communicated it to us. "He was not, therefore," he said, "first man and then became God; but He was first God and then became man in order that He might the better deify us (_theopoiêsê_)" (_Orat._ i. 39). It was not the Logos of the philosophers, the cosmological Logos, that Athanasius knew and adored;[15] and thus he instituted a separation between nature and revelation. The Athanasian or Nicene Christ, who is the Catholic Christ, is not the cosmological, nor even, strictly, the ethical Christ; he is the eternalizing, the deifying, the religious Christ. Harnack says of this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, that he is essentially docetic--that is, apparential--because the process of the divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a myth or in a social atom? This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us that Arianism or Unitarianism would have been the death of Christianity, reducing it to cosmology and ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the learned might pass over to Catholicism--that is to say, from reason to faith. To this same learned historian of dogmas it appears to be an indication of a perverse state of things that the man Athanasius, who saved Christianity as the religion of a living communion with God, should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus, whom neither Paul nor Athanasius knew personally, nor yet Harnack himself. Among Protestants, this historical Jesus is subjected to the scalpel of criticism, while the Catholic Christ lives, the really historical Christ, he who lives throughout the centuries guaranteeing the faith in personal immortality and personal salvation. And Athanasius had the supreme audacity of faith, that of asserting things mutually contradictory: "The complete contradiction that exists in the _homoousios_ carried in its train a whole army of contradictions which increased as thought advanced," says Harnack. Yes, so it was, and so it had to be. And he adds: "Dogma took leave for ever of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and habituated itself to the contra-rational." In truth, it drew closer to life, which is contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Not only are judgements of worth never rationalizable--they are anti-rational. At Nicæa, then, as afterwards at the Vatican, victory rested with the idiots--taking this word in its proper, primitive, and etymological sense--the simple-minded, the rude and headstrong bishops, the representatives of the genuine human spirit, the popular spirit, the spirit that does not want to die, in spite of whatever reason may say, and that seeks a guarantee, the most material possible, for this desire. _Quid ad æternitatem?_ This is the capital question. And the Creed ends with that phrase, _resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi sæculi_--the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. In the cemetery of Mallona, in my native town of Bilbao, there is a tombstone on which this verse is carved: _Aunque estamos en polvo convertidos, en Ti, Señor, nuestra esperanza fía, que tornaremos a vivir vestidos con la carne y la piel que nos cubria._[16] "With the same bodies and souls that they had," as the Catechism says. So much so, that it is orthodox Catholic doctrine that the happiness of the blessed is not perfectly complete until they recover their bodies. They lament in heaven, says our Brother Pedro Malón de Chaide of the Order of St. Augustine, a Spaniard and a Basque,[17] and "this lament springs from their not being perfectly whole in heaven, for only the soul is there; and although they cannot suffer, because they see God, in whom they unspeakably delight, yet with all this it appears that they are not wholly content. They will be so when they are clothed with their own bodies." And to this central dogma of the resurrection in Christ and by Christ corresponds likewise a central sacrament, the axis of popular Catholic piety--the Sacrament of the Eucharist. In it is administered the body of Christ, which is the bread of immortality. This sacrament is genuinely realist--_dinglich_, as the Germans would say--which may without great violence be translated "material." It is the sacrament most genuinely _ex opere operato_, for which is substituted among Protestants the idealistic sacrament of the word. Fundamentally it is concerned with--and I say it with all possible respect, but without wishing to sacrifice the expressiveness of the phrase--the eating and drinking of God, the Eternalizer, the feeding upon Him. Little wonder then if St. Teresa tells us that when she was communicating in the monastery of the Incarnation and in the second year of her being Prioress there, on the octave of St. Martin, and the Father, Fr. Juan de la Cruz, divided the Host between her and another sister, she thought that it was done not because there was any want of Hosts, but because he wished to mortify her, "for I had told him how much I delighted in Hosts of a large size. Yet I was not ignorant that the size of the Host is of no moment, for I knew that our Lord is whole and entire in the smallest particle." Here reason pulls one way, feeling another. And what importance for this feeling have the thousand and one difficulties that arise from reflecting rationally upon the mystery of this sacrament? What is a divine body? And the body, in so far as it is the body of Christ, is it divine? What is an immortal and immortalizing body? What is substance separated from the accidents? Nowadays we have greatly refined our notion of materiality and substantiality; but there were even some among the Fathers of the Church to whom the immateriality of God Himself was not a thing so clear and definite as it is for us. And this sacrament of the Eucharist is the immortalizing sacrament _par excellence_, and therefore the axis of popular Catholic piety, and if it may be so said, the most specifically religious of sacraments. For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical. It was from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions--namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism. The preoccupation of sin has never been such a matter of anguish, or at any rate has never displayed itself with such an appearance of anguish, among Catholics. The sacrament of Confession contributes to this. And there persists, perhaps, among Catholics more than among Protestants the substance of the primitive Judaic and pagan conception of sin as something material and infectious and hereditary, which is cured by baptism and absolution. In Adam all his posterity sinned, almost materially, and his sin was transmitted as a material disease is transmitted. Renan, whose education was Catholic, was right, therefore, in calling to account the Protestant Amiel who accused him of not giving due importance to sin. And, on the other hand, Protestantism, absorbed in this preoccupation with justification, which in spite of its religious guise was taken more in an ethical sense than anything else, ends by neutralizing and almost obliterating eschatology; it abandons the Nicene symbol, falls into an anarchy of creeds, into pure religious individualism and a vague esthetic, ethical, or cultured religiosity. What we may call "other-worldliness" (_Jenseitigkeit_) was obliterated little by little by "this-worldliness" (_Diesseitigkeit_); and this in spite of Kant, who wished to save it, but by destroying it. To its earthly vocation and passive trust in God is due the religious coarseness of Lutheranism, which was almost at the point of expiring in the age of the Enlightenment, of the _Aufklärung_, and which pietism, infusing into it something of the religious sap of Catholicism, barely succeeded in galvanizing a little. Hence the exactness of the remarks of Oliveira Martins in his magnificent _History of Iberian Civilization_, in which he says (book iv., chap, iii.) that "Catholicism produced heroes and Protestantism produced societies that are sensible, happy, wealthy, free, as far as their outer institutions go, but incapable of any great action, because their religion has begun by destroying in the heart of man all that made him capable of daring and noble self-sacrifice." Take any of the dogmatic systems that have resulted from the latest Protestant dissolvent analysis--that of Kaftan, the follower of Ritschl, for example--and note the extent to which eschatology is reduced. And his master, Albrecht Ritschl, himself says: "The question regarding the necessity of justification or forgiveness can only be solved by conceiving eternal life as the direct end and aim of that divine operation. But if the idea of eternal life be applied merely to our state in the next life, then its content, too, lies beyond all experience, and cannot form the basis of knowledge of a scientific kind. Hopes and desires, though marked by the strongest subjective certainty, are not any the clearer for that, and contain in themselves no guarantee of the completeness of what one hopes or desires. Clearness and completeness of idea, however, are the conditions of comprehending anything--_i.e._, of understanding the necessary connection between the various elements of a thing, and between the thing and its given presuppositions. The Evangelical article of belief, therefore, that justification by faith establishes or brings with it assurance of eternal life, is of no use theologically, so long as this purposive aspect of justification cannot be verified in such experience as is possible now" (_Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung_, vol. iii., chap. vii., 52). All this is very rational, but ... In the first edition of Melanchthon's _Loci Communes_, that of 1521, the first Lutheran theological work, its author omits all Trinitarian and Christological speculations, the dogmatic basis of eschatology. And Dr. Hermann, professor at Marburg, the author of a book on the Christian's commerce with God (_Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_)--a book the first chapter of which treats of the opposition between mysticism and the Christian religion, and which is, according to Harnack, the most perfect Lutheran manual--tells us in another place,[18] referring to this Christological (or Athanasian) speculation, that "the effective knowledge of God and of Christ, in which knowledge faith lives, is something entirely different. Nothing ought to find a place in Christian doctrine that is not capable of helping man to recognize his sins, to obtain the grace of God, and to serve Him in truth. Until that time--that is to say, until Luther--the Church had accepted much as _doctrina sacra_ which cannot absolutely contribute to confer upon man liberty of heart and tranquillity of conscience." For my part, I cannot conceive the liberty of a heart or the tranquillity of a conscience that are not sure of their perdurability after death. "The desire for the soul's salvation," Hermann continues, "must at last have led men to the knowledge and understanding of the effective doctrine of salvation." And in his book on the Christian's commerce with God, this eminent Lutheran doctor is continually discoursing upon trust in God, peace of conscience, and an assurance of salvation that is not strictly and precisely certainty of everlasting life, but rather certainty of the forgiveness of sins. And I have read in a Protestant theologian, Ernst Troeltsch, that in the conceptual order Protestantism has attained its highest reach in music, in which art Bach has given it its mightiest artistic expression. This, then, is what Protestantism dissolves into--celestial music![19] On the other hand we may say that the highest artistic expression of Catholicism, or at least of Spanish Catholicism, is in the art that is most material, tangible, and permanent--for the vehicle of sounds is air--in sculpture and painting, in the Christ of Velasquez, that Christ who is for ever dying, yet never finishes dying, in order that he may give us life. And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No! No modern religion can leave ethics on one side. But our religion--although its doctors may protest against this--is fundamentally and for the most part a compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed into the service of ethics. What else but this is that atrocity of the eternal pains of hell, which agrees so ill with the Pauline apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind those words which the _Theologica Germanica_, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the mouth of God: "If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with good, for I am and have none other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps knows what he does. But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element preponderating. The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism, is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation? The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And, strictly, what is important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not. It is not necessary to take very literally, but as a lyrical, or rather rhetorical, effusion, the words of our famous sonnet-- _No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte el cielo que me tienes prometido,_[20] and the rest that follows. The real sin--perhaps it is the sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission--is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal--that is, a heretic--is worse than being an assassin, a thief, or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason. And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible--the Bible, or a society of men--the Church, or a single man? Does it make any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than that of a single man, this supreme offence in the eyes of reason had to be posited. It is the vital asserting itself, and in order to assert itself it creates, with the help of its enemy, the rational, a complete dogmatic structure, and this the Church defends against rationalism, against Protestantism, and against Modernism. The Church defends life. It stood up against Galileo, and it did right; for his discovery, in its inception and until it became assimilated to the general body of human knowledge, tended to shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the universe was created for man. It opposed Darwin, and it did right, for Darwinism tends to shatter our belief that man is an exceptional animal, created expressly to be eternalized. And lastly, Pius IX., the first Pontiff to be proclaimed infallible, declared that he was irreconcilable with the so-called modern civilization. And he did right. Loisy, the Catholic ex-abbé, said: "I say simply this, that the Church and theology have not looked with favour upon the scientific movement, and that on certain decisive occasions, so far as it lay in their power, they have hindered it. I say, above all, that Catholic teaching has not associated itself with, or accommodated itself to, this movement. Theology has conducted itself, and conducts itself still, as if it were self-possessed of a science of nature and a science of history, together with that general philosophy of nature and history which results from a scientific knowledge of them. It might be supposed that the domain of theology and that of science, distinct in principle and even as defined by the Vatican Council, must not be distinct in practice. Everything proceeds almost as if theology had nothing to learn from modern science, natural or historical, and as if by itself it had the power and the right to exercise a direct and absolute control over all the activities of the human mind" (_Autour d'un Petit Livre_, 1903, p. 211). And such must needs be, and such in fact is, the Church's attitude in its struggle with Modernism, of which Loisy was the learned and leading exponent. The recent struggle against Kantian and fideist Modernism is a struggle for life. Is it indeed possible for life, life that seeks assurance of survival, to tolerate that a Loisy, a Catholic priest, should affirm that the resurrection of the Saviour is not a fact of the historical order, demonstrable and demonstrated by the testimony of history alone? Read, moreover, the exposition of the central dogma, that of the resurrection of Jesus, in E. Le Roy's excellent work, _Dogme et Critique_, and tell me if any solid ground is left for our hope to build on. Do not the Modernists see that the question at issue is not so much that of the immortal life of Christ, reduced, perhaps, to a life in the collective Christian consciousness, as that of a guarantee of our own personal resurrection of body as well as soul? This new psychological apologetic appeals to the moral miracle, and we, like the Jews, seek for a sign, something that can be taken hold of with all the powers of the soul and with all the senses of the body. And with the hands and the feet and the mouth, if it be possible. But alas! we do not get it. Reason attacks, and faith, which does not feel itself secure without reason, has to come to terms with it. And hence come those tragic contradictions and lacerations of consciousness. We need security, certainty, signs, and they give us _motiva credibilitatis_--motives of credibility--upon which to establish the _rationale obsequium_, and although faith precedes reason (_fides præcedit rationem_), according to St. Augustine, this same learned doctor and bishop sought to travel by faith to understanding (_per fidem ad intellectum_), and to believe in order to understand (_credo ut intelligam_). How far is this from that superb expression of Tertullian--_et sepultus resurrexit, certum est quia impossibile est!_--"and he was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is impossible!" and his sublime _credo quia absurdum!_--the scandal of the rationalists. How far from the _il faut s'abêtir_ of Pascal and from the "human reason loves the absurd" of our Donoso Cortés, which he must have learned from the great Joseph de Maistre! And a first foundation-stone was sought in the authority of tradition and the revelation of the word of God, and the principle of unanimous consent was arrived at. _Quod apud multos unum invenitur, non est erratum, sed traditum_, said Tertullian; and Lamennais added, centuries later, that "certitude, the principle of life and intelligence ... is, if I may be allowed the expression, a social product."[21] But here, as in so many cases, the supreme formula was given by that great Catholic, whose Catholicism was of the popular and vital order, Count Joseph de Maistre, when he wrote: "I do not believe that it is possible to show a single opinion of universal utility that is not true."[22] Here you have the Catholic hall-mark--the deduction of the truth of a principle from its supreme goodness or utility. And what is there of greater, of more sovereign utility, than the immortality of the soul? "As all is uncertain, either we must believe all men or none," said Lactantius; but that great mystic and ascetic, Blessed Heinrich Seuse, the Dominican, implored the Eternal Wisdom for one word affirming that He was love, and when the answer came, "All creatures proclaim that I am love," Seuse replied, "Alas! Lord, that does not suffice for a yearning soul." Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks the support of its enemy, reason. And thus scholastic theology was devised, and with it its handmaiden--_ancilla theologiæ_--scholastic philosophy, and this handmaiden turned against her mistress. Scholasticism, a magnificent cathedral, in which all the problems of architectonic mechanism were resolved for future ages, but a cathedral constructed of unbaked bricks, gave place little by little to what is called natural theology and is merely Christianity depotentialized. The attempt was even made, where it was possible, to base dogmas upon reason, to show at least that if they were indeed super-rational they were not contra-rational, and they were reinforced with a philosophical foundation of Aristotelian-Neoplatonic thirteenth-century philosophy. And such is the Thomism recommended by Leo XIII. And now the question is not one of the enforcement of dogma but of its philosophical, medieval, and Thomist interpretation. It is not enough to believe that in receiving the consecrated Host we receive the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; we must needs negotiate all those difficulties of transubstantiation and substance separated from accidents, and so break with the whole of the modern rational conception of substantiality. But for this, implicit faith suffices--the faith of the coalheaver,[23] the faith of those who, like St. Teresa (_Vida_, cap. xxv. 2), do not wish to avail themselves of theology. "Do not ask me the reason of that, for I am ignorant; Holy Mother Church possesses doctors who will know how to answer you," as we were made to learn in the Catechism. It was for this, among other things, that the priesthood was instituted, that the teaching Church might be the depositary--"reservoir instead of river," as Phillips Brooks said--of theological secrets. "The work of the Nicene Creed," says Harnack (_Dogmengeschichte_, ii. 1, cap. vii. 3), "was a victory of the priesthood over the faith of the Christian people. The doctrine of the Logos had already become unintelligible to those who were not theologians. The setting up of the Niceno-Cappadocian formula as the fundamental confession of the Church made it perfectly impossible for the Catholic laity to get an inner comprehension of the Christian Faith, taking as their guide the form in which it was presented in the doctrine of the Church. The idea became more and more deeply implanted in men's minds that Christianity was the revelation of the unintelligible." And so, in truth, it is. And why was this? Because faith--that is, Life--no longer felt sure of itself. Neither traditionalism nor the theological positivism of Duns Scotus sufficed for it; it sought to rationalize itself. And it sought to establish its foundation--not, indeed, over against reason, where it really is, but upon reason--that is to say, within reason--itself. The nominalist or positivist or voluntarist position of Scotus--that which maintains that law and truth depend, not so much upon the essence as upon the free and inscrutable will of God--by accentuating its supreme irrationality, placed religion in danger among the majority of believers endowed with mature reason and not mere coalheavers. Hence the triumph of the Thomist theological rationalism. It is no longer enough to believe in the existence of God; but the sentence of anathema falls on him who, though believing in it, does not believe that His existence is demonstrable by rational arguments, or who believes that up to the present nobody by means of these rational arguments has ever demonstrated it irrefutably. However, in this connection the remark of Pohle is perhaps capable of application: "If eternal salvation depended upon mathematical axioms, we should have to expect that the most odious human sophistry would attack their universal validity as violently as it now attacks God, the soul, and Christ."[24] The truth is, Catholicism oscillates between mysticism, which is the inward experience of the living God in Christ, an intransmittible experience, the danger of which, however, is that it absorbs our own personality in God, and so does not save our vital longing--between mysticism and the rationalism which it fights against (see Weizsäcker, _op. cit._); it oscillates between religionized science and scientificized religion. The apocalyptic enthusiasm changed little by little into neo-platonic mysticism, which theology thrust further into the background. It feared the excesses of the imagination which was supplanting faith and creating gnostic extravagances. But it had to sign a kind of pact with gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither imagination nor reason allowed itself to be completely vanquished. And thus the body of Catholic dogma became a system of contradictions, more or less successfully harmonized. The Trinity was a kind of pact between monotheism and polytheism, and humanity and divinity sealed a peace in Christ, nature covenanted with grace, grace with free will, free will with the Divine prescience, and so on. And it is perhaps true, as Hermann says (_loc. cit._), that "as soon as we develop religious thought to its logical conclusions, it enters into conflict with other ideas which belong equally to the life of religion." And this it is that gives to Catholicism its profound vital dialectic. But at what a cost? At the cost, it must needs be said, of doing violence to the mental exigencies of those believers in possession of an adult reason. It demands from them that they shall believe all or nothing, that they shall accept the complete totality of dogma or that they shall forfeit all merit if the least part of it be rejected. And hence the result, as the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out,[25] that in France and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget scepticism in those who received them without reflection. None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the terrible danger comes from another quarter--from seeking to believe with the reason and not with life. The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the individual soul, satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to rationalize it by means of dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what clearly appears to us to be contra-rational, neither is it any good wishing to become coalheavers when we are not coalheavers. Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a rationalistic category. Let us now consider the rationalist or scientific solution--or, more properly, dissolution--of our problem. FOOTNOTES: [13] Erwin Rohde, _Psyche_, "Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen." Tübingen, 1907. Up to the present this is the leading work dealing with the belief of the Greeks in the immortality of the soul. [14] Gal. ii. 20. [15] On all relating to this question see, among others, Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, ii., Teil i., Buch vii., cap. i. [16] Though we are become dust, In thee, O Lord, our hope confides, That we shall live again clad In the flesh and skin that once covered us. [17] _Libra de la Conversión de la Magdelena_, part iv., chap. ix. [18] In his exposition of Protestant dogma in _Systematische christliche Religion_, Berlin, 1909, one of the series entitled _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_, published by P. Hinneberg. [19] The common use of the expression _música celestial_ to denote "nonsense, something not worth listening to," lends it a satirical byplay which disappears in the English rendering.--J.E.C.F. [20] It is not Thy promised heaven, my God, that moves me to love Thee. (Anonymous, sixteenth or seventeenth century. See _Oxford Book of Spanish Verse_, No. 106.) [21] _Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion_, part iii., chap. i. [22] _Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg_, x^{me} entretien. [23] The allusion is to the traditional story of the coalheaver whom the devil sought to convince of the irrationality of belief in the Trinity. The coalheaver took the cloak that he was wearing and folded it in three folds. "Here are three folds," he said, "and the cloak though threefold is yet one." And the devil departed baffled.--J.E.C.F. [24] Joseph Pohle, "Christlich Katolische Dogmatik," in _Systematische Christliche Religion_, Berlin, 1909. _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_ series. [25] "Objections to Unitarian Christianity Considered," 1816, in _The Complete Works of William Ellery Channing, D.D._, London, 1884. V THE RATIONALIST DISSOLUTION The great master of rationalist phenomenalism, David Hume, begins his essay "On the Immortality of the Soul" with these decisive words: "It appears difficult by the mere light of reason to prove the immortality of the soul. The arguments in favour of it are commonly derived from metaphysical, moral, or physical considerations. But it is really the Gospel, and only the Gospel, that has brought to light life and immortality." Which is equivalent to denying the rationality of the belief that the soul of each one of us is immortal. Kant, whose criticism found its point of departure in Hume, attempted to establish the rationality of this longing for immortality and the belief that it imports; and this is the real origin, the inward origin, of his _Critique of Practical Reason_, and of his categorical imperative and of his God. But in spite of all this, the sceptical affirmation of Hume holds good. There is no way of proving the immortality of the soul rationally. There are, on the other hand, ways of proving rationally its mortality. It would be not merely superfluous but ridiculous to enlarge here upon the extent to which the individual human consciousness is dependent upon the physical organism, pointing out how it comes to birth by slow degrees according as the brain receives impressions from the outside world, how it is temporarily suspended during sleep, swoons, and other accidents, and how everything leads us to the rational conjecture that death carries with it the loss of consciousness. And just as before our birth we were not, nor have we any personal pre-natal memory, so after our death we shall cease to be. This is the rational position. The designation "soul" is merely a term used to denote the individual consciousness in its integrity and continuity; and that this soul undergoes change, that in like manner as it is integrated so it is disintegrated, is a thing very evident. For Aristotle it was the substantial form of the body--the entelechy, but not a substance. And more than one modern has called it an epiphenomenon--an absurd term. The appellation phenomenon suffices. Rationalism--and by rationalism I mean the doctrine that abides solely by reason, by objective truth--is necessarily materialist. And let not idealists be scandalized thereby. The truth is--it is necessary to be perfectly explicit in this matter--that what we call materialism means for us nothing else but the doctrine which denies the immortality of the individual soul, the persistence of personal consciousness after death. In another sense it may be said that, as we know what matter is no more than we know what spirit is, and as matter is for us merely an idea, materialism is idealism. In fact, and as regards our problem--the most vital, the only really vital problem--it is all the same to say that everything is matter as to say that everything is idea, or that everything is energy, or whatever you please. Every monist system will always seem to us materialist. The immortality of the soul is saved only by the dualist systems--those which teach that human consciousness is something substantially distinct and different from the other manifestations of phenomena. And reason is naturally monist. For it is the function of reason to understand and explain the universe, and in order to understand and explain it, it is in no way necessary for the soul to be an imperishable substance. For the purpose of explaining and understanding our psychic life, for psychology, the hypothesis of the soul is unnecessary. What was formerly called rational psychology, in opposition to empirical psychology, is not psychology but metaphysics, and very muddy metaphysics; neither is it rational, but profoundly irrational, or rather contra-rational. The pretended rational doctrine of the substantiality and spirituality of the soul, with all the apparatus that accompanies it, is born simply of the necessity which men feel of grounding upon reason their inexpugnable longing for immortality and the subsequent belief in it. All the sophistries which aim at proving that the soul is substance, simple and incorruptible, proceed from this source. And further, the very concept of substance, as it was fixed and defined by scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept, designed expressly to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul. William James, in the third of the lectures which he devoted to pragmatism in the Lowell Institute in Boston, in December, 1906, and January, 1907[26]--the weakest thing in all the work of the famous American thinker, an extremely weak thing indeed--speaks as follows: "Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents of the wafer do not change in the Lord's Supper, and yet it has become the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn and the Divine substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate sensible properties. But though these do not alter, a tremendous difference has been made--no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament now feed upon the very substance of Divinity. The substance-notion breaks into life, with tremendous effect, if once you allow that substances can separate from their accidents and exchange these latter. This is the only pragmatic application of the substance-idea with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will only be treated seriously by those who already believe in the 'real presence' on independent grounds." Now, leaving on one side the question as to whether it is good theology--and I do not say good reasoning because all this lies outside the sphere of reason--to confound the substance of the body--the body, not the soul--of Christ with the very substance of Divinity--that is to say, with God Himself--it would appear impossible that one so ardently desirous of the immortality of the soul as William James, a man whose whole philosophy aims simply at establishing this belief on rational grounds, should not have perceived that the pragmatic application of the concept of substance to the doctrine of the Eucharistic transubstantiation is merely a consequence of its anterior application to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. As I explained in the preceding chapter, the Sacrament of the Eucharist is simply the reflection of the belief in immortality; it is, for the believer, the proof, by a mystical experience, that the soul is immortal and will enjoy God eternally. And the concept of substance was born, above all and before all, of the concept of the substantiality of the soul, and the latter was affirmed in order to confirm faith in the persistence of the soul after its separation from the body. Such was at the same time its first pragmatic application and its origin. And subsequently we have transferred this concept to external things. It is because I feel myself to be substance--that is to say, permanent in the midst of my changes--that I attribute substantiality to those agents exterior to me, which are also permanent in the midst of their changes--just as the concept of force is born of my sensation of personal effort in putting a thing in motion. Read carefully in the first part of the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas Aquinas the first six articles of question lxxv., which discuss whether the human soul is body, whether it is something self-subsistent, whether such also is the soul of the lower animals, whether the soul is the man, whether the soul is composed of matter and form, and whether it is incorruptible, and then say if all this is not subtly intended to support the belief that this incorruptible substantiality of the soul renders it capable of receiving from God immortality, for it is clear that as He created it when He implanted it in the body, as St. Thomas says, so at its separation from the body He could annihilate it. And as the criticism of these proofs has been undertaken a hundred times, it is unnecessary to repeat it here. Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to conclude that our soul is a substance from the fact that our consciousness of our identity--and this within very narrow and variable limits--persists through all the changes of our body? We might as well say of a ship that put out to sea and lost first one piece of timber, which was replaced by another of the same shape and dimensions, then lost another, and so on with all her timbers, and finally returned to port the same ship, with the same build, the same sea-going qualities, recognizable by everybody as the same--we might as well say of such a ship that it had a substantial soul. Is it possible for the unforewarned reason to infer the simplicity of the soul from the fact that we have to judge and unify our thoughts? Thought is not one but complex, and for the reason the soul is nothing but the succession of co-ordinated states of consciousness. In books of psychology written from the spiritualist point of view, it is customary to begin the discussion of the existence of the soul as a simple substance, separable from the body, after this style: There is in me a principle which thinks, wills, and feels.... Now this implies a begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I think, will, and feel. And I--the I that thinks, wills, and feels--am immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills, and feels. How? How you please. And they proceed to seek to establish the substantiality of the soul, hypostatizing the states of consciousness, and they begin by saying that this substance must be simple--that is, by opposing thought to extension, after the manner of the Cartesian dualism. And as Balmes was one of the spiritualist writers who have given the clearest and most concise form to the argument, I will present it as he expounds it in the second chapter of his _Curso de Filosofia Elemental_. "The human soul is simple," he says, and adds: "Simplicity consists in the absence of parts, and the soul has none. Let us suppose that it has three parts--A, B, C. I ask, Where, then, does thought reside? If in A only, then B and C are superfluous; and consequently the simple subject A will be the soul. If thought resides in A, B, and C, it follows that thought is divided into parts, which is absurd. What sort of a thing is a perception, a comparison, a judgement, a ratiocination, distributed among three subjects?" A more obvious begging of the question cannot be conceived. Balmes begins by taking it for granted that the whole, as a whole, is incapable of making a judgement. He continues: "The unity of consciousness is opposed to the division of the soul. When we think, there is a subject which knows everything that it thinks, and this is impossible if parts be attributed to it. Of the thought that is in A, B and C will know nothing, and so in the other cases respectively. There will not, therefore, be _one_ consciousness of the whole thought: each part will have its special consciousness, and there will be within us as many thinking beings as there are parts." The begging of the question continues; it is assumed without any proof that a whole, as a whole, cannot perceive as a unit. Balmes then proceeds to ask if these parts A, B, and C are simple or compound, and repeats his argument until he arrives at the conclusion that the thinking subject must be a part which is not a whole--that is, simple. The argument is based, as will be seen, upon the unity of apperception and of judgement. Subsequently he endeavours to refute the hypothesis of a communication of the parts among themselves. Balmes--and with him the _a priori_ spiritualists who seek to rationalize faith in the immortality of the soul--ignore the only rational explanation, which is that apperception and judgement are a resultant, that perceptions or ideas themselves are components which agree. They begin by supposing something external to and distinct from the states of consciousness, something that is not the living body which supports these states, something that is not I but is within me. The soul is simple, others say, because it reflects upon itself as a complete whole. No; the state of consciousness A, in which I think of my previous state of consciousness B, is not the same as its predecessor. Or if I think of my soul, I think of an idea distinct from the act by which I think of it. To think that one thinks and nothing more, is not to think. The soul is the principle of life, it is said. Yes; and similarly the category of force or energy has been conceived as the principle of movement. But these are concepts, not phenomena, not external realities. Does the principle of movement move? And only that which moves has external reality. Does the principle of life live? Hume was right when he said that he never encountered this idea of himself--that he only observed himself desiring or performing or feeling something.[27] The idea of some individual thing--of this inkstand in front of me, of that horse standing at my gate, of these two and not of any other individuals of the same class--is the fact, the phenomenon itself. The idea of myself is myself. All the efforts to substantiate consciousness, making it independent of extension--remember that Descartes opposed thought to extension--are but sophistical subtilties intended to establish the rationality of faith in the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the value of objective reality to that which does not possess it--to that whose reality exists only in thought. And the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal immortality--it is the continuation of this present life. The unity of consciousness is for scientific psychology--the only rational psychology--simply a phenomenal unity. No one can say what a substantial unity is. And, what is more, no one can say what a substance is. For the notion of substance is a non-phenomenal category. It is a noumenon and belongs properly to the unknowable--that is to say, according to the sense in which it is understood. But in its transcendental sense it is something really unknowable and strictly irrational. It is precisely this concept of substance that an unforewarned mind reduces to a use that is very far from that pragmatic application to which William James referred. And this application is not saved by understanding it in an idealistic sense, according to the Berkeleyan principle that to be is to be perceived (_esse est percipi_). To say that everything is idea or that everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or everything spirit, and if, therefore, this diamond is idea or spirit, just as my consciousness is, it is not plain why the diamond should not endure for ever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures for ever. George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne and brother in spirit to the Anglican bishop Joseph Butler, was equally as anxious to save the belief in the immortality of the soul. In the first words of the Preface to his _Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge_, he tells us that he considers that this treatise will be useful, "particularly to those who are tainted with scepticism, or want a demonstration of the existence and immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the soul." In paragraph cxl. he lays it down that we have an idea, or rather a notion, of spirit, and that we know other spirits by means of our own, from which follows--so in the next paragraph he roundly affirms--the natural immortality of the soul. And here he enters upon a series of confusions arising from the ambiguity with which he invests the term notion. And after having established the immortality of the soul, almost as it were _per saltum_, on the ground that the soul is not passive like the body, he proceeds to tell us in paragraph cxlvii. that the existence of God is more evident than that of man. And yet, in spite of this, there are still some who are doubtful! The question was complicated by making consciousness a property of the soul, consciousness being something more than soul--that is to say, a substantial form of the body, the originator of all the organic functions of the body. The soul not only thinks, feels, and wills, but moves the body and prompts its vital functions; in the human soul are united the vegetative, animal, and rational functions. Such is the theory. But the soul separated from the body can have neither vegetative nor animal functions. A theory, in short, which for the reason is a veritable contexture of confusions. After the Renaissance and the restoration of purely rational thought, emancipated from all theology, the doctrine of the mortality of the soul was re-established by the newly published writings of the second-century philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias and by Pietro Pomponazzi and others. And in point of fact, little or nothing can be added to what Pomponazzi has written in his _Tractatus de immortalitate animæ_. It is reason itself, and it serves nothing to reiterate his arguments. Attempts have not been wanting, however, to find an empirical support for belief in the immortality of the soul, and among these may be counted the work of Frederic W.H. Myers on _Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death_. No one ever approached more eagerly than myself the two thick volumes of this work in which the leading spirit of the Society for Psychical Research resumed that formidable mass of data relating to presentiments, apparitions of the dead, the phenomena of dreams, telepathy, hypnotism, sensorial automatism, ecstasy, and all the rest that goes to furnish the spiritualist arsenal. I entered upon the reading of it not only without that temper of cautious suspicion which men of science maintain in investigations of this character, but even with a predisposition in its favour, as one who comes to seek the confirmation of his innermost longings; but for this reason was my disillusion all the greater. In spite of its critical apparatus it does not differ in any respect from medieval miracle-mongering. There is a fundamental defect of method, of logic. And if the belief in the immortality of the soul has been unable to find vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die we return to God, or, more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were born, and if when we die we return to where we were before being born, then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said, to be merely atheism disguised; and, in my opinion, undisguised. And they were right in calling Spinoza an atheist, for his is the most logical, the most rational, system of pantheism. Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable, which, when it has professed to wish to leave religious feelings scathless, has always been inspired by the most refined hypocrisy. The whole of the first part of Spencer's _First Principles_, and especially the fifth chapter entitled "Reconciliation"--that between reason and faith or science and religion being understood--is a model at the same time of philosophical superficiality and religious insincerity, of the most refined British cant. The unknowable, if it is something more than the merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up. The science of religion, on the other hand, of religion considered as an individual and social psychic phenomenon irrespective of the transcendental objective validity of religious affirmations, is a science which, in explaining the origin of the belief that the soul is something that can live disjoined from the body, has destroyed the rationality of this belief. However much the religious man may repeat with Schleiermacher, "Science can teach thee nothing; it is for science to learn from thee," inwardly he thinks otherwise. From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of life. A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely individual, is, strictly, unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains the same for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them. Worms also feed upon corpses. My own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the innermost recesses of my soul, once they are torn from their roots in the heart, poured out on to this paper and there fixed in unalterable shape, are already only the corpses of thoughts. How, then, shall reason open its portals to the revelation of life? It is a tragic combat--it is the very essence of tragedy--this combat of life with reason. And truth? Is truth something that is lived or that is comprehended? It is only necessary to read the terrible _Parmenides_ of Plato to arrive at his tragic conclusion that "the one is and is not, and both itself and others, in relation to themselves and one another, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be." All that is vital is irrational, and all that is rational is anti-vital, for reason is essentially sceptical. The rational, in effect, is simply the relational; reason is limited to relating irrational elements. Mathematics is the only perfect science, inasmuch as it adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides numbers, but not real and substantial things, inasmuch as it is the most formal of the sciences. Who can extract the cube root of an ash-tree? Nevertheless we need logic, this terrible power, in order to communicate thoughts and perceptions and even in order to think and perceive, for we think with words, we perceive with forms. To think is to converse with oneself; and speech is social, and social are thought and logic. But may they not perhaps possess a content, an individual matter, incommunicable and untranslatable? And may not this be the source of their power? The truth is that man, the prisoner of logic, without which he cannot think, has always sought to make logic subservient to his desires, and principally to his fundamental desire. He has always sought to hold fast to logic, and especially in the Middle Ages, in the interests of theology and jurisprudence, both of which based themselves on what was established by authority. It was not until very much later that logic propounded the problem of knowledge, the problem of its own validity, the scrutiny of the metalogical foundations. "The Western theology," Dean Stanley wrote, "is essentially logical in form and based on law. The Eastern theology is rhetorical in form and based on philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate. The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist."[28] And all the laboured arguments in support of our hunger of immortality, which pretend to be grounded on reason or logic, are merely advocacy and sophistry. The property and characteristic of advocacy is, in effect, to make use of logic in the interests of a thesis that is to be defended, while, on the other hand, the strictly scientific method proceeds from the facts, the data, presented to us by reality, in order that it may arrive, or not arrive, as the case may be, at a certain conclusion. What is important is to define the problem clearly, whence it follows that progress consists not seldom in undoing what has been done. Advocacy always supposes a _petitio principii_, and its arguments are _ad probandum_. And theology that pretends to be rational is nothing but advocacy. Theology proceeds from dogma, and dogma, _dogma_, in its primitive and most direct sense, signifies a decree, something akin to the Latin _placitum_, that which has seemed to the legislative authority fitting to be law. This juridical concept is the starting-point of theology. For the theologian, as for the advocate, dogma, law, is something given--a starting-point which admits of discussion only in respect of its application and its most exact interpretation. Hence it follows that the theological or advocatory spirit is in its principle dogmatical, while the strictly scientific and purely rational spirit is sceptical, _skeptikos_--that is, investigative. It is so at least in its principle, for there is the other sense of the term scepticism, that which is most usual to-day, that of a system of doubt, suspicion, and uncertainty, and this has arisen from the theological or advocatory use of reason, from the abuse of dogmatism. The endeavour to apply the law of authority, the _placitum_, the dogma, to different and sometimes contraposed practical necessities, is what has engendered the scepticism of doubt. It is advocacy, or what amounts to the same thing, theology, that teaches the distrust of reason--not true science, not the science of investigation, sceptical in the primitive and direct meaning of the word, which hastens towards no predetermined solution nor proceeds save by the testing of hypotheses. Take the _Summa Theologica_ of St. Thomas, the classical monument of the theology--that is, of the advocacy--of Catholicism, and open it where you please. First comes the thesis--_utrum_ ... whether such a thing be thus or otherwise; then the objections--_ad primum sic proceditur_; next the answers to these objections--_sed contra est_ ... or _respondeo dicendum_.... Pure advocacy! And underlying many, perhaps most, of its arguments you will find a logical fallacy which may be expressed _more scholastico_ by this syllogism: I do not understand this fact save by giving it this explanation; it is thus that I must understand it, therefore this must be its explanation. The alternative being that I am left without any understanding of it at all. True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant; advocacy neither doubts nor believes that it does not know. It requires a solution. To the mentality that assumes, more or less consciously, that we must of necessity find a solution to every problem, belongs the argument based on the disastrous consequences of a thing. Take any book of apologetics--that is to say, of theological advocacy--and you will see how many times you will meet with this phrase--"the disastrous consequences of this doctrine." Now the disastrous consequences of a doctrine prove at most that the doctrine is disastrous, but not that it is false, for there is no proof that the true is necessarily that which suits us best. The identification of the true and the good is but a pious wish. In his _Études sur Blaise Pascal_, A. Vinet says: "Of the two needs that unceasingly belabour human nature, that of happiness is not only the more universally felt and the more constantly experienced, but it is also the more imperious. And this need is not only of the senses; it is intellectual. It is not only for the _soul_; it is for the _mind_ that happiness is a necessity. Happiness forms a part of truth." This last proposition--_le bonheur fait partie de la verité_--is a proposition of pure advocacy, but not of science or of pure reason. It would be better to say that truth forms a part of happiness in a Tertullianesque sense, in the sense of _credo quia absurdum_, which means actually _credo quia consolans_--I believe because it is a thing consoling to me. No, for reason, truth is that of which it can be proved that it is, that it exists, whether it console us or not. And reason is certainly not a consoling faculty. That terrible Latin poet Lucretius, whose apparent serenity and Epicurean _ataraxia_ conceal so much despair, said that piety consists in the power to contemplate all things with a serene soul--_pacata posse mente omnia tueri_. And it was the same Lucretius who wrote that religion can persuade us into so great evils--_tantum religio potuit suadere malorum_. And it is true that religion--above all the Christian religion--has been, as the Apostle says, to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the intellectuals foolishness.[29] The Christian religion, the religion of the immortality of the soul, was called by Tacitus a pernicious superstition (_exitialis superstitio_), and he asserted that it involved a hatred of mankind (_odium generis humani_). Speaking of the age in which these men lived, the most genuinely rationalistic age in the world's history, Flaubert, writing to Madame Roger des Genettes, uttered these pregnant words: "You are right; we must speak with respect of Lucretius; I see no one who can compare with him except Byron, and Byron has not his gravity nor the sincerity of his sadness. The melancholy of the ancients seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, who all more or less presuppose an immortality on the yonder side of the _black hole_. But for the ancients this black hole was the infinite itself; the procession of their dreams is imaged against a background of immutable ebony. The gods being no more and Christ being not yet, there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius a unique moment in which man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find this grandeur; but what renders Lucretius intolerable is his physics, which he gives as if positive. If he is weak, it is because he did not doubt enough; he wished to explain, to arrive at a conclusion!"[30] Yes, Lucretius wished to arrive at a conclusion, a solution, and, what is worse, he wished to find consolation in reason. For there is also an anti-theological advocacy, and an _odium anti-theologicum_. Many, very many, men of science, the majority of those who call themselves rationalists, are afflicted by it. The rationalist acts rationally--that is to say, he does not speak out of his part--so long as he confines himself to denying that reason satisfies our vital hunger for immortality; but, furious at not being able to believe, he soon becomes a prey to the vindictiveness of the _odium anti-theologicum_, and exclaims with the Pharisees: "This people who knoweth not the law are cursed." There is much truth in these words of Soloviev: "I have a foreboding of the near approach of a time when Christians will gather together again in the Catacombs, because of the persecution of the faith--a persecution less brutal, perhaps, than that of Nero's day, but not less refined in its severity, consummated by mendacity, derision, and all the hypocrisies." The anti-theological hate, the scientificist--I do not say scientific--fury, is manifest. Consider, not the more detached scientific investigators, those who know how to doubt, but the fanatics of rationalism, and observe with what gross brutality they speak of faith. Vogt considered it probable that the cranial structure of the Apostles was of a pronounced simian character; of the indecencies of Haeckel, that supreme incomprehender, there is no need to speak, nor yet of those of Büchner; even Virchow is not free from them. And others work with more subtilty. There are people who seem not to be content with not believing that there is another life, or rather, with believing that there is none, but who are vexed and hurt that others should believe in it or even should wish that it might exist. And this attitude is as contemptible as that is worthy of respect which characterizes those who, though urged by the need they have of it to believe in another life, are unable to believe. But of this most noble attitude of the spirit, the most profound, the most human, and the most fruitful, the attitude of despair, we will speak later on. And the rationalists who do not succumb to the anti-theological fury are bent on convincing men that there are motives for living and consolations for having been born, even though there shall come a time, at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for living and working, this thing which some call humanism, are the amazing products of the affective and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of its stupendous hypocrisy--a hypocrisy bent on sacrificing sincerity to veracity, and sworn not to confess that reason is a dissolvent and disconsolatory power. Must I repeat again what I have already said about all this business of manufacturing culture, of progressing, of realizing good, truth, and beauty, of establishing justice on earth, of ameliorating life for those who shall come after us, of subserving I know not what destiny, and all this without our taking thought for the ultimate end of each one of us? Must I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of science, of art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice ... of all these beautiful conceptions, if at the last, in four days or in four millions of centuries--it matters not which--no human consciousness shall exist to appropriate this civilization, this science, art, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest? Many and very various have been the rationalist devices--more or less rational--by means of which from the days of the Epicureans and the Stoics it has been sought to discover rational consolation in truth and to convince men, although those who sought so to do remained themselves unconvinced, that there are motives for working and lures for living, even though the human consciousness be destined some day to disappear. The Epicurean attitude, the extreme and grossest expression of which is "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," or the Horatian _carpe diem_, which may be rendered by "Live for the day," does not differ in its essence from the Stoic attitude with its "Accomplish what the moral conscience dictates to thee, and afterward let it be as it may be." Both attitudes have a common base; and pleasure for pleasure's sake comes to the same as duty for duty's sake. Spinoza, the most logical and consistent of atheists--I mean of those who deny the persistence of individual consciousness through indefinite future time--and at the same time the most pious, Spinoza devoted the fifth and last part of his _Ethic_ to elucidating the path that leads to liberty and to determining the concept of happiness. The concept! Concept, not feeling! For Spinoza, who was a terrible intellectualist, happiness (_beatitudo_) is a concept, and the love of God an intellectual love. After establishing in proposition xxi. of the fifth part that "the mind can imagine nothing, neither can it remember anything that is past, save during the continuance of the body"--which is equivalent to denying the immortality of the soul, since a soul which, disjoined from the body in which it lived, does not remember its past, is neither immortal nor is it a soul--he goes on to affirm in proposition xxiii. that "the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something which is _eternal_," and this eternity of the mind is a certain mode of thinking. But do not let yourselves be deceived; there is no such eternity of the individual mind. Everything is _sub æternitatis specie_--that is to say, pure illusion. Nothing could be more dreary, nothing more desolating, nothing more anti-vital than this happiness, this _beatitudo_, of Spinoza, that consists in the intellectual love of the mind towards God, which is nothing else but the very love with which God loves Himself (prop, xxxvi.). Our happiness--that is to say, our liberty--consists in the constant and eternal love of God towards men. So affirms the corollary to this thirty-sixth proposition. And all this in order to arrive at the conclusion, which is the final and crowning proposition of the whole _Ethic_, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself. The everlasting refrain! Or, to put it plainly, we proceed from God and to God we return, which, translated into concrete language, the language of life and feeling, means that my personal consciousness sprang from nothingness, from my unconsciousness, and to nothingness it will return. And this most dreary and desolating voice of Spinoza is the very voice of reason. And the liberty of which he tells us is a terrible liberty. And against Spinoza and his doctrine of happiness there is only one irresistible argument, the argument _ad hominem_. Was he happy, Benedict Spinoza, while, to allay his inner unhappiness, he was discoursing of happiness? Was he free? In the corollary to proposition xli. of this same final and most tragic part of that tremendous tragedy of his _Ethic_, the poor desperate Jew of Amsterdam discourses of the common persuasion of the vulgar of the truth of eternal life. Let us hear what he says: "It would appear that they esteem piety and religion--and, indeed, all that is referred to fortitude or strength of mind--as burdens which they expect to lay down after death, when they hope to receive a reward for their servitude, not for their piety and religion in this life. Nor is it even this hope alone that leads them; the fear of frightful punishments with which they are menaced after death also influences them to live--in so far as their impotence and poverty of spirit permits--in conformity with the prescription of the Divine law. And were not this hope and this fear infused into the minds of men--but, on the contrary, did they believe that the soul perished with the body, and that, beyond the grave, there was no other life prepared for the wretched who had borne the burden _of piety_ in this--they would return to their natural inclinations, preferring to accommodate everything to their own liking, and would follow fortune rather than reason. But all this appears no less absurd than it would be to suppose that a man, because he did not believe that he could nourish his body eternally with wholesome food, would saturate himself with deadly poisons; or than if because believing that his soul was not eternal and immortal, he should therefore prefer to be without a soul (_amens_) and to live without reason; all of which is so absurd as to be scarcely worth refuting (_quæ adeo absurda sunt, ut vix recenseri mereantur_)." When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid--in which case all comment is superfluous--or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem. And this it is in this case. Yes! poor Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland, yes! that he who is convinced without a vestige of doubt, without the faintest hope of any saving uncertainty, that his soul is not immortal, should prefer to be without a soul (_amens_), or irrational, or idiot, that he should prefer not to have been born, is a supposition that has nothing, absolutely nothing, absurd in it. Was he happy, the poor Jewish intellectualist definer of intellectual love and of happiness? For that and no other is the problem. "What does it profit thee to know the definition of compunction if thou dost not feel it?" says à Kempis. And what profits it to discuss or to define happiness if you cannot thereby achieve happiness? Not inapposite in this connection is that terrible story that Diderot tells of a eunuch who desired to take lessons in esthetics from a native of Marseilles in order that he might be better qualified to select the slaves destined for the harem of the Sultan, his master. At the end of the first lesson, a physiological lesson, brutally and carnally physiological, the eunuch exclaimed bitterly, "It is evident that I shall never know esthetics!" Even so, and just as eunuchs will never know esthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned about or defined. And you have another rationalist, one not sad or submissive, like Spinoza, but rebellious, and though concealing a despair not less bitter, making a hypocritical pretence of light-heartedness, you have Nietzsche, who discovered _mathematically_ (!!!) that counterfeit of the immortality of the soul which is called "eternal recurrence," and which is in fact the most stupendous tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy. The number of atoms or irreducible primary elements being finite and the universe eternal, a combination identical with that which at present exists must at some future time be reproduced, and therefore that which now is must be repeated an infinite number of times. This is evident, and just as I shall live again the life that I am now living, so I have already lived it before an infinite number of times, for there is an eternity that stretches into the past--_a parte ante_--just as there will be one stretching into the future--_a parte post_. But, unfortunately, it happens that I remember none of my previous existences, and perhaps it is impossible that I should remember them, for two things absolutely and completely identical are but one. Instead of supposing that we live in a finite universe, composed of a finite number of irreducible primary elements, suppose that we live in an infinite universe, without limits in space--which concrete infinity is not less inconceivable than the concrete eternity in time--then it will follow that this system of ours, that of the Milky Way, is repeated an infinite number of times in the infinite of space, and that therefore I am now living an infinite number of lives, all exactly identical. A jest, as you see, but one not less comic--that is to say, not less tragic--than that of Nietzsche, that of the laughing lion. And why does the lion laugh? I think he laughs with rage, because he can never succeed in finding consolation in the thought that he has been the same lion before and is destined to be the same lion again. But if Spinoza and Nietzsche were indeed both rationalists, each after his own manner, they were not spiritual eunuchs; they had heart, feeling, and, above all, hunger, a mad hunger for eternity, for immortality. The physical eunuch does not feel the need of reproducing himself carnally, in the body, and neither does the spiritual eunuch feel the hunger for self-perpetuation. Certain it is that there are some who assert that reason suffices them, and they counsel us to desist from seeking to penetrate into the impenetrable. But of those who say that they have no need of any faith in an eternal personal life to furnish them with incentives to living and motives for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from birth may also assure us that he feels no great longing to enjoy the world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it, and we must needs believe him, for what is wholly unknown cannot be the object of desire--_nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, there can be no volition save of things already known. But I cannot be persuaded that he who has once in his life, either in his youth or for some other brief space of time, cherished the belief in the immortality of the soul, will ever find peace without it. And of this sort of blindness from birth there are but few instances among us, and then only by a kind of strange aberration. For the merely and exclusively rational man is an aberration and nothing but an aberration. More sincere, much more sincere, are those who say: "We must not talk about it, for in talking about it we only waste our time and weaken our will; let us do our duty here and hereafter let come what may." But this sincerity hides a yet deeper insincerity. May it perhaps be that by saying "We must not talk about it," they succeed in not thinking about it? Our will is weakened? And what then? We lose the capacity for human action? And what then? It is very convenient to tell a man whom a fatal disease condemns to an early death, and who knows it, not to think about it. _Meglio oprando obliar, senzá indagarlo, Questo enorme mister del universo!_ "Better to work and to forget and not to probe into this vast mystery of the universe!" Carducci wrote in his _Idilio Maremmano_, the same Carducci who at the close of his ode _Sul Monte Mario_ tells us how the earth, the mother of the fugitive soul, must roll its burden of glory and sorrow round the sun "until, worn out beneath the equator, mocked by the last flames of dying heat, the exhausted human race is reduced to a single man and woman, who, standing in the midst of dead woods, surrounded by sheer mountains, livid, with glassy eyes watch thee, O sun, set across the immense frozen waste." But is it possible for us to give ourselves to any serious and lasting work, forgetting the vast mystery of the universe and abandoning all attempt to understand it? Is it possible to contemplate the vast All with a serene soul, in the spirit of the Lucretian piety, if we are conscious of the thought that a time must come when this All will no longer be reflected in any human consciousness? Cain, in Byron's poem, asks of Lucifer, the prince of the intellectuals, "Are ye happy?" and Lucifer replies, "We are mighty." Cain questions again, "Are ye happy?" and then the great Intellectual says to him: "No; art thou?" And further on, this same Lucifer says to Adah, the sister and wife of Cain: "Choose betwixt love and knowledge--since there is no other choice." And in the same stupendous poem, when Cain says that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a lying tree, for "we know nothing; at least it promised knowledge at the price of death," Lucifer answers him: "It may be death leads to the highest knowledge"--that is to say, to nothingness. To this word _knowledge_ which Lord Byron uses in the above quotations, the Spanish _ciencia_, the French _science_, the German _Wissenschaft_, is often opposed the word _wisdom, sabiduria, sagesse, Weisheit_. Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast, Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest, says another lord, Tennyson, in his _Locksley Hall_. And what is this wisdom which we have to seek chiefly in the poets, leaving knowledge on one side? It is well enough to say with Matthew Arnold in his Introduction to Wordsworth's poems, that poetry is reality and philosophy illusion; but reason is always reason and reality is always reality, that which can be proved to exist externally to us, whether we find in it consolation or despair. I do not know why so many people were scandalized, or pretended to be scandalized, when Brunetière proclaimed again the bankruptcy of science. For science as a substitute for religion and reason as a substitute for faith have always fallen to pieces. Science will be able to satisfy, and in fact does satisfy in an increasing measure, our increasing logical or intellectual needs, our desire to know and understand the truth; but science does not satisfy the needs of our heart and our will, and far from satisfying our hunger for immortality it contradicts it. Rational truth and life stand in opposition to one another. And is it possible that there is any other truth than rational truth? It must remain established, therefore, that reason--human reason--within its limits, not only does not prove rationally that the soul is immortal or that the human consciousness shall preserve its indestructibility through the tracts of time to come, but that it proves rather--within its limits, I repeat--that the individual consciousness cannot persist after the death of the physical organism upon which it depends. And these limits, within which I say that human reason proves this, are the limits of rationality, of what is known by demonstration. Beyond these limits is the irrational, which, whether it be called the super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational, is all the same thing. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the impossible of the _certum est, quia impossibile est_. And this absurd can only base itself upon the most absolute uncertainty. The rational dissolution ends in dissolving reason itself; it ends in the most absolute scepticism, in the phenomenalism of Hume or in the doctrine of absolute contingencies of Stuart Mill, the most consistent and logical of the positivists. The supreme triumph of reason, the analytical--that is, the destructive and dissolvent--faculty, is to cast doubt upon its own validity. The stomach that contains an ulcer ends by digesting itself; and reason ends by destroying the immediate and absolute validity of the concept of truth and of the concept of necessity. Both concepts are relative; there is no absolute truth, no absolute necessity. We call a concept true which agrees with the general system of all our concepts; and we call a perception true which does not contradict the system of our perceptions. Truth is coherence. But as regards the whole system, the aggregate, as there is nothing outside of it of which we have knowledge, we cannot say whether it is true or not. It is conceivable that the universe, as it exists in itself, outside of our consciousness, may be quite other than it appears to us, although this is a supposition that has no meaning for reason. And as regards necessity, is there an absolute necessity? By necessary we mean merely that which is, and in so far as it is, for in another more transcendental sense, what absolute necessity, logical and independent of the fact that the universe exists, is there that there should be a universe or anything else at all? Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than scepticism, in the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of the reasoning reason. Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth into consolation. But reason going beyond truth itself, beyond the concept of reality itself, succeeds in plunging itself into the depths of scepticism. And in this abyss the scepticism of the reason encounters the despair of the heart, and this encounter leads to the discovery of a basis--a terrible basis!--for consolation to build on. Let us examine it. FOOTNOTES: [26] _Pragmatism, a New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking_. Popular lectures on philosophy by William James, 1907. [27] _Treatise of Human Nature_, book i., part iv., sect. vi., "Of Personal Identity": "I never can catch _myself_ at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception." [28] Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, _Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church_, lecture i., sect. iii. [29] 1 Cor. i. 23. [30] Gustave Flaubert, _Correspondance_, troisième série (1854-1869). Paris, 1910. VI IN THE DEPTHS OF THE ABYSS _Parce unicæ spes totius orbis._--TERTULLIANUS, Adversus Marcionem, 5. We have seen that the vital longing for human immortality finds no consolation in reason and that reason leaves us without incentive or consolation in life and life itself without real finality. But here, in the depths of the abyss, the despair of the heart and of the will and the scepticism of reason meet face to face and embrace like brothers. And we shall see it is from this embrace, a tragic--that is to say, an intimately loving--embrace, that the wellspring of life will flow, a life serious and terrible. Scepticism, uncertainty--the position to which reason, by practising its analysis upon itself, upon its own validity, at last arrives--is the foundation upon which the heart's despair must build up its hope. Disillusioned, we had to abandon the position of those who seek to give consolation the force of rational and logical truth, pretending to prove the rationality, or at any rate the non-irrationality, of consolation; and we had to abandon likewise the position of those who seek to give rational truth the force of consolation and of a motive for life. Neither the one nor the other of these positions satisfied us. The one is at variance with our reason, the other with our feeling. These two powers can never conclude peace and we must needs live by their war. We must make of this war, of war itself, the very condition of our spiritual life. Neither does this high debate admit of that indecent and repugnant expedient which the more or less parliamentary type of politician has devised and dubbed "a formula of agreement," the property of which is to render it impossible for either side to claim to be victorious. There is no place here for a time-serving compromise. Perhaps a degenerate and cowardly reason might bring itself to propose some such formula of agreement, for in truth reason lives by formulas; but life, which cannot be formulated, life which lives and seeks to live for ever, does not submit to formulas. Its sole formula is: all or nothing. Feeling does not compound its differences with middle terms. _Initium sapientiæ timor Domini_, it is said, meaning perhaps _timor mortis_, or it may be, _timor vitæ_, which is the same thing. Always it comes about that the beginning of wisdom is a fear. Is it true to say of this saving scepticism which I am now going to discuss, that it is doubt? It is doubt, yes, but it is much more than doubt. Doubt is commonly something very cold, of very little vitalizing force, and above all something rather artificial, especially since Descartes degraded it to the function of a method. The conflict between reason and life is something more than a doubt. For doubt is easily resolved into a comic element. The methodical doubt of Descartes is a comic doubt, a doubt purely theoretical and provisional--that is to say, the doubt of a man who acts as if he doubted without really doubting. And because it was a stove-excogitated doubt, the man who deduced that he existed from the fact that he thought did not approve of "those turbulent (_brouillonnes_) and restless persons who, being called neither by birth nor by fortune to the management of public affairs, are perpetually devising some new reformation," and he was pained by the suspicion that there might be something of this kind in his own writings. No, he, Descartes, proposed only to "reform his own thoughts and to build upon ground that was wholly his." And he resolved not to accept anything as true when he did not recognize it clearly to be so, and to make a clean sweep of all prejudices and received ideas, to the end that he might construct his intellectual habitation anew. But "as it is not enough, before beginning to rebuild one's dwelling-house, to pull it down and to furnish materials and architects, or to study architecture oneself ... but it is also necessary to be provided with some other wherein to lodge conveniently while the work is in progress," he framed for himself a provisional ethic--_une morale de provision_--the first law of which was to observe the customs of his country and to keep always to the religion in which, by the grace of God, he had been instructed from his infancy, governing himself in all things according to the most moderate opinions. Yes, exactly, a provisional religion and even a provisional God! And he chose the most moderate opinions "because these are always the most convenient for practice." But it is best to proceed no further. This methodical or theoretical Cartesian doubt, this philosophical doubt excogitated in a stove, is not the doubt, is not the scepticism, is not the incertitude, that I am talking about here. No! This other doubt is a passionate doubt, it is the eternal conflict between reason and feeling, science and life, logic and biotic. For science destroys the concept of personality by reducing it to a complex in continual flux from moment to moment--that is to say, it destroys the very foundation of the spiritual and emotional life, which ranges itself unyieldingly against reason. And this doubt cannot avail itself of any provisional ethic, but has to found its ethic, as we shall see, on the conflict itself, an ethic of battle, and itself has to serve as the foundation of religion. And it inhabits a house which is continually being demolished and which continually it has to rebuild. Without ceasing the will, I mean the will never to die, the spirit of unsubmissiveness to death, labours to build up the house of life, and without ceasing the keen blasts and stormy assaults of reason beat it down. And more than this, in the concrete vital problem that concerns us, reason takes up no position whatever. In truth, it does something worse than deny the immortality of the soul--for that at any rate would be one solution--it refuses even to recognize the problem as our vital desire presents it to us. In the rational and logical sense of the term problem, there is no such problem. This question of the immortality of the soul, of the persistence of the individual consciousness, is not rational, it falls outside reason. As a problem, and whatever solution it may receive, it is irrational. Rationally even the very propounding of the problem lacks sense. The immortality of the soul is as unconceivable as, in all strictness, is its absolute mortality. For the purpose of explaining the world and existence--and such is the task of reason--it is not necessary that we should suppose that our soul is either mortal or immortal. The mere enunciation of the problem is, therefore, an irrationality. Let us hear what our brother Kierkegaard has to say. "The danger of abstract thought is seen precisely in respect of the problem of existence, the difficulty of which it solves by going round it, afterwards boasting that it has completely explained it. It explains immortality in general, and it does so in a remarkable way by identifying it with eternity--with the eternity which is essentially the medium of thought. But with the immortality of each individually existing man, wherein precisely the difficulty lies, abstraction does not concern itself, is not interested in it. And yet the difficulty of existence lies just in the interest of the existing being--the man who exists is infinitely interested in existing. Abstract thought besteads immortality only in order that it may kill me as an individual being with an individual existence, and so make me immortal, pretty much in the same way as that famous physician in one of Holberg's plays, whose medicine, while it took away the patient's fever, took away his life at the same time. An abstract thinker, who refuses to disclose and admit the relation that exists between his abstract thought and the fact that he is an existing being, produces a comic impression upon us, however accomplished and distinguished he may be, for he runs the risk of ceasing to be a man. While an effective man, compounded of infinitude and finitude, owes his effectiveness precisely to the conjunction of these two elements and is infinitely interested in existing, an abstract thinker, similarly compounded, is a double being, a fantastical being, who lives in the pure being of abstraction, and at times presents the sorry figure of a professor who lays aside this abstract essence as he lays aside his walking-stick. When one reads the Life of a thinker of this kind--whose writings may be excellent--one trembles at the thought of what it is to be a man. And when one reads in his writings that thinking and being are the same thing, one thinks, remembering his life, that that being, which is identical with thinking, is not precisely the same thing as being a man" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, chap. iii.). What intense passion--that is to say, what truth--there is in this bitter invective against Hegel, prototype of the rationalist!--for the rationalist takes away our fever by taking away our life, and promises us, instead of a concrete, an abstract immortality, as if the hunger for immortality that consumes us were an abstract and not a concrete hunger! It may indeed be said that when once the dog is dead there is an end to the rabies, and that after I have died I shall no more be tortured by this rage of not dying, and that the fear of death, or more properly, of nothingness, is an irrational fear, but ... Yes, but ... _Eppur si muove!_ And it will go on moving. For it is the source of all movement! I doubt, however, whether our brother Kierkegaard is altogether in the right, for this same abstract thinker, or thinker of abstractions, thinks _in order that_ he may exist, that he may not cease to exist, or thinks perhaps in order to forget that he will have to cease to exist. This is the root of the passion for abstract thought. And possibly Hegel was as infinitely interested as Kierkegaard in his own concrete, individual existence, although the professional decorum of the state-philosopher compelled him to conceal the fact. Faith in immortality is irrational. And, notwithstanding, faith, life, and reason have mutual need of one another. This vital longing is not properly a problem, cannot assume a logical status, cannot be formulated in propositions susceptible of rational discussion; but it announces itself in us as hunger announces itself. Neither can the wolf that throws itself with the fury of hunger upon its prey or with the fury of instinct upon the she-wolf, enunciate its impulse rationally and as a logical problem. Reason and faith are two enemies, neither of which can maintain itself without the other. The irrational demands to be rationalized and reason only can operate on the irrational. They are compelled to seek mutual support and association. But association in struggle, for struggle is a mode of association. In the world of living beings the struggle for life establishes an association, and a very close one, not only between those who unite together in combat against a common foe, but between the combatants themselves. And is there any possible association more intimate than that uniting the animal that eats another and the animal that is eaten, between the devourer and the devoured? And if this is clearly seen in the struggle between individuals, it is still more evident in the struggle between peoples. War has always been the most effective factor of progress, even more than commerce. It is through war that conquerors and conquered learn to know each other and in consequence to love each other. Christianity, the foolishness of the Cross, the irrational faith that Christ rose from the dead in order to raise us from the dead, was saved by the rationalistic Hellenic culture, and this in its turn was saved by Christianity. Without Christianity the Renaissance would have been impossible. Without the Gospel, without St. Paul, the peoples who had traversed the Middle Ages would have understood neither Plato nor Aristotle. A purely rationalist tradition is as impossible as a tradition purely religious. It is frequently disputed whether the Reformation was born as the child of the Renaissance or as a protest against it, and both propositions may be said to be true, for the son is always born as a protest against the father. It is also said that it was the revived Greek classics that led men like Erasmus back to St. Paul and to primitive Christianity, which is the most irrational form of Christianity; but it may be retorted that it was St. Paul, that it was the Christian irrationality underlying his Catholic theology, that led them back to the classics. "Christianity is what it has come to be," it has been said, "only through its alliance with antiquity, while with the Copts and Ethiopians it is but a kind of buffoonery. Islam developed under the influence of Persian and Greek culture, and under that of the Turks it has been transformed into a destructive barbarism."[31] We have emerged from the Middle Ages, from the medieval faith as ardent as it was at heart despairing, and not without its inward and abysmal incertitudes, and we have entered upon the age of rationalism, likewise not without its incertitudes. Faith in reason is exposed to the same rational indefensibility as all other faith. And we may say with Robert Browning, All we have gained, then, by our unbelief Is a life of doubt diversified by faith For one of faith diversified by doubt. (_Bishop Blougram's Apology_.) And if, as I have said, faith, life, can only sustain itself by leaning upon reason, which renders it transmissible--and above all transmissible from myself to myself--that is to say, reflective and conscious--it is none the less true that reason in its turn can only sustain itself by leaning upon faith, upon life, even if only upon faith in reason, faith in its availability for something more than mere knowing, faith in its availability for living. Nevertheless, neither is faith transmissible or rational, nor is reason vital. The will and the intelligence have need of one another, and the reverse of that old aphorism, _nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, nothing is willed but what is previously known, is not so paradoxical as at first sight it may appear--_nihil cognitum quin prævolitum_, nothing is known but what is previously willed. Vinet, in his study of Cousin's book on the _Pensées_ of Pascal, says: "The very knowledge of the mind as such has need of the heart. Without the desire to see there is no seeing; in a great materialization of life and of thought there is no believing in the things of the spirit." We shall see presently that to believe is, in the first instance, to wish to believe. The will and the intelligence seek opposite ends: that we may absorb the world into ourselves, appropriate it to ourselves, is the aim of the will; that we may be absorbed into the world, that of the intelligence. Opposite ends?--are they not rather one and the same? No, they are not, although they may seem to be so. The intelligence is monist or pantheist, the will monotheist or egoist. The intelligence has no need of anything outside it to exercise itself upon; it builds its foundation with ideas themselves, while the will requires matter. To know something is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it, to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself. Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they have need of one another. There is no religion without some philosophic basis, no philosophy without roots in religion. Each lives by its contrary. The history of philosophy is, strictly speaking, a history of religion. And the attacks which are directed against religion from a presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks from another but opposing religious point of view. "The opposition which professedly exists between natural science and Christianity really exists between an impulse derived from natural religion blended with the scientific investigation of nature, and the validity of the Christian view of the world, which assures to spirit its pre-eminence over the entire world of nature," says Ritschl (_Rechtfertgung und Versöhnung_, iii. chap. iv. § 28). Now this instinct is the instinct of rationality itself. And the critical idealism of Kant is of religious origin, and it is in order to save religion that Kant enlarged the limits of reason after having in a certain sense dissolved it in scepticism. The system of antitheses, contradictions, and antinomies, upon which Hegel constructed his absolute idealism, has its root and germ in Kant himself, and this root is an irrational root. We shall see later on, when we come to deal with faith, that faith is in its essence simply a matter of will, not of reason, that to believe is to wish to believe, and to believe in God is, before all and above all, to wish that there may be a God. In the same way, to believe in the immortality of the soul is to wish that the soul may be immortal, but to wish it with such force that this volition shall trample reason under foot and pass beyond it. But reason has its revenge. The instinct of knowing and the instinct of living, or rather of surviving, come into conflict. In his work on the _Analysis of the Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical_,[32] Dr. E. Mach tells us that not even the investigator, the savant, _der Forscher_, is exempted from taking his part in the struggle for existence, that even the roads of science lead mouth-wards, and that in the actual conditions of the society in which we live the pure instinct of knowing, _der reine Erkenntnisstrieb_, is still no more than an ideal. And so it always will be. _Primum vivere, deinde philosophari_, or perhaps better, _primum supervivere_ or _superesse_. Every position of permanent agreement or harmony between reason and life, between philosophy and religion, becomes impossible. And the tragic history of human thought is simply the history of a struggle between reason and life--reason bent on rationalizing life and forcing it to submit to the inevitable, to mortality; life bent on vitalizing reason and forcing it to serve as a support for its own vital desires. And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of religion. Our sense of the world of objective reality is necessarily subjective, human, anthropomorphic. And vitalism will always rise up against rationalism; reason will always find itself confronted by will. Hence the rhythm of the history of philosophy and the alternation of periods in which life imposes itself, giving birth to spiritual forms, with those in which reason imposes itself, giving birth to materialist forms, although both of these classes of forms of belief may be disguised by other names. Neither reason nor life ever acknowledges itself vanquished. But we will return to this in the next chapter. The vital consequence of rationalism would be suicide. Kierkegaard puts it very well: "The consequence for existence[33] of pure thought is suicide.... We do not praise suicide but passion. The thinker, on the contrary, is a curious animal--for a few spells during the day he is very intelligent, but, for the rest, he has nothing in common with man" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, chap iii., § 1). As the thinker, in spite of all, does not cease to be a man, he employs reason in the interests of life, whether he knows it or not. Life cheats reason and reason cheats life. Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy fabricated in the interest of life a teleologic-evolutionist system, rational in appearance, which might serve as a support for our vital longing. This philosophy, the basis of the orthodox Christian supernaturalism, whether Catholic or Protestant, was, in its essence, merely a trick on the part of life to force reason to lend it its support. But reason supported it with such pressure that it ended by pulverizing it. I have read that the ex-Carmelite, Hyacinthe Loyson, declared that he could present himself before God with tranquillity, for he was at peace with his conscience and with his reason. With what conscience? If with his religious conscience, then I do not understand. For it is a truth that no man can serve two masters, and least of all when, though they may sign truces and armistices and compromises, these two are enemies because of their conflicting interests. To all this someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought, therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur: "Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding. Again, there are those who talk of the religious duty of resignation to mortality. This is indeed the very summit of aberration and insincerity. But someone is sure to oppose the idea of veracity to that of sincerity. Granted, and yet the two may very well be reconciled. Veracity, the homage I owe to what I believe to be rational, to what logically we call truth, moves me to affirm, in this case, that the immortality of the individual soul is a contradiction in terms, that it is something, not only irrational, but contra-rational; but sincerity leads me to affirm also my refusal to resign myself to this previous affirmation and my protest against its validity. What I feel is a truth, at any rate as much a truth as what I see, touch, hear, or what is demonstrated to me--nay, I believe it is more of a truth--and sincerity obliges me not to hide what I feel. And life, quick to defend itself, searches for the weak point in reason and finds it in scepticism, which it straightway fastens upon, seeking to save itself by means of this stranglehold. It needs the weakness of its adversary. Nothing is sure. Everything is elusive and in the air. In an outburst of passion Lamennais exclaims: "But what! Shall we, losing all hope, shut our eyes and plunge into the voiceless depths of a universal scepticism? Shall we doubt that we think, that we feel, that we are? Nature does not allow it; she forces us to believe even when our reason is not convinced. Absolute certainty and absolute doubt are both alike forbidden to us. We hover in a vague mean between these two extremes, as between being and nothingness; for complete scepticism would be the extinction of the intelligence and the total death of man. But it is not given to man to annihilate himself; there is in him something which invincibly resists destruction, I know not what vital faith, indomitable even by his will. Whether he likes it or not, he must believe, because he must act, because he must preserve himself. His reason, if he listened only to that, teaching him to doubt everything, itself included, would reduce him to a state of absolute inaction; he would perish before even he had been able to prove to himself that he existed" (_Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion_, iii^e partie, chap. lxvii.). Reason, however, does not actually lead us to absolute scepticism. No! Reason does not lead me and cannot lead me to doubt that I exist. Whither reason does lead me is to vital scepticism, or more properly, to vital negation--not merely to doubt, but to deny, that my consciousness survives my death. Scepticism is produced by the clash between reason and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace between despair and scepticism, is born that holy, that sweet, that saving incertitude, which is our supreme consolation. The absolute and complete certainty, on the one hand, that death is a complete, definite, irrevocable annihilation of personal consciousness, a certainty of the same order as the certainty that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or, on the other hand, the absolute and complete certainty that our personal consciousness is prolonged beyond death in these present or in other conditions, and above all including in itself that strange and adventitious addition of eternal rewards and punishments--both of these certainties alike would make life impossible for us. In the most secret chamber of the spirit of him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, and all unknown to him perhaps, there lurks a shadow, a vague shadow, a shadow of shadow, of uncertainty, and while he says within himself, "Well, let us live this life that passes away, for there is no other!" the silence of this secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs, "Who knows!..." He may not think he hears it, but he hears it nevertheless. And likewise in some secret place of the soul of the believer who most firmly holds the belief in a future life, there is a muffled voice, a voice of uncertainty, which whispers in the ear of his spirit, "Who knows!..." These voices are like the humming of a mosquito when the south-west wind roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish this faint humming, yet nevertheless, merged in the clamour of the storm, it reaches the ear. Otherwise, without this uncertainty, how could we live? _"Is there?" "Is there not?"_--these are the bases of our inner life. There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would only prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness. I do not understand those men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason--I wish rather that there should be war between them! In the ninth chapter of the Gospel according to Mark it is related how a man brought unto Jesus his son who was possessed by a dumb spirit, and wheresoever the spirit took him it tore him, causing him to foam and gnash his teeth and pine away, wherefore he sought to bring him to Jesus that he might cure him. And the Master, impatient of those who sought only for signs and wonders, exclaimed: "O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him unto me" (ver. 19), and they brought him unto him. And when the Master saw him wallowing on the ground, he asked his father how long it was ago since this had come unto him and the father replied that it was since he was & child. And Jesus said unto him: "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth" (ver. 23). And then the father of the epileptic or demoniac uttered these pregnant and immortal words: "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!"--_Pisteyô, kyrie, boêthei tê hapistia mou_ (ver. 24). "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!" A contradiction seemingly, for if he believes, if he trusts, how is it that he beseeches the Lord to help his lack of trust? Nevertheless, it is this contradiction that gives to the heart's cry of the father of the demoniac its most profound human value. His faith is a faith that is based upon incertitude. Because he believes--that is to say, because he wishes to believe, because he has need that his son should be cured--he beseeches the Lord to help his unbelief, his doubt that such a cure could be effected. Of such kind is human faith; of such kind was the heroic faith that Sancho Panza had in his master, the knight Don Quijote de la Mancha, as I think I have shown in my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_; a faith based upon incertitude, upon doubt. Sancho Panza was indeed a man, a whole and a true man, and he was not stupid, for only if he had been stupid would he have believed, without a shadow of doubt, in the follies of his master. And his master himself did not believe in them without a shadow of doubt, for neither was Don Quixote, though mad, stupid. He was at heart a man of despair, as I think I have shown in my above-mentioned book. And because he was a man of an heroical despair, the hero of that inward and resigned despair, he stands as the eternal exemplar of every man whose soul is the battle-ground of reason and immortal desire. Our Lord Don Quixote is the prototype of the vitalist whose faith is based upon uncertainty, and Sancho is the prototype of the rationalist who doubts his own reason. Tormented by torturing doubts, August Hermann Francke resolved to call upon God, a God in whom he did not believe, or rather in whom he believed that he did not believe, imploring Him to take pity upon him, upon the poor pietist Francke, if perchance He really existed.[34] And from a similar state of mind came the inspiration of the sonnet entitled "The Atheist's Prayer," which is included in my _Rosario de Sonetos Líricos_, and closes with these lines: _Sufro yo a tu costa, Dios no existiente, pues si tú existieras existiería yo también de veras._[35] Yes, if God the guarantor of our personal immortality existed, then should we ourselves really exist. And if He exists not, neither do we exist. That terrible secret, that hidden will of God which, translated into the language of theology, is known as predestination, that idea which dictated to Luther his _servum arbitrium_, and which gives to Calvinism its tragic sense, that doubt of our own salvation, is in its essence nothing but uncertainty, and this uncertainty, allied with despair, forms the basis of faith. Faith, some say, consists in not thinking about it, in surrendering ourselves trustingly to the arms of God, the secrets of whose providence are inscrutable. Yes, but infidelity also consists in not thinking about it. This absurd faith, this faith that knows no shadow of uncertainty, this faith of the stupid coalheaver, joins hands with an absurd incredulity, the incredulity that knows no shadow of uncertainty, the incredulity of the intellectuals who are afflicted with affective stupidity in order that they may not think about it. And what but uncertainty, doubt, the voice of reason, was that abyss, that terrible _gouffre_, before which Pascal trembled? And it was that which led him to pronounce his terrible sentence, _il faut s'abêtir_--need is that we become fools! All Jansenism, the Catholic adaptation of Calvinism, bears the same impress. Port-Royal, which owed its existence to a Basque, the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, a man of the same race as Iñigo de Loyola and as he who writes these lines, always preserved deep down a sediment of religious despair, of the suicide of reason. Loyola also slew his reason in obedience. Our affirmation is despair, our negation is despair, and from despair we abstain from affirming and denying. Note the greater part of our atheists and you will see that they are atheists from a kind of rage, rage at not being able to believe that there is a God. They are the personal enemies of God. They have invested Nothingness with substance and personality, and their No-God is an Anti-God. And concerning that abject and ignoble saying, "If there were not a God it would be necessary to invent Him," we shall say nothing. It is the expression of the unclean scepticism of those conservatives who look upon religion merely as a means of government and whose interest it is that in the other life there shall be a hell for those who oppose their worldly interests in this life. This repugnant and Sadducean phrase is worthy of the time-serving sceptic to whom it is attributed. No, with all this the deep vital sense has nothing to do. It has nothing to do with a transcendental police regimen, or with securing order--and what an order!--upon earth by means of promises and threats of eternal rewards and punishments after death. All this belongs to a lower plane--that is to say, it is merely politics, or if you like, ethics. The vital sense has to do with living. But it is in our endeavour to represent to ourselves what the life of the soul after death really means that uncertainty finds its surest foundation. This it is that most shakes our vital desire and most intensifies the dissolvent efficacy of reason. For even if by a mighty effort of faith we overcome that reason which tells and teaches us that the soul is only a function of the physical organism, it yet remains for our imagination to conceive an image of the immortal and eternal life of the soul. This conception involves us in contradictions and absurdities, and it may be that we shall arrive with Kierkegaard at the conclusion that if the mortality of the soul is terrible, not less terrible is its immortality. But when we have overcome the first, the only real difficulty, when we have overcome the impediment of reason, when we have achieved the faith, however painful and involved in uncertainty it may be, that our personal consciousness shall continue after death, what difficulty, what impediment, lies in the way of our imagining to ourselves this persistence of self in harmony with our desire? Yes, we can imagine it as an eternal rejuvenescence, as an eternal growth of ourselves, and as a journeying towards God, towards the Universal Consciousness, without ever an arrival, we can imagine it as ... But who shall put fetters upon the imagination, once it has broken the chain of the rational? I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps tedious, but it is all necessary. And I must repeat once again that we have nothing to do with a transcendental police system or with the conversion of God into a great Judge or Policeman--that is to say, we are not concerned with heaven or hell considered as buttresses to shore up our poor earthly morality, nor are we concerned with anything egoistic or personal. It is not I myself alone, it is the whole human race that is involved, it is the ultimate finality of all our civilization. I am but one, but all men are I's. Do you remember the end of that _Song of the Wild Cock_ which Leopardi wrote in prose?--the despairing Leopardi, the victim of reason, who never succeeded in achieving belief. "A time will come," he says, "when this Universe and Nature itself will be extinguished. And just as of the grandest kingdoms and empires of mankind and the marvellous things achieved therein, very famous in their own time, no vestige or memory remains to-day, so, in like manner, of the entire world and of the vicissitudes and calamities of all created things there will remain not a single trace, but a naked silence and a most profound stillness will fill the immensity of space. And so before ever it has been uttered or understood, this admirable and fearful secret of universal existence will be obliterated and lost." And this they now describe by a scientific and very rationalistic term--namely, _entropia_. Very pretty, is it not? Spencer invented the notion of a primordial homogeneity, from which it is impossible to conceive how any heterogeneity could originate. Well now, this _entropia_ is a kind of ultimate homogeneity, a state of perfect equilibrium. For a soul avid of life, it is the most like nothingness that the mind can conceive. * * * * * To this point, through a series of dolorous reflections, I have brought the reader who has had the patience to follow me, endeavouring always to do equal justice to the claims of reason and of feeling. I have not wished to keep silence on matters about which others are silent; I have sought to strip naked, not only my own soul, but the human soul, be its nature what it may, its destiny to disappear or not to disappear. And we have arrived at the bottom of the abyss, at the irreconcilable conflict between reason and vital feeling. And having arrived here, I have told you that it is necessary to accept the conflict as such and to live by it. Now it remains for me to explain to you how, according to my way of feeling, and even according to my way of thinking, this despair may be the basis of a vigorous life, of an efficacious activity, of an ethic, of an esthetic, of a religion and even of a logic. But in what follows there will be as much of imagination as of ratiocination, or rather, much more. I do not wish to deceive anyone, or to offer as philosophy what it may be is only poetry or phantasmagoria, in any case a kind of mythology. The divine Plato, after having discussed the immortality of the soul in his dialogue _Phædo_ (an ideal--that is to say, a lying--immortality), embarked upon an interpretation of the myths which treat of the other life, remarking that it was also necessary to mythologize. Let us, then, mythologize. He who looks for reasons, strictly so called, scientific arguments, technically logical reflections, may refuse to follow me further. Throughout the remainder of these reflections upon the tragic sense, I am going to fish for the attention of the reader with the naked, unbaited hook; whoever wishes to bite, let him bite, but I deceive no one. Only in the conclusion I hope to gather everything together and to show that this religious despair which I have been talking about, and which is nothing other than the tragic sense of life itself, is, though more or less hidden, the very foundation of the consciousness of civilized individuals and peoples to-day--that is to say, of those individuals and those peoples who do not suffer from stupidity of intellect or stupidity of feeling. And this tragic sense is the spring of heroic achievements. If in that which follows you shall meet with arbitrary apothegms, brusque transitions, inconsecutive statements, veritable somersaults of thought, do not cry out that you have been deceived. We are about to enter--if it be that you wish to accompany me--upon a field of contradictions between feeling and reasoning, and we shall have to avail ourselves of the one as well as of the other. That which follows is not the outcome of reason but of life, although in order that I may transmit it to you I shall have to rationalize it after a fashion. The greater part of it can be reduced to no logical theory or system; but like that tremendous Yankee poet, Walt Whitman, "I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me" (_Myself and Mine_). Neither am I the only begetter of the fancies I am about to set forth. By no means. They have also been conceived by other men, if not precisely by other thinkers, who have preceded me in this vale of tears, and who have exhibited their life and given expression to it. Their life, I repeat, not their thought, save in so far as it was thought inspired by life, thought with a basis of irrationality. Does this mean that in all that follows, in the efforts of the irrational to express itself, there is a total lack of rationality, of all objective value? No; the absolutely, the irrevocably irrational, is inexpressible, is intransmissible. But not the contra-rational. Perhaps there is no way of rationalizing the irrational; but there is a way of rationalizing the contra-rational, and that is by trying to explain it. Since only the rational is intelligible, really intelligible, and since the absurd, being devoid of sense, is condemned to be incommunicable, you will find that whenever we succeed in giving expression and intelligibility to anything apparently irrational or absurd we invariably resolve it into something rational, even though it be into the negation of that which we affirm. The maddest dreams of the fancy have some ground of reason, and who knows if everything that the imagination of man can conceive either has not already happened, or is not now happening or will not happen some time, in some world or another? The possible combinations are perhaps infinite. It only remains to know whether all that is imaginable is possible. It may also be said, and with justice, that much of what I am about to set forth is merely a repetition of ideas which have been expressed a hundred times before and a hundred times refuted; but the repetition of an idea really implies that its refutation has not been final. And as I do not pretend that the majority of these fancies are new, so neither do I pretend, obviously, that other voices before mine have not spoken to the winds the same laments. But when yet another voice echoes the same eternal lament it can only be inferred that the same grief still dwells in the heart. And it comes not amiss to repeat yet once again the same eternal lamentations that were already old in the days of Job and Ecclesiastes, and even to repeat them in the same words, to the end that the devotees of progress may see that there is something that never dies. Whosoever repeats the "Vanity of vanities" of Ecclesiastes or the lamentations of Job, even though without changing a letter, having first experienced them in his soul, performs a work of admonition. Need is to repeat without ceasing the _memento mori_. "But to what end?" you will ask. Even though it be only to the end that some people should be irritated and should see that these things are not dead and, so long as men exist, cannot die; to the end that they should be convinced that to-day, in the twentieth century, all the bygone centuries and all of them alive, are still subsisting. When a supposed error reappears, it must be, believe me, that it has not ceased to be true in part, just as when one who was dead reappears, it must be that he was not wholly dead. Yes, I know well that others before me have felt what I feel and express; that many others feel it to-day, although they keep silence about it. Why do I not keep silence about it too? Well, for the very reason that most of those who feel it are silent about it; and yet, though they are silent, they obey in silence that inner voice. And I do not keep silence about it because it is for many the thing which must not be spoken, the abomination of abominations--_infandum_--and I believe that it is necessary now and again to speak the thing which must not be spoken. But if it leads to nothing? Even if it should lead only to irritating the devotees of progress, those who believe that truth is consolation, it would lead to not a little. To irritating them and making them say: Poor fellow! if he would only use his intelligence to better purpose!... Someone perhaps will add that I do not know what I say, to which I shall reply that perhaps he may be right--and being right is such a little thing!--but that I feel what I say and I know what I feel and that suffices me. And that it is better to be lacking in reason than to have too much of it. And the reader who perseveres in reading me will also see how out of this abyss of despair hope may arise, and how this critical position may be the well-spring of human, profoundly human, action and effort, and of solidarity and even of progress. He will see its pragmatic justification. And he will see how, in order to work, and to work efficaciously and morally, there is no need of either of these two conflicting certainties, either that of faith or that of reason, and how still less is there any need--this never under any circumstances--to shirk the problem of the immortality of the soul, or to distort it idealistically--that is to say, hypocritically. The reader will see how this uncertainty, with the suffering that accompanies it, and the fruitless struggle to escape from it, may be and is a basis for action and morals. And in the fact that it serves as a basis for action and morals, this feeling of uncertainty and the inward struggle between reason on the one hand and faith and the passionate longing for eternal life on the other, should find their justification in the eyes of the pragmatist. But it must be clearly stated that I do not adduce this practical consequence in order to justify the feeling, but merely because I encounter it in my inward experience. I neither desire to seek, nor ought I to seek, any justification for this state of inward struggle and uncertainty and longing; it is a fact and that suffices. And if anyone finding himself in this state, in the depth of the abyss, fails to find there motives for and incentives to life and action, and concludes by committing bodily or spiritual suicide, whether he kills himself or he abandons all co-operation with his fellows in human endeavour, it will not be I who will pass censure upon him. And apart from the fact that the evil consequences of a doctrine, or rather those which we call evil, only prove, I repeat, that the doctrine is disastrous for our desires, but not that it is false in itself, the consequences themselves depend not so much upon the doctrine as upon him who deduces them. The same principle may furnish one man with grounds for action and another man with grounds for abstaining from action, it may lead one man to direct his effort towards a certain end and another man towards a directly opposite end. For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the justification _a posteriori_ of our conduct, or else they are our way of trying to explain that conduct to ourselves. Man, in effect, is unwilling to remain in ignorance of the motives of his own conduct. And just as a man who has been led to perform a certain action by hypnotic suggestion will afterwards invent reasons which would justify it and make it appear logical to himself and others, being unaware all the time of the real cause of his action, so every man--for since "life is a dream" every man is in a condition of hypnotism--seeks to find reasons for his conduct. And if the pieces on a chessboard were endowed with consciousness, they would probably have little difficulty in ascribing their moves to freewill--that is to say, they would claim for them a finalist rationality. And thus it comes about that every philosophic theory serves to explain and justify an ethic, a doctrine of conduct, which has its real origin in the inward moral feeling of the author of the theory. But he who harbours this feeling may possibly himself have no clear consciousness of its true reason or cause. Consequently, if my reason, which is in a certain sense a part of the reason of all my brothers in humanity in time and space, teaches me this absolute scepticism in respect of what concerns my longing for never-ending life, I think that I can assume that my feeling of life, which is the essence of life itself, my vitality, my boundless appetite for living and my abhorrence of dying, my refusal to submit to death--that it is this which suggests to me the doctrines with which I try to counter-check the working of the reason. Have these doctrines an objective value? someone will ask me, and I shall answer that I do not understand what this objective value of a doctrine is. I will not say that the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines that I am about to set forth are those which make me live; but I will venture to say that it is my longing to live and to live for ever that inspires these doctrines within me. And if by means of them I succeed in strengthening and sustaining this same longing in another, perhaps when it was all but dead, then I shall have performed a man's work and, above all, I shall have lived. In a word, be it with reason or without reason or against reason, I am resolved not to die. And if, when at last I die out, I die out altogether, then I shall not have died out of myself--that is, I shall not have yielded myself to death, but my human destiny will have killed me. Unless I come to lose my head, or rather my heart, I will not abdicate from life--life will be wrested from me. To have recourse to those, ambiguous words, "optimism" and "pessimism," does not assist us in any way, for frequently they express the very contrary of what those who use them mean to express. To ticket a doctrine with the label of pessimism is not to impugn its validity, and the so-called optimists are not the most efficient in action. I believe, on the contrary, that many of the greatest heroes, perhaps the greatest of all, have been men of despair and that by despair they have accomplished their mighty works. Apart from this, however, and accepting in all their ambiguity these denominations of optimism and pessimism, that there exists a certain transcendental pessimism which may be the begetter of a temporal and terrestrial optimism, is a matter that I propose to develop in the following part of this treatise. Very different, well I know, is the attitude of our progressives, the partisans of "the central current of contemporary European thought"; but I cannot bring myself to believe that these individuals do not voluntarily close their eyes to the grand problem of existence and that, in endeavouring to stifle this feeling of the tragedy of life, they themselves are not living a lie. The foregoing reflections are a kind of practical summary of the criticism developed in the first six chapters of this treatise, a kind of definition of the practical position to which such a criticism is capable of leading whosoever will not renounce life and will not renounce reason and who is compelled to live and act between these upper and nether millstones which grind upon the soul. The reader who follows me further is now aware that I am about to carry him into the region of the imagination, of imagination not destitute of reason, for without reason nothing subsists, but of imagination founded on feeling. And as regards its truth, the real truth, that which is independent of ourselves, beyond the reach of our logic and of our heart--of this truth who knows aught? FOOTNOTES: [31] See Troeltsch, _Systematische christliche Religion_, in _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_ series. [32] _Die Analyse der Empfindigungen und das Verhältniss des Physischen zum Psychischen_, i., § 12, note. [33] I have left the original expression here, almost without translating it--_Existents-Consequents_. It means the existential or practical, not the purely rational or logical, consequence. (Author's note.) [34] Albrecht Ritschl: _Geschichte des Pietismus_, ii., Abt. i., Bonn, 1884, p. 251. [35] Thou art the cause of my suffering, O non-existing God, for if Thou didst exist, then should I also really exist. VII LOVE, SUFFERING, PITY, AND PERSONALITY CAIN: Let me, or happy or unhappy, learn To anticipate my immortality. LUCIFER: Thou didst before I came upon thee. CAIN: How? LUCIFER: By suffering. BYRON: _Cain_, Act II., Scene I. The most tragic thing in the world and in life, readers and brothers of mine, is love. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion; love is consolation in desolation; it is the sole medicine against death, for it is death's brother. _Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, Amore e Morte Ingeneró la sorte_, as Leopardi sang. Love seeks with fury, through the medium of the beloved, something beyond, and since it finds it not, it despairs. Whenever we speak of love there is always present in our memory the idea of sexual love, the love between man and woman, whose end is the perpetuation of the human race upon the earth. Hence it is that we never succeed in reducing love either to a purely intellectual or to a purely volitional element, putting aside that part in it which belongs to the feeling, or, if you like, to the senses. For, in its essence, love is neither idea nor volition; rather it is desire, feeling; it is something carnal in spirit itself. Thanks to love, we feel all that spirit has of flesh in it. Sexual love is the generative type of every other love. In love and by love we seek to perpetuate ourselves, and we perpetuate ourselves on the earth only on condition that we die, that we yield up our life to others. The humblest forms of animal life, the lowest of living beings, multiply by dividing themselves, by splitting into two, by ceasing to be the unit which they previously formed. But when at last the vitality of the being that multiplies itself by division is exhausted, the species must renew the source of life from time to time by means of the union of two wasting individuals, by means of what is called, among protozoaria, conjugation. They unite in order to begin dividing again with more vigour. And every act of generation consists in a being's ceasing to be what it was, either wholly or in part, in a splitting up, in a partial death. To live is to give oneself, to perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself and to give oneself is to die. The supreme delight of begetting is perhaps nothing but a foretaste of death, the eradication of our own vital essence. We unite with another, but it is to divide ourselves; this most intimate embrace is only a most intimate sundering. In its essence, the delight of sexual love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of renewing our life in another, for only in others can we renew our life and so perpetuate ourselves. Without doubt there is something tragically destructive in the essence of love, as it presents itself to us in its primitive animal form, in the unconquerable instinct which impels the male and the female to mix their being in a fury of conjunction. The same impulse that joins their bodies, separates, in a certain sense, their souls; they hate one another, while they embrace, no less than they love, and above all they contend with one another, they contend for a third life, which as yet is without life. Love is a contention, and there are animal species in which the male maltreats the female in his union with her, and other in which the female devours the male after being fertilized by him. It has been said that love is a mutual selfishness; and, in fact, each one of the lovers seeks to possess the other, and in seeking his own perpetuation through the instrumentality of the other, though without being at the time conscious of it or purposing it, he thereby seeks his own enjoyment. Each one of the lovers is an immediate instrument of enjoyment and a mediate instrument of perpetuation, for the other. And thus they are tyrants and slaves, each one at once the tyrant and slave of the other. Is there really anything strange in the fact that the deepest religious feeling has condemned carnal love and exalted virginity? Avarice, said the Apostle, is the root of all evil, and the reason is because avarice takes riches, which are only a means, for an end; and therein lies the essence of sin, in taking means for ends, in not recognizing or in disesteeming the end. And since it takes enjoyment for the end, whereas it is only the means, and not perpetuation, which is the true end, what is carnal love but avarice? And it is possible that there are some who preserve their virginity in order the better to perpetuate themselves, and in order to perpetuate something more human than the flesh. For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth of eternal despair, out of which spring hope and consolation. For out of this carnal and primitive love of which I have been speaking, out of this love of the whole body with all its senses, which is the animal origin of human society, out of this loving-fondness, rises spiritual and sorrowful love. This other form of love, this spiritual love, is born of sorrow, is born of the death of carnal love, is born also of the feeling of compassion and protection which parents feel in the presence of a stricken child. Lovers never attain to a love of self abandonment, of true fusion of soul and not merely of body, until the heavy pestle of sorrow has bruised their hearts and crushed them in the same mortar of suffering. Sensual love joined their bodies but disjoined their souls; it kept their souls strangers to one another; but of this love is begotten a fruit of their flesh--a child. And perchance this child, begotten in death, falls sick and dies. Then it comes to pass that over the fruit of their carnal fusion and spiritual separation and estrangement, their bodies now separated and cold with sorrow but united by sorrow their souls, the lovers, the parents, join in an embrace of despair, and then is born, of the death of the child of their flesh, the true spiritual love. Or rather, when the bond of flesh which united them is broken, they breathe with a sigh of relief. For men love one another with a spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground bowed beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they know one another and feel one another, and feel with one another in their common anguish, they pity one another and love one another. For to love is to pity; and if bodies are united by pleasure, souls are united by pain. And this is felt with still more clearness and force in the seeding, the taking root, and the blossoming of one of those tragic loves which are doomed to contend with the diamond-hard laws of Destiny--one of those loves which are born out of due time and season, before or after the moment, or out of the normal mode in which the world, which is custom, would have been willing to welcome them. The more barriers Destiny and the world and its law interpose between the lovers, the stronger is the impulse that urges them towards one another, and their happiness in loving one another turns to bitterness, and their unhappiness in not being able to love freely and openly grows heavier, and they pity one another from the bottom of their hearts; and this common pity, which is their common misery and their common happiness, gives fire and fuel to their love. And they suffer their joy, enjoying their suffering. And they establish their love beyond the confines of the world, and the strength of this poor love suffering beneath the yoke of Destiny gives them intuition of another world where there is no other law than the liberty of love--another world where there are no barriers because there is no flesh. For nothing inspires us more with hope and faith in another world than the impossibility of our love truly fructifying in this world of flesh and of appearances. And what is maternal love but compassion for the weak, helpless, defenceless infant that craves the mother's milk and the comfort of her breast? And woman's love is all maternal. To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most. Men aflame with a burning charity towards their neighbours are thus enkindled because they have touched the depth of their own misery, their own apparentiality, their own nothingness, and then, turning their newly opened eyes upon their fellows, they have seen that they also are miserable, apparential, condemned to nothingness, and they have pitied them and loved them. Man yearns to be loved, or, what is the same thing, to be pitied. Man wishes others to feel and share his hardships and his sorrows. The roadside beggar's exhibition of his sores and gangrened mutilations is something more than a device to extort alms from the passer-by. True alms is pity rather than the pittance that alleviates the material hardships of life. The beggar shows little gratitude for alms thrown to him by one who hurries past with averted face; he is more grateful to him who pities him but does not help than to him who helps but does not pity, although from another point of view he may prefer the latter. Observe with what satisfaction he relates his woes to one who is moved by the story of them. He desires to be pitied, to be loved. Woman's love, above all, as I have remarked, is always compassionate in its essence--maternal. Woman yields herself to the lover because she feels that his desire makes him suffer. Isabel had compassion upon Lorenzo, Juliet upon Romeo, Francesca upon Paolo. Woman seems to say: "Come, poor one, thou shalt not suffer so for my sake!" And therefore is her love more loving and purer than that of man, braver and more enduring. Pity, then, is the essence of human spiritual love, of the love that is conscious of being love, of the love that is not purely animal, of the love, in a word, of a rational person. Love pities, and pities most when it loves most. Reversing the terms of the adage _nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, I have told you that _nihil cognitum quin prævolitum_, that we know nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desired; and it may even be added that we can know nothing well save what we love, save what we pity. As love grows, this restless yearning to pierce to the uttermost and to the innermost, so it continually embraces all that it sees, and pities all that it embraces. According as you turn inwards and penetrate more deeply into yourself, you will discover more and more your own emptiness, that you are not all that you are not, that you are not what you would wish to be, that you are, in a word, only a nonentity. And in touching your own nothingness, in not feeling your permanent base, in not reaching your own infinity, still less your own eternity, you will have a whole-hearted pity for yourself, and you will burn with a sorrowful love for yourself--a love that will consume your so-called self-love, which is merely a species of sensual self-delectation, the self-enjoyment, as it were, of the flesh of your soul. Spiritual self-love, the pity that one feels for oneself, may perhaps be called egotism; but nothing could be more opposed to ordinary egoism. For this love or pity for yourself, this intense despair, bred of the consciousness that just as before you were born you were not, so after your death you will cease to be, will lead you to pity--that is, to love--all your fellows and brothers in this world of appearance, these unhappy shadows who pass from nothingness to nothingness, these sparks of consciousness which shine for a moment in the infinite and eternal darkness. And this compassionate feeling for other men, for your fellows, beginning with those most akin to you, those with whom you live, will expand into a universal pity for all living things, and perhaps even for things that have not life but merely existence. That distant star which shines up there in the night will some day be quenched and will turn to dust and will cease to shine and cease to exist. And so, too, it will be with the whole of the star-strewn heavens. Unhappy heavens! And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to be, perhaps it would be more grievous still to go on being always oneself, and no more than oneself, without being able to be at the same time other, without being able to be at the same time everything else, without being able to be all. If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly as you are able to look--that is to say, if you look within yourself; if you not only contemplate but feel all things in your own consciousness, upon which all things have traced their painful impression--you will arrive at the abyss of the tedium, not merely of life, but of something more: at the tedium of existence, at the bottomless pit of the vanity of vanities. And thus you will come to pity all things; you will arrive at universal love. In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves, everything that it pities, love personalizes. We only pity--that is to say, we only love--that which is like ourselves and in so far as it is like ourselves, and the more like it is the more we love; and thus our pity for things, and with it our love, grows in proportion as we discover in them the likenesses which they have with ourselves. Or, rather, it is love itself, which of itself tends to grow, that reveals these resemblances to us. If I am moved to pity and love the luckless star that one day will vanish from the face of heaven, it is because love, pity, makes me feel that it has a consciousness, more or less dim, which makes it suffer because it is no more than a star, and a star that is doomed one day to cease to be. For all consciousness is consciousness of death and of suffering. Consciousness (_conscientia_) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling, and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total All, that the Universe, is also a Person possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, which love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God. And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by Him; loves Him and feels itself loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and infinitizing itself, is the supreme happiness itself. God is, then, the personalization of the All; He is the eternal and infinite Consciousness of the Universe--Consciousness taken captive by matter and struggling to free himself from it. We personalize the All in order to save ourselves from Nothingness; and the only mystery really mysterious is the mystery of suffering. Suffering is the path of consciousness, and by it living beings arrive at the possession of self-consciousness. For to possess consciousness of oneself, to possess personality, is to know oneself and to feel oneself distinct from other beings, and this feeling of distinction is only reached through an act of collision, through suffering more or less severe, through the sense of one's own limits. Consciousness of oneself is simply consciousness of one's own limitation. I feel myself when I feel that I am not others; to know and to feel the extent of my being is to know at what point I cease to be, the point beyond which I no longer am. And how do we know that we exist if we do not suffer, little or much? How can we turn upon ourselves, acquire reflective consciousness, save by suffering? When we enjoy ourselves we forget ourselves, forget that we exist; we pass over into another, an alien being, we alienate ourselves. And we become centred in ourselves again, we return to ourselves, only by suffering. _Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria_ are the words that Dante puts into the mouth of Francesca da Rimini (_Inferno_, v., 121-123); but if there is no greater sorrow than the recollection in adversity of happy bygone days, there is, on the other hand, no pleasure in remembering adversity in days of prosperity. "The bitterest sorrow that man can know is to aspire to do much and to achieve nothing" (_polla phroneoita mêdenos chrateein_)--so Herodotus relates that a Persian said to a Theban at a banquet (book ix., chap. xvi.). And it is true. With knowledge and desire we can embrace everything, or almost everything; with the will nothing, or almost nothing. And contemplation is not happiness--no! not if this contemplation implies impotence. And out of this collision between our knowledge and our power pity arises. We pity what is like ourselves, and the greater and clearer our sense of its likeness with ourselves, the greater our pity. And if we may say that this likeness provokes our pity, it may also be maintained that it is our reservoir of pity, eager to diffuse itself over everything, that makes us discover the likeness of things with ourselves, the common bond that unites us with them in suffering. Our own struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase our own consciousness makes us discover in the endeavours and movements and revolutions of all things a struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase consciousness, to which everything tends. Beneath the actions of those most akin to myself, of my fellow-men, I feel--or, rather, I co-feel--a state of consciousness similar to that which lies beneath my own actions. On hearing my brother give a cry of pain, my own pain awakes and cries in the depth of my consciousness. And in the same way I feel the pain of animals, and the pain of a tree when one of its branches is being cut off, and I feel it most when my imagination is alive, for the imagination is the faculty of intuition, of inward vision. Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits. And this process of personalization or subjectivization of everything external, phenomenal, or objective, is none other than the vital process of philosophy in the contest of life against reason and of reason against life. We have already indicated it in the preceding chapter, and we must now confirm it by developing it further. Giovanni Baptista Vico, with his profound esthetic penetration into the soul of antiquity, saw that the spontaneous philosophy of man was to make of himself the norm of the universe, guided by the _instinto d'animazione_. Language, necessarily anthropomorphic, mythopeic, engenders thought. "Poetic wisdom, which was the primitive wisdom of paganism," says Vico in his _Scienza Nuova_, "must have begun with a metaphysic, not reasoned and abstract, like that of modern educated men, but felt and imagined, such as must have been that of primitive men. This was their own poetry, which with them was inborn, an innate faculty, for nature had furnished them with such feelings and such imaginations, a faculty born of the ignorance of causes, and therefore begetting a universal sense of wonder, for knowing nothing they marvelled greatly at everything. This poetry had a divine origin, for, while they invented the causes of things out of their own imagination, at the same time they regarded these causes with feelings of wonder as gods. In this way the first men of the pagan peoples, as children of the growing human race, fashioned things out of their ideas.... This nature of human things has bequeathed that eternal property which Tacitus elucidated with a fine phrase when he said, not without reason, that men in their terror _fingunt simul creduntque_." And then, passing from the age of imagination, Vico proceeds to show us the age of reason, this age of ours in which the mind, even the popular mind, is too remote from the senses, "with so many abstractions of which all languages are full," an age in which "the ability to conceive an immense image of such a personage as we call sympathetic Nature is denied to us, for though the phrase 'Dame Nature' may be on our lips, there is nothing in our minds that corresponds with it, our minds being occupied with the false, the non-existent." "To-day," Vico continues, "it is naturally impossible for us to enter into the vast imagination of these primitive men." But is this certain? Do not we continue to live by the creations of their imagination, embodied for ever in the language with which we think, or, rather, the language which thinks in us? It was in vain that Comte declared that human thought had already emerged from the age of theology and was now emerging from the age of metaphysics into the age of positivism; the three ages coexist, and although antagonistic they lend one another mutual support. High-sounding positivism, whenever it ceases to deny and begins to affirm something, whenever it becomes really positive, is nothing but metaphysics; and metaphysics, in its essence, is always theology, and theology is born of imagination yoked to the service of life, of life with its craving for immortality. Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it, is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic. When rationalism dawned with Thales of Miletus, this philosopher abandoned Oceanus and Thetis, gods and the progenitors of gods, and attributed the origin of things to water; but this water was a god in disguise. Beneath nature (_phhysist_) and the world (_khosmos_), mythical and anthropomorphic creations throbbed with life. They were implicated in the structure of language itself. Xenophon tells us (_Memorabilia_, i., i., 6-9) that among phenomena Socrates distinguished between those which were within the scope of human study and those which the gods had reserved for themselves, and that he execrated the attempt of Anaxagoras to explain everything rationally. His contemporary, Hippocrates, regarded diseases as of divine origin, and Plato believed that the sun and stars were animated gods with their souls (_Philebus_, cap. xvi., _Laws_, x.), and only permitted astronomical investigation so long as it abstained from blasphemy against these gods. And Aristotle in his _Physics_ tells us that Zeus rains not in order that the corn may grow, but by necessity (_ex anharchêst_). They tried to mechanize and rationalize God, but God rebelled against them. And what is the concept of God, a concept continually renewed because springing out of the eternal feeling of God in man, but the eternal protest of life against reason, the unconquerable instinct of personalization? And what is the notion of substance itself but the objectivization of that which is most subjective--that is, of the will or consciousness? For consciousness, even before it knows itself as reason, feels itself, is palpable to itself, is most in harmony with itself, as will, and as will not to die. Hence that rhythm, of which we spoke, in the history of thought. Positivism inducted us into an age of rationalism--that is to say, of materialism, mechanism, or mortalism; and behold now the return of vitalism, of spiritualism. What was the effort of pragmatism but an effort to restore faith in the human finality of the universe? What is the effort of a Bergson, for example, especially in his work on creative evolution, but an attempt to re-integrate the personal God and eternal consciousness? Life never surrenders. And it avails us nothing to seek to repress this mythopeic or anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our thought, as if we thought only for the sake of thinking and knowing, and not for the sake of living. The very language with which we think prevents us from so doing. Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors with a mythic and anthropomorphic base. And to construct a purely rational philosophy it would be necessary to construct it by means of algebraic formulas or to create a new language for it, an inhuman language--that is to say, one inapt for the needs of life--as indeed Dr. Richard Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zürich, attempted to do in his _Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung_), in order to avoid preconceptions. And this rigorous attempt of Avenarius, the chief of the critics of experience, ends strictly in pure scepticism. He himself says at the end of the Prologue to the work above mentioned: "The childish confidence that it is granted to us to discover truth has long since disappeared; as we progress we become aware of the difficulties that lie in the way of its discovery and of the limitation of our powers. And what is the end?... If we could only succeed in seeing clearly into ourselves!" Seeing clearly! seeing clearly! Clear vision would be only attainable by a pure thinker who used algebra instead of language and was able to divest himself of his own humanity--that is to say, by an unsubstantial, merely objective being: a no-being, in short. In spite of reason we are compelled to think with life, and in spite of life we are compelled to rationalize thought. This animation, this personification, interpenetrates our very knowledge. "Who is it that sends the rain? Who is it that thunders?" old Strepsiades asks of Socrates in _The Clouds_ of Aristophanes, and the philosopher replies: "Not Zeus, but the clouds." "But," questions Strepsiades, "who but Zeus makes the clouds sweep along?" to which Socrates answers: "Not a bit of it; it is atmospheric whirligig." "Whirligig?" muses Strepsiades; "I never thought of that--that Zeus is gone and that Son Whirligig rules now in his stead." And so the old man goes on personifying and animating the whirlwind, as if the whirlwind were now a king, not without consciousness of his kingship. And in exchanging a Zeus for a whirlwind--God for matter, for example--we all do the same thing. And the reason is because philosophy does not work upon the objective reality which we perceive with the senses, but upon the complex of ideas, images, notions, perceptions, etc., embodied in language and transmitted to us with our language by our ancestors. That which we call the world, the objective world, is a social tradition. It is given to us ready made. Man does not submit to being, as consciousness, alone in the Universe, nor to being merely one objective phenomenon the more. He wishes to save his vital or passional subjectivity by attributing life, personality, spirit, to the whole Universe. In order to realize his wish he has discovered God and substance; God and substance continually reappear in his thought cloaked in different disguises. Because we are conscious, we feel that we exist, which is quite another thing from knowing that we exist, and we wish to feel the existence of everything else; we wish that of all the other individual things each one should also be an "I." The most consistent, although the most incongruous and vacillating, idealism, that of Berkeley, who denied the existence of matter, of something inert and extended and passive, as the cause of our sensations and the substratum of external phenomena, is in its essence nothing but an absolute spiritualism or dynamism, the supposition that every sensation comes to us, causatively, from another spirit--that is, from another consciousness. And his doctrine has a certain affinity with those of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The former's doctrine of the Will and the latter's doctrine of the Unconscious are already implied in the Berkeleyan theory that to be is to be perceived. To which must be added: and to cause others to perceive what is. Thus the old adage _operari sequitur esse_ (action follows being) must be modified by saying that to be is to act, and only that which acts--the active--exists, and in so far as it acts. As regards Schopenhauer, there is no need to endeavour to show that the will, which he posits as the essence of things, proceeds from consciousness. And it is only necessary to read his book on the Will in Nature to see how he attributed a certain spirit and even a certain personality to the plants themselves. And this doctrine of his carried him logically to pessimism, for the true property and most inward function of the will is to suffer. The will is a force which feels itself--that is, which suffers. And, someone will add, which enjoys. But the capacity to enjoy is impossible without the capacity to suffer; and the faculty of enjoyment is one with that of pain. Whosoever does not suffer does not enjoy, just as whosoever is insensible to cold is insensible to heat. And it is also quite logical that Schopenhauer, who deduced pessimism from the voluntarist doctrine or doctrine of universal personalization, should have deduced from both of these that the foundation of morals is compassion. Only his lack of the social and historical sense, his inability to feel that humanity also is a person, although a collective one, his egoism, in short, prevented him from feeling God, prevented him from individualizing and personalizing the total and collective Will--the Will of the Universe. On the other hand, it is easy to understand his aversion from purely empirical, evolutionist, or transformist doctrines, such as those set forth in the works of Lamarck and Darwin which came to his notice. Judging Darwin's theory solely by an extensive extract in _The Times_, he described it, in a letter to Adam Louis von Doss (March 1, 1860), as "downright empiricism" _(platter Empirismus)_. In fact, for a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously empirical and rational as that of Darwin left out of account the inward force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation? Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions. This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are. And it may be said that this force is the divine in us, that it is God Himself who works in us because He suffers in us. And sympathy teaches us to discover this force, this aspiration towards consciousness, in all things. It moves and activates the most minute living creatures; it moves and activates, perhaps, the very cells of our own bodily organism, which is a confederation, more or less solidary, of living beings; it moves the very globules of our blood. Our life is composed of lives, our vital aspiration of aspirations existing perhaps in the limbo of subconsciousness. Not more absurd than so many other dreams which pass as valid theories is the belief that our cells, our globules, may possess something akin to a rudimentary cellular, globular consciousness or basis of consciousness. Or that they may arrive at possessing such consciousness. And since we have given a loose rein to the fancy, we may fancy that these cells may communicate with one another, and that some of them may express their belief that they form part of a superior organism endowed with a collective personal consciousness. And more than once in the history of human feeling this fancy has been expressed in the surmisal of some philosopher or poet that we men are a kind of globules in the blood of a Supreme Being, who possesses his own personal collective consciousness, the consciousness of the Universe. Perhaps the immense Milky Way which on clear nights we behold stretching across the heavens, this vast encircling ring in which our planetary system is itself but a molecule, is in its turn but a cell in the Universe, in the Body of God. All the cells of our body combine and co-operate in maintaining and kindling by their activity our consciousness, our soul; and if the consciousness or the souls of all these cells entered completely into our consciousness, into the composite whole, if I possessed consciousness of all that happens in my bodily organism, I should feel the universe happening within myself, and perhaps the painful sense of my limitedness would disappear. And if all the consciousness of all beings unite in their entirety in the universal consciousness, this consciousness--that is to say, God--is all. In every instant obscure consciousnesses, elementary souls, are born and die within us, and their birth and death constitute our life. And their sudden and violent death constitutes our pain. And in like manner, in the heart of God consciousnesses are born and die--but do they die?--and their births and deaths constitute His life. If there is a Universal and Supreme Consciousness, I am an idea in it; and is it possible for any idea in this Supreme Consciousness to be completely blotted out? After I have died, God will go on remembering me, and to be remembered by God, to have my consciousness sustained by the Supreme Consciousness, is not that, perhaps, to be? And if anyone should say that God has made the universe, it may be rejoined that so also our soul has made our body as much as, if not more than, it has been made by it--if, indeed, there be a soul. When pity, love, reveals to us the whole universe striving to gain, to preserve, and to enlarge its consciousness, striving more and more to saturate itself with consciousness, feeling the pain of the discords which are produced within it, pity reveals to us the likeness of the whole universe with ourselves; it reveals to us that it is human, and it leads us to discover our Father in it, of whose flesh we are flesh; love leads us to personalize the whole of which we form a part. To say that God is eternally producing things is fundamentally the same as saying that things are eternally producing God. And the belief in a personal and spiritual God is based on the belief in our own personality and spirituality. Because we feel ourselves to be consciousness, we feel God to be consciousness--that is to say, a person; and because we desire ardently that our consciousness shall live and be independently of the body, we believe that the divine person lives and exists independently of the universe, that his state of consciousness is _ad extra_. No doubt logicians will come forward and confront us with the evident rational difficulties which this involves; but we have already stated that, although presented under logical forms, the content of all this is not strictly rational. Every rational conception of God is in itself contradictory. Faith in God is born of love for God--we believe that God exists by force of wishing that He may exist, and it is born also, perhaps, of God's love for us. Reason does not prove to us that God exists, but neither does it prove that He cannot exist. But of this conception of faith in God as the personalization of the universe we shall have more to say presently. And recalling what has been said in another part of this work, we may say that material things, in so far as they are known to us, issue into knowledge through the agency of hunger, and out of hunger issues the sensible or material universe in which we conglomerate these things; and that ideal things issue out of love, and out of love issues God, in whom we conglomerate these ideal things as in the Consciousness of the Universe. It is social consciousness, the child of love, of the instinct of perpetuation, that leads us to socialize everything, to see society in everything, and that shows us at last that all Nature is really an infinite Society. For my part, the feeling that Nature is a society has taken hold of me hundreds of times in walking through the woods possessed with a sense of solidarity with the oaks, a sense of their dim awareness of my presence. Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature--that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize. And just as a fruitful union is consummated between the individual--who is, in a certain sense, a society--and society, which is also an individual--the two being so inseparable from one another that it is impossible to say where the one begins and the other ends, for they are rather two aspects of a single essence--so also the spirit, the social element, which by relating us to others makes us conscious, unites with matter, the individual and individualizing element; similarly, reason or intelligence and imagination embrace in a mutually fruitful union, and the Universe merges into one with God. * * * * * Is all this true? And what is truth? I in my turn will ask, as Pilate asked--not, however, only to turn away and wash my hands, without waiting for an answer. Is truth in reason, or above reason, or beneath reason, or outside of reason, in some way or another? Is only the rational true? May there not be a reality, by its very nature, unattainable by reason, and perhaps, by its very nature, opposed to reason? And how can we know this reality if reason alone holds the key to knowledge? Our desire of living, our need of life, asks that that may be true which urges us to self-preservation and self-perpetuation, which sustains man and society; it asks that the true water may be that which assuages our thirst, and because it assuages it, that the true bread may be that which satisfies our hunger, because it satisfies it. The senses are devoted to the service of the instinct of preservation, and everything that satisfies this need of preserving ourselves, even though it does not pass through the senses, is nevertheless a kind of intimate penetration of reality in us. Is the process of assimilating nutriment perhaps less real than the process of knowing the nutritive substance? It may be said that to eat a loaf of bread is not the same thing as seeing, touching, or tasting it; that in the one case it enters into our body, but not therefore into our consciousness. Is this true? Does not the loaf of bread that I have converted into my flesh and blood enter more into my consciousness than the other loaf which I see and touch, and of which I say: "This is mine"? And must I refuse objective reality to the bread that I have thus converted into my flesh and blood and made mine when I only touch it? There are some who live by air without knowing it. In the same way, it may be, we live by God and in God--in God the spirit and consciousness of society and of the whole Universe, in so far as the Universe is also a society. God is felt only in so far as He is lived; and man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God (Matt. iv. 4; Deut. viii. 3). And this personalization of the all, of the Universe, to which we are led by love, by pity, is the personalization of a person who embraces and comprehends within himself the other persons of which he is composed. The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness. For where there is no consciousness there is no finality, finality presupposing a purpose. And, as we shall see, faith in God is based simply upon the vital need of giving finality to existence, of making it answer to a purpose. We need God, not in order to understand the _why_, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate _wherefore_, to give a meaning to the Universe. And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation that this consciousness of the Universe is composed and integrated by the consciousnesses of the beings which form the Universe, by the consciousnesses of all the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it remains a personal consciousness distinct from those which compose it. Only thus is it possible to understand how in God we live, move, and have our being. That great visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, saw or caught a glimpse of this in his book on Heaven and Hell _(De Coelo et Inferno_, lii.), when he tells us: "An entire angelic society appears sometimes in the form of a single angel, which also it hath been granted me by the Lord to see. When the Lord Himself appears in the midst of the angels, He doth not appear as encompassed by a multitude, but as a single being in angelic form. Hence it is that the Lord in the Word is called an angel, and likewise that on entire society is so called. Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael are nothing but angelical societies, which are so named from their functions." May we not perhaps live and love--that is, suffer and pity--in this all-enveloping Supreme Person--we, all the persons who suffer and pity and all the beings that strive to achieve personality, to acquire consciousness of their suffering and their limitation? And are we not, perhaps, ideas of this total Grand Consciousness, which by thinking of us as existing confers existence upon us? Does not our existence consist in being perceived and felt by God? And, further on, this same visionary tells us, under the form of images, that each angel, each society of angels, and the whole of heaven comprehensively surveyed, appear in human form, and in virtue of this human form the Lord rules them as one man. "God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal," wrote Kierkegaard (_Afslutende uvidens-kabelige Efterskrift_); but perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that "God is great because His thought is action" (_Ai giovani d'ltalia_), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is the unthinkable by God. Is it not written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word--that is to say, with His thought--and that by this, by His Word, He made everything that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May it not be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all existence eternalized? Our longing to save consciousness, to give personal and human finality to the Universe and to existence, is such that even in the midst of a supreme, an agonizing and lacerating sacrifice, we should still hear the voice that assured us that if our consciousness disappears, it is that the infinite and eternal Consciousness may be enriched thereby, that our souls may serve as nutriment to the Universal Soul. Yes, I enrich God, because before I existed He did not think of me as existing, because I am one more--one more even though among an infinity of others--who, having really lived, really suffered, and really loved, abide in His bosom. It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in God, to wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word. To create Him, yes! This saying ought not to scandalize even the most devout theist. For to believe in God is, in a certain sense, to create Him, although He first creates us.[37] It is He who in us is continually creating Himself. We have created God in order to save the Universe from nothingness, for all that is not consciousness and eternal consciousness, conscious of its eternity and eternally conscious, is nothing more than appearance. There is nothing truly real save that which feels, suffers, pities, loves, and desires, save consciousness; there is nothing substantial but consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it. Love is a contradiction if there is no God. Let us now consider this idea of God, of the logical God or the Supreme Reason, and of the vital God or the God of the heart--that is, Supreme Love. FOOTNOTES: [36] _Todo lo humaniza, y aun lo humana_. [37] In the translation it is impossible to retain the play upon the verbs _crear_, to create, and _creer_, to believe: _"Porque creer en Dios es en cierto modo crearle, aunque El nos cree antes."_--J.E.C.F. VIII FROM GOD TO GOD To affirm that the religious sense is a sense of divinity and that it is impossible without some abuse of the ordinary usages of human language to speak of an atheistic religion, is not, I think, to do violence to the truth; although it is clear that everything will depend upon the concept that we form of God, a concept which in its turn depends upon the concept of divinity. Our proper procedure, in effect, will be to begin with this sense of divinity, before prefixing to the concept of this quality the definite article and the capital letter and so converting it into "the Divinity"--that is, into God. For man has not deduced the divine from God, but rather he has reached God through the divine. In the course of these somewhat wandering but at the same time urgent reflections upon the tragic sense of life, I have already alluded to the _timor fecit deos_ of Statius with the object of limiting and correcting it. It is not my intention to trace yet once again the historical processes by which peoples have arrived at the consciousness and concept of a personal God like the God of Christianity. And I say peoples and not isolated individuals, for if there is any feeling or concept that is truly collective and social it is the feeling and concept of God, although the individual subsequently individualizes it. Philosophy may, and in fact does, possess an individual origin; theology is necessarily collective. Schleiermacher's theory, which attributes the origin, or rather the essence, of the religious sense to the immediate and simple feeling of dependency, appears to be the most profound and exact explanation. Primitive man, living in society, feels himself to be dependent upon the mysterious forces invisibly environing him; he feels himself to be in social communion, not only with beings like himself, his fellow-men, but with the whole of Nature, animate and inanimate, which simply means, in other words, that he personalizes everything. Not only does he possess a consciousness of the world, but he imagines that the world, like himself, possesses consciousness also. Just as a child talks to his doll or his dog as if it understood what he was saying, so the savage believes that his fetich hears him when he speaks to it, and that the angry storm-cloud is aware of him and deliberately pursues him. For the newly born mind of the primitive natural man has not yet wholly severed itself from the cords which still bind it to the womb of Nature, neither has it clearly marked out the boundary that separates dreaming from waking, imagination from reality. The divine, therefore, was not originally something objective, but was rather the subjectivity of consciousness projected exteriorly, the personalization of the world. The concept of divinity arose out of the feeling of divinity, and the feeling of divinity is simply the dim and nascent feeling of personality vented upon the outside world. And strictly speaking it is not possible to speak of outside and inside, objective and subjective, when no such distinction was actually felt; indeed it is precisely from this lack of distinction that the feeling and concept of divinity proceed. The clearer our consciousness of the distinction between the objective and the subjective, the more obscure is the feeling of divinity in us. It has been said, and very justly so it would appear, that Hellenic paganism was not so much polytheistic as pantheistic. I do not know that the belief in a multitude of gods, taking the concept of God in the sense in which we understand it to-day, has ever really existed in any human mind. And if by pantheism is understood the doctrine, not that everything and each individual thing is God--a proposition which I find unthinkable--but that everything is divine, then it may be said without any great abuse of language that paganism was pantheistic. Its gods not only mixed among men but intermixed with them; they begat gods upon mortal women and upon goddesses mortal men begat demi-gods. And if demi-gods, that is, demi-men, were believed to exist, it was because the divine and the human were viewed as different aspects of the same reality. The divinization of everything was simply its humanization. To say that the sun was a god was equivalent to saying that it was a man, a human consciousness, more or less, aggrandized and sublimated. And this is true of all beliefs from fetichism to Hellenic paganism. The real distinction between gods and men consisted in the fact that the former were immortal. A god came to be identical with an immortal man and a man was deified, reputed as a god, when it was deemed that at his death he had not really died. Of certain heroes it was believed that they were alive in the kingdom of the dead. And this is a point of great importance in estimating the value of the concept of the divine. In those republics of gods there was always some predominating god, some real monarch. It was through the agency of this divine monarchy that primitive peoples were led from monocultism to monotheism. Hence monarchy and monotheism are twin brethren. Zeus, Jupiter, was in process of being converted into an only god, just as Jahwé originally one god among many others, came to be converted into an only god, first the god of the people of Israel, then the god of humanity, and finally the god of the whole universe. Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march and in time of war," says Robertson Smith in _The Prophets of Israel_,[38] "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national organization, centring in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought of mainly as the host of Jehovah. The very name of Israel is martial, and means 'God (_El_) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwè Çebäôth--the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace." God, the only God, issued, therefore, from man's sense of divinity as a warlike, monarchical and social God. He revealed himself to the people as a whole, not to the individual. He was the God of a people and he jealously exacted that worship should be rendered to him alone. The transition from this monocultism to monotheism was effected largely by the individual action, more philosophical perhaps than theological, of the prophets. It was, in fact, the individual activity of the prophets that individualized the divinity. And above all by making the divinity ethical. Subsequently reason--that is, philosophy--took possession of this God who had arisen in the human consciousness as a consequence of the sense of divinity in man, and tended to define him and convert him into an idea. For to define a thing is to idealize it, a process which necessitates the abstraction from it of its incommensurable or irrational element, its vital essence. Thus the God of feeling, the divinity felt as a unique person and consciousness external to us, although at the same time enveloping and sustaining us, was converted into the idea of God. The logical, rational God, the _ens summum_, the _primum movens_, the Supreme Being of theological philosophy, the God who is reached by the three famous ways of negation, eminence and causality, _viæ negationis, eminentiæ, causalitatis_, is nothing but an idea of God, a dead thing. The traditional and much debated proofs of his existence are, at bottom, merely a vain attempt to determine his essence; for as Vinet has very well observed, existence is deduced from essence; and to say that God exists, without saying what God is and how he is, is equivalent to saying nothing at all. And this God, arrived at by the methods of eminence and negation or abstraction of finite qualities, ends by becoming an unthinkable God, a pure idea, a God of whom, by the very fact of his ideal excellence, we can say that he is nothing, as indeed he has been defined by Scotus Erigena: _Deus propter excellentiam non inmerito nihil vocatur_. Or in the words of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in his fifth Epistle, "The divine darkness is the inaccessible light in which God is said to dwell." The anthropomorphic God, the God who is felt, in being purified of human, and as such finite, relative and temporal, attributes, evaporates into the God of deism or of pantheism. The traditional so-called proofs of the existence of God all refer to this God-Idea, to this logical God, the God by abstraction, and hence they really prove nothing, or rather, they prove nothing more than the existence of this idea of God. In my early youth, when first I began to be puzzled by these eternal problems, I read in a book, the author of which I have no wish to recall,[39] this sentence: "God is the great X placed over the ultimate barrier of human knowledge; in the measure in which science advances, the barrier recedes." And I wrote in the margin, "On this side of the barrier, everything is explained without Him; on the further side, nothing is explained, either with Him or without Him; God therefore is superfluous." And so far as concerns the God-Idea, the God of the proofs, I continue to be of the same opinion. Laplace is said to have stated that he had not found the hypothesis of God necessary in order to construct his scheme of the origin of the Universe, and it is very true. In no way whatever does the idea of God help us to understand better the existence, the essence and the finality of the Universe. That there is a Supreme Being, infinite, absolute and eternal, whose existence is unknown to us, and who has created the Universe, is not more conceivable than that the material basis of the Universe itself, its matter, is eternal and infinite and absolute. We do not understand the existence of the world one whit the better by telling ourselves that God created it. It is a begging of the question, or a merely verbal solution, intended to cover up our ignorance. In strict truth, we deduce the existence of the Creator from the fact that the thing created exists, a process which does not justify rationally His existence. You cannot deduce a necessity from a fact, or else everything were necessary. And if from the nature of the Universe we pass to what is called its order, which is supposed to necessitate an Ordainer, we may say that order is what there is, and we do not conceive of any other. This deduction of God's existence from the order of the Universe implies a transition from the ideal to the real order, an outward projection of our mind, a supposition that the rational explanation of a thing produces the thing itself. Human art, instructed by Nature, possesses a conscious creative faculty, by means of which it apprehends the process of creation, and we proceed to transfer this conscious and artistic creative faculty to the consciousness of an artist-creator, but from what nature he in his turn learnt his art we cannot tell. The traditional analogy of the watch and the watchmaker is inapplicable to a Being absolute, infinite and eternal. It is, moreover, only another way of explaining nothing. For to say that the world is as it is and not otherwise because God made it so, while at the same time we do not know for what reason He made it so, is to say nothing. And if we knew for what reason God made it so, then God is superfluous and the reason itself suffices. If everything were mathematics, if there were no irrational element, we should not have had recourse to this explanatory theory of a Supreme Ordainer, who is nothing but the reason of the irrational, and so merely another cloak for our ignorance. And let us not discuss here that absurd proposition that, if all the type in a printing-press were printed at random, the result could not possibly be the composition of _Don Quixote_. Something would be composed which would be as good as _Don Quixote_ for those who would have to be content with it and would grow in it and would form part of it. In effect, this traditional supposed proof of God's existence resolves itself fundamentally into hypostatizing or substantivating the explanation or reason of a phenomenon; it amounts to saying that Mechanics is the cause of movement, Biology of life, Philology of language, Chemistry of bodies, by simply adding the capital letter to the science and converting it into a force distinct from the phenomena from which we derive it and distinct from our mind which effects the derivation. But the God who is the result of this process, a God who is nothing but reason hypostatized and projected towards the infinite, cannot possibly be felt as something living and real, nor yet be conceived of save as a mere idea which will die with us. The question arises, on the other hand, whether a thing the idea of which has been conceived but which has no real existence, does not exist because God wills that it should not exist, or whether God does not will it to exist because, in fact, it does not exist; and, with regard to the impossible, whether a thing is impossible because God wills it so, or whether God wills it so because, in itself and by the very fact of its own inherent absurdity, it is impossible. God has to submit to the logical law of contradiction, and He cannot, according to the theologians, cause two and two to make either more or less than four. Either the law of necessity is above Him or He Himself is the law of necessity. And in the moral order the question arises whether falsehood, or homicide, or adultery, are wrong because He has so decreed it, or whether He has so decreed it because they are wrong. If the former, then God is a capricious and unreasonable God, who decrees one law when He might equally well have decreed another, or, if the latter, He obeys an intrinsic nature and essence which exists in things themselves independently of Him--that is to say, independently of His sovereign will; and if this is the case, if He obeys the innate reason of things, this reason, if we could but know it, would suffice us without any further need of God, and since we do not know it, God explains nothing. This reason would be above God. Neither is it of any avail to say that this reason is God Himself, the supreme reason of things. A reason of this kind, a necessary reason, is not a personal something. It is will that gives personality. And it is because of this problem of the relations between God's reason, necessarily necessary, and His will, necessarily free, that the logical and Aristotelian God will always be a contradictory God. The scholastic theologians never succeeded in disentangling themselves from the difficulties in which they found themselves involved when they attempted to reconcile human liberty with divine prescience and with the knowledge that God possesses of the free and contingent future; and that is strictly the reason why the rational God is wholly inapplicable to the contingent, for the notion of contingency is fundamentally the same as the notion of irrationality. The rational God is necessarily necessary in His being and in His working; in every single case He cannot do other than the best, and a number of different things cannot all equally be the best, for among infinite possibilities there is only one that is best accommodated to its end, just as among the infinite number of lines that can be drawn from one point to another, there is only one straight line. And the rational God, the God of reason, cannot but follow in each case the straight line, the line that leads most directly to the end proposed, a necessary end, just as the only straight line that leads to it is a necessary line. And thus for the divinity of God is substituted His necessity. And in the necessity of God, His free will--that is to say, His conscious personality--perishes. The God of our heart's desire, the God who shall save our soul from nothingness, must needs be an arbitrary God. Not because He thinks can God be God, but because He works, because He creates; He is not a contemplative but an active God. A God-Reason, a theoretical or contemplative God, such as is this God of theological rationalism, is a God that is diluted in His own contemplation. With this God corresponds, as we shall see, the beatific vision, understood as the supreme expression of human felicity. A quietist God, in short, as reason, by its very essence, is quietist. There remains the other famous proof of God's existence, that of the supposed unanimous consent in a belief in Him among all peoples. But this proof is not strictly rational, neither is it an argument in favour of the rational God who explains the Universe, but of the God of the heart, who makes us live. We should be justified in calling it a rational proof only on the supposition that we believed that reason was identical with a more or less unanimous agreement among all peoples, that it corresponded with the verdict of a universal suffrage, only on the supposition that we held that _vox populi_, which is said to be _vox Dei_, was actually the voice of reason. Such was, indeed, the belief of Lamennais, that tragic and ardent spirit, who affirmed that life and truth were essentially one and the same thing--would that they were!--and that reason was one, universal, everlasting and holy (_Essai sur l'indifférence_, partie iv., chap, viii.). He invoked the _aut omnibus credendum est aut nemini_ of Lactantius--we must believe all or none--and the saying of Heraclitus that every individual opinion is fallible, and that of Aristotle that the strongest proof consists in the general agreement of mankind, and above all that of Pliny (_Paneg. Trajani_, lxii.), to the effect that one man cannot deceive all men or be deceived by all--_nemo omnes, neminem omnes fefellerunt_. Would that it were so! And so he concludes with the dictum of Cicero (_De natura deorum_, lib. iii., cap. ii., 5 and 6), that we must believe the tradition of our ancestors even though they fail to render us a reason--_maioribus autem nostris, etiam nulla ratione reddita credere_. Let us suppose that this belief of the ancients in the divine interpenetration of the whole of Nature is universal and constant, and that it is, as Aristotle calls it, an ancestral dogma (_patrios doxa_) (_Metaphysica_, lib. vii., cap. vii.); this would prove only that there is a motive impelling peoples and individuals--that is to say, all or almost all or a majority of them--to believe in a God. But may it not be that there are illusions and fallacies rooted in human nature itself? Do not all peoples begin by believing that the sun turns round the earth? And do we not all naturally incline to believe that which satisfies our desires? Shall we say with Hermann[40] that, "if there is a God, He has not left us without some indication of Himself, and if is His will that we should find Him." A pious desire, no doubt, but we cannot strictly call it a reason, unless we apply to it the Augustinian sentence, but which again is not a reason, "Since thou seekest Me, it must be that thou hast found Me," believing that God is the cause of our seeking Him. This famous argument from the supposed unanimity of mankind's belief in God, the argument which with a sure instinct was seized upon by the ancients, is in its essence identical with the so-called moral proof which Kant employed in his _Critique of Practical Reason_, transposing its application from mankind collectively to the individual, the proof which he derives from our conscience, or rather from our feeling of divinity. It is not a proof strictly or specifically rational, but vital; it cannot be applied to the logical God, the _ens summum_, the essentially simple and abstract Being, the immobile and impassible prime mover, the God-Reason, in a word, but to the biotic God, to the Being essentially complex and concrete, to the suffering God who suffers and desires in us and with us, to the Father of Christ who is only to be approached through Man, through His Son (John xiv. 6), and whose revelation is historical, or if you like, anecdotical, but not philosophical or categorical. The unanimous consent of mankind (let us suppose the unanimity) or, in other words, this universal longing of all human souls who have arrived at the consciousness of their humanity, which desires to be the end and meaning of the Universe, this longing, which is nothing but that very essence of the soul which consists in its effort to persist eternally and without a break in the continuity of consciousness, leads us to the human, anthropomorphic God, the projection of our consciousness to the Consciousness of the Universe; it leads us to the God who confers human meaning and finality upon the Universe and who is not the _ens summum_, the _primum movens_, nor the Creator of the Universe, nor merely the Idea-God. It leads us to the living, subjective God, for He is simply subjectivity objectified or personality universalized--He is more than a mere idea, and He is will rather than reason. God is Love--that is, Will. Reason, the Word, derives from Him, but He, the Father, is, above all, Will. "There can be no doubt whatever," Ritschl says (_Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung_, iii., chap. v.), "that a very imperfect view was taken of God's spiritual personality in the older theology, when the functions of knowing and willing alone were employed to illustrate it. Religious thought plainly ascribes to God affections of feeling as well. The older theology, however, laboured under the impression that feeling and emotion were characteristic only of limited and created personality; it transformed, _e.g._, the religious idea of the Divine blessedness into eternal self-knowledge, and that of the Divine wrath into a fixed purpose to punish sin." Yes, this logical God, arrived at by the _via negationis_, was a God who, strictly speaking, neither loved nor hated, because He neither enjoyed nor suffered, an inhuman God, and His justice was a rational or mathematical justice--that is, an injustice. The attributes of the living God, of the Father of Christ, must be deduced from His historical revelation in the Gospel and in the conscience of every Christian believer, and not from metaphysical reasonings which lead only to the Nothing-God of Scotus Erigena, to the rational or pantheistic God, to the atheist God--in short, to the de-personalized Divinity. Not by the way of reason, but only by the way of love and of suffering, do we come to the living God, the human God. Reason rather separates us from Him. We cannot first know Him in order that afterwards we may love Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering after Him, before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God, and this knowledge has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to seek to confine Him within the limits of our mind--that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we attempt to define Him, there rises up before us--Nothingness. The idea of God, formulated by a theodicy that claims to be rational, is simply an hypothesis, like the hypotheses of ether, for example. Ether is, in effect, a merely hypothetical entity, valuable only in so far as it explains that which by means of it we endeavour to explain--light, electricity or universal gravitation--and only in so far as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. In like manner the idea of God is also an hypothesis, valuable only in so far as it enables us to explain that which by means of if we endeavour to explain--the essence and existence of the Universe--and only so long as these cannot be explained in any other way. And since in reality we explain the Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the idea of God, the supreme _petitio principii_, is valueless. But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air, on the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even though it did not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless always be directly aware of it, and, above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and even though the idea of Him does not enable us to explain either the existence or the essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And this feeling--mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic sense of life is founded upon this--this feeling is a feeling of hunger for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance, as we shall see, to wish that there may be a God, to be unable to live without Him. So long as I pilgrimaged through the fields of reason in search of God, I could not find Him, for I was not deluded by the idea of God, neither could I take an idea for God, and it was then, as I wandered among the wastes of rationalism, that I told myself that we ought to seek no other consolation than the truth, meaning thereby reason, and yet for all that I was not comforted. But as I sank deeper and deeper into rational scepticism on the one hand and into heart's despair on the other, the hunger for God awoke within me, and the suffocation of spirit made me feel the want of God, and with the want of Him, His reality. And I wished that there might be a God, that God might exist. And God does not exist, but rather super-exists, and He is sustaining our existence, existing us _(existiéndonos)_. God, who is Love, the Father of Love, is the son of love in us. There are men of a facile and external habit of mind, slaves of reason, that reason which externalizes us, who think it a shrewd comment to say that so far from God having made man in His image and likeness, it is rather man who has made his gods or his God in his own image and likeness,[41] and so superficial are they that they do not pause to consider that if the second of these propositions be true, as in fact it is, it is owing to the fact that the first is not less true. God and man, in effect, mutually create one another; God creates or reveals Himself in man and man creates himself in God. God is His own maker, _Deus ipse se facit_, said Lactantius (_Divinarum Institutionum_, ii., 8), and we may say that He is making Himself continually both in man and by man. And if each of us, impelled by his love, by his hunger for divinity, creates for himself an image of God according to his own desire, and if according to His desire God creates Himself for each of us, then there is a collective, social, human God, the resultant of all the human imaginations that imagine Him. For God is and reveals Himself in collectivity. And God is the richest and most personal of human conceptions. The Master of divinity has bidden us be perfect as our Father who is in heaven is perfect (Matt. v. 48), and in the sphere of thought and feeling our perfection consists in the zeal with which we endeavour to equate our imagination with the total imagination of the humanity of which in God we form a part. The logical theory of the opposition between the extension and the comprehension of a concept, the one increasing in the ratio in which the other diminishes, is well known. The concept that is most extensive and at the same time least comprehensive is that of being or of thing, which embraces everything that exists and possesses no other distinguishing quality than that of being; while the concept that is most comprehensive and least extensive is that of the Universe, which is only applicable to itself and comprehends all existing qualities. And the logical or rational God, the God obtained by way of negation, the absolute entity, merges, like reality itself, into nothingness; for, as Hegel pointed out, pure being and pure nothingness are identical. And the God of the heart, the God who is felt, the God of living men, is the Universe itself conceived as personality, is the consciousness of the Universe. A God universal and personal, altogether different from the individual God of a rigid metaphysical monotheism. I must advert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the continent or thing which contains, personality the content or thing contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself--which is in a certain way the whole Universe--and that my individuality is my extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite. A hundred jars of hard earthenware are strongly individualized, but it is possible for them to be all equally empty or all equally full of the same homogeneous liquid, whereas two bladders of so delicate a membrane as to admit of the action of osmosis and exosmosis may be strongly differentiated and contain liquids of a very mixed composition. And thus a man, in so far as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more personality a man has and the greater his interior richness and the more he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from his fellows. In the same way the rigid God of deism, of Aristotelian monotheism, the _ens summum_, is a being in whom individuality, or rather simplicity, stifles personality. Definition kills him, for to define is to impose boundaries, it is to limit, and it is impossible to define the absolutely indefinable. This God lacks interior richness; he is not a society in himself. And this the vital revelation obviated by the belief in the Trinity, which makes God a society and even a family in himself and no longer a pure individual. The God of faith is personal; He is a person because He includes three persons, for personality is not sensible of itself in isolation. An isolated person ceases to be a person, for whom should he love? And if he does not love, he is not a person. Nor can a simple being love himself without his love expanding him into a compound being. It was because God was felt as a Father that the belief in the Trinity arose. For a God-Father cannot be a single, that is, a solitary, God. A father is always the father of a family. And the fact that God was felt as a father acted as a continual incentive to conceive Him not merely anthropomorphically--that is to say, as a man, _anthropos_--but andromorphically, as a male, _anêr_. In the popular Christian imagination, in effect, God the Father is conceived of as a male. And the reason is that man, _homo_, _anthropos_, as we know him, is necessarily either a male, _vir_, _anêr_, or a female, _mulier_, _gynê_. And to these may be added the child, who is neuter. And hence in order to satisfy imaginatively this necessity of feeling God as a perfect man--that is, as a family--arose the cult of the God-Mother, the Virgin Mary, and the cult of the Child Jesus. The cult of the Virgin, Mariolatry, which, by the gradual elevation of the divine element in the Virgin has led almost to her deification, answers merely to the demand of the feeling that God should be a perfect man, that God should include in His nature the feminine element. The progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary, the work of Catholic piety, having its beginning in the expression Mother of God, _theotokos_, _deipara_, has culminated in attributing to her the status of co-redeemer and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without the stain of original sin. Hence she now occupies a position between Humanity and Divinity and nearer Divinity than Humanity. And it has been surmised that in course of time she may perhaps even come to be regarded as yet another personal manifestation of the Godhead. And yet this might not necessarily involve the conversion of the Trinity into a Quaternity. If _pneuma_, in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? That fervent piety which always knows how to mould theological speculation in accordance with its own desires would have found sufficient warranty for such a doctrine in the text of the Gospel, in Luke's narrative of the Annunciation where the angel Gabriel hails Mary with the words, "The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee," _pneuma agion epeleusetai epi se_ (Luke i. 35). And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification with the Word. In any case the cult of the Virgin, of the eternal feminine, or rather of the divine feminine, of the divine maternity, helps to complete the personalization of God by constituting Him a family. In one of my books (_Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_, part ii., chap. lxvii.) I have said that "God was and is, in our mind, masculine. In His mode of judging and condemning men, He acts as a male, not as a human person above the limitation of sex; He acts as a father. And to counterbalance this, the Mother element was required, the Mother who always forgives, the Mother whose arms are always open to the child when he flies from the frowning brow or uplifted hand of the angry father; the Mother in whose bosom we seek the dim, comforting memory of that warmth and peace of our pre-natal unconsciousness, of that milky sweetness that soothed our dreams of innocence; the Mother who knows no justice but that of forgiveness, no law but that of love. Our weak and imperfect conception of God as a God with a long beard and a voice of thunder, of a God who promulgates laws and pronounces dooms, of a God who is the Master of a household, a Roman Paterfamilias, required counterpoise and complement, and since fundamentally we are unable to conceive of the personal and living God as exalted above human and even masculine characteristics, and still less as a neutral or hermaphrodite God, we have recourse to providing Him with a feminine God, and by the side of the God-Father we have placed the Goddess-Mother, she who always forgives, because, since she sees with love-blind eyes, she sees always the hidden cause of the fault and in that hidden cause the only justice of forgiveness ..." And to this I must now add that not only are we unable to conceive of the full and living God as masculine simply, but we are unable to conceive of Him as individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I, an unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. My living I is an I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of other, and by other I's; I am sprung, from a multitude of ancestors, I carry them within me in extract, and at the same time I carry within me, potentially, a multitude of descendants, and God, the projection of my I to the infinite--or rather I, the projection of God to the finite--must also be multitude. Hence, in order to save the personality of God--that is to say, in order to save the living God--faith's need--the need of the feeling and the imagination--of conceiving Him and; feeling Him as possessed of a certain internal multiplicity. This need the pagan feeling of a living divinity obviated by polytheism. It is the agglomeration of its gods, the republic of them, that really constitutes its Divinity. The real God of Hellenic paganism is not so much Father Zeus (_Jupiter_) as the whole society of gods and demi-gods. Hence the solemnity of the invocation of Demosthenes when he invoked all the gods and all the goddesses: _tois theohis euchomai pasi kahi pasais_. And when the rationalizers converted the term god, _theos_, which is properly an adjective, a quality predicated of each one of the gods, into a substantive, and added the definite article to it, they produced _the_ god, _o theos_, the dead and abstract god of philosophical rationalism, a substantivized quality and therefore void of personality. For the masculine concrete god (_el_ dios) is nothing but the neuter abstract divine quality (_lo_ divino). Now the transition from feeling the divinity in all things to substantivating it and converting the Divinity into God, cannot be achieved without feeling undergoing a certain risk. And the Aristotelian God, the God of the logical proofs, is nothing more than the Divinity, a concept and not a living person who can be felt and with whom through love man can communicate. This God is merely a substantivized adjective; He is a constitutional God who reigns but does not govern, and Knowledge is His constitutional charter. And even in Greco-Latin paganism itself the tendency towards a living monotheism is apparent in the fact that Zeus was conceived of and felt as a father, _Zeus patêr_, as Homer calls him, the _Ju-piter_ or _Ju-pater_ of the Latins, and as a father of a whole widely extended family of gods and goddesses who together with him constituted the Divinity. The conjunction of pagan polytheism with Judaic monotheism, which had endeavoured by other means to save the personality of God, gave birth to the feeling of the Catholic God, a God who is a society, as the pagan God of whom I have spoken was a society, and who at the same time is one, as the God of Israel finally became one. Such is the Christian Trinity, whose deepest sense rationalistic deism has scarcely ever succeeded in understanding, that deism, which though more or less impregnated with Christianity, always remains Unitarian or Socinian. And the truth is that we feel God less as a superhuman consciousness than as the actual consciousness of the whole human race, past, present, and future, as the collective consciousness of the whole race, and still more, as the total and infinite consciousness which embraces and sustains all consciousnesses, infra-human, human, and perhaps, super-human. The divinity that there is in everything, from the lowest--that is to say, from the least conscious--of living forms, to the highest, including our own human consciousness, this divinity we feel to be personalized, conscious of itself, in God. And this gradation of consciousnesses, this sense of the gulf between the human and the fully divine, the universal, consciousness, finds its counterpart in the belief in angels with their different hierarchies, as intermediaries between our human consciousness and that of God. And these gradations a faith consistent with itself must believe to be infinite, for only by an infinite number of degrees is it possible to pass from the finite to the infinite. Deistic rationalism conceives God as the Reason of the Universe, but its logic compels it to conceive Him as an impersonal reason--that is to say, as an idea--while deistic vitalism feels and imagines God as Consciousness, and therefore as a person or rather as a society of persons. The consciousness of each one of us, in effect, is a society of persons; in me there are various I's and even the I's of those among whom I live, live in me. The God of deistic rationalism, in effect, the God of the logical proofs of His existence, the _ens realissimum_ and the immobile prime mover, is nothing more than a Supreme Reason, but in the same sense in which we can call the law of universal gravitation the reason of the falling of bodies, this law being merely the explanation of the phenomenon. But will anyone say that that which we call the law of universal gravitation, or any other law or mathematical principle, is a true and independent reality, that it is an angel, that it is something which possesses consciousness of itself and others, that it is a person? No, it is nothing but an idea without any reality outside of the mind of him who conceives it. And similarly this God-Reason either possesses consciousness of himself or he possesses no reality outside the mind that conceives him. And if he possesses consciousness of himself, he becomes a personal reason, and then all the value of the traditional proofs disappears, for these proofs only proved a reason, but not a supreme consciousness. Mathematics prove an order, a constancy, a reason in the series of mechanical phenomena, but they 'do not prove that this reason is conscious of itself. This reason is a logical necessity, but the logical necessity does not prove the teleological or finalist necessity. And where there is no finality there is no personality, there is no consciousness. The rational God, therefore--that is to say, the God who is simply the Reason of the Universe and nothing more--consummates his own destruction, is destroyed in our mind in so far as he is such a God, and is only born again in us when we feel him in our heart as a living person, as Consciousness, and no longer merely as the impersonal and objective Reason of the Universe. If we wish for a rational explanation of the construction of a machine, all that we require to know is the mechanical science of its constructor; but if we would have a reason for the existence of such a machine, then, since it is the work not of Nature but of man, we must suppose a conscious, constructive being. But the second part of this reasoning is not applicable to God, even though it be said that in Him the mechanical science and the mechanician, by means of which the machine was constructed, are one and the same thing. From the rational point of view this identification is merely a begging of the question. And thus it is that reason destroys this Supreme Reason, in so far as the latter is a person. The human reason, in effect, is a reason that is based upon the irrational, upon the total vital consciousness, upon will and feeling; our human reason is not a reason that can prove to us the existence of a Supreme Reason, which in its turn would have to be based upon the Supreme Irrational, upon the Universal Consciousness. And the revelation of this Supreme Consciousness in our feeling and imagination, by love, by faith, by the process of personalization, is that which leads us to believe in the living God. And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you, lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And He is in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is Himself creating the longing for Himself. And He is the God of the humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (i Cor. i. 27). And God is in each one of us in the measure in which each one feels Him and loves Him. "If of two men," says Kierkegaard, "one prays to the true God without sincerity of heart, and the other prays to an idol with all the passion of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to an idol, while the second really prays to God." It would be better to say that the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires. And there may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in theology. The venerable Father of the long beard and white locks who appears among the clouds carrying the globe of the world in his hand is more living and more real than the _ens realissimum_ of theodicy. Reason is an analytical, that is, a dissolving force, whenever it transfers its activity from the form of intuitions, whether those of the individual instinct of preservation or those of the social instinct of perpetuation, and applies it to the essence and matter of them. Reason orders the sensible perceptions which give us the material world; but when its analysis is exercised upon the reality of the perceptions themselves, it dissolves them and plunges us into a world of appearances, a world of shadows without consistency, for outside the domain of the formal, reason is nihilist and annihilating. And it performs the same terrible office when we withdraw it from its proper domain and apply it to the scrutiny of the imaginative intuitions which give us the spiritual world. For reason annihilates and imagination completes, integrates or totalizes; reason by itself alone kills, and it is imagination that gives life. If it is true that imagination by itself alone, in giving us life without limit, leads us to lose our identity in the All and also kills us as individuals, it kills us by excess of life. Reason, the head, speaks to us the word Nothing! imagination, the heart, the word All! and between all and nothing, by the fusion of the all and the nothing within us, we live in God, who is All, and God lives in us who, without Him, are nothing. Reason reiterates, Vanity of vanities! all is vanity! And imagination answers, Plenitude of plenitudes! all is plenitude! And thus we live the vanity of plenitude or the plenitude of vanity. And so deeply rooted in the depths of man's being is this vital need of living a world[42] illogical, irrational, personal or divine, that those who do not believe in God, or believe that they do not believe in Him, believe nevertheless in some little pocket god or even devil of their own, or in an omen, or in a horseshoe picked up by chance on the roadside and carried about with them to bring them good luck and defend them from that very reason whose loyal and devoted henchmen they imagine themselves to be. The God whom we hunger after is the God to whom we pray, the God of the _Pater Noster_, of the Lord's Prayer; the God whom we beseech, before all and above all, and whether we are aware of it or not, to instil faith into us, to make us believe in Him, to make Himself in us, the God to whom we pray that His name may be hallowed and that His will may be done--His will, not His reason--on earth as it is in heaven; but feeling that His will cannot be other than the essence of our will, the desire to persist eternally. And such a God is the God of love--_how_ He is it profits us not to ask, but rather let each consult his own heart and give his imagination leave to picture Him in the remoteness of the Universe, gazing down upon him with those myriad eyes of His that shine in the night-darkened heavens. He in whom you believe, reader, He is your God, He who has lived with you and within you, who was born with you, who was a child when you were a child, who became a man according as you became a man, who will vanish when you yourself vanish, and who is your principle of continuity in the spiritual life, for He is the principle of solidarity among all men and in each man and between men and the Universe, and He is, as you are, a person. And if you believe in God, God believes in you, and believing in you He creates you continually. For in your essence you are nothing but the idea that God possesses of you--but a living idea, because the idea of a God who is living and conscious of Himself, of a God-Consciousness, and apart from what you are in the society of God you are nothing. How to define God? Yes, that is our longing. That was the longing of the man Jacob, when, after wrestling all the night until the breaking of the day with that divine visitant, he cried, "Tell me, I pray thee, thy name!" (Gen. xxxii. 29). Listen to the words of that great Christian preacher, Frederick William Robertson, in a sermon preached in Trinity Chapel, Brighton, on the 10th of June, 1849: "And this is our struggle--_the_ struggle. Let any true man go down into the deeps of his own being, and answer us--what is the cry that comes from the most real part of his nature? Is it the cry for daily bread? Jacob asked for that in his _first_ communing with God--preservation, safety. Is it even this--to be forgiven our sins? Jacob had a sin to be forgiven, and in that most solemn moment of his existence he did not say a syllable about it. Or is it this--'Hallowed be Thy name'? No, my brethren. Out of our frail and yet sublime humanity, the demand that rises in the earthlier hours of our religion may be this--'Save my soul'; but in the most unearthly moments it is this--'Tell me thy name.' We move through a world of mystery; and the deepest question is, What is the being that is ever near, sometimes felt, never seen; that which has haunted us from childhood with a dream of something surpassingly fair, which has never yet been realized; that which sweeps through the soul at times as a desolation, like the blast from the wings of the Angel of Death, leaving us stricken and silent in our loneliness; that which has touched us in our tenderest point, and the flesh has quivered with agony, and our mortal affections have shrivelled up with pain; that which comes to us in aspirations of nobleness and conceptions of superhuman excellence? Shall we say It or He? What is It? Who is He? Those anticipations of Immortality and God--what are they? Are they the mere throbbings of my own heart, heard and mistaken for a living something beside me? Are they the sound of my own wishes, echoing through the vast void of Nothingness? or shall I call them God, Father, Spirit, Love? A living Being within me or outside me? Tell me Thy name, thou awful mystery of Loveliness! This is the struggle of all earnest life."[43] Thus Robertson. To which I must add this comment, that Tell me thy name is essentially the same as Save my soul! We ask Him His name in order that He may save our soul, that He may save the human soul, that He may save the human finality of the Universe. And if they tell us that He is called He, that He is the _ens realissimum_ or the Supreme Being or any other metaphysical name, we are not contented, for we know that every metaphysical name is an X, and we go on asking Him His name. And there is only one name that satisfies our longing, and that is the name Saviour, Jesus. God is the love that saves. As Browning said in his _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_, For the loving worm within its clod, Were diviner than a loveless God Amid his worlds, I will dare to say. The essence of the divine is Love, Will that personalizes and eternalizes, that feels the hunger for eternity and infinity. It is ourselves, it is our eternity that we seek in God, it is our divinization. It was Browning again who said, in _Saul_, 'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh that I seek In the Godhead! But this God who saves us, this personal God, the Consciousness of the Universe who envelops and sustains our consciousnesses, this God who gives human finality to the whole creation--does He exist? Have we proofs of His existence? This question leads in the first place to an enquiry into the cleaning of this notion of existence. What is it to exist and in what sense do we speak of things as not existing? In its etymological signification to exist is to be outside of ourselves, outside of our mind: _ex-sistere_. But is there anything outside of our mind, outside of our consciousness which embraces the sum of the known? Undoubtedly there is. The matter of knowledge comes to us from without. And what is the mode of this matter? It is impossible for us to know, for to know is to clothe matter with form, and hence we cannot know the formless as formless. To do so would be tantamount to investing chaos with order. This problem of the existence of God, a problem that is rationally insoluble, is really identical with the problem of consciousness, of the _ex-sistentia_ and not of the _in-sistentia_ of consciousness, it is none other than the problem of the substantial existence of the soul, the problem of the perpetuity of the human soul, the problem of the human finality of the Universe itself. To believe in a living and personal God, in an eternal and universal consciousness that knows and loves us, is to believe that the Universe exists _for_ man. For man, or for a consciousness of the same order as the human consciousness, of the same nature, although sublimated, a consciousness that is capable of knowing us, in the depth of whose being our memory may live for ever. Perhaps, as I have said before, by a supreme and desperate effort of resignation we might succeed in making the sacrifice of our personality provided that we knew that at our death it would go to enrich a Supreme Personality; provided that we knew that the Universal Soul was nourished by our souls and had need of them. We might perhaps meet death with a desperate resignation or with a resigned despair, delivering up our soul to the soul of humanity, bequeathing to it our work, the work that bears the impress of our person, if it were certain that this humanity were destined to bequeath its soul in its turn to another soul, when at long last consciousness shall have become extinct upon this desire-tormented Earth. But is it certain? And if the soul of humanity is eternal, if the human collective consciousness is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe, and if this Consciousness is eternal, why must our own individual consciousness--yours, reader, mine--be not eternal? In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique anomaly--a consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, joined to an organism which can only live within such and such degrees of heat, a merely transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity that inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by living organisms, by consciousnesses akin to our own, and a profound longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less degree, extends through everything. We wish not only to save ourselves, but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is His finality as we feel it. What would a universe be without any consciousness capable of reflecting it and knowing it? What would objectified reason be without will and feeling? For us it would be equivalent to nothing--a thousand times more dreadful than nothing. If such a supposition is reality, our life is deprived of sense and value. It is not, therefore, rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels us to believe in God. And to believe in God--I must reiterate it yet again--is, before all and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger for divinity, to be sensible of His lack and absence, to wish that God may exist. And it is to wish to save the human finality of the Universe. For one might even come to resign oneself to being absorbed by God, if it be that our consciousness is based upon a Consciousness, if consciousness is the end of the Universe. "The wicked man hath said in his heart, There is no God." And this is truth. For in his head the righteous man may say to himself, God does not exist! But only the wicked can say it in his heart. Not to believe that there is a God or to believe that there is not a God, is one thing; to resign oneself to there not being a God is another thing, and it is a terrible and inhuman thing; but not to wish that there be a God exceeds every other moral monstrosity; although, as a matter of fact, those who deny God deny Him because of their despair at not finding Him. And now reason once again confronts us with the Sphinx-like question--the Sphinx, in effect, is reason--Does God exist? This eternal and eternalizing person who gives meaning--and I will add, a human meaning, for there is none other--to the Universe, is it a substantial something, existing independently of our consciousness, independently of our desire? Here we arrive at the insoluble, and it is best that it should be so. Let it suffice for reason that it cannot prove the impossibility of His existence. To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if He existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness. Let us see how this may be. FOOTNOTES: [38] Lecture I., p. 36. London, 1895, Black. [39] _No quiero acordarme_, a phrase that is always associated in Spanish literature with the opening sentence of _Don Quijote: En an lugar de la Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme_.--J.E.C.F. [40] W. Hermann, _Christlich systematische Dogmatik_, in the volume entitled _Systematische christliche Religion. Die Kultur der Gegenwart_ series, published by P. Hinneberg. [41] _Dieu a fait l'homme à son image, mais l'homme le lui a bien rendu_, Voltaire.--J.E.C.F. [42] _Vivir un mundo_. [43] _Sermons_, by the Rev. Frederick W. Robertson. First series, sermon iii., "Jacob's Wrestling." Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübuer and Co., London, 1898. IX FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY Sanctius ac reverentius visum de actis deorum credere quam scire.--TACITUS: _Germania_, 34. The road that leads us to the living God, the God of the heart, and that leads us back to Him when we have left Him for the lifeless God of logic, is the road of faith, not of rational or mathematical conviction. And what is faith? This is the question propounded in the Catechism of Christian Doctrine that was taught us at school, and the answer runs: Faith is believing what we have not seen. This, in an essay written some twelve years ago, I amended as follows: "Believing what we have not seen, no! but creating what we do not see." And I have already told you that believing in God is, in the first instance at least, wishing that God may be, longing for the existence of God. The theological virtue of faith, according to the Apostle Paul, whose definition serves as the basis of the traditional Christian disquisitions upon it, is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," _elpizomevôn hupostasis, pragmatôn elegchos ou blepomenôn_ (Heb. xi. 1). The substance, or rather the support and basis, of hope, the guarantee of it. That which connects, or, rather than connects, subordinates, faith to hope. And in fact we do not hope because we believe, but rather we believe because we hope. It is hope in God, it is the ardent longing that there may be a God who guarantees the eternity of consciousness, that leads us to believe in Him. But faith, which after all is something compound, comprising a cognitive, logical, or rational element together with an affective, biotic, sentimental, and strictly irrational element, is presented to us under the form of knowledge. And hence the insuperable difficulty of separating it from some dogma or other. Pure faith, free from dogmas, about which I wrote a great deal years ago, is a phantasm. Neither is the difficulty overcome by inventing the theory of faith in faith itself. Faith needs a matter to work upon. Believing is a form of knowing, even if it be no more than a knowing and even a formulating of our vital longing. In ordinary language the term "believing," however, is used in a double and even a contradictory sense. It may express, on the one hand, the highest degree of the mind's conviction of the truth of a thing, and, on the other hand, it may imply merely a weak and hesitating persuasion of its truth. For if in one sense believing expresses the firmest kind of assent we are capable of giving, the expression "I believe that it is so, although I am not sure of it," is nevertheless common in ordinary speech. And this agrees with what we have said above with respect to uncertainty as the basis of faith. The most robust faith, in so far as it is distinguished from all other knowledge that is not _pistic_ or of faith--faithful, as we might say--is based on uncertainty. And this is because faith, the guarantee of things hoped for, is not so much rational adhesion to a theoretical principle as trust in a person who assures us of something. Faith supposes an objective, personal element. We do not so much believe something as believe someone who promises us or assures us of this or the other thing. We believe in a person and in God in so far as He is a person and a personalization of the Universe. This personal or religious element in faith is evident. Faith, it is said, is in itself neither theoretical knowledge nor rational adhesion to a truth, nor yet is its essence sufficiently explained by defining it as trust in God. Seeberg says of faith that it is "the inward submission to the spiritual authority of God, immediate obedience. And in so far as this obedience is the means of attaining a rational principle, faith is a personal conviction."[44] The faith which St. Paul defined, _pistis_ in Greek, is better translated as trust, confidence. The word _pistis_ is derived from the verb _peithô_, which in its active voice means to persuade and in its middle voice to trust in someone, to esteem him as worthy of trust, to place confidence in him, to obey. And _fidare se_, to trust, is derived from the root _fid_--whence _fides_, faith, and also confidence. The Greek root _pith_ and the Latin _fid_ are twin brothers. In the root of the word "faith" itself, therefore, there is implicit the idea of confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we conceive as something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the person who gives us hope, that we believe, not directly and immediately in truth itself or in hope itself. And this personal or rather personifying element in faith extends even to the lowest forms of it, for it is this that produces faith in pseudo-revelation, in inspiration, in miracle. There is a story of a Parisian doctor, who, when he found that a quack-healer was drawing away his clientèle, removed to a quarter of the city as distant as possible from his former abode, where he was totally unknown, and here he gave himself out as a quack-healer and conducted himself as such. When he was denounced as an illegal practitioner he produced his doctor's certificate, and explained his action more or less as follows: "I am indeed a doctor, but if I had announced myself as such I should not have had as large a clientèle as I have as a quack-healer. Now that all my clients know that I have studied medicine, however, and that I am a properly qualified medical man, they will desert me in favour of some quack who can assure them that he has never studied, but cures simply by inspiration." And true it is that a doctor is discredited when it is proved that he has never studied medicine and possesses no qualifying certificate, and that a quack is discredited when it is proved that he has studied and is a qualified practitioner. For some believe in science and in study, while others believe in the person, in inspiration, and even in ignorance. "There is one distinction in the world's geography which comes immediately to our minds when we thus state the different thoughts and desires of men concerning their religion. We remember how the whole world is in general divided into two hemispheres upon this matter. One half of the world--the great dim East--is mystic. It insists upon not seeing anything too clearly. Make any one of the great ideas of life distinct and clear, and immediately it seems to the Oriental to be untrue. He has an instinct which tells him that the vastest thoughts are too vast for the human mind, and that if they are made to present themselves in forms of statement which the human mind can comprehend, their nature is violated and their strength is lost. "On the other hand, the Occidental, the man of the West, demands clearness and is impatient with mystery. He loves a definite statement as much as his brother of the East dislikes it. He insists on knowing what the eternal and infinite forces mean to his personal life, how they will make him personally happier and better, almost how they will build the house over his head, and cook the dinner on his hearth. This is the difference between the East and the West, between man on the banks of the Ganges and man on the banks of the Mississippi. Plenty of exceptions, of course, there are--mystics in Boston and St. Louis, hard-headed men of facts in Bombay and Calcutta. The two great dispositions cannot be shut off from one another by an ocean or a range of mountains. In some nations and places--as, for instance, among the Jews and in our own New England--they notably commingle. But in general they thus divide the world between them. The East lives in the moonlight of mystery, the West in the sunlight of scientific fact. The East cries out to the Eternal for vague impulses. The West seizes the present with light hands, and will not let it go till it has furnished it with reasonable, intelligible motives. Each misunderstands, distrusts, and in large degree despises the other. But the two hemispheres together, and not either one by itself, make up the total world." Thus, in one of his sermons, spoke the great Unitarian preacher Phillips Brooks, late Bishop of Massachusetts (_The Mystery of Iniquity and Other Sermons_, sermon xvi.). We might rather say that throughout the whole world, in the East as well as in the West, rationalists seek definition and believe in the concept, while vitalists seek inspiration and believe in the person. The former scrutinize the Universe in order that they may wrest its secrets from it; the latter pray to the Consciousness of the Universe, strive to place themselves in immediate relationship with the Soul of the World, with God, in order that they may find the guarantee or substance of what they hope for, which is not to die, and the evidence of what they do not see. And since a person is a will, and will always has reference to the future, he who believes, believes in what is to come--that is, in what he hopes for. We do not believe, strictly speaking, in what is or in what was, except as the guarantee, as the substance, of what will be. For the Christian, to believe in the resurrection of Christ--that is to say, in tradition and in the Gospel, which assure him that Christ has risen, both of them personal forces--is to believe that he himself will one day rise again by the grace of Christ. And even scientific faith--for such there is--refers to the future and is an act of trust. The man of science believes that at a certain future date an eclipse of the sun will take place; he believes that the laws which have governed the world hitherto will continue to govern it. To believe, I repeat, is to place confidence in someone, and it has reference to a person. I say that I know that there is an animal called the horse, and that it has such and such characteristics, because I have seen it; and I say that I believe in the existence of the giraffe or the ornithorhyncus, and that it possesses such and such qualities, because I believe those who assure me that they have seen it. And hence the element of uncertainty attached to faith, for it is possible that a person may be deceived or that he may deceive us. But, on the other hand, this personal element in belief gives it an effective and loving character, and above all, in religious faith, a reference to what is hoped for. Perhaps there is nobody who would sacrifice his life for the sake of maintaining that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles, for such a truth does not demand the sacrifice of our life; but, on the other hand, there are many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their religious faith. Indeed it is truer to say that martyrs make faith than that faith makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition of a theoretical truth, a process in which the will merely sets in motion our faculty of comprehension; faith is an act of the will--it is a movement of the soul towards a practical truth, towards a person, towards something that makes us not merely comprehend life, but that makes us live.[45] Faith makes us live by showing us that life, although it is dependent upon reason, has its well-spring and source of power elsewhere, in something supernatural and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind, has said that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that gives life, and that when it is lacking, all the speculations of the reason lead to nothing but affliction of spirit (_Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l'histoire_, § 329). And in truth we wish to live. But, although we have said that faith is a thing of the will, it would perhaps be better to say that it is will itself--the will not to die, or, rather, that it is some other psychic force distinct from intelligence, will, and feeling. We should thus have feeling, knowing, willing, and believing or creating. For neither feeling, nor intelligence, nor will creates; they operate upon a material already given, upon the material given them by faith. Faith is the creative power in man. But since it has a more intimate relation with the will than with any other of his faculties, we conceive it under the form of volition. It should be borne in mind, however, that wishing to believe--that is to say, wishing to create--is not precisely the same as believing or creating, although it is its starting-point. Faith, therefore, if not a creative force, is the fruit of the will, and its function is to create. Faith, in a certain sense, creates its object. And faith in God consists in creating God; and since it is God who gives us faith in Himself, it is God who is continually creating Himself in us. Therefore St. Augustine said: "I will seek Thee, Lord, by calling upon Thee, and I will call upon Thee by believing in Thee. My faith calls upon Thee, Lord, the faith which Thou hast given me, with which Thou hast inspired me through the Humanity of Thy Son, through the ministry of Thy preacher" (_Confessions_, book i., chap. i.). The power of creating God in our own image and likeness, of personalizing the Universe, simply means that we carry God within us, as the substance of what we hope for, and that God is continually creating us in His own image and likeness. And we create God--that is to say, God creates Himself in us--by compassion, by love. To believe in God is to love Him, and in our love to fear Him; and we begin by loving Him even before knowing Him, and by loving Him we come at last to see and discover Him in all things. Those who say that they believe in God and yet neither love nor fear Him, do not in fact believe in Him but in those who have taught them that God exists, and these in their turn often enough do not believe in Him either. Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself. And just as belief in God is born of love, so also it may be born of fear, and even of hate, and of such kind was the belief of Vanni Fucci, the thief, whom Dante depicts insulting God with obscene gestures in Hell (_Inf._, xxv., 1-3). For the devils also believe in God, and not a few atheists. Is it not perhaps a mode of believing in God, this fury with which those deny and even insult Him, who, because they cannot bring themselves to believe in Him, wish that He may not exist? Like those who believe, they, too, wish that God may exist; but being men of a weak and passive or of an evil disposition, in whom reason is stronger than will, they feel themselves caught in the grip of reason and haled along in their own despite, and they fall into despair, and because of their despair they deny, and in their denial they affirm and create the thing that they deny, and God reveals Himself in them, affirming Himself by their very denial of Him. But it will be objected to all this that to demonstrate that faith creates its own object is to demonstrate that this object is an object for faith alone, that outside faith it has no objective reality; just as, on the other hand, to maintain that faith is necessary because it affords consolation to the masses of the people, or imposes a wholesome restraint upon them, is to declare that the object of faith is illusory. What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith is, before all and above all, wishing that God may exist. Wishing that God may exist, and acting and feeling as if He did exist. And desiring God's existence and acting conformably with this desire, is the means whereby we create God--that is, whereby God creates Himself in us, manifests Himself to us, opens and reveals Himself to us. For God goes out to meet him who seeks Him with love and by love, and hides Himself from him who searches for Him with the cold and loveless reason. God wills that the heart should have rest, but not the head, reversing the order of the physical life in which the head sleeps and rests at times while the heart wakes and works unceasingly. And thus knowledge without love leads us away from God; and love, even without knowledge, and perhaps better without it, leads us to God, and through God to wisdom. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God! And if you should ask me how I believe in God--that is to say, how God creates Himself in me and reveals Himself to me--my answer may, perhaps, provoke your smiles or your laughter, or it may even scandalize you. I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me, leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a particular providence and of a universal mind that marks out for me the course of my own destiny. And the concept of law--it is nothing but a concept after all!--tells me nothing and teaches me nothing. Once and again in my life I have seen myself suspended in a trance over the abyss; once and again I have found myself at the cross-roads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in choosing one I should be renouncing all the others--for there is no turning back upon these roads of life; and once and again in such unique moments as these I have felt the impulse of a mighty power, conscious, sovereign, and loving. And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens out the way of the Lord. It is possible for a man to feel the Universe calling to him and guiding him as one person guides and calls to another, to hear within him its voice speaking without words and saying: "Go and preach to all peoples!" How do you know that the man you see before you possesses a consciousness like you, and that an animal also possesses such a consciousness, more or less dimly, but not a stone? Because the man acts towards you like a man, like a being made in your likeness, and because the stone does not act towards you at all, but suffers you to act upon it. And in the same way I believe that the Universe possesses a certain consciousness like myself, because its action towards me is a human action, and I feel that it is a personality that environs me. Here is a formless mass; it appears to be a kind of animal; it is impossible to distinguish its members; I only see two eyes, eyes which gaze at me with a human gaze, the gaze of a fellow-being, a gaze which asks for pity; and I hear it breathing. I conclude that in this formless mass there is a consciousness. In just such a way and none other, the starry-eyed heavens gaze down upon the believer, with a superhuman, a divine, gaze, a gaze that asks for supreme pity and supreme love, and in the serenity of the night he hears the breathing of God, and God touches him in his heart of hearts and reveals Himself to him. It is the Universe, living, suffering, loving, and asking for love. From loving little trifling material things, which lightly come and lightly go, having no deep root in our affections, we come to love the more lasting things, the things which our hands cannot grasp; from loving goods we come to love the Good; from loving beautiful things we come to love Beauty; from loving the true we come to love the Truth; from loving pleasures we come to love Happiness; and, last of all, we come to love Love. We emerge from ourselves in order to penetrate further into our supreme I; individual consciousness emerges from us in order to submerge itself in the total Consciousness of which we form a part, but without being dissolved in it. And God is simply the Love that springs from universal suffering and becomes consciousness. But this, it will be said, is merely to revolve in an iron ring, for such a God is not objective. And at this point it may not be out of place to give reason its due and to examine exactly what is meant by a thing existing, being objective. What is it, in effect, to exist? and when do we say that a thing exists? A thing exists when it is placed outside us, and in such a way that it shall have preceded our perception of it and be capable of continuing to subsist outside us after we have disappeared. But have I any certainty that anything has preceded me or that anything must survive me? Can my consciousness know that there is anything outside it? Everything that I know or can know is within my consciousness. We will not entangle ourselves, therefore, in the insoluble problem of an objectivity outside our perceptions. Things exist in so far as they act. To exist is to act. But now it will be said that it is not God, but the idea of God, that acts in us. To which we shall reply that it is sometimes God acting by His idea, but still very often it is rather God acting in us by Himself. And the retort will be a demand for proofs of the objective truth of the existence of God, since we ask for signs. And we shall have to answer with Pilate: What is truth? And having asked this question, Pilate turned away without waiting for an answer and proceeded to wash his hands in order that he might exculpate himself for having allowed Christ to be condemned to death. And there are many who ask this question, What is truth? but without any intention of waiting for the answer, and solely in order that they may turn away and wash their hands of the crime of having helped to kill and eject God from their own consciousness or from the consciousness of others. What is truth? There are two kinds of truth--the logical or objective, the opposite of which is error, and the moral or subjective, the opposite of which is falsehood. And in a previous essay I have endeavoured to show that error is the fruit of falsehood.[46] Moral truth, the road that leads to intellectual truth, which also is moral, inculcates the study of science, which is over and above all a school of sincerity and humility. Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are--that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them be. In a religiously scientific investigation, it is the data of reality themselves, it is the perceptions which we receive from the outside world, that formulate themselves in our mind as laws--it is not we ourselves who thus formulate them. It is the numbers themselves which in our mind create mathematics. Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts. And it is the gateway of religion; but within the temple itself its function ceases. And just as there is logical truth, opposed to error, and moral truth, opposed to falsehood, so there is also esthetic truth or verisimilitude, which is opposed to extravagance, and religious truth or hope, which is opposed to the inquietude of absolute despair. For esthetic verisimilitude, the expression of which is sensible, differs from logical truth, the demonstration of which is rational; and religious truth, the truth of faith, the substance of things hoped for, is not equivalent to moral truth, but superimposes itself upon it. He who affirms a faith built upon a basis of uncertainty does not and cannot lie. And not only do we not believe with reason, nor yet above reason nor below reason, but we believe against reason. Religious faith, it must be repeated yet again, is not only irrational, it is contra-rational. Kierkegaard says: "Poetry is illusion before knowledge; religion illusion after knowledge. Between poetry and religion the worldly wisdom of living plays its comedy. Every individual who does not live either poetically or religiously is a fool" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, chap. iv., sect. 2a, § 2). The same writer tells us that Christianity is a desperate sortie (_salida_). Even so, but it is only by the very desperateness of this sortie that we can win through to hope, to that hope whose vitalizing illusion is of more force than all rational knowledge, and which assures us that there is always something that cannot be reduced to reason. And of reason the same may be said as was said of Christ: that he who is not with it is against it. That which is not rational is contra-rational; and such is hope. By this circuitous route we always arrive at hope in the end. To the mystery of love, which is the mystery of suffering, belongs a mysterious form, and this form is time. We join yesterday to to-morrow with links of longing, and the now is, strictly, nothing but the endeavour of the before to make itself the after; the present is simply the determination of the past to become the future. The now is a point which, if not sharply articulated, vanishes; and, nevertheless, in this point is all eternity, the substance of time. Everything that has been can be only as it was, and everything that is can be only as it is; the possible is always relegated to the future, the sole domain of liberty, wherein imagination, the creative and liberating energy, the incarnation of faith, has space to roam at large. Love ever looks and tends to the future, for its work is the work of our perpetuation; the property of love is to hope, and only upon hopes does it nourish itself. And thus when love sees the fruition of its desire it becomes sad, for it then discovers that what it desired was not its true end, and that God gave it this desire merely as a lure to spur it to action; it discovers that its end is further on, and it sets out again upon its toilsome pilgrimage through life, revolving through a constant cycle of illusions and disillusions. And continually it transforms its frustrated hopes into memories, and from these memories it draws fresh hopes. From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jewelled visions of our future; imagination shapes our remembrances into hopes. And humanity is like a young girl full of longings, hungering for life and thirsting for love, who weaves her days with dreams, and hopes, hopes ever, hopes without ceasing, for the eternal and predestined lover, for him who, because he was destined for her from the beginning, from before the dawn of her remotest memory, from before her cradle-days, shall live with her and for her into the illimitable future, beyond the stretch of her furthest hopes, beyond the grave itself. And for this poor lovelorn humanity, as for the girl ever awaiting her lover, there is no kinder wish than that when the winter of life shall come it may find the sweet dreams of its spring changed into memories sweeter still, and memories that shall burgeon into new hopes. In the days when our summer is over, what a flow of calm felicity, of resignation to destiny, must come from remembering hopes which have never been realized and which, because they have never been realized, preserve their pristine purity. Love hopes, hopes ever and never wearies of hoping; and love of God, our faith in God, is, above all, hope in Him. For God dies not, and he who hopes in God shall live for ever. And our fundamental hope, the root and stem of all our hopes, is the hope of eternal life. And if faith is the substance of hope, hope in its turn is the form of faith. Until it gives us hope, our faith is a formless faith, vague, chaotic, potential; it is but the possibility of believing, the longing to believe. But we must needs believe in something, and we believe in what we hope for, we believe in hope. We remember the past, we know the present, we only believe in the future. To believe what we have not seen is to believe what we shall see. Faith, then, I repeat once again, is faith in hope; we believe what we hope for. Love makes us believe in God, in whom we hope and from whom we hope to receive life to come; love makes us believe in that which the dream of hope creates for us. Faith is our longing for the eternal, for God; and hope is God's longing, the longing of the eternal, of the divine in us, which advances to meet our faith and uplifts us. Man aspires to God by faith and cries to Him: "I believe--give me, Lord, wherein to believe!" And God, the divinity in man, sends him hope in another life in order that he may believe in it. Hope is the reward of faith. Only he who believes truly hopes; and only he who truly hopes believes. We only believe what we hope, and we only hope what we believe. It was hope that called God by the name of Father; and this name, so comforting yet so mysterious, is still bestowed upon Him by hope. The father gave us life and gives bread wherewith to sustain it, and we ask the father to preserve our life for us. And if Christ was he who, with the fullest heart and purest mouth, named with the name of Father his Father and ours, if the noblest feeling of Christianity is the feeling of the Fatherhood of God, it is because in Christ the human race sublimated its hunger for eternity. It may perhaps be said that this longing of faith, that this hope, is more than anything else an esthetic feeling. Possibly the esthetic feeling enters into it, but without completely satisfying it. We seek in art an image of eternalization. If for a brief moment our spirit finds peace and rest and assuagement in the contemplation of the beautiful, even though it finds therein no real cure for its distress, it is because the beautiful is the revelation of the eternal, of the divine in things, and beauty but the perpetuation of momentaneity. Just as truth is the goal of rational knowledge, so beauty is the goal of hope, which is perhaps in its essence irrational. Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time, returns to eternity. The temporal world has its roots in eternity, and in eternity yesterday is united with to-day and to-morrow. The scenes of life pass before us as in a cinematograph show, but on the further side of time the film is one and indivisible. Physicists affirm that not a single particle of matter nor a single tremor of energy is lost, but that each is transformed and transmitted and persists. And can it be that any form, however fugitive it may be, is lost? We must needs believe--believe and hope!--that it is not, but that somewhere it remains archived and perpetuated, and that there is some mirror of eternity in which, without losing themselves in one another, all the images that pass through time are received. Every impression that reaches me remains stored up in my brain even though it may be so deep or so weak that it is buried in the depths of my subconsciousness; but from these depths it animates my life; and if the whole of my spirit, the total content of my soul, were to awake to full consciousness, all these dimly perceived and forgotten fugitive impressions would come to life again, including even those which I had never been aware of. I carry within me everything that has passed before me, and I perpetuate it with myself, and it may be that it all goes into my germs, and that all my ancestors live undiminished in me and will continue so to live, united with me, in my descendants. And perhaps I, the whole I, with all this universe of mine, enter into each one of my actions, or, at all events, that which is essential in me enters into them--that which makes me myself, my individual essence. And how is this individual essence in each several thing--that which makes it itself and not another--revealed to us save as beauty? What is the beauty of anything but its eternal essence, that which unites its past with its future, that element of it that rests and abides in the womb of eternity? or, rather, what is it but the revelation of its divinity? And this beauty, which is the root of eternity, is revealed to us by love; it is the supreme revelation of the love of God and the token of our ultimate victory over time. It is love that reveals to us the eternal in us and in our neighbours. Is it the beautiful, the eternal, in things, that awakens and kindles our love for them, or is it our love for things that reveals to us the beautiful, the eternal, in them? Is not beauty perhaps a creation of love, in the same way and in the same sense that the sensible world is a creation of the instinct of preservation and the supersensible world of that of perpetuation? Is not beauty, and together with beauty eternity, a creation of love? "Though our outward man perish," says the Apostle, "yet the inward man is renewed day by day" (2 Cor. iv. 16). The man of passing appearances perishes and passes away with them; the man of reality remains and grows. "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory" (ver. 17). Our suffering causes us anguish, and this anguish, bursting because of its own fullness, seems to us consolation. "While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal" (ver. 18). This suffering gives hope, which is the beautiful in life, the supreme beauty, or the supreme consolation. And since love is full of suffering, since love is compassion and pity, beauty springs from compassion and is simply the temporal consolation that compassion seeks. A tragic consolation! And the supreme beauty is that of tragedy. The consciousness that everything passes away, that we ourselves pass away, and that everything that is ours and everything that environs us passes away, fills us with anguish, and this anguish itself reveals to us the consolation of that which does not pass away, of the eternal, of the beautiful. And this beauty thus revealed, this perpetuation of momentaneity, only realizes itself practically, only lives through the work of charity. Hope in action is charity, and beauty in action is goodness. * * * * * Charity, which eternalizes everything it loves, and in giving us the goodness of it brings to light its hidden beauty, has its root in the love of God, or, if you like, in charity towards God, in pity for God. Love, pity, personalizes everything, we have said; in discovering the suffering in everything and in personalizing everything, it personalizes the Universe itself as well--for the Universe also suffers--and it discovers God to us. For God is revealed to us because He suffers and because we suffer; because He suffers He demands our love, and because we suffer He gives us His love, and He covers our anguish with the eternal and infinite anguish. This was the scandal of Christianity among Jews and Greeks, among Pharisees and Stoics, and this, which was its scandal of old, the scandal of the Cross, is still its scandal to-day, and will continue to be so, even among Christians themselves--the scandal of a God who becomes man in order that He may suffer and die and rise again, because He has suffered and died, the scandal of a God subject to suffering and death. And this truth that God suffers--a truth that appals the mind of man--is the revelation of the very heart of the Universe and of its mystery, the revelation that God revealed to us when He sent His Son in order that he might redeem us by suffering and dying. It was the revelation of the divine in suffering, for only that which suffers is divine. And men made a god of this Christ who suffered, and through him they discovered the eternal essence of a living, human God--that is, of a God who suffers--it is only the dead, the inhuman, that does not suffer--a God who loves and thirsts for love, for pity, a God who is a person. Whosoever knows not the Son will never know the Father, and the Father is only known through the Son; whosoever knows not the Son of Man--he who suffers bloody anguish and the pangs of a breaking heart, whose soul is heavy within him even unto death, who suffers the pain that kills and brings to life again--will never know the Father, and can know nothing of the suffering God. He who does not suffer, and who does not suffer because he does not live, is that logical and frozen _ens realissimum_, the _primum movens_, that impassive entity, which because of its impassivity is nothing but a pure idea. The category does not suffer, but neither does it live or exist as a person. And how is the world to derive its origin and life from an impassive idea? Such a world would be but the idea of the world. But the world suffers, and suffering is the sense of the flesh of reality; it is the spirit's sense of its mass and substance; it is the self's sense of its own tangibility; it is immediate reality. Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons. And suffering is universal, suffering is that which unites all us living beings together; it is the universal or divine blood that flows through us all. That which we call will, what is it but suffering? And suffering has its degrees, according to the depth of its penetration, from the suffering that floats upon the sea of appearances to the eternal anguish, the source of the tragic sense of life, which seeks a habitation in the depths of the eternal and there awakens consolation; from the physical suffering that contorts our bodies to the religious anguish that flings us upon the bosom of God, there to be watered by the divine tears. Anguish is something far deeper, more intimate, and more spiritual than suffering. We are wont to feel the touch of anguish even in the midst of that which we call happiness, and even because of this happiness itself, to which we cannot resign ourselves and before which we tremble. The happy who resign themselves to their apparent happiness, to a transitory happiness, seem to be as men without substance, or, at any rate, men who have not discovered this substance in themselves, who have not touched it. Such men are usually incapable of loving or of being loved, and they go through life without really knowing either pain or bliss. There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. And love leads us to no other happiness than that of love itself and its tragic consolation of uncertain hope. The moment love becomes happy and satisfied, it no longer desires and it is no longer love. The satisfied, the happy, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbour to annihilation. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be. Man is the more man--that is, the more divine--the greater his capacity for suffering, or, rather, for anguish. At our coming into the world it is given to us to choose between love and happiness, and we wish--poor fools!--for both: the happiness of loving and the love of happiness. But we ought to ask for the gift of love and not of happiness, and to be preserved from dozing away into habit, lest we should fall into a fast sleep, a sleep without waking, and so lose our consciousness beyond power of recovery. We ought to ask God to make us conscious of ourselves in ourselves, in our suffering. What is Fate, what is Fatality, but the brotherhood of love and suffering? What is it but that terrible mystery in virtue of which love dies as soon as it touches the happiness towards which it reaches out, and true happiness dies with it? Love and suffering mutually engender one another, and love is charity and compassion, and the love that is not charitable and compassionate is not love. Love, in a word, is resigned despair. That which the mathematicians call the problem of maxima and minima, which is also called the law of economy, is the formula for all existential--that is, passional--activity. In material mechanics and in social mechanics, in industry and in political economy, every problem resolves itself into an attempt to obtain the greatest possible resulting utility with the least possible effort, the greatest income with the least expenditure, the most pleasure with the least pain. And the terrible and tragic formula of the inner, spiritual life is either to obtain the most happiness with the least love, or the most love with the least happiness. And it is necessary to choose between the one and the other, and to know that he who approaches the infinite of love, the love that is infinite, approaches the zero of happiness, the supreme anguish. And in reaching this zero he is beyond the reach of the misery that kills. "Be not, and thou shalt be mightier than aught that is," said Brother Juan de los Angeles in one of his _Diálogos de la conquista del reino de Dios_ (Dial. iii. 8). And there is something still more anguishing than suffering. A man about to receive a much-dreaded blow expects to have to suffer so severely that he may even succumb to the suffering, and when the blow falls he feels scarcely any pain; but afterwards, when he has come to himself and is conscious of his insensibility, he is seized with terror, a tragic terror, the most terrible of all, and choking with anguish he cries out: "Can it be that I no longer exist?" Which would you find most appalling--to feel such a pain as would deprive you of your senses on being pierced through with a white-hot iron, or to see yourself thus pierced through without feeling any pain? Have you never felt the horrible terror of feeling yourself incapable of suffering and of tears? Suffering tells us that we exist; suffering tells us that those whom we love exist; suffering tells us that the world in which we live exists; and suffering tells us that God exists and suffers; but it is the suffering of anguish, the anguish of surviving and being eternal. Anguish discovers God to us and makes us love Him. To believe in God is to love Him, and to love Him is to feel Him suffering, to pity Him. It may perhaps appear blasphemous to say that God suffers, for suffering implies limitation. Nevertheless, God, the Consciousness of the Universe, is limited by the brute matter in which He lives, by the unconscious, from which He seeks to liberate Himself and to liberate us. And we, in our turn, must seek to liberate Him. God suffers in each and all of us, in each and all of the consciousnesses imprisoned in transitory matter, and we all suffer in Him. Religious anguish is but the divine suffering, the feeling that God suffers in me and that I suffer in Him. The universal suffering is the anguish of all in seeking to be all else but without power to achieve it, the anguish of each in being he that he is, being at the same time all that he is not, and being so for ever. The essence of a being is not only its endeavour to persist for ever, as Spinoza taught us, but also its endeavour to universalize itself; it is the hunger and thirst for eternity and infinity. Every created being tends not only to preserve itself in itself, but to perpetuate itself, and, moreover, to invade all other beings, to be others without ceasing to be itself, to extend its limits to the infinite, but without breaking them. It does not wish to throw down its walls and leave everything laid flat, common and undefended, confounding and losing its own individuality, but it wishes to carry its walls to the extreme limits of creation and to embrace everything within them. It seeks the maximum of individuality with the maximum also of personality; it aspires to the identification of the Universe with itself; it aspires to God. And this vast I, within which each individual I seeks to put the Universe--what is it but God? And because I aspire to God, I love Him; and this aspiration of mine towards God is my love for Him, and just as I suffer in being He, He also suffers in being I, and in being each one of us. I am well aware that in spite of my warning that I am attempting here to give a logical form to a system of a-logical feelings, I shall be scandalizing not a few of my readers in speaking of a God who suffers, and in applying to God Himself, as God, the passion of Christ. The God of so-called rational theology excludes in effect all suffering. And the reader will no doubt think that this idea of suffering can have only a metaphorical value when applied to God, similar to that which is supposed to attach to those passages in the Old Testament which describe the human passions of the God of Israel. For anger, wrath, and vengeance are impossible without suffering. And as for saying that God suffers through being bound by matter, I shall be told that, in the words of Plotinus (_Second Ennead_, ix., 7), the Universal Soul cannot be bound by the very thing--namely, bodies or matter--which is bound by It. Herein is involved the whole problem of the origin of evil, the evil of sin no less than the evil of pain, for if God does not suffer, He causes suffering; and if His life, since God lives, is not a process of realizing in Himself a total consciousness which is continually becoming fuller--that is to say, which is continually becoming more and more God--it is a process of drawing all things towards Himself, of imparting Himself to all, of constraining the consciousness of each part to enter into the consciousness of the All, which is He Himself, until at last He comes to be all in all--_panta en paot_, according to the expression of St. Paul, the first Christian mystic. We will discuss this more fully, however, in the next chapter on the apocatastasis or beatific union. For the present let it suffice to say that there is a vast current of suffering urging living beings towards one another, constraining them to love one another and to seek one another, and to endeavour to complete one another, and to be each himself and others at the same time. In God everything lives, and in His suffering everything suffers, and in loving God we love His creatures in Him, just as in loving and pitying His creatures we love and pity God in them. No single soul can be free so long as there is anything enslaved in God's world, neither can God Himself, who lives in the soul of each one of us, be free so long as our soul is not free. My most immediate sensation is the sense and love of my own misery, my anguish, the compassion I feel for myself, the love I bear for myself. And when this compassion is vital and superabundant, it overflows from me upon others, and from the excess of my own compassion I come to have compassion for my neighbours. My own misery is so great that the compassion for myself which it awakens within me soon overflows and reveals to me the universal misery. And what is charity but the overflow of pity? What is it but reflected pity that overflows and pours itself out in a flood of pity for the woes of others and in the exercise of charity? When the overplus of our pity leads us to the consciousness of God within us, it fills us with so great anguish for the misery shed abroad in all things, that we have to pour our pity abroad, and this we do in the form of charity. And in this pouring abroad of our pity we experience relief and the painful sweetness of goodness. This is what Teresa de Jesús, the mystical doctor, called "sweet-tasting suffering" (_dolor sabroso_), and she knew also the lore of suffering loves. It is as when one looks upon some thing of beauty and feels the necessity of making others sharers in it. For the creative impulse, in which charity consists, is the work of suffering love. We feel, in effect, a satisfaction in doing good when good superabounds within us, when we are swollen with pity; and we are swollen with pity when God, filling our soul, gives us the suffering sensation of universal life, of the universal longing for eternal divinization. For we are not merely placed side by side with others in the world, having no common root with them, neither is their lot indifferent to us, but their pain hurts us, their anguish fills us with anguish, and we feel our community of origin and of suffering even without knowing it. Suffering, and pity which is born of suffering, are what reveal to us the brotherhood of every existing thing that possesses life and more or less of consciousness. "Brother Wolf" St. Francis of Assisi called the poor wolf that feels a painful hunger for the sheep, and feels, too, perhaps, the pain of having to devour them; and this brotherhood reveals to us the Fatherhood of God, reveals to us that God is a Father and that He exists. And as a Father He shelters our common misery. Charity, then, is the impulse to liberate myself and all my fellows from suffering, and to liberate God, who embraces us all. Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate revelation of consciousness, and it may be that our body was given us simply in order that suffering might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely possess consciousness of himself. The child first cries at birth when the air, entering into his lungs and limiting him, seems to say to him: You have to breathe me in order that you may live! We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us, that the material or sensible world which the senses create for us exists solely in order to embody and sustain that other spiritual or imaginable world which the imagination creates for us. Consciousness tends to be ever more and more consciousness, to intensify its consciousness, to acquire full consciousness of its complete self, of the whole of its content. We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire consciousness of itself, to be itself--for to be oneself is to know oneself--to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at the same time that it remains the prisoner of it. The face can only see itself when portrayed in the mirror, but in order to see itself it must remain the prisoner of the mirror in which it sees itself, and the image which it sees therein is as the mirror distorts it; and if the mirror breaks, the image is broken; and if the mirror is blurred, the image is blurred. Spirit finds itself limited by the matter in which it has to live and acquire consciousness of itself, just as thought is limited by the word in which as a social medium it is incarnated. Without matter there is no spirit, but matter makes spirit suffer by limiting it. And suffering is simply the obstacle which matter opposes to spirit; it is the clash of the conscious with the unconscious. Suffering is, in effect, the barrier which unconsciousness, matter, sets up against consciousness, spirit; it is the resistance to will, the limit which the visible universe imposes upon God; it is the wall that consciousness runs up against when it seeks to extend itself at the expense of unconsciousness; it is the resistance which unconsciousness opposes to its penetration by consciousness. Although in deference to authority we may believe, we do not in fact know, that we possess heart, stomach, or lungs so long as they do not cause us discomfort, suffering, or anguish. Physical suffering, or even discomfort, is what reveals to us our own internal core. And the same is true of spiritual suffering and anguish, for we do not take account of the fact that we possess a soul until it hurts us. Anguish is that which makes consciousness return upon itself. He who knows no anguish knows what he does and what he thinks, but he does not truly know that he does it and that he thinks it. He thinks, but he does not think that he thinks, and his thoughts are as if they were not his. Neither does he properly belong to himself. For it is only anguish, it is only the passionate longing never to die, that makes a human spirit master of itself. Pain, which is a kind of dissolution, makes us discover our internal core; and in the supreme dissolution, which is death, we shall, at last, through the pain of annihilation, arrive at the core of our temporal core--at God, whom in our spiritual anguish we breathe and learn to love. Even so must we believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us. The origin of evil, as many discovered of old, is nothing other than what is called by another name the inertia of matter, and, as applied to the things of the spirit, sloth. And not without truth has it been said that sloth is the mother of all vices, not forgetting that the supreme sloth is that of not longing madly for immortality. Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always more, hunger of eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God--these are never satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and to be all other consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself: it seeks to be God. And matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing, its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and matter answers: I wish not to be! And in the order of human life, the individual would tend, under the sole instigation of the instinct of preservation, the creator of the material world, to destruction, to annihilation, if it were not for society, which, in implanting in him the instinct of perpetuation, the creator of the spiritual world, lifts and impels him towards the All, towards immortalization. And everything that man does as a mere individual, opposed to society, for the sake of his own preservation, and at the expense of society, if need be, is bad; and everything that he does as a social person, for the sake of the society in which he himself is included, for the sake of its perpetuation and of the perpetuation of himself in it, is good. And many of those who seem to be the greatest egoists, trampling everything under their feet in their zeal to bring their work to a successful issue, are in reality men whose souls are aflame and overflowing with charity, for they subject and subordinate their petty personal I to the social I that has a mission to accomplish. He who would tie the working of love, of spiritualization, of liberation, to transitory and individual forms, crucifies God in matter; he crucifies God who makes the ideal subservient to his own temporal interests or worldly glory. And such a one is a deicide. The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavour to liberate God from brute matter, to endeavour to give consciousness to everything, to spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious, that the Word may become life. We have but to look at the eucharistic symbol to see an instance of it. The Word has been imprisoned in a piece of material bread, and it has been imprisoned therein to the end that we may eat it, and in eating it make it our own, part and parcel of our body in which the spirit dwells, and that it may beat in our heart and think in our brain and be consciousness. It has been imprisoned in this bread in order that, after being buried in our body, it may come to life again in our spirit. And we must spiritualize everything. And this we shall accomplish by giving our spirit, which grows the more the more it is distributed, to all men and to all things. And we give our spirit when we invade other spirits and make ourselves the master of them. All this is to be believed with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us. * * * * * And now we are about to see what practical consequences all these more or less fantastical doctrines may have in regard to logic, to esthetics, and, above all, to ethics--their religious concretion, in a word. And perhaps then they will gain more justification in the eyes of the reader who, in spite of my warnings, has hitherto been looking for the scientific or even philosophic development of an irrational system. I think it may not be superfluous to recall to the reader once again what I said at the conclusion of the sixth chapter, that entitled "In the Depths of the Abyss"; but we now approach the practical or pragmatical part of this treatise. First, however, we must see how the religious sense may become concrete in the hopeful vision of another life. FOOTNOTES: [44] Reinold Seeberg, _Christliche-protestantische Ethik_ in _Systematische christliche Religion_, in _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_ series. [45] _Cf._ St. Thomas Aquinas, _Summa_, secunda secundæ, quæstio iv., art. 2. [46] "_Qué es Verdad?_" ("What is truth?"), published in _La España Moderna_, March, 1906, vol. 207 (reprinted in the edition of collected _Ensayos_, vol. vi., Madrid, 1918). X RELIGION, THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE BEYOND AND THE APOCATASTASIS _Kai gar isôs kai malista prepei mellonta echeise apodêmein diaskopein te kai muthologein peri tês apodêmias tês echei, poian tina autên oiometha einai._--PLATO: _Phædo_. Religion is founded upon faith, hope, and charity, which in their turn are founded upon the feeling of divinity and of God. Of faith in God is born our faith in men, of hope in God hope in men, and of charity or piety towards God--for as Cicero said,[47] _est enim pietas iustitia adversum deos_--charity towards men. In God is resumed not only Humanity, but the whole Universe, and the Universe spiritualized and penetrated with consciousness, for as the Christian Faith teaches, God shall at last be all in all. St. Teresa said, and Miguel de Molinos repeated with a harsher and more despairing inflection, that the soul must realize that nothing exists but itself and God. And this relation with God, this more or less intimate union with Him, is what we call religion. What is religion? In what does it differ from the religious sense and how are the two related? Every man's definition of religion is based upon his own inward experience of it rather than upon his observation of it in others, nor indeed is it possible to define it without in some way or another experiencing it. Tacitus said (_Hist._ v. 4), speaking of the Jews, that they regarded as profane everything that the Romans held to be sacred, and that what was sacred to them was to the Romans impure: _profana illic omnia quæ apud nos sacra, rursum conversa apud illos quæ nobis incesta_. Therefore he, the Roman, describes the Jews as a people dominated by superstition and hostile to religion, _gens superstitioni obnoxia, religionibus adversa_, while as regards Christianity, with which he was very imperfectly acquainted, scarcely distinguishing it from Judaism, he deemed it to be a pernicious superstition, _existialis superstitio_, inspired by a hatred of mankind, _odium generis humani_ (_Ab excessu Aug._, xv., 44). And there have been many others who have shared his opinion. But where does religion end and superstition begin, or perhaps rather we should say at what point does superstition merge into religion? What is the criterion by means of which we discriminate between them? It would be of little profit to recapitulate here, even summarily, the principal definitions, each bearing the impress of the personal feeling of its definer, which have been given of religion. Religion is better described than defined and better felt than described. But if there is any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance, it is that of Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion consists in the simple feeling of a relationship of dependence upon something above us and a desire to establish relations with this mysterious power. Nor is there much amiss with the statement of W. Hermann[48] that the religious longing of man is a desire for truth concerning his human existence. And to cut short these extraneous citations, I will end with one from the judicious and perspicacious Cournot: "Religious manifestations are the necessary consequence of man's predisposition to believe in the existence of an invisible, supernatural and miraculous world, a predisposition which it has been possible to consider sometimes as a reminiscence of an anterior state, sometimes as an intimation of a future destiny" (_Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l'histoire_, § 396). And it is this problem of human destiny, of eternal life, or of the human finality of the Universe or of God, that we have now reached. All the highways of religion lead up to this, for it is the very essence of all religion. Beginning with the savage's personalization of the whole Universe in his fetich, religion has its roots in the vital necessity of giving human finality to the Universe, to God, and this necessity obliges it, therefore, to attribute to the Universe, to God, consciousness of self and of purpose. And it may be said that religion is simply union with God, each one interpreting God according to his own sense of Him. God gives transcendent meaning and finality to life; but He gives it relatively to each one of us who believe in Him. And thus God is for man as much as man is for God, for God in becoming man, in becoming human, has given Himself to man because of His love of him. And this religious longing for union with God is a longing for a union that cannot be consummated in science or in art, but only in life. "He who possesses science and art, has religion; he who possesses neither science nor art, let him get religion," said Goethe in one of his frequent accesses of paganism. And yet in spite of what he said, he himself, Goethe...? And to wish that we may be united with God is not to wish that we may be lost and submerged in Him, for this loss and submersion of self ends at last in the complete dissolution of self in the dreamless sleep of Nirvana; it is to wish to possess Him rather than to be possessed by Him. When his disciples, amazed at his saying that it was impossible for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, asked Jesus who then could be saved, the Master replied that with men it was impossible but not with God; and then said Peter, "Behold, we have forsaken all and followed thee; what shall we have therefore?" And the reply of Jesus was, not that they should be absorbed in the Father, but that they should sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Matt. xix. 23-26). It was a Spaniard, and very emphatically a Spaniard, Miguel de Molinos, who said in his _Guía Espiritual_[49] that "he who would attain to the mystical science must abandon and be detached from five things: first, from creatures; second, from temporal things; third, from the very gifts of the Holy Spirit; fourth, from himself; and fifth, he must be detached even from God." And he adds that "this last is the completest of all, because that soul only that knows how to be so detached is that which attains to being lost in God, and only the soul that attains to being so lost succeeds in finding itself." Emphatically a true Spaniard, Molinos, and truly Spanish is this paradoxical expression of quietism or rather of nihilism--for he himself elsewhere speaks of annihilation--and not less Spanish, nay, perhaps even more Spanish, were the Jesuits who attacked him, upholding the prerogatives of the All against the claims of Nothingness. For religion is not the longing for self-annihilation, but for self-completion, it is the longing not for death but for life. "The eternal religion of the inward essence of man ... the individual dream of the heart, is the worship of his own being, the adoration of life," as the tortured soul of Flaubert was intimately aware (_Par les champs et par les grèves_, vii.). When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance, the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took concrete form in the knightly ideal with its codes of love and honour. But it was a paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman--_la donna_--was the divinity enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full force and purity; the Universe is woman. And so it was in Germany, in France, in Provence, in Spain, in Italy, at the beginning of the modern age. History was cast in this mould; Trojans and Romans were conceived as knights-errant, and so too were Arabs, Saracens, Turks, the Sultan and Saladin.... In this universal fraternity mingle angels, saints, miracles and paradise, strangely blended with the fantasy and voluptuousness of the Oriental world, and all baptized in the name of Chivalry." Thus, in his _Storia della Letteratura italiana_, ii., writes Francesco de Sanctis, and in an earlier passage he informs us that for that breed of men "in paradise itself the lover's delight was to look upon his lady--_Madonna_--and that he had no desire to go thither if he might not go in his lady's company." What, in fact, was Chivalry--which Cervantes, intending to kill it, afterwards purified and Christianized in _Don Quixote_--but a real though distorted religion, a hybrid between paganism and Christianity, whose gospel perhaps was the legend of Tristan and Iseult? And did not even the Christianity of the mystics--those knights-errant of the spirit--possibly reach its culminating-point in the worship of the divine woman, the Virgin Mary? What else was the Mariolatry of a St. Bonaventura, the troubadour of Mary? And this sentiment found its inspiration in love of the fountain of life, of that which saves us from death. But as the Renaissance advanced men turned from the religion of woman to the religion of science; desire, the foundation of which was curiosity, ended in curiosity, in eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of good and evil. Europe flocked to the University of Bologna in search of learning. Chivalry was succeeded by Platonism. Men sought to discover the mystery of the world and of life. But it was really in order to save life, which they had also sought to save in the worship of woman. Human consciousness sought to penetrate the Universal Consciousness, but its real object, whether it was aware of it or not, was to save itself. For the truth is that we feel and imagine the Universal Consciousness--and in this feeling and imagination religious experience consists--simply in order that thereby we may save our own individual consciousnesses. And how? Once again I must repeat that the longing for the immortality of the soul, for the permanence, in some form or another, of our personal and individual consciousness, is as much of the essence of religion as is the longing that there may be a God. The one does not exist apart from the other, the reason being that fundamentally they are one and the same thing. But as soon as we attempt to give a concrete and rational form to this longing for immortality and permanence, to define it to ourselves, we encounter even more difficulties than we encountered in our attempt to rationalize God. The universal consent of mankind has again been invoked as a means of justifying this immortal longing for immortality to our own feeble reason. _Permanere animos arbitratur consensu nationum omnium_, said Cicero, echoing the opinion of the ancients (_Tuscul. Quæst._, xvi., 36). But this same recorder of his own feelings confessed that, although when he read the arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul in the _Phædo_ of Plato he was compelled to assent to them, as soon as he put the book aside and began to revolve the problem in his own mind, all his previous assent melted away, _assentio omnis illa illabitur_ (cap. xi., 25). And what happened to Cicero happens to us all, and it happened likewise to Swedenborg, the most daring visionary of the other world. Swedenborg admitted that he who discourses of life after death, putting aside all erudite notions concerning the soul and its mode of union with the body, believes that after death he shall live in a glorious joy and vision, as a man among angels; but when he begins to reflect upon the doctrine of the union of the soul with the body, or upon the hypothetical opinion concerning the soul, doubts arise in him as to whether the soul is thus or otherwise, and when these doubts arise, his former idea is dissipated (_De cælo et inferno_, § 183). Nevertheless, as Cournot says, "it is the destiny that awaits me, _me_ or my _person_, that moves, perturbs and consoles me, that makes me capable of abnegation and sacrifice, whatever be the origin, the nature or the essence of this inexplicable bond of union, in the absence of which the philosophers are pleased to determine that my person must disappear" (_Traité_, etc., § 297). Must we then embrace the pure and naked faith in an eternal life without trying to represent it to ourselves? This is impossible; it is beyond our power to bring ourselves or accustom ourselves to do so. And nevertheless there are some who call themselves Christians and yet leave almost altogether on one side this question of representation. Take any work of theology informed by the most enlightened--that is, the most rationalistic and liberal--Protestantism; take, for instance, the _Dogmatik_ of Dr. Julius Kaftan, and of the 668 pages of which the sixth edition, that of 1909, consists, you will find only one, the last, that is devoted to this problem. And in this page, after affirming that Christ is not only the beginning and middle but also the end and consummation of History, and that those who are in Christ will attain to fullness of life, the eternal life of those who are in Christ, not a single word as to what that life may be. Half a dozen words at most about eternal death, that is, hell, "for its existence is demanded by the moral character of faith and of Christian hope." Its moral character, eh? not its religious character, for I am not aware that the latter knows any such exigency. And all this inspired by a prudent agnostic parsimony. Yes, the prudent, the rational, and, some will say, the pious, attitude, is not to seek to penetrate into mysteries that are hidden from our knowledge, not to insist upon shaping a plastic representation of eternal glory, such as that of the _Divina Commedia_. True faith, true Christian piety, we shall be told, consists in resting upon the confidence that God, by the grace of Christ, will, in some way or another, make us live in Him, in His Son; that, as our destiny is in His almighty hands, we should surrender ourselves to Him, in the full assurance that He will do with us what is best for the ultimate end of life, of spirit and of the universe. Such is the teaching that has traversed many centuries, and was notably prominent in the period between Luther and Kant. And nevertheless men have not ceased endeavouring to imagine to themselves what this eternal life may be, nor will they cease their endeavours so long as they are men and not merely thinking machines. There are books of theology--or of what passes for theology--full of disquisitions upon the conditions under which the blessed dead live in paradise, upon their mode of enjoyment, upon the properties of the glorious body, for without some form of body the soul cannot be conceived. And to this same necessity, the real necessity of forming to ourselves a concrete representation of what this other life may be, must in great part be referred the indestructible vitality of doctrines such as those of spiritualism, metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from star to star, and the like; doctrines which as often as they are pronounced to be defeated and dead, are found to have come to life again, clothed in some more or less new form. And it is merely supine to be content to ignore them and not to seek to discover their permanent and living essence. Man will never willingly abandon his attempt to form a concrete representation of the other life. But is an eternal and endless life after death indeed thinkable? How can we conceive the life of a disembodied spirit? How can we conceive such a spirit? How can we conceive a pure consciousness, without a corporal organism? Descartes divided the world into thought and extension, a dualism which was imposed upon him by the Christian dogma of the immortality of the soul. But is extension, is matter, that which thinks and is spiritualized, or is thought that which is extended and materialized? The weightiest questions of metaphysics arise practically out of our desire to arrive at an understanding of the possibility of our immortality--from this fact they derive their value and cease to be merely the idle discussions of fruitless curiosity. For the truth is that metaphysics has no value save in so far as it attempts to explain in what way our vital longing can or cannot be realized. And thus it is that there is and always will be a rational metaphysic and a vital metaphysic, in perennial conflict with one another, the one setting out from the notion of cause, the other from the notion of substance. And even if we were to succeed in imagining personal immortality, might we not possibly feel it to be something no less terrible than its negation? "Calypso was inconsolable at the departure of Ulysses; in her sorrow she was dismayed at being immortal," said the gentle, the mystical Fénelon at the beginning of his _Télémaque_. Was it not a kind of doom that the ancient gods, no less than the demons, were subject to--the deprivation of the power to commit suicide? When Jesus took Peter and James and John up into a high mountain and was transfigured before them, his raiment shining as white as snow, and Moses and Elias appeared and talked with him, Peter said to the Master: "Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three tabernacles; one for thee and one for Moses and one for Elias," for he wished to eternalize that moment. And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them that they should tell no man what they had seen until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead. And they, keeping this saying to themselves, questioned one with another what this rising from the dead should mean, as men not understanding the purport of it. And it was after this that Jesus met the father whose son was possessed with a dumb spirit and who cried out to him, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief" (Mark ix.). Those three apostles did not understand what this rising from the dead meant. Neither did those Sadducees who asked the Master whose wife she should be in the resurrection who in this life had had seven husbands (Matt. xxii.); and it was then that Jesus said that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. And the other life is not, in fact, thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and transitory life. Nor is the mystery at all clarified by that metaphor of the grain and the wheat that it bears, with which Paul answers the question, "How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?" (1 Cor. xv. 35). How can a human soul live and enjoy God eternally without losing its individual personality--that is to say, without losing itself? What is it to enjoy God? What is eternity as opposed to time? Does the soul change or does it not change in the other life? If it does not change, how does it live? And if it changes, how does it preserve its individuality through so vast a period of time? For though the other life may exclude space, it cannot exclude time, as Cournot observes in the work quoted above. If there is life in heaven there is change. Swedenborg remarked that the angels change, because the delight of the celestial life would gradually lose its value if they always enjoyed it in its fullness, and because angels, like men, love themselves, and he who loves himself experiences changes of state; and he adds further that at times the angels are sad, and that he, Swedenborg, discoursed with some when they were sad (_De Cælo et Inferno_, §§ 158, 160). In any case, it is impossible for us to conceive life without change, change of growth or of diminution, of sadness or of joy, of love or of hate. In effect, an eternal life is unthinkable and an eternal life of absolute felicity, of beatific vision, is more unthinkable still. And what precisely is this beatific vision? We observe in the first place that it is called vision and not action, something passive being therefore presupposed. And does not this beatific vision suppose loss of personal consciousness? A saint in heaven, says Bossuet, is a being who is scarcely sensible of himself, so completely is he possessed by God and immerged in His glory.... Our attention cannot stay on the saint, because one finds him outside of himself, and subject by an unchangeable love to the source of his being and his happiness (_Du culte qui est dû à Dieu_). And these are the words of Bossuet, the antiquietist. This loving vision of God supposes an absorption in Him. He who in a state of blessedness enjoys God in His fullness must perforce neither think of himself, nor remember himself, nor have any consciousness of himself, but be in perpetual ecstasy (_ekstasis_) outside of himself, in a condition of alienation. And the ecstasy that the mystics describe is a prelude of this vision. He who sees God shall die, say the Scriptures (Judg. xiii. 22); and may it not be that the eternal vision of God is an eternal death, a swooning away of the personality? But St. Teresa, in her description of the last state of prayer, the rapture, transport, flight, or ecstasy of the soul, tells us that the soul is borne as upon a cloud or a mighty eagle, "but you see yourself carried away and know not whither," and it is "with delight," and "if you do not resist, the senses are not lost, at least I was so much myself as to be able to perceive that I was being lifted up "--that is to say, without losing consciousness. And God "appears to be not content with thus attracting the soul to Himself in so real a way, but wishes to have the body also, though it be mortal and of earth so foul." "Ofttimes the soul is absorbed--or, to speak more correctly, the Lord absorbs it in Himself; and when He has held it thus for a moment, the will alone remains in union with Him"--not the intelligence alone. We see, therefore, that it is not so much vision as a union of the will, and meanwhile, "the understanding and memory are distraught ... like one who has slept long and dreamed and is hardly yet awake." It is "a soft flight, a delicious flight, a noiseless flight." And in this delicious flight the consciousness of self is preserved, the awareness of distinction from God with whom one is united. And one is raised to this rapture, according to the Spanish mystic, by the contemplation of the Humanity of Christ--that is to say, of something concrete and human; it is the vision of the living God, not of the idea of God. And in the 28th chapter she tells us that "though there were nothing else to delight the sight in heaven but the great beauty of the glorified bodies, that would be an excessive bliss, particularly the vision of the Humanity of Jesus Christ our Lord...." "This vision," she continues, "though imaginary, I did never see with my bodily eyes, nor, indeed, any other, but only with the eyes of the soul." And thus it is that in heaven the soul does not see God only, but everything in God, or rather it sees that everything is God, for God embraces all things. And this idea is further emphasized by Jacob Böhme. The saint tells us in the _Moradas Setimas_ (vii. 2) that "this secret union takes place in the innermost centre of the soul, where God Himself must dwell." And she goes on to say that "the soul, I mean the spirit of the soul, is made one with God ..."; and this union may be likened to "two wax candles, the tips of which touch each other so closely that there is but one light; or again, the wick, the wax, and the light become one, but the one candle can again be separated from the other, and the two candles remain distinct; or the wick may be withdrawn from the wax." But there is another more intimate union, and this is "like rain falling from heaven into a river or stream, becoming one and the same liquid, so that the river and the rain-water cannot be divided; or it resembles a streamlet flowing into the sea, which cannot afterwards be disunited from it; or it may be likened to a room into which a bright light enters through two windows--though divided when it enters, the light becomes one and the same." And what difference is there between this and the internal and mystical silence of Miguel de Molinos, the third and most perfect degree of which is the silence of thought? (_Guía Espiritual_, book i., chap. xvii., § 128). Do we not here very closely approach the view that "nothingness is the way to attain to that high state of a mind reformed"? (book iii., chap. xx., § 196). And what marvel is it that Amiel in his _Journal Intime_ should twice have made use of the Spanish word _nada_, nothing, doubtless because he found none more expressive in any other language? And nevertheless, if we read our mystical doctor, St. Teresa, with care, we shall see that the sensitive element is never excluded, the element of delight--that is to say, the element of personal consciousness. The soul allows itself to be absorbed in God in order that it may absorb Him, in order that it may acquire consciousness of its own divinity. A beatific vision, a loving contemplation in which the soul is absorbed in God and, as it were, lost in Him, appears either as an annihilation of self or as a prolonged tedium to our natural way of feeling. And hence a certain feeling which we not infrequently observe and which has more than once expressed itself in satires, not altogether free from irreverence or perhaps impiety, with reference to the heaven of eternal glory as a place of eternal boredom. And it is useless to despise feelings such as these, so wholly natural and spontaneous. It is clear that those who feel thus have failed to take note of the fact that man's highest pleasure consists in acquiring and intensifying consciousness. Not the pleasure of knowing, exactly, but rather that of learning. In knowing a thing we tend to forget it, to convert it, if the expression may be allowed, into unconscious knowledge. Man's pleasure, his purest delight, is allied with the act of learning, of getting at the truth of things, of acquiring knowledge with differentiation. And hence the famous saying of Lessing which I have already quoted. There is a story told of an ancient Spaniard who accompanied Vasco Núñez de Balboa when he climbed that peak in Darien from which both the Atlantic and the Pacific are visible. On beholding the two oceans the old man fell on his knees and exclaimed, "I thank Thee, God, that Thou didst not let me die without having seen so great a wonder." But if this man had stayed there, very soon the wonder would have ceased to be wonderful, and with the wonder the pleasure, too, would have vanished. His joy was the joy of discovery. And perhaps the joy of the beatific vision may be not exactly that of the contemplation of the supreme Truth, whole and entire (for this the soul could not endure), but rather that of a continual discovery of the Truth, of a ceaseless act of learning involving an effort which keeps the sense of personal consciousness continually active. It is difficult for us to conceive a beatific vision of mental quiet, of full knowledge and not of gradual apprehension, as in any way different from a kind of Nirvana, a spiritual diffusion, a dissipation of energy in the essence of God, a return to unconsciousness induced by the absence of shock, of difference--in a word, of activity. May it not be that the very condition which makes our eternal union with God thinkable destroys our longing? What difference is there between being absorbed by God and absorbing Him in ourself? Is it the stream that is lost in the sea or the sea that is lost in the stream? It is all the same. Our fundamental feeling is our longing not to lose the sense of the continuity of our consciousness, not to break the concatenation of our memories, the feeling of our own personal concrete identity, even though we may be gradually being absorbed in God, enriching Him. Who at eighty years of age remembers the child that he was at eight, conscious though he may be of the unbroken chain connecting the two? And it may be said that the problem for feeling resolves itself into the question as to whether there is a God, whether there is a human finality to the Universe. But what is finality? For just as it is always possible to ask the why of every why, so it is also always possible to ask the wherefore of every wherefore. Supposing that there is a God, then wherefore God? For Himself, it will be said. And someone is sure to reply: What is the difference between this consciousness and no-consciousness? But it will always be true, as Plotinus has said (_Enn_., ii., ix., 8), that to ask why God made the world is the same as to ask why there is a soul. Or rather, not why, but wherefore (_dia ti_). For him who places himself outside himself, in an objective hypothetical position--which is as much as to say in an inhuman position--the ultimate wherefore is as inaccessible--and strictly, as absurd--as the ultimate why. What difference in effect does it make if there is not any finality? What logical contradiction is involved in the Universe not being destined to any finality, either human or superhuman? What objection is there in reason to there being no other purpose in the sum of things save only to exist and happen as it does exist and happen? For him who places himself outside himself, none; but for him who lives and suffers and desires within himself--for him it is a question of life or death. Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding oneself, does not one find one's own nothingness? "Having become a sinner in seeking himself, man has become wretched in finding himself," said Bossuet (_Traité de la Concupiscence_, chap. xi.). "Seek thyself" begins with "Know thyself." To which Carlyle answers (_Past and Present_, book iii., chap. xi.): "The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. 'Know thyself': long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules. That will be thy better plan." Yes, but what I work at, will not that too be lost in the end? And if it be lost, wherefore should I work at it? Yes, yes, it may be that to accomplish my work--and what is my work?--without thinking about myself, is to love God. And what is it to love God? And on the other hand, in loving God in myself, am I not loving myself more than God, am I not loving myself in God? What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium, and without death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his _Consolatio ad Marciam_ (xxvi.); what he desired was to live this life again: _ista moliri_. And what Job asked for (xix. 25-7) was to see God in the flesh, not in the spirit. And what but that is the meaning of that comic conception of _eternal recurrence_ which issued from the tragic soul of poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality? And this beatific vision which is the primary Catholic solution of the problem, how can it be realized, I ask again, without obliteration of the consciousness of self? Will it not be like a sleep in which we dream without knowing what we dream? Who would wish for an eternal life like that? To think without knowing that we think is not to be sensible of ourselves, it is not to be ourselves. And is not eternal life perhaps eternal consciousness, not only seeing God, but seeing that we see Him, seeing ourselves at the same time and ourselves as distinct from Him? He who sleeps lives, but he has no consciousness of himself; and would anyone wish for an eternal sleep? When Circe advised Ulysses to descend to the abode of the dead in order to consult the soothsayer Teiresias, she told him that Teiresias alone among the shades of the dead was possessed of understanding, for all the others flitted about like shadows (_Odyssey_, x., 487-495). And can it be said that the others, apart from Teiresias, had really overcome death? Is it to overcome death to flit about like shadows without understanding? And on the other hand, may we not imagine that possibly this earthly life of ours is to the other life what sleep is to waking? May not all our life be a dream and death an awakening? But an awakening to what? And supposing that everything is but the dream of God and that God one day will awaken? Will He remember His dream? Aristotle, the rationalist, tells in his _Ethics_ of the superior happiness of the contemplative life, _bios theôrêtikos_; and all rationalists are wont to place happiness in knowledge. And the conception of eternal happiness, of the enjoyment of God, as a beatific vision, as knowledge and comprehension of God, is a thing of rationalist origin, it is the kind of happiness that corresponds with the God-Idea of Aristotelianism. But the truth is that, in addition to vision, happiness demands delight, and this is a thing which has very little to do, with rationalism and is only attainable when we feel ourselves distinct from God. Our Aristotelian Catholic theologian, the author of the endeavour to rationalize Catholic feeling, St. Thomas Aquinas, tells us in his _Summa_ (_prima secundæ partis, quæstio_ iv., _art_. i) that "delight is requisite for happiness. For delight is caused by the fact of desire resting in attained good. Hence, since happiness is nothing but the attainment of the Sovereign Good, there cannot be happiness without concomitant delight." But where is the delight of him who rests? To rest, _requiescere_--is not that to sleep and not to possess even the consciousness that one is resting? "Delight is caused by the vision of God itself," the theologian continues. But does the soul feel itself distinct from God? "The delight that accompanies the activity of the understanding does not impede, but rather strengthens that activity," he says later on. Obviously! for what happiness were it else? And in order to save delectation, delight, pleasure, which, like pain, has always something material in it, and which we conceive of only as existing in a soul incarnate in a body, it was necessary to suppose that the soul in a state of blessedness is united with its body. Apart from some kind of body, how is delight possible? The immortality of the pure soul, without some sort of body or spirit-covering, is not true immortality. And at bottom, what we long for is a prolongation of this life, this life and no other, this life of flesh and suffering, this life which we imprecate at times simply because it comes to an end. The majority of suicides would not take their lives if they had the assurance that they would never die on this earth. The self-slayer kills himself because he will not wait for death. When in the thirty-third canto of the _Paradiso_, Dante relates how he attained to the vision of God, he tells us that just as a man who beholds somewhat in his sleep retains on awakening nothing but the impression of the feeling in his mind, so it was with him, for when the vision had all but passed away the sweetness that sprang from it still distilled itself in his heart. _Cotal son to, che quasi tutta cessa mia visione ed ancor mi distilla nel cuor lo dulce che nacque da essa_ like snow that melts in the sun-- _cosi la neve al sol si disigilla_. That is to say, that the vision, the intellectual content, passes, and that which remains is the delight, the _passione impressa_, the emotional, the irrational--in a word, the corporeal. What we desire is not merely spiritual felicity, not merely vision, but delight, bodily happiness. The other happiness, the rationalist _beatitude_, the happiness of being submerged in understanding, can only--I will not say satisfy or deceive, for I do not believe that it ever satisfied or deceived even a Spinoza. At the conclusion of his _Ethic_, in propositions xxxv. and xxxvi. of the fifth part, Spinoza, affirms that God loves Himself with an infinite intellectual love; that the intellectual love of the mind towards God is the selfsame love with which God loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far as He can be manifested through the essence of the human mind, considered under the form of eternity--that is to say, that the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love with which God loves Himself. And after these tragic, these desolating propositions, we are told in the last proposition of the whole book, that which closes and crowns this tremendous tragedy of the _Ethic_, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, and that our repression of our desires is not the cause of our enjoyment of virtue, but rather because we find enjoyment in virtue we are able to repress our desires. Intellectual love! intellectual love! what is this intellectual love? Something of the nature of a red flavour, or a bitter sound, or an aromatic colour, or rather something of the same sort as a love-stricken triangle or an enraged ellipse--a pure metaphor, but a tragic metaphor. And a metaphor corresponding tragically with that saying that the heart also has its reasons. Reasons of the heart! loves of the head! intellectual delight! delicious intellection!--tragedy, tragedy, tragedy! And nevertheless there is something which may be called intellectual love, and that is the love of understanding, that which Aristotle meant by the contemplative life, for there is something of action and of love in the act of understanding, and the beatific vision is the vision of the total truth. Is there not perhaps at the root of every passion something of curiosity? Did not our first parents, according to the Biblical story, fall because of their eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and to be as gods, knowers of this knowledge? The vision of God--that is to say, the vision of the Universe itself, in its soul, in its inmost essence--would not that appease all our longing? And this vision can fail to satisfy only men of a gross mind who do not perceive that the greatest joy of man is to be more man--that is, more God--and that man is more God the more consciousness he has. And this intellectual love, which is nothing but the so-called platonic love, is a means to dominion and possession. There is, in fact, no more perfect dominion than knowledge; he who knows something, possesses it. Knowledge unites the knower with the known. "I contemplate thee and in contemplating thee I make thee mine"--such is the formula. And to know God, what can that be but to possess Him? He who knows God is thereby himself God. In _La Dégradation de l'énergie_ (iv^e partie, chap. xviii., 2) B. Brunhes relates a story concerning the great Catholic mathematician Cauchy, communicated to him by M. Sarrau, who had it from Père Gratry. While Cauchy and Père Gratry were walking in the gardens of the Luxumbourg, their conversation turned upon the happiness which those in heaven would have in knowing at last, without any obscurity or limitation, the truths which they had so long and so laboriously sought to investigate on earth. In allusion to the study which Cauchy had made of the mechanistic theory of the reflection of light, Père Gratry threw out the suggestion that one on the greatest intellectual joys of the great geometrician in the future life would be to penetrate into the secret of light. To which Cauchy replied that it did not appear to him to be possible to know more about this than he himself already knew, neither could he conceive how the most perfect intelligence could arrive at a clearer comprehension of the mystery of reflection than that manifested in his own explanation of it, seeing that he had furnished a mechanistic theory of the phenomenon. "His piety," Brunhes adds, "did not extend to a belief that God Himself could have created anything different or anything better." From this narrative two points of interest emerge. The first is the idea expressed in it as to what contemplation, intellectual love, or beatific vision, may mean for men of a superior order of intelligence, men whose ruling passion is knowledge; and the second is the implicit faith shown in the mechanistic explanation of the world. This mechanistic tendency of the intellect coheres with the well-known formula, "Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed"--a formula by means of which it has been sought to interpret the ambiguous principle of the conservation of energy, forgetting that practically, for us, for men, energy is utilizable energy, and that this is continually being lost, dissipated by the diffusion of heat, and degraded, its tendency being to arrive at a dead-level and homogeneity. That which has value, and more than value, reality, for us, is the differential, which is the qualitative; pure, undifferentiated quantity is for us as if it did not exist, for it does not act. And the material Universe, the body of the Universe, would appear to be gradually proceeding--unaffected by the retarding action of living organisms or even by the conscious action of man--towards a state of perfect stability, of homogeneity (_vide_ Brunhes, _op. cit._) For, while spirit tends towards concentration, material energy tends towards diffusion. And may not this have an intimate relation with our problem? May there not be a connection between this conclusion of scientific philosophy with respect to a final state of stability and homogeneity and the mystical dream of the apocatastasis? May not this death of the body of the Universe be the final triumph of its spirit, of God? It is manifest that there is an intimate relation between the religious need of an eternal life after death and the conclusions--always provisional--at which scientific philosophy arrives with respect to the probable future of the material or sensible Universe. And the fact is that just as there are theologians of God and the immortality of the soul, so there are also those whom Brunhes calls (_op. cit._, chap. xxvi., § 2) theologians of monism, and whom it would perhaps be better to call atheologians, people who pertinaciously adhere to the spirit of _a priori_ affirmation; and this becomes intolerable, Brunhes adds, when they harbour the pretension of despising theology. A notable type of these gentlemen may be found in Haeckel, who has succeeded in solving the riddles of Nature! These atheologians have seized upon the principle of the conservation of energy, the "Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed" formula, the theological origin of which is seen in Descartes, and have made use of it as a means whereby we are able to dispense with God. "The world built to last," Brunhes comments, "resisting all wear and tear, or rather automatically repairing the rents that appear in it--what a splendid theme for oratorical amplification! But these same amplifications which served in the seventeenth century to prove the wisdom of the Creator have been used in our days as arguments for those who presume to do without Him." It is the old story: so-called scientific philosophy, the origin and inspiration of which is fundamentally theological or religious, ending in an atheology or irreligion, which is itself nothing else but theology and religion. Let us call to mind the comments of Ritschl upon this head, already quoted in this work. To-day the last word of science, or rather of scientific philosophy, appears to be that, by virtue of the degradation of energy, of the predominance of irreversible phenomena, the material, sensible world is travelling towards a condition of ultimate levelness, a kind of final homogeneity. And this brings to our mind the hypothesis, not only so much used but abused by Spencer, of a primordial homogeneity, and his fantastic theory of the instability of the homogeneous. An instability that required the atheological agnosticism of Spencer in order to explain the inexplicable transition from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. For how, without any action from without, can any heterogeneity emerge from perfect and absolute homogeneity? But as it was necessary to get rid of every kind of creation, "the unemployed engineer turned metaphysician," as Papini called him, invented the theory of the instability of the homogeneous, which is more ... what shall I say? more mystical, and even more mythological if you like, than the creative action of God. The Italian positivist, Roberto Ardigo, was nearer the mark when, objecting to Spencer's theory, he said that the most natural supposition was that things always were as they are now, that always there have been worlds in process of formation, in the nebulous stage, worlds completely formed and worlds in process of dissolution; that heterogeneity, in short, is eternal. Another way, it will be seen, of not solving the riddle. Is this perhaps the solution? But in that case the Universe would be infinite, and in reality we are unable to conceive a Universe that is both eternal and limited such as that which served as the basis of Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence. If the Universe must be eternal, if within it and as regards each of its component worlds, periods in which the movement is towards homogeneity, towards the degradation of energy, must alternate with other periods in which the movement is towards heterogeneity, then it is necessary that the Universe should be infinite, that there should be scope, always and in each world, for some action coming from without. And, in fact, the body of God cannot be other than eternal and infinite. But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual levelling-down--or, we might say, its death--appears to be proved. And how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with the degradation of the energy of our world and return to unconsciousness, or will it rather grow according as the utilizable energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to retard this degradation and to dominate Nature?--for this it is that constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at the expense of the other? The fact is that the best of our scientific work, the best of our industry (that part of it I mean--and it is a large part--that does not tend to destruction), is directed towards retarding this fatal process of the degradation of energy. And organic life, the support of our consciousness, is itself an effort to avoid, so far as it is possible, this fatal period, to postpone it. It is useless to seek to deceive ourselves with pagan pæans in praise of Nature, for as Leopardi, that Christian atheist, said with profound truth in his stupendous poem _La Ginestra_, Nature "gives us life like a mother, but loves us like a step-mother." The origin of human companionship was opposition to Nature; it was horror of impious Nature that first linked men together in the bonds of society. It is human society, in effect, the source of reflective consciousness and of the craving for immortality, that inaugurates the state of grace upon the state of Nature; and it is man who, by humanizing and spiritualizing Nature by his industry, supernaturalizes her. In two amazing sonnets which he called _Redemption_, the tragic Portuguese poet, Antero de Quental, embodied his dream of a spirit imprisoned, not in atoms or ions or crystals, but--as is natural in a poet--in the sea, in trees, in the forest, in the mountains, in the wind, in all material individualities and forms; and he imagines that a day may come when all these captive souls, as yet in the limbo of existence, will awaken to consciousness, and, emerging as pure thought from the forms that imprisoned them, they will see these forms, the creatures of illusion, fall away and dissolve like a baseless vision. It is a magnificent dream of the penetration of everything by consciousness. May it not be that the Universe, our Universe--who knows if there are others?--began with a zero of spirit--and zero is not the same as nothing--and an infinite of matter, and that its goal is to end with an infinite of spirit and a zero of matter? Dreams! May it be that everything has a soul and that this soul begs to be freed? _Oh tierras de Alvargonzález, en el corazón de España, tierras pobres, tierras tristes, tan tristes que tienen alma!_ sings our poet Antonio Machado in his _Campos de Castilla_.[50] Is the sadness of the field in the fields themselves or in us who look upon them? Do they not suffer? But what can an individual soul in a world of matter actually be? Is it the rock or the mountain that is the individual? Is it the tree? And nevertheless the fact always remains that spirit and matter are at strife. This is the thought that Espronceda expressed when he wrote: _Aquí, para vivir en santa calma, o sobra la materia, o sobra el alma._[51] And is there not in the history of thought, or of human imagination if you prefer it, something that corresponds to this process of the reduction of matter, in the sense of a reduction of everything to consciousness? Yes, there is, and its author is the first Christian mystic, St. Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle of the Gentiles, he who because he had never with his bodily eyes looked upon the face of the fleshly and mortal Christ, the ethical Christ, created within himself an immortal and religious Christ--he who was caught up into the third heaven and there beheld secret and unspeakable things (2 Cor. xii.). And this first Christian mystic dreamed also of a final triumph of spirit, of consciousness, and this is what in theology is technically called the apocatastasis or restitution. In 1 Cor. xv. 26-28 he tells us that "the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death, for he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all": _hina hê ho theos panta en pasin_--that is to say, that the end is that God, Consciousness, will end by being all in all. This doctrine is completed by Paul's teaching, in his Epistle to the Ephesians, with regard to the end of the whole history of the world. In this Epistle, as you know, he represents Christ--by whom "were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible" (Col. i. 16)--as the head over all things (Eph. i. 22), and in him, in this head, we all shall be raised up that we may live in the communion of saints and that we "may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge" (Eph. iii. 18, 19). And this gathering of us together in Christ, who is the head and, as it were, the compendium, of Humanity, is what the Apostle calls the gathering or collecting together or recapitulating of all things in Christ, _anakephalaiôsthai ta panta en Christô_. And this recapitulation--_anakephalaiôsis_, anacefaleosis--the end of the world's history and of the human race, is merely another aspect of the apocatastasis. The apocatastasis, God's coming to be all in all, thus resolves itself into the anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all things in Christ, in Humanity--Humanity therefore being the end of creation. And does not this apocatastasis, this humanization or divinization of all things, do away with matter? But if matter, which is the principle of individuation, the scholastic _principium individuationis_, is once done away with, does not everything return to pure consciousness, which, in its pure purity, neither knows itself nor is it anything that can be conceived or felt? And if matter be abolished, what support is there left for spirit? Thus a different train of thought leads us to the same difficulties, the same unthinkabilities. It may be said, on the other hand, that the apocatastasis, God's coming to be all in all, presupposes that there was a time when He was not all in all. The supposition that all beings shall attain to the enjoyment of God implies the supposition that God shall attain to the enjoyment of all beings, for the beatific vision is mutual, and God is perfected in being better known, and His being is nourished and enriched with souls. Following up the track of these wild dreams, we might imagine an unconscious God, slumbering in matter, and gradually wakening into consciousness of everything, consciousness of His own divinity; we might imagine the whole Universe becoming conscious of itself as a whole and becoming conscious of each of its constituent consciousnesses, becoming God. But in that case, how did this unconscious God begin? Is He not matter itself? God would thus be not the beginning but the end of the Universe; but can that be the end which was not the beginning? Or can it be that outside time, in eternity, there is a difference between beginning and end? "The soul of all things cannot be bound by that very thing--that is, matter--which it itself has bound," says Plotinus (_Enn._ ii., ix. 7). Or is it not rather the Consciousness of the Whole that strives to become the consciousness of each part and to make each partial consciousness conscious of itself--that is, of the total consciousness? Is not this universal soul a monotheist or solitary God who is in process of becoming a pantheist God? And if it is not so, if matter and pain are alien to God, wherefore, it will be asked, did God create the world? For what purpose did He make matter and introduce pain? Would it not have been better if He had not made anything? What added glory does He gain by the creation of angels or of men whose fall He must punish with eternal torment? Did He perhaps create evil for the sake of remedying it? Or was redemption His design, redemption complete and absolute, redemption of all things and of all men? For this hypothesis is neither more rational nor more pious than the other. In so far as we attempt to represent eternal happiness to ourselves, we are confronted by a series of questions to which there is no satisfactory--that is, rational--answer, and it matters not whether the supposition from which we start be monotheist, or pantheist, or even panentheist. Let us return to the Pauline apocatastasis. Is it not possible that in becoming all in all God completes Himself, becomes at last fully God, an infinite consciousness embracing all consciousnesses? And what is an infinite consciousness? Since consciousness supposes limitation, or rather since consciousness is consciousness of limitation, of distinction, does it not thereby exclude infinitude? What value has the notion of infinitude applied to consciousness? What is a consciousness that is all consciousness, without anything outside it that is not consciousness? In such a case, of what is consciousness the consciousness? Of its content? Or may it not rather be that, starting from chaos, from absolute unconsciousness, in the eternity of the past, we continually approach the apocatastasis or final apotheosis without ever reaching it? May not this apocatastasis, this return of all things to God, be rather an ideal term to which we unceasingly approach--some of us with fleeter step than others--but which we are destined never to reach? May not the absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would die if it were to be realized? Is it possible to be happy without hope? And there is no place for hope when once possession has been realized, for hope, desire, is killed by possession. May it not be, I say, that all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater measure than others, but all having to pass some time through the same degree of growth, whatever that degree may be, and yet without ever arriving at the infinite, at God, to whom they continually approach? Is not eternal happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of sorrow in order that happiness shall not be swallowed up in nothingness? Follow more questions to which there is no answer. "He shall be all in all," says the Apostle. But will His mode of being in each one be different or will it be the same for all alike? Will not God be wholly in one of the damned? Is He not in his soul? Is He not in what is called hell? And in what sense is He in hell? Whence arise new problems, those relating to the opposition between heaven and hell, between eternal happiness and eternal unhappiness. May it not be that in the end all shall be saved, including Cain and Judas and Satan himself, as Origen's development of the Pauline apocatastasis led him to hope? When our Catholic theologians seek to justify rationally--or in other words, ethically--the dogma of the eternity of the pains of hell, they put forward reasons so specious, ridiculous, and childish, that it would appear impossible that they should ever have obtained currency. For to assert that since God is infinite, an offence committed against Him is infinite also and therefore demands an eternal punishment, is, apart from the inconceivability of an infinite offence, to be unaware that, in human ethics, if not in the human police system, the gravity of the offence is measured not by the dignity of the injured person but by the intention of the injurer, and that to speak of an infinite culpable intention is sheer nonsense, and nothing else. In this connection those words which Christ addressed to His Father are capable of application: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and no man who commits an offence against God or his neighbour knows what he does. In human ethics, or if you like in human police regulations--that which is called penal law and is anything but law[52] eternal punishment is a meaningless phrase. "God is just and punishes us; that is all we need to know; as far as we are concerned the rest is merely curiosity." Such was the conclusion of Lamennais (_Essai_, etc., iv^e partie, chap, vii.), an opinion shared by many others. Calvin also held the same view. But is there anyone who is content with this? Pure curiosity!--to call this load that wellnigh crushes our heart pure curiosity! May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is annihilated because he wished to be annihilated, or that he did not wish strongly enough to eternalize himself because he was evil? May we not say that it is not believing in the other life that makes a man good, but rather that being good makes him believe in it? And what is being good and being evil? These states pertain to the sphere of ethics, not of religion: or, rather, does not the doing good though being evil pertain to ethics, and the being good though doing evil to religion? Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to sin?--for the damned sin without ceasing. This, however, is no solution of the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as correction, has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples. And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to be shut up. But, on the other hand, as a religious conception and veiled in mystery, why not--although the idea revolts our feelings--an eternity of suffering? why not a God who is nourished by our suffering? Is our happiness the end of the Universe? or may we possibly sustain with our suffering some alien happiness? Let us read again in the _Eumenides_ of that terrible tragedian, Æschylus, those choruses of the Furies in which they curse the new gods for overturning the ancient laws and snatching Orestes from their hands--impassioned invectives against the Apollinian redemption. Does not redemption tear man, their captive and plaything, from the hands of the gods, who delight and amuse themselves in his sufferings, like children, as the tragic poet says, torturing beetles? And let us remember the cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Yes, why not an eternity of suffering? Hell is an eternalization of the soul, even though it be an eternity of pain. Is not pain essential to life? Men go on inventing theories to explain what they call the origin of evil. And why not the origin of good? Why suppose that it is good that is positive and original, and evil that is negative and derivatory? "Everything that is, in so far as it is, is good," St. Augustine affirmed. But why? What does "being good" mean? Good is good for something, conducive to an end, and to say that everything is good is equivalent to saying that everything is making for its end. But what is its end? Our desire is to eternalize ourselves, to persist, and we call good everything that conspires to this end and bad everything that tends to lessen or destroy our consciousness. We suppose that human consciousness is an end and not a means to something else which may not be consciousness, whether human or superhuman. All metaphysical optimism, such as that of Leibnitz, and all metaphysical pessimism, such as that of Schopenhauer, have no other foundation than this. For Leibnitz this world is the best because it conspires to perpetuate consciousness, and, together with consciousness, will, because intelligence increases will and perfects it, because the end of man is the contemplation of God; while for Schopenhauer this world is the worst of all possible worlds, because it conspires to destroy will, because intelligence, representation, nullifies the will that begot it. And similarly Franklin, who believed in another life, asserted that he was willing to live this life over again, the life that he had actually lived, "from its beginning to the end"; while Leopardi, who did not believe in another life, asserted that nobody would consent to live his life over again. These two views of life are not merely ethical, but religious; and the feeling of moral good, in so far as it is a teleological value, is of religious origin also. And to return to our interrogations: Shall not all be saved, shall not all be made eternal, and eternal not in suffering but in happiness, those whom we call good and those whom we call bad alike? And as regards this question of good and evil, does not the malice of him who judges enter in? Is the badness in the intention of him who does the deed or is it not rather in that of him who judges it to be bad? But the terrible thing is that man judges himself, creates himself his own judge. Who then shall be saved? And now the imagination puts forth another possibility--neither more nor less rational than all those which have just been put forward interrogatively--and that is that only those are saved who have longed to be saved, that only those are eternalized who have lived in an agony of hunger for eternity and for eternalization. He who desires never to die and believes that he shall never die in the spirit, desires it because he deserves it, or rather, only he desires personal immortality who carries his immortality within him. The man who does not long passionately, and with a passion that triumphs over all the dictates of reason, for his own immortality, is the man who does not deserve it, and because he does not deserve it he does not long for it. And it is no injustice not to give a man that which he does not know how to desire, for "ask, and it shall be given you." It may be that to each will be given that which he desired. And perhaps the sin against the Holy Ghost--for which, according to the Evangelist, there is no remission--is none other than that of not desiring God, not longing to be made eternal. As is your sort of mind So is your sort of search; you'll find What you desire, and that's to be A Christian, said Robert Browning in _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_. In his _Inferno_ Dante condemned the Epicureans, those who did not believe in another life, to something more terrible than the not having it, and that is the consciousness of not having it, and this he expressed in plastic form by picturing them shut up in their tombs for all eternity, without light, without air, without fire, without movement, without life (_Inferno_, x., 10-15). What cruelty is there in denying to a man that which he did not or could not desire? In the sixth book of his _Æneid_ (426-429) the gentle Virgil makes us hear the plaintive voices and sobbing of the babes who weep upon the threshold of Hades, _Continuo àuditæ voces, vagitus et ingens, Infantumque animæ flentes in limine primo,_ unhappy in that they had but entered upon life and never known the sweetness of it, and whom, torn from their mothers' breasts, a dark day had cut off and drowned in bitter death-- _Quos dulcis vitæ exsortes et at ubere raptos Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo._ But what life did they lose, if they neither knew life nor longed for it? And yet is it true that they never longed for it? It may be said that others craved life on their behalf, that their parents longed for them to be eternal to the end that they might be gladdened by them in paradise. And so a fresh field is opened up for the imagination--namely, the consideration of the solidarity and representivity of eternal salvation. There are many, indeed, who imagine the human race as one being, a collective and solidary individual, in whom each member may represent or may come to represent the total collectivity; and they imagine salvation as something collective. As something collective also, merit, and as something collective sin, and redemption. According to this mode of feeling and imagining, either all are saved or none is saved; redemption is total and it is mutual; each man is his neighbour's Christ. And is there not perhaps a hint of this in the popular Catholic belief with regard to souls in purgatory, the belief that the living may devote suffrages and apply merits to the souls of their dead? This sense of the transmission of merits, both to the living and the dead, is general in popular Catholic piety. Nor should it be forgotten that in the history of man's religious thought there has often presented itself the idea of an immortality restricted to a certain number of the elect, spirits representative of the rest and in a certain sense including them; an idea of pagan derivation--for such were the heroes and demi-gods--which sometimes shelters itself behind the pronouncement that there are many that are called and few that are chosen. Recently, while I was engaged upon this essay, there came into my hands the third edition of the _Dialogue sur la vie et sur la mort_, by Charles Bonnefon, a book in which imaginative conceptions similar to those that I have been setting forth find succinct and suggestive expression. The soul cannot live without the body, Bonnefon says, nor the body without the soul, and thus neither birth nor death has any real existence--strictly speaking, there is no body, no soul, no birth, no death, all of which are abstractions and appearances, but only a thinking life, of which we form part and which can neither be born nor die. Hence he is led to deny human individuality and to assert that no one can say "I am" but only "we are," or, more correctly, "there is in us." It is humanity, the species, that thinks and loves in us. And souls are transmitted in the same way that bodies are transmitted. "The living thought or the thinking life which we are will find itself again immediately in a form analogous to that which was our origin and corresponding with our being in the womb of a pregnant woman." Each of us, therefore, has lived before and will live again, although he does not know it. "If humanity is gradually raised above itself, when the last man dies, the man who will contain all the rest of mankind in himself, who shall say that he may not have arrived at that higher order of humanity such as exists elsewhere, in heaven?... As we are all bound together in solidarity, we shall all, little by little, gather the fruits of our travail." According to this mode of imagining and thinking, since nobody is born, nobody dies, no single soul has finished its struggle but many times has been plunged into the midst of the human struggle "ever since the type of embryo corresponding with the same consciousness was represented in the succession of human phenomena." It is obvious that since Bonnefon begins by denying personal individuality, he leaves out of account our real longing, which is to save our individuality; but on the other hand, since he, Bonnefon, is a personal individual and feels this longing, he has recourse to the distinction between the called and the chosen, and to the idea of representative spirits, and he concedes to a certain number of men this representative individual immortality. Of these elect he says that "they will be somewhat more necessary to God than we ourselves." And he closes this splendid dream by supposing that "it is not impossible that we shall arrive by a series of ascensions at the supreme happiness, and that our life shall be merged in the perfect Life as a drop of water in the sea. Then we shall understand," he continues, "that everything was necessary, that every philosophy and every religion had its hour of truth, and that in all our wanderings and errors and in the darkest moments of our history we discerned the light of the distant beacon, and that we were all predestined to participate in the Eternal Light. And if the God whom we shall find again possesses a body--and we cannot conceive a living God without a body--we, together with each of the myriads of races that the myriads of suns have brought forth, shall be the conscious cells of his body. If this dream should be fulfilled, an ocean of love would beat upon our shores and the end of every life would be to add a drop of water to this ocean's infinity." And what is this cosmic dream of Bonnefon's but the plastic representation of the Pauline apocatastasis? Yes, this dream, which has its origin far back in the dawn of Christianity, is fundamentally the same as the Pauline anacefaleosis, the fusion of all men in Man, in the whole of Humanity embodied in a Person, who is Christ, and the fusion not only of all men but of all things, and the subsequent subjection of all things to God, in order that God, Consciousness, may be all in all. And this supposes a collective redemption and a society beyond the grave. In the middle of the eighteenth century, two pietists of Protestant origin, Johann Jakob Moser and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, gave a new force and value to the Pauline anacefaleosis. Moser "declared that his religion consisted not in holding certain doctrines to be true and in living a virtuous life conformably therewith, but in being reunited to God through Christ. But this demands the thorough knowledge--a knowledge that goes on increasing until the end of life--of one's own sins and also of the mercy and patience of God, the transformation of all natural feelings, the appropriation of the atonement wrought by the death of Christ, the enjoyment of peace with God in the permanent witness of the Holy Spirit to the remission of sins, the ordering of life according to the pattern of Christ, which is the fruit of faith alone, the drawing near to God and the intercourse of the soul with Him, the disposition to die in grace and the joyful expectation of the Judgement which will bestow blessedness in the more intimate enjoyment of God and in the _commerce with all the saints_" (Ritschl, _Geschichte des Pietismus_, vol. iii., § 43). The commerce with all the saints--that is to say, the eternal human society. And for his part, Oetinger considers eternal happiness not as the contemplation of God in His infinitude, but, taking the Epistle to the Ephesians as his authority, as the contemplation of God in the harmony of the creature with Christ. The commerce with all the saints was, according to him, essential to the content of eternal happiness. It was the realization of the kingdom of God, which thus comes to be the kingdom of Man. And in his exposition of these doctrines of the two pietists, Ritschl confesses _(op. cit._, iii., § 46) that both witnesses have with these doctrines contributed something to Protestantism that is of like value with the theological method of Spener, another pietist. We see, therefore, that the Christian, mystical, inward longing ever since St. Paul, has been to give human finality, or divine finality, to the Universe, to save human consciousness, and to save it by converting all humanity into a person. This longing is expressed in the anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all things, all things in earth and in heaven, the visible and the invisible, in Christ, and also in the apocatastasis, the return of all things to God, to consciousness, in order that God may be all in all. And does not God's being all in all mean that all things shall acquire consciousness and that in this consciousness everything that has happened will come to life again, and that everything that has existed in time will be eternalized? And within the all, all individual consciousnesses, those which have been, those that are, and those that will be, and as they have been, as they are, and as they will be, will exist in a condition of society and solidarity. But does not this awakening to consciousness of everything that has been, necessarily involve a fusion of the identical, an amalgamation of like things? In this conversion of the human race into a true society in Christ, a communion of saints, a kingdom of heaven, will not individual differences, tainted as they are with deceit and even with sin, be obliterated, and in the perfect society will that alone remain of each man which was the essential part of him? Would it not perhaps result, according to Bonnefon's supposition, that this consciousness that lived in the twentieth century in this corner of this earth would feel itself to be the same with other such consciousnesses as have lived in other centuries and perhaps in other worlds? And how can we conceive of an effective and real union, a substantial and intimate union, soul with soul, of all those who have been? If any two creatures grew into one They would do more than the world has done, said Browning in _The Flight of the Duchess_; and Christ has told us that where two or three are gathered together in His name, there is He in the midst of them. Heaven, then, so it is believed by many, is society, a more perfect society than that of this world; it is human society fused into a person. And there are not wanting some who believe that the tendency of all human progress is the conversion of our species into one collective being with real consciousness--is not perhaps an individual human organism a kind of confederation of cells?--and that when it shall have acquired full consciousness, all those who have existed will come to life again in it. Heaven, so many think, is society. Just as no one can live in isolation, so no one can survive in isolation. No one can enjoy God in heaven who sees his brother suffering in hell, for the sin and the merit were common to both. We think with the thoughts of others and we feel with the feelings of others. To see God when God shall be all in all is to see all things in God and to live in God with all things. This splendid dream of the final solidarity of mankind is the Pauline anacefaleosis and apocatastasis. We Christians, said the Apostle (I Cor. xii. 27) are the body of Christ, members of Him, flesh of His flesh and bone of His bone (Eph. v. 30), branches of the vine. But in this final solidarization, in this true and supreme _Christination_ of all creatures, what becomes of each individual consciousness? what becomes of Me, of this poor fragile I, this I that is the slave of time and space, this I which reason tells me is a mere passing accident, but for the saving of which I live and suffer and hope and believe? Granting that the human finality of the Universe is saved, that consciousness is saved, would I resign myself to make the sacrifice of this poor I, by which and by which alone I know this finality and this consciousness? And here, facing this supreme religious sacrifice, we reach the summit of the tragedy, the very heart of it--the sacrifice of our own individual consciousness upon the altar of the perfected Human Consciousness, of the Divine Consciousness. But is there really a tragedy? If we could attain to a clear vision of this anacefaleosis, if we could succeed in understanding and feeling that we were going to enrich Christ, should we hesitate for a moment in surrendering ourselves utterly to Him? Would the stream that flows into the sea, and feels in the freshness of its waters the bitterness of the salt of the ocean, wish to flow back to its source? would it wish to return to the cloud which drew its life from the sea? is not its joy to feel itself absorbed? And yet.... Yes, in spite of everything, this is the climax of the tragedy. And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to approach and never to arrive, it longs for a never-ending longing, for an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled. And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows without ceasing in consciousness and in longing. Do not write upon the gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of hell, _Lasciate ogni speranza!_ Do not destroy time! Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope. Give us leave to live! The eternity that is like an eternal present, without memory and without hope, is death. Thus do ideas exist, but not thus do men live. Thus do ideas exist in the God-Idea, but not thus can men live in the living God, in the God-Man. An eternal purgatory, then, rather than a heaven of glory; an eternal ascent. If there is an end of all suffering, however pure and spiritualized we may suppose it to be, if there is an end of all desire, what is it that makes the blessed in paradise go on living? If in paradise they do not suffer for want of God, how shall they love Him? And if even there, in the heaven of glory, while they behold God little by little and closer and closer, yet without ever wholly attaining to Him, there does not always remain something more for them to know and desire, if there does not always remain a substratum of doubt, how shall they not fall asleep? Or, to sum up, if in heaven there does not remain something of this innermost tragedy of the soul, what sort of a life is that? Is there perhaps any greater joy than that of remembering misery--and to remember it is to feel it--in time of felicity? Does not the prison haunt the freed prisoner? Does he not miss his former dreams of liberty? * * * * * Mythological dreams! it will be said. And I have not pretended that they are anything else. But has not the mythological dream its content of truth? Are not dream and myth perhaps revelations of an inexpressible truth, of an irrational truth, of a truth that cannot be proven? Mythology! Perhaps; but, as in the days of Plato, we must needs mythologize when we come to deal with the other life. But we have just seen that whenever we seek to give a form that is concrete, conceivable, or in other words, rational, to our primary, primordial, and fundamental longing for an eternal life conscious of itself and of its personal individuality, esthetic, logical, and ethical absurdities are multiplied and there is no way of conceiving the beatific vision and the apocatastasis that is free from contradictions and inconsistencies. And nevertheless!... Nevertheless, yes, we must needs long for it, however absurd it may appear to us; nay, more, we must needs believe in it, in some way or another, in order that we may live. In order that we may live, eh? not in order that we may understand the Universe. We must needs believe in it, and to believe in it is to be religious. Christianity, the only religion which we Europeans of the twentieth century are really capable of feeling, is, as Kierkegaard said, a desperate sortie (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, ii., i., cap. i.), a sortie which can be successful only by means of the martyrdom of faith, which is, according to this same tragic thinker, the crucifixion of reason. Not without reason did he who had the right to do so speak of the foolishness of the cross. Foolishness, without doubt, foolishness. And the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was not altogether wide of the mark in making one of the characters in his ingenious conversations say that he thought better of those who were confined in a lunatic asylum on account of religious mania than of those who, while professing the same religious principles, kept their wits and appeared to enjoy life very well outside of the asylums.[53] But those who are at large, are they not really, thanks to God, mad too? Are there not mild madnesses, which not only permit us to mix with our neighbours without danger to society, but which rather enable us to do so, for by means of them we are able to attribute a meaning and finality to life and society themselves? And after all, what is madness and how can we distinguish it from reason, unless we place ourselves outside both the one and the other, which for us is impossible? Madness perhaps it is, and great madness, to seek to penetrate into the mystery of the Beyond; madness to seek to superimpose the self-contradictory dreams of our imagination upon the dictates of a sane reason. And a sane reason tells us that nothing can be built up without foundations, and that it is not merely an idle but a subversive task to fill the void of the unknown with fantasies. And nevertheless.... We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal life beyond the grave, and in an individual and personal life, in a life in which each one of us may feel his consciousness and fed that it is united, without being confounded, with all other consciousnesses in the Supreme Consciousness, in God; we must needs believe in that other life in order that we may live this life, and endure it, and give it meaning and finality. And we must needs believe in that other life, perhaps, in order that we may deserve it, in order that we may obtain it, for it may be that he neither deserves it nor will obtain it who does not passionately desire it above reason and, if need be, against reason. And above all, we must feel and act as if an endless continuation of our earthly life awaited us after death; and if it be that nothingness is the fate that awaits us we must not, in the words of _Obermann_, so act that it shall be a just fate. And this leads us directly to the examination of the practical or ethical aspect of our sole problem. FOOTNOTES: [47] _De natura deorum_, lib. i., cap. 41. [48] _Op. cit._ [49] _Guía Espiritual que desembaraza al alma y la conduce por el interior camino para alcanzar la perfecta contemplación y el rico tesoro de la paz interior_, book iii., chap. xviii., § 185. [50] O land of Alvargonzález, In the heart of Spain, Sad land, poor land, So sad that it has a soul! [51] To living a life of blessed quiet here on earth, Either matter or soul is a hindrance. [52] Eso que llaman derecho penal, y que es todo menos derecho. [53] _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table._ XI THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM L'homme est périssable. II se peut; mais périssons en résistant, et, si le néant nous est reservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice.--SÉNANCOUR: _Obermann_, lettre xc. Several times in the devious course of these essays I have defined, in spite of my horror of definitions, my own position with regard to the problem that I have been examining; but I know there will always be some dissatisfied reader, educated in some dogmatism or other, who will say: "This man comes to no conclusion, he vacillates--now he seems to affirm one thing and then its contrary--he is full of contradictions--I can't label him. What is he?" Just this--one who affirms contraries, a man of contradiction and strife, as Jeremiah said of himself; one who says one thing with his heart and the contrary with his head, and for whom this conflict is the very stuff of life. And that is as clear as the water that flows from the melted snow upon the mountain tops. I shall be told that this is an untenable position, that a foundation must be laid upon which to build our action and our works, that it is impossible to live by contradictions, that unity and clarity are essential conditions of life and thought, and that it is necessary to unify thought. And this leaves us as we were before. For it is precisely this inner contradiction that unifies my life and gives it its practical purpose. Or rather it is the conflict itself, it is this self-same passionate uncertainty, that unifies my action and makes me live and work. We think in order that we may live, I have said; but perhaps it were more correct to say that we think because we live, and the form of our thought corresponds with that of our life. Once more I must repeat that our ethical and philosophical doctrines in general are usually merely the justification _a posteriori_ of our conduct, of our actions. Our doctrines are usually the means we seek in order to explain and justify to others and to ourselves our own mode of action. And this, be it observed, not merely for others, but for ourselves. The man who does not really know why he acts as he does and not otherwise, feels the necessity of explaining to himself the motive of his action and so he forges a motive. What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it. The very same reason which one man may regard as a motive for taking care to prolong his life may be regarded by another man as a motive for shooting himself. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that reasons, ideas, have an influence upon human actions, and sometimes even determine them, by a process analogous to that of suggestion upon a hypnotized person, and this is so because of the tendency in every idea to resolve itself into action--an idea being simply an inchoate or abortive act. It was this notion that suggested to Fouillée his theory of idea-forces. But ordinarily ideas are forces which we accommodate to other forces, deeper and much less conscious. But putting all this aside for the present, what I wish to establish is that uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable dogmatic foundation, may be the basis of an ethic. He who bases or thinks that he bases his conduct--his inward or his outward conduct, his feeling or his action--upon a dogma or theoretical principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If, the earth that he thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for we do not all come up to the standard of the ideal Stoic who remains undaunted among the ruins of a world shattered into atoms. Happily the stuff that is underneath a man's ideas will save him. For if a man should tell you that he does not defraud or cuckold his best friend only because he is afraid of hell, you may depend upon it that neither would he do so even if he were to cease to believe in hell, but that he would invent some other excuse instead. And this is all to the honour of the human race. But he who believes that he is sailing, perhaps without a set course, on an unstable and sinkable raft, must not be dismayed if the raft gives way beneath his feet and threatens to sink. Such a one thinks that he acts, not because he deems his principle of action to be true, but in order to make it true, in order to prove its truth, in order to create his own spiritual world. My conduct must be the best proof, the moral proof, of my supreme desire; and if I do not end by convincing myself, within the bounds of the ultimate and irremediable uncertainty, of the truth of what I hope for, it is because my conduct is not sufficiently pure. Virtue, therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not faith that creates martyrs but martyrs who create faith. There is no security or repose--so far as security and repose are obtainable in this life, so essentially insecure and unreposeful--save in conduct that is passionately good. Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory. "If any man will do His will--the will of Him that sent me," said Jesus, "he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself" (John vii. 17); and there is a well-known saying of Pascal: "Begin by taking holy water and you will end by becoming a believer." And pursuing a similar train of thought, Johann Jakob Moser, the pietist, was of the opinion that no atheist or naturalist had the right to regard the Christian religion as void of truth so long as he had not put it to the proof by keeping its precepts and commandments (Ritschl, _Geschichte des Pietismus_, book vii., 43). What is our heart's truth, anti-rational though it be? The immortality of the human soul, the truth of the persistence of our consciousness without any termination whatsoever, the truth of the human finality of the Universe. And what is its moral proof? We may formulate it thus: Act so that in your own judgement and in the judgement of others you may merit eternity, act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that you may not merit death. Or perhaps thus: Act as if you were to die to-morrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized. The end of morality is to give personal, human finality to the Universe; to discover the finality that belongs to it--if indeed it has any finality--and to discover it by acting. More than a century ago, in 1804, in Letter XC of that series that constitutes the immense monody of his _Obermann_, Sénancour wrote the words which I have put at the head of this chapter--and of all the spiritual descendants of the patriarchal Rousseau, Sénancour was the most profound and the most intense; of all the men of heart and feeling that France has produced, not excluding Pascal, he was the most tragic. "Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a just fate." Change this sentence from its negative to the positive form--"And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an unjust fate"--and you get the firmest basis of action for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist. That which is irreligious and demoniacal, that which incapacitates us for action and leaves us without any ideal defence against our evil tendencies, is the pessimism that Goethe puts into the mouth of Mephistopheles when he makes him say, "All that has achieved existence deserves to be destroyed" (_denn alles was ensteht ist wert doss es zugrunde geht_). This is the pessimism which we men call evil, and not that other pessimism that consists in lamenting what it fears to be true and struggling against this fear--namely, that everything is doomed to annihilation in the end. Mephistopheles asserts that everything that exists deserves to be destroyed, annihilated, but not that everything will be destroyed or annihilated; and we assert that everything that exists deserves to be exalted and eternalized, even though no such fate is in store for it. The moral attitude is the reverse of this. Yes, everything deserves to be eternalized, absolutely everything, even evil itself, for that which we call evil would lose its evilness in being eternalized, because it would lose its temporal nature. For the essence of evil consists in its temporal nature, in its not applying itself to any ultimate and permanent end. And it might not be superfluous here to say something about that distinction, more overlaid with confusion than any other, between what we are accustomed to call optimism and pessimism, a confusion not less than that which exists with regard to the distinction between individualism and socialism. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to form a clear idea as to what pessimism really is. I have just this very day read in the _Nation_ (July 6, 1912) an article, entitled "A Dramatic Inferno," that deals with an English translation of the works of Strindberg, and it opens with the following judicious observations: "If there were in the world a sincere and total pessimism, it would of necessity be silent. The despair which finds a voice is a social mood, it is the cry of misery which brother utters to brother when both are stumbling through a valley of shadows which is peopled with--comrades. In its anguish it bears witness to something that is good in life, for it presupposes sympathy ... The real gloom, the sincere despair, is dumb and blind; it writes no books, and feels no impulse to burden an intolerable universe with a monument more lasting than brass." Doubtless there is something of sophistry in this criticism, for the man who is really in pain weeps and even cries aloud, even if he is alone and there is nobody to hear him, simply as a means of alleviating his pain, although this perhaps may be a result of social habits. But does not the lion, alone in the desert, roar if he has an aching tooth? But apart from this, it cannot be denied that there is a substance of truth underlying these remarks. The pessimism that protests and defends itself cannot be truly said to be pessimism. And, in truth, still less is it pessimism to hold that nothing ought to perish although all things may be doomed to annihilation, while on the other hand it is pessimism to affirm that all things ought to be annihilated even though nothing may perish. Pessimism, moreover, may possess different values. There is a eudemonistic or economic pessimism, that which denies happiness; there is an ethical pessimism, that which denies the triumph of moral good; and there is a religious pessimism, that which despairs of the human finality of the Universe, of the eternal salvation of the individual soul. All men deserve to be saved, but, as I have said in the previous chapter, he above all deserves immortality who desires it passionately and even in the face of reason. An English writer, H.G. Wells, who has taken upon himself the rôle of the prophet (a thing not uncommon in his country), tells us in _Anticipations_ that "active and capable men of all forms of religious profession tend in practice to disregard the question of immortality altogether." And this is because the religious professions of these active and capable men to whom Wells refers are usually simply a lie, and their lives are a lie, too, if they seek to base them upon religion. But it may be that at bottom there is not so much truth in what Wells asserts as he and others imagine. These active and capable men live in the midst of a society imbued with Christian principles, surrounded by institutions and social feelings that are the product of Christianity, and faith in the immortality of the soul exists deep down in their own souls like a subterranean river, neither seen nor heard, but watering the roots of their deeds and their motives. It must be admitted that there exists in truth no more solid foundation for morality than the foundation of the Catholic ethic. The end of man is eternal happiness, which consists in the vision and enjoyment of God _in sæcula sæculorum_. Where it errs, however, is in the choice of the means conducive to this end; for to make the attainment of eternal happiness dependent upon believing or not believing in the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son and not from the Father alone, or in the Divinity of Jesus, or in the theory of the Hypostatic Union, or even in the existence of God, is, as a moment's reflection will show, nothing less than monstrous. A human God--and that is the only kind of God we are able to conceive--would never reject him who was unable to believe in Him with his head, and it is not in his head but in his heart that the wicked man says that there is no God, which is equivalent to saying that he wishes that there may not be a God. If any belief could be bound up with the attainment of eternal happiness it would be the belief in this happiness itself and in the possibility of it. And what shall we say of that other proposition of the king of pedants, to the effect that we have not come into the world to be happy but to fulfil our duty (_Wir sind nicht auf der Welt, um glücklich zu sein, sondern um unsere Schuldigkeit zu tun_)? If we are in the world _for_ something (_um etwas_), whence can this _for_ be derived but from the very essence of our own will, which asks for happiness and not duty as the ultimate end? And if it is sought to attribute some other value to this _for_, an objective value, as some Sadducean pedant would say, then it must be recognized that the objective reality, that which would remain even though humanity should disappear, is as indifferent to our duty as to our happiness, is as little concerned with our morality as with our felicity. I am not aware that Jupiter, Uranus, or Sirius would allow their course to be affected by the fact that we are or are not fulfilling our duty any more than by the fact that we are or are not happy. Such considerations must appear to these pedants to be characterized by a ridiculous vulgarity and a dilettante superficiality. (The intellectual world is divided into two classes--dilettanti on the one hand, and pedants on the other.) What choice, then, have we? The modern man is he who resigns himself to the truth and is content to be ignorant of the synthesis of culture--witness what Windelband says on this head in his study of the fate of Hölderlin (_Praeludien_, i.). Yes, these men of culture are resigned, but there remain a few poor savages like ourselves for whom resignation is impossible. We do not resign ourselves to the idea of having one day to disappear, and the criticism of the great Pedant does not console us. The quintessence of common sense was expressed by Galileo Galilei when he said: "Some perhaps will say that the bitterest pain is the loss of life, but I say that there are others more bitter; for whosoever is deprived of life is deprived at the same time of the power to lament, not only this, but any other loss whatsoever." Whether Galileo was conscious or not of the humour of this sentence I do not know, but it is a tragic humour. But, to turn back, I repeat that if the attainment of eternal happiness could be bound up with any particular belief, it would be with the belief in the possibility of its realization. And yet, strictly speaking, not even with this. The reasonable man says in his head, "There is no other life after this," but only the wicked says it in his heart. But since the wicked man is possibly only a man who has been driven to despair, will a human God condemn him because of his despair? His despair alone is misfortune enough. But in any event let us adopt the Calderónian formula in _La Vida es Sueño_: _Que estoy soñando y que quiero obrar hacer bien, pues no se pierde el hacer bien aun en sueños_[54] But are good deeds really not lost? Did Calderón know? And he added: _Acudamos a lo eterno que es la fama vividora donde ni duermen las dichas no las grandezas reposan_[55] Is it really so? Did Calderón know? Calderón had faith, robust Catholic faith; but for him who lacks faith, for him who cannot believe in what Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca believed, there always remains the attitude of _Obermann_. If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory; let us fight against it quixotically. And not only do we fight against destiny in longing for what is irrational, but in acting in such a way that we make ourselves irreplaceable, in impressing our seal and mark upon others, in acting upon our neighbours in order to dominate them, in giving ourselves to them in order that we may eternalize ourselves so far as we can. Our greatest endeavour must be to make ourselves irreplaceable; to make the theoretical fact--if this expression does not involve a contradiction in terms--the fact that each one of us is unique and irreplaceable, that no one else can fill the gap that will be left when we die, a practical truth. For in fact each man is unique and irreplaceable; there cannot be any other I; each one of us--our soul, that is, not our life--is worth the whole Universe. I say the spirit and not the life, for the ridiculously exaggerated value which those attach to human life who, not really believing in the spirit--that is to say, in their personal immortality--tirade against war and the death penalty, for example, is a value which they attach to it precisely because they do not really believe in the spirit of which life is the servant. For life is of use only in so far as it serves its lord and master, spirit, and if the master perishes with the servant, neither the one nor the other is of any great value. And to act in such a way as to make our annihilation an injustice, in such a way as to make our brothers, our sons, and our brothers' sons, and their sons' sons, feel that we ought not to have died, is something that is within the reach of all. The essence of the doctrine of the Christian redemption is in the fact that he who suffered agony and death was the unique man--that is, Man, the Son of Man, or the Son of God; that he, because he was sinless, did not deserve to have died; and that this propitiatory divine victim died in order that he might rise again and that he might raise us up from the dead, in order that he might deliver us from death by applying his merits to us and showing us the way of life. And the Christ who gave himself for his brothers in humanity with an absolute self-abnegation is the pattern for our action to shape itself on. All of us, each one of us, can and ought to determine to give as much of himself as he possibly can--nay, to give more than he can, to exceed himself, to go beyond himself, to make himself irreplaceable, to give himself to others in order that he may receive himself back again from them. And each one in his own civil calling or office. The word office, _officium_, means obligation, debt, but in the concrete, and that is what it always ought to mean in practice. We ought not so much to try to seek that particular calling which we think most fitting and suitable for ourselves, as to make a calling of that employment in which chance, Providence, or our own will has placed us. Perhaps Luther rendered no greater service to Christian civilization than that of establishing the religious value of the civil occupation, of shattering the monastic and medieval idea of the religious calling, an idea involved in the mist of human passions and imaginations and the cause of terrible life tragedies. If we could but enter into the cloister and examine the religious vocation of those whom the self-interest of their parents had forced as children into a novice's cell and who had suddenly awakened to the life of the world--if indeed they ever do awake!--or of those whom their own self-delusions had led into it! Luther saw this life of the cloister at close quarters and suffered it himself, and therefore he was able to understand and feel the religious value of the civil calling, to which no man is bound by perpetual vows. All that the Apostle said in the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the Ephesians with regard to the respective functions of Christians in the Church must be transferred and applied to the civil or non-ecclesiastical life, for to-day among ourselves the Christian--whether he know it or not, and whether he like it or not--is the citizen, and just as the Apostle exclaimed, "I am a Roman citizen!" each one of us, even the atheist, might exclaim "I am a Christian!" And this demands the _civilizing_, in the sense of dis-ecclesiasticizing, of Christianity, which was Luther's task, although he himself eventually became the founder of a Church. There is a common English phrase, "the right man in the right place." To which we might rejoin, "Cobbler, to thy last!" Who knows what is the post that suits him best and for which he is most fitted? Does a man himself know it better than others or do they know it better than he? Who can measure capacities and aptitudes? The religious attitude, undoubtedly, is to endeavour to make the occupation in which we find ourselves our vocation, and only in the last resort to change it for another. This question of the proper vocation is possibly the gravest and most deep-seated of social problems, that which is at the root of all the others. That which is known _par excellence_ as the social question is perhaps not so much a problem of the distribution of wealth, of the products of labour, as a problem of the distribution of avocations, of the modes of production. It is not aptitude--a thing impossible to ascertain without first putting it to the test and not always clearly indicated in a man, for with regard to the majority of callings a man is not born but made--it is not special aptitude, but rather social, political, and customary reasons that determine a man's occupation. At certain times and in certain countries it is caste and heredity; at other times and in other places, the guild or corporation; in later times machinery--in almost all cases necessity; liberty scarcely ever. And the tragedy of it culminates in those occupations, pandering to evil, in which the soul is sacrificed for the sake of the livelihood, in which the workman works with the consciousness, not of the uselessness merely, but of the social perversity, of his work, manufacturing the poison that will kill him, the weapon, perchance, with which his children will be murdered. This, and not the question of wages, is the gravest problem. I shall never forget a scene of which I was a witness that took place on the banks of the river that flows through Bilbao, my native town. A workman was hammering at something in a shipwright's yard, working without putting his heart into his work, as if he lacked energy or worked merely for the sake of getting a wage, when suddenly a woman's voice was heard crying, "Help! help!" A child had fallen into the river. Instantly the man was transformed. With an admirable energy, promptitude, and sang-froid he threw off his clothes and plunged into the water to rescue the drowning infant. Possibly the reason why there is less bitterness in the agrarian socialist movement than in that of the towns is that the field labourer, although his wages and his standard of living are no better than those of the miner or artisan, has a clearer consciousness of the social value of his work. Sowing corn is a different thing from extracting diamonds from the earth. And it may be that the greatest social progress consists in a certain indifferentiation of labour, in the facility for exchanging one kind of work for another, and that other not perhaps a more lucrative, but a nobler one--for there are degrees of nobility in labour. But unhappily it is only too seldom that a man who keeps to one occupation without changing is concerned with making a religious vocation of it, or that the man who changes his occupation for another does so from any religious motive. And do you not know cases in which a man, justifying his action on the ground that the professional organism to which he belongs and in which he works is badly organized and does not function as it ought, will evade the strict performance of his duty on the pretext that he is thereby fulfilling a higher duty? Is not this insistence upon the literal carrying out of orders called disciplinarianism, and do not people speak disparagingly of bureaucracy and the Pharisaism of public officials? And cases occur not unlike that of an intelligent and studious military officer who should discover the deficiencies of his country's military organization and denounce them to his superiors and perhaps to the public--thereby fulfilling his duty--and who, when on active service, should refuse to carry out an operation which he was ordered to undertake, believing that there was but scant probability of success or rather certainty of failure, so long as these deficiencies remained unremedied. He would deserve to be shot. And as for this question of Pharisaism ... And there is always a way of obeying an order while yet retaining the command, a way of carrying out what one believes to be an absurd operation while correcting its absurdity, even though it involve one's own death. When in my bureaucratic capacity I have come across some legislative ordinance that has fallen into desuetude because of its manifest absurdity, I have always endeavoured to apply it. There is nothing worse than a loaded pistol which nobody uses left lying in some corner of the house; a child finds it, begins to play with it, and kills its own father. Laws that have fallen into desuetude are the most terrible of all laws, when the cause of the desuetude is the badness of the law. And these are not groundless suppositions, and least of all in our country. For there are many who, while they go about looking out for I know not what ideal--that is to say, fictitious duties and responsibilities--neglect the duty of putting their whole soul into the immediate and concrete business which furnishes them with a living; and the rest, the immense majority, perform their task perfunctorily, merely for the sake of nominally complying with their duty--_para cumplir_, a terribly immoral phrase--in order to get themselves out of a difficulty, to get the job done, to qualify for their wages without earning them, whether these wages be pecuniary or otherwise. Here you have a shoemaker who lives by making shoes, and makes them with just enough care and attention to keep his clientèle together without losing custom. Another shoemaker lives on a somewhat higher spiritual plane, for he has a proper love for his work, and out of pride or a sense of honour strives for the reputation of being the best shoemaker in the town or in the kingdom, even though this reputation brings him no increase of custom or profit, but only renown and prestige. But there is a still higher degree of moral perfection in this business of shoemaking, and that is for the shoemaker to aspire to become for his fellow-townsmen the one and only shoemaker, indispensable and irreplaceable, the shoemaker who looks after their footgear so well that they will feel a definite loss when he dies--when he is "dead to them," not merely "dead"[56]--and they will feel that he ought not to have died. And this will result from the fact that in working for them he was anxious to spare them any discomfort and to make sure that it should not be any preoccupation with their feet that should prevent them from being at leisure to contemplate the higher truths; he shod them for the love of them and for the love of God in them--he shod them religiously. I have chosen this example deliberately, although it may perhaps appear to you somewhat pedestrian. For the fact is that in this business of shoemaking, the religious, as opposed to the ethical, sense is at a very low ebb. Working men group themselves in associations, they form co-operative societies and unions for defence, they fight very justly and nobly for the betterment of their class; but it is not clear that these associations have any great influence on their moral attitude towards their work. They have succeeded in compelling employers to employ only such workmen, and no others, as the respective unions shall designate in each particular case; but in the selection of those designated they pay little heed to their technical fitness. Often the employer finds it almost impossible to dismiss an inefficient workman on account of his inefficiency, for his fellow-workers take his part. Their work, moreover, is often perfunctory, performed merely as a pretext for receiving a wage, and instances even occur when they deliberately mishandle it in order to injure their employer. In attempting to justify this state of things, it may be said that the employers are a hundred times more blameworthy than the workmen, for they are not concerned to give a better wage to the man who does better work, or to foster the general education and technical proficiency of the workman, or to ensure the intrinsic goodness of the article produced. The improvement of the product--which, apart from reasons of industrial and mercantile competition, ought to be in itself and for the good of the consumers, for charity's sake, the chief end of the business--is not so regarded either by employers or employed, and this is because neither the one nor the other have any religious sense of their social function. Neither of them seek to make themselves irreplaceable. The evil is aggravated when the business takes the unhappy form of the impersonal limited company, for where there is no longer any personal signature there is no longer any of that pride which seeks to give the signature prestige, a pride which in its way is a substitute for the craving for eternalization. With the disappearance of the concrete individuality, the basis of all religion, the religious sense of the business calling disappears also. And what has been said of employers and workmen applies still more to members of the liberal professions and public functionaries. There is scarcely a single servant of the State who feels the religious bearing of his official and public duties. Nothing could be more unsatisfactory, nothing more confused, than the feeling among our people with regard to their duties towards the State, and this sense of duty is still further obliterated by the attitude of the Catholic Church, whose action so far as the State is concerned is in strict truth anarchical. It is no uncommon thing to find among its ministers upholders of the moral lawfulness of smuggling and contraband as if in disobeying the legally constituted authority the smuggler and contrabandist did not sin against the Fourth Commandment of the law of God, which in commanding us to honour our father and mother commands us to obey all lawful authority in so far as the ordinances of such authority are not contrary (and the levying of these contributions is certainly not contrary) to the law of God. There are many who, since it is written "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," regard work as a punishment, and therefore they attribute merely an economico-political, or at best an esthetic, value to the work of everyday life. For those who take this view--and it is the view principally held by the Jesuits--the business of life is twofold: there is the inferior and transitory business of winning a livelihood, of winning bread for ourselves and our children in an honourable, manner--and the elasticity of this honour is well known; and there is the grand business of our salvation, of winning eternal glory. This inferior or worldly business is to be undertaken not only so as to permit us, without deceiving or seriously injuring our neighbours, to live decently in accordance with our social position, but also so as to afford us the greatest possible amount of time for attending to the other main business of our life. And there are others who, rising somewhat above this conception of the work of our civil occupation, a conception which is economical rather than ethical, attain to an esthetic conception and sense of it, and this involves endeavouring to acquire distinction and renown in our occupation, the converting of it into an art for art's sake, for beauty's sake. But it is necessary to rise still higher than this, to attain to an ethical sense of our civil calling, to a sense which derives from our religious sense, from our hunger of eternalization. To work at our ordinary civil occupation, with eyes fixed on God, for the love of God, which is equivalent to saying for the love of our eternalization, is to make of this work a work of religion. That saying, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," does not mean that God condemned man to work, but to the painfulness of it. It would have been no condemnation to have condemned man to work itself, for work is the only practical consolation for having been born. And, for a Christian, the proof that God did not condemn man to work itself consists in the saying of the Scripture that, before the Fall, while he was still in a state of innocence, God took man and put him in the garden "to dress it and to keep it" (Gen. ii. 15). And how, in fact, would man have passed his time in Paradise if he had had no work to do in keeping it in order? And may it not be that the beatific vision itself is a kind of work? And even if work were our punishment, we ought to strive to make it, the punishment itself, our consolation and our redemption; and if we must needs embrace some cross or other, there is for each one of us no better cross than the cross of our own civil calling. For Christ did not say, "Take up my cross and follow me," but "Take up thy cross and follow me": every man his own cross, for the Saviour's cross the Saviour alone can bear. And the imitation of Christ, therefore, does not consist in that monastic ideal so shiningly set forth in the book that commonly bears the name of à Kempis, an ideal only applicable to a very limited number of persons and therefore anti-Christian; but to imitate Christ is to take up each one his own cross, the cross of his own civil occupation--civil and not merely religions--as Christ took up his cross, the cross of his calling, and to embrace it and carry it, looking towards God and striving to make each act of this calling a true prayer. In making shoes and because he makes them a man can gain heaven, provided that the shoemaker strives to be perfect, as a shoemaker, as our Father in heaven is perfect. Fourier, the socialist dreamer, dreamed of making work attractive in his phalansteries by the free choice of vocations and in other ways. There is no other way than that of liberty. Wherein consists the charm of the game of chance, which is a kind of work, if not in the voluntary submission of the player to the liberty of Nature--that is, to chance? But do not let us lose ourselves in a comparison between work and play. And the sense of making ourselves irreplaceable, of not meriting death, of making our annihilation, if it is annihilation that awaits us, an injustice, ought to impel us not only to perform our own occupation religiously, from love of God and love of our eternity and eternalization, but to perform it passionately, tragically if you like. It ought to impel us to endeavour to stamp others with our seal, to perpetuate ourselves in them and in their children by dominating them, to leave on all things the imperishable impress of our signature. The most fruitful ethic is the ethic of mutual imposition. Above all, we must recast in a positive form the negative commandments which we have inherited from the Ancient Law. Thus where it is written, "Thou shalt not lie!" let us understand, "Thou shalt always speak the truth, in season and out of season!" although it is we ourselves, and not others, who are judges in each case of this seasonableness. And for "Thou shalt not kill!" let us understand, "Thou shalt give life and increase it!" And for "Thou shalt not steal!" let us say, "Thou shalt increase the general wealth!" And for "Thou shalt not commit adultery!" "Thou shalt give children, healthy, strong, and good, to thy country and to heaven!" And thus with all the other commandments. He who does not lose his life shall not find it. Give yourself then to others, but in order to give yourself to them, first dominate them. For it is not possible to dominate except by being dominated. Everyone nourishes himself upon the flesh of that which he devours. In order that you may dominate your neighbour you must know and love him. It is by attempting to impose my ideas upon him that I become the recipient of his ideas. To love my neighbour is to wish that he may be like me, that he may be another I--that is to say, it is to wish that I may be he; it is to wish to obliterate the division between him and me, to suppress the evil. My endeavour to impose myself upon another, to be and live in him and by him, to make him mine--which is the same as making myself his--is that which gives religious meaning to human collectivity, to human solidarity. The feeling of solidarity originates in myself; since I am a society, I feel the need of making myself master of human society; since I am a social product, I must socialize myself, and from myself I proceed to God--who is I projected to the All--and from God to each of my neighbours. My immediate first impulse is to protest against the inquisitor and to prefer the merchant who comes to offer me his wares. But when my impressions are clarified by reflection, I begin to see that the inquisitor, when he acts from a right motive, treats me as a man, as an end in myself, and if he molests me it is from a charitable wish to save my soul; while the merchant, on the other hand, regards me merely as a customer, as a means to an end, and his indulgence and tolerance is at bottom nothing but a supreme indifference to my destiny. There is much more humanity in the inquisitor. Similarly there is much more humanity in war than in peace. Non-resistance to evil implies resistance to good, and to take the offensive, leaving the defensive out of the question, is perhaps the divinest thing in humanity. War is the school of fraternity and the bond of love; it is war that has brought peoples into touch with one another, by mutual aggression and collision, and has been the cause of their knowing and loving one another. Human love knows no purer embrace, or one more fruitful in its consequences, than that between victor and vanquished on the battlefield. And even the purified hate that springs from war is fruitful. War is, in its strictest sense, the sanctification of homicide; Cain is redeemed as a leader of armies. And if Cain had not killed his brother Abel, perhaps he would have died by the hand of Abel. God revealed Himself above all in war; He began by being the God of battles; and one of the greatest services of the Cross is that, in the form of the sword-hilt, it protects the hand that wields the sword. The enemies of the State say that Cain, the fratricide, was the founder of the State. And we must accept the fact and turn it to the glory of the State, the child of war. Civilization began on the day on which one man, by subjecting another to his will and compelling him to do the work of two, was enabled to devote himself to the contemplation of the world and to set his captive upon works of luxury. It was slavery that enabled Plato to speculate upon the ideal republic, and it was war that brought slavery about. Not without reason was Athena the goddess of war and of wisdom. But is there any need to repeat once again these obvious truths, which, though they have continually been forgotten, are continually rediscovered? And the supreme commandment that arises out of love towards God, and the foundation of all morality, is this: Yield yourself up entirely, give your spirit to the end that you may save it, that you may eternalize it. Such is the sacrifice of life. The individual _quâ_ individual, the wretched captive of the instinct of preservation and of the senses, cares only about preserving himself, and all his concern is that others should not force their way into his sphere, should not disturb him, should not interrupt his idleness; and in return for their abstention or for the sake of example he refrains from forcing himself upon them, from interrupting their idleness, from disturbing them, from taking possession of them. "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you," he translates thus: I do not interfere with others--let them not interfere with me. And he shrinks and pines and perishes in this spiritual avarice and this repellent ethic of anarchic individualism: each one for himself. And as each one is not himself, he can hardly live for himself. But as soon as the individual feels himself in society, he feels himself in God, and kindled by the instinct of perpetuation he glows with love towards God, and with a dominating charity he seeks to perpetuate himself in others, to perennialize his spirit, to eternalize it, to unnail God, and his sole desire is to seal his spirit upon other spirits and to receive their impress in return. He has shaken off the yoke of his spiritual sloth and avarice. Sloth, it is said, is the mother of all the vices; and in fact sloth does engender two vices--avarice and envy--which in their turn are the source of all the rest. Sloth is the weight of matter, in itself inert, within us, and this sloth, while it professes to preserve us by economizing our forces, in reality attenuates us and reduces us to nothing. In man there is either too much matter or too much spirit, or to put it better, either he feels a hunger for spirit--that is, for eternity--or he feels a hunger for matter--that is, submission to annihilation. When spirit is in excess and he feels a hunger for yet more of it, he pours it forth and scatters it abroad, and in scattering it abroad he amplifies it with that of others; and on the contrary, when a man is avaricious of himself and thinks that he will preserve himself better by withdrawing within himself, he ends by losing all--he is like the man who received the single talent: he buried it in order that he might not lose it, and in the end he was bereft of it. For to him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath but a little shall be taken away even the little that he hath. Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect, we are bidden, and this terrible precept--terrible because for us the infinite perfection of the Father is unattainable--must be our supreme rule of conduct. Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will be scarcely worth the trouble of achieving. It behoves us to aspire to the impossible, to the absolute and infinite perfection, and to say to the Father, "Father, I cannot--help Thou my impotence." And He acting in us will achieve it for us. And to be perfect is to be all, it is to be myself and to be all else, it is to be humanity, it is to be the Universe. And there is no other way of being all but to give oneself to all, and when all shall be in all, all will be in each one of us. The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream: it is a rule of action, it is a beacon beckoning us to high exploits. And from it springs the ethic of invasion, of domination, of aggression, of inquisition if you like. For true charity is a kind of invasion--it consists in putting my spirit into other spirits, in giving them my suffering as the food and consolation for their sufferings, in awakening their unrest with my unrest, in sharpening their hunger for God with my hunger for God. It is not charity to rock and lull our brothers to sleep in the inertia and drowsiness of matter, but rather to awaken them to the uneasiness and torment of spirit. To the fourteen works of mercy which we learnt in the Catechism of Christian Doctrine there should sometimes be added yet another, that of awakening the sleeper. Sometimes, at any rate, and surely when the sleeper sleeps on the brink of a precipice, it is much more merciful to awaken him than to bury him after he is dead--let us leave the dead to bury their dead. It has been well said, "Whosoever loves thee dearly will make thee weep," and charity often causes weeping. "The love that does not mortify does not deserve so divine a name," said that ardent Portuguese apostle, Fr. Thomé de Jesús,[57] who was also the author of this ejaculation--"O infinite fire, O eternal love, who weepest when thou hast naught to embrace and feed upon and many hearts to burn!" He who loves his neighbour burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, in burning groans and distils itself in tears. And to do this is generosity, one of the two mother virtues which are born when inertia, sloth, is overcome. Most of our miseries come from spiritual avarice. The cure for suffering--which, as we have said, is the collision of consciousness with unconsciousness--is not to be submerged in unconsciousness, but to be raised to consciousness and to suffer more. The evil of suffering is cured by more suffering, by higher suffering. Do not take opium, but put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for when you sleep and no longer feel the suffering, you are not. And to be, that is imperative. Do not then close your eyes to the agonizing Sphinx, but look her in the face and let her seize you in her mouth and crunch you with her hundred thousand poisonous teeth and swallow you. And when she has swallowed you, you will know the sweetness of the taste of suffering. The way thereto in practice is by the ethic of mutual imposition. Men should strive to impose themselves upon one another, to give their spirits to one another, to seal one another's souls. There is matter for thought in the fact that the Christian ethic has been called an ethic of slaves. By whom? By anarchists! It is anarchism that is an ethic of slaves, for it is only the slave that chants the praises of anarchical liberty. Anarchism, no! but _panarchism_; not the creed of "Nor God nor master!" but that of "All gods and all masters!" all striving to become gods, to become immortal, and achieving this by dominating others. And there are so many ways of dominating. There is even a passive way, or one at least that is apparently passive, of fulfilling at times this law of life. Adaptation to environment, imitation, putting oneself in another's place, sympathy, in a word, besides being a manifestation of the unity of the species, is a mode of self-expansion, of being another. To be conquered, or at least to seem to be conquered, is often to conquer; to take what is another's is a way of living in him. And in speaking of domination, I do not mean the domination of the tiger. The fox also dominates by cunning, and the hare by flight, and the viper by poison, and the mosquito by its smallness, and the squid by the inky fluid with which it darkens the water and under cover of which it escapes. And no one is scandalized at this, for the same universal Father who gave its fierceness, its talons, and its jaws to the tiger, gave cunning to the fox, swift feet to the hare, poison to the viper, diminutiveness to the mosquito, and its inky fluid to the squid. And nobleness or ignobleness does not consist in the weapons we use, for every species and even every individual possesses its own, but rather in the way in which we use them, and above all in the cause in which we wield them. And among the weapons of conquest must be included the weapon of patience and of resignation, but a passionate patience and a passionate resignation, containing within itself an active principle and antecedent longings. You remember that famous sonnet of Milton--Milton, the great fighter, the great Puritan disturber of the spiritual peace, the singer of Satan--who, when he considered how his light was spent and that one talent which it is death to hide lodged with him useless, heard the voice of Patience saying to him, God doth not need Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best: his state Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed, And post o'er land and ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait. They also serve who only stand and wait--yes, but it is when they wait for Him passionately, hungeringly, full of longing for immortality in Him. And we must impose ourselves, even though it be by our patience. "My cup is small, but I drink out of my cup," said the egoistical poet of an avaricious people.[58] No, out of my cup all drink, for I wish all to drink out of it; I offer it to them, and my cup grows according to the number of those who drink out of it, and all, in putting it to their lips, leave in it something of their spirit. And while they drink out of my cup, I also drink out of theirs. For the more I belong to myself, and the more I am myself, the more I belong to others; out of the fullness of myself I overflow upon my brothers, and as I overflow upon them they enter into me. "Be ye perfect, as your Father is perfect," we are bidden, and our Father is perfect because He is Himself and because He is in each one of His children who live and move and have their being in Him. And the end of perfection is that we all may be one (John xvii. 21), all one body in Christ (Rom. xii. 5), and that, at the last, when all things are subdued unto the Son, the Son himself may be subject to Him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all. And this is to make the Universe consciousness, to make Nature a society, and a human society. And then shall we be able confidently to call God Father. I am aware that those who say that ethics is a science will say that all this commentary of mine is nothing but rhetoric; but each man has his own language and his own passion--that is to say, each man who knows what passion is--and as for the man who knows it not, nothing will it avail him to know science. And the passion that finds its expression in this rhetoric, the devotees of ethical science call egotism. But this egotism is the only true remedy for egoism, spiritual avarice, the vice of preserving and reserving oneself and of not striving to perennialize oneself by giving oneself. "Be not, and ye shall be mightier than all that is," said Fr. Juan de los Angeles in one of his _Diálogos de la Conquista del Reina de Dios_ (_Dial._, iii., 8); but what does this "Be not" mean? May it not mean paradoxically--and such a mode of expression is common with the mystics--the contrary of that which, at a first and literal reading, it would appear to mean? Is not the whole ethic of submission and quietism an immense paradox, or rather a great tragic contradiction? Is not the monastic, the strictly monastic, ethic an absurdity? And by the monastic ethic I mean that of the solitary Carthusian, that of the hermit, who flees from the world--perhaps carrying it with him nevertheless--in order that he may live quite alone with a God who is lonely as himself; not that of the Dominican inquisitor who scoured Provence in search of Albigensian hearts to burn. "Let God do it all," someone will say; but if man folds his arms, God will go to sleep. This Carthusian ethic and that scientific ethic which is derived from ethical science--oh, this science of ethics! rational and rationalistic ethics! pedantry of pedantry, all is pedantry!--yes, this perhaps is egoism and coldness of heart. There are some who say that they isolate themselves with God in order that they may the better work out their salvation, their redemption; but since sin is collective, redemption must be collective also. "The religious is the determination of the whole, and everything outside this is an illusion of the senses, and that is why the greatest criminal is at bottom innocent, a good-natured man and a saint" (Kierkegaard, _Afsluttende_, etc., ii., ii., cap. iv., sect. 2, _a_). Are we to understand, on the other hand, that men seek to gain the other, the eternal life, by renouncing this the temporal life? If the other life is anything, it must be a continuation of this, and only as such a continuation, more or less purified, is it mirrored in our desire; and if this is so, such as is this life of time, so will be the life of eternity. "This world and the other are like the two wives of one husband--if he pleases one he makes the other envious," said an Arab thinker, quoted by Windelband (_Das Heilige_, in vol. ii. of _Präludien_); but such a thought could only have arisen in the mind of one who had failed to resolve the tragic conflict between his spirit and the world in a fruitful warfare, a practical contradiction. "Thy kingdom come" to us; so Christ taught us to pray to the Father, not "May we come to Thy kingdom"; and according to the primitive Christian belief the eternal life was to be realized on this earth itself and as a continuation of the earthly life. We were made men and not angels in order that we might seek our happiness through the medium of this life, and the Christ of the Christian Faith became, not an angelic, but a human, being, redeeming us by taking upon himself a real and effective body and not an appearance of one merely. And according to this same Faith, even the highest of the angelical hierarchy adore the Virgin, the supreme symbol of terrestrial Humanity. The angelical ideal, therefore, is not the Christian ideal, and still less is it the human ideal, nor can it be. An angel, moreover, is a neutral being, without sex and without country. It is impossible for us to feel the other life, the eternal life, I have already repeated more than once, as a life of angelical contemplation; it must be a life of action. Goethe said that "man must believe in immortality, since in his nature he has a right to it." And he added: "The conviction of our persistence arises in me from the concept of activity. If I work without ceasing to the end, Nature is obliged (_so ist die Natur verpflichtet_) to provide me with another form of existence, since my actual spirit can bear no more." Change Nature to God, and you have a thought that remains Christian in character, for the first Fathers of the Church did not believe that the immortality of the soul was a natural gift--that is to say, something rational--but a divine gift of grace. And that which is of grace is usually, in its essence, of justice, since justice is divine and gratuitous, not natural. And Goethe added: "I could begin nothing with an eternal happiness before me, unless new tasks and new difficulties were given me to overcome." And true it is that there is no happiness in a vacuity of contemplation. But may there not be some justification for the morality of the hermit, of the Carthusian, the ethic of the Thebaid? Might we not say, perhaps, that it is necessary to preserve these exceptional types in order that they may stand as everlasting patterns for mankind? Do not men breed racehorses, which are useless for any practical kind of work, but which preserve the purity of the breed and become the sires of excellent hackneys and hunters? Is there not a luxury of ethics, not less justifiable than any other sort of luxury? But, on the other hand, is not all this substantially esthetics, and not ethics, still less religion? May not the contemplative, medieval, monastic ideal be esthetical, and not religious nor even ethical? And after all, those of the seekers after solitude who have related to us their conversation when they were alone with God have performed an eternalizing work, they have concerned themselves with the souls of others. And by this alone, that it has given us an Eckhart, a Seuse, a Tauler, a Ruysbroek, a Juan de la Cruz, a Catherine of Siena, an Angela of Foligno, a Teresa de Jesús, is the cloister justified. But the chief of our Spanish Orders are the Predicadores, founded by Domingo de Guzmán for the aggressive work of extirpating heresy; the Company of Jesus, a militia with the world as its field of operations (which explains its history); the order of the Escuelas Pías, also devoted to a work of an aggressive or invasive nature, that of instruction. I shall certainly be reminded that the reform of the contemplative Order of the Carmelites which Teresa de Jesús undertook was a Spanish work. Yes, Spanish it was, and in it men sought liberty. It was, in fact, the yearning for liberty, for inward liberty, which, in the troubled days of the Inquisition, led many choice spirits to the cloister. They imprisoned themselves in order that they might be more free. "Is it not a fine thing that a poor nun of San José can attain to sovereignty over the whole earth and the elements?" said St. Teresa in her _Life_. It was the Pauline yearning for liberty, the longing to shake off the bondage of the external law, which was then very severe, and, as Maestro Fray Luis de León said, very stubborn. But did they actually find liberty in the cloister? It is very doubtful if they did, and to-day it is impossible. For true liberty is not to rid oneself of the external law; liberty is consciousness of the law. Not he who has shaken off the yoke of the law is free, but he who has made himself master of the law. Liberty must be sought in the midst of the world, which is the domain of the law, and of sin, the offspring of the law. That which we must be freed from is sin, which is collective. Instead of renouncing the world in order that we may dominate it--and who does not know the collective instinct of domination of those religious Orders whose members renounce the world?--what we ought to do is to dominate the world in order that we may be able to renounce it. Not to seek poverty and submission, but to seek wealth in order that we may use it to increase human consciousness, and to seek power for the same end. It is curious that monks and anarchists should be at enmity with each other, when fundamentally they both profess the same ethic and are related by close ties of kinship. Anarchism tends to become a kind of atheistic monachism and a religious, rather than an ethical or economico-social, doctrine. The one party starts from the assumption that man is naturally evil, born in original sin, and that it is through grace that he becomes good, if indeed he ever does become good; and the other from the assumption that man is naturally good and is subsequently perverted by society. And these two theories really amount to the same thing, for in both the individual is opposed to society, as if the individual had preceded society and therefore were destined to survive it. And both ethics are ethics of the cloister. And the fact that guilt is collective must not actuate me to throw mine upon the shoulders of others, but rather to take upon myself the burden of the guilt of others, the guilt of all men; not to merge and sink my guilt in the total mass of guilt, but to make this total guilt my own; not to dismiss and banish my own guilt, but to open the doors of my heart to the guilt of all men, to centre it within myself and appropriate it to myself. And each one of us ought to help to remedy the guilt, and just because others do not do so. The fact that society is guilty aggravates the guilt of each member of it. "Someone ought to do it, but why should I? is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. Someone ought to do it, so why not I? is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution." Thus spoke Mrs. Annie Besant in her autobiography. Thus spoke theosophy. The fact that society is guilty aggravates the guilt of each one, and he is most guilty who most is sensible of the guilt. Christ, the innocent, since he best knew the intensity of the guilt, was in a certain sense the most guilty. In him the culpability, together with the divinity, of humanity arrived at the consciousness of itself. Many are wont to be amused when they read how, because of the most trifling faults, faults at which a man of the world would merely smile, the greatest saints counted themselves the greatest sinners. But the intensity of the fault is not measured by the external act, but by the consciousness of it, and an act for which the conscience of one man suffers acutely makes scarcely any impression on the conscience of another. And in a saint, conscience may be developed so fully and to such a degree of sensitiveness that the slightest sin may cause him more remorse than his crime causes the greatest criminal. And sin rests upon our consciousness of it, it is in him who judges and in so far as he judges. When a man commits a vicious act believing in good faith that he is doing a virtuous action, we cannot hold him morally guilty, while on the other hand that man is guilty who commits an act which he believes to be wrong, even though in itself the act is indifferent or perhaps beneficent. The act passes away, the intention remains, and the evil of the evil act is that it corrupts the intention, that in knowingly doing wrong a man is predisposed to go on doing it, that it blurs the conscience. And doing evil is not the same as being evil. Evil blurs the conscience, and not only the moral conscience but the general, psychical consciousness. And everything that exalts and expands consciousness is good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil. And here we might raise the question which, according to Plato, was propounded by Socrates, as to whether virtue is knowledge, which is equivalent to asking whether virtue is rational. The ethicists--those who maintain that ethics is a science, those whom the reading of these divagations will provoke to exclaim, "Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric!"--would appear to think that virtue is the fruit of knowledge, of rational study, and that even mathematics help us to be better men. I do not know, but for my part I feel that virtue, like religion, like the longing never to die--and all these are fundamentally the same thing--is the fruit of passion. But, I shall be asked, What then is passion? I do not know, or rather, I know full well, because I feel it, and since I feel it there is no need for me to define it to myself. Nay, more; I fear that if I were to arrive at a definition of it, I should cease to feel it and to possess it. Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates its object. It is easier for the fire to find something to burn than for something combustible to find the fire. That this may appear empty and sophistical well I know. And I shall also be told that there is the science of passion and the passion of science, and that it is in the moral sphere that reason and life unite together. I do not know, I do not know, I do not know.... And perhaps I may be saying fundamentally the same thing, although more confusedly, that my imaginary adversaries say, only more clearly, more definitely, and more rationally, those adversaries whom I imagine in order that I may have someone to fight. I do not know, I do not know.... But what they say freezes me and sounds to me as though it proceeded from emptiness of feeling. And, returning to our former question, Is virtue knowledge?--Is knowledge virtue? For they are two distinct questions. Virtue may be a science, the science of acting rightly, without every other science being therefore virtue. The virtue of Machiavelli is a science, and it cannot be said that his _virtu_ is always moral virtue It is well known, moreover, that the cleverest and the most learned men are not the best. No, no, no! Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics how to be good. And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be the pedantry of logic, or of esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy. Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make either heroes or saints. Perhaps the saint is he who does good not for good's sake, but for God's sake, for the sake of eternalization. Perhaps, on the other hand, culture, or as I should say Culture--oh, this culture!--which is primarily the work of philosophers and men of science, is a thing which neither heroes nor saints have had any share in the making of. For saints have concerned themselves very little with the progress of human culture; they have concerned themselves rather with the salvation of the individual souls of those amongst whom they lived. Of what account in the history of human culture is our San Juan de la Cruz, for example--that fiery little monk, as culture, in perhaps somewhat uncultured phrase, has called him--compared with Descartes? All those saints, burning with religious charity towards their neighbours, hungering for their own and others' eternalization, who went about burning hearts, inquisitors, it may be--what have all those saints done for the progress of the science of ethics? Did any of them discover the categorical imperative, like the old bachelor of Königsberg, who, if he was not a saint, deserved to be one? The son of a famous professor of ethics, one who scarcely ever opened his lips without mentioning the categorical imperative, was lamenting to me one day the fact that he lived in a desolating dryness of spirit, in a state of inward emptiness. And I was constrained to answer him thus: "My friend, your father had a subterranean river flowing through his spirit, a fresh current fed by the beliefs of his early childhood, by hopes in the beyond; and while he thought that he was nourishing his soul with this categorical imperative or something of that sort, he was in reality nourishing it with those waters which had their spring in his childish days. And it may be that to you he has given the flower of his spirit, his rational doctrines of ethics, but not the root, not the subterranean source, not the irrational substratum." How was it that Krausism took root here in Spain, while Kantism and Hegelianism did not, although the two latter systems are much more profound, morally and philosophically, than the first? Because in transplanting the first, its roots were transplanted with it. The philosophical thought of a people or a period is, as it were, the flower, the thing that is external and above ground; but this flower, or fruit if you prefer it, draws its sap from the root of the plant, and this root, which is in and under the ground, is the religious sense. The philosophical thought of Kant, the supreme flower of the mental evolution of the Germanic people, has its roots in the religious feeling of Luther, and it is not possible for Kantism, especially the practical part of it, to take root and bring forth flower and fruit in peoples who have not undergone the experience of the Reformation and who perhaps were incapable of experiencing it. Kantism is Protestant, and we Spaniards are fundamentally Catholic. And if Krause struck some roots here--more numerous and more permanent than is commonly supposed--it is because Krause had roots in pietism, and pietism, as Ritschl has demonstrated in his _Geschichte des Pietismus_, has specifically Catholic roots and may be described as the irruption, or rather the persistence, of Catholic mysticism in the heart of Protestant rationalism. And this explains why not a few Catholic thinkers in Spain became followers of Krause. And since we Spaniards are Catholic--whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not--and although some of us may claim to be rationalists or atheists, perhaps the greatest service we can render to the cause of culture, and of what is of more value than culture, religiousness--if indeed they are not the same thing--is in endeavouring to formulate clearly to ourselves this subconscious, social, or popular Catholicism of ours. And that is what I have attempted to do in this work. What I call the tragic sense of life in men and peoples is at any rate our tragic sense of life, that of Spaniards and the Spanish people, as it is reflected in my consciousness, which is a Spanish consciousness, made in Spain. And this tragic sense of life is essentially the Catholic sense of it, for Catholicism, and above all popular Catholicism, is tragic. The people abhors comedy. When Pilate--the type of the refined gentleman, the superior person, the esthete, the rationalist if you like--proposes to give the people comedy and mockingly presents Christ to them, saying, "Behold the man!" the people mutinies and shouts "Crucify him! Crucify him!" The people does not want comedy but tragedy. And that which Dante, the great Catholic, called the Divine Comedy, is the most tragical tragedy that has ever been written. And as I have endeavoured in these essays to exhibit the soul of a Spaniard, and therewithal the Spanish soul, I have curtailed the number of quotations from Spanish writers, while scattering with perhaps too lavish a hand those from the writers of other countries. For all human souls are brother-souls. And there is one figure, a comically tragic figure, a figure in which is revealed all that is profoundly tragic in the human comedy, the figure of Our Lord Don Quixote, the Spanish Christ, who resumes and includes in himself the immortal soul of my people. Perhaps the passion and death of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is the passion and death of the Spanish people, its death and resurrection. And there is a Quixotesque philosophy and even a Quixotesque metaphysic, there is a Quixotesque logic, and also a Quixotesque ethic and a Quixotesque religious sense--the religious sense of Spanish Catholicism. This is the philosophy, this is the logic, this is the ethic, this is the religious sense, that I have endeavoured to outline, to suggest rather than to develop, in this work. To develop it rationally, no; the Quixotesque madness does not submit to scientific logic. And now, before concluding and bidding my readers farewell, it remains for me to speak of the rôle that is reserved for Don Quixote in the modern European tragi-comedy. Let us see, in the next and last essay, what this may be. FOOTNOTES: [54] Act II., Scene 4: "I am dreaming and I wish to act rightly, for good deeds are not lost, though they be wrought in dreams." [55] Act III., Scene 10: "Let us aim at the eternal, the glory that does not wane, where bliss slumbers not and where greatness does not repose." [56] "Se _les_ muera," y no sólo "se muera." [57] _Trabalhos de Jesus_, part i. [58] De Musset. CONCLUSION DON QUIXOTE IN THE CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN TRAGI-COMEDY "A voice crying in the wilderness!"--ISA. xl. 3. Need is that I bring to a conclusion, for the present at any rate, these essays that threaten to become like a tale that has no ending. They have gone straight from my hands to the press in the form of a kind of improvization upon notes collected during a number of years, and in writing each essay I have not had before me any of those that preceded it. And thus they will go forth full of inward contradictions--apparent contradictions, at any rate--like life and like me myself. My sin, if any, has been that I have embellished them to excess with foreign quotations, many of which will appear to have been dragged in with a certain degree of violence. But I will explain this another time. A few years after Our Lord Don Quixote had journeyed through Spain, Jacob Böhme declared in his _Aurora_ (chap xi., § 142) that he did not write a story or history related to him by others, but that he himself had had to stand in the battle, which he found to be full of heavy strivings, and wherein he was often struck down to the ground like all other men; and a little further on (§ 152) he adds: "Although I must become a spectacle of scorn to the world and the devil, yet my hope is in God concerning the life to come; in Him will I venture to hazard it and not resist or strive against the Spirit. Amen." And like this Quixote of the German intellectual world, neither will I resist the Spirit. And therefore I cry with the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and I send forth my cry from this University of Salamanca, a University that arrogantly styled itself _omnium scientiarum princeps_, and which Carlyle called a stronghold of ignorance and which a French man of letters recently called a phantom University; I send it forth from this Spain--"the land of dreams that become realities, the rampart of Europe, the home of the knightly ideal," to quote from a letter which the American poet Archer M. Huntington sent me the other day--from this Spain which was the head and front of the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century. And well they repay her for it! In the fourth of these essays I spoke of the essence of Catholicism. And the chief factors in _de-essentializing_ it--that is, in de-Catholicizing Europe--have been the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution, which for the ideal of an eternal, ultra-terrestrial life, have substituted the ideal of progress, of reason, of science, or, rather, of Science with the capital letter. And last of all, the dominant ideal of to-day, comes Culture. And in the second half of the nineteenth century, an age essentially unphilosophical and technical, dominated by a myopic specialism and by historical materialism, this ideal took a practical form, not so much in the popularization as in the vulgarization of science--or, rather, of pseudo-science--venting itself in a flood of cheap, popular, and propagandist literature. Science sought to popularize itself as if it were its function to come down to the people and subserve their passions, and not the duty of the people to rise to science and through science to rise to higher heights, to new and profounder aspirations. All this led Brunetière to proclaim the bankruptcy of science, and this science--if you like to call it science--did in effect become bankrupt. And as it failed to satisfy, men continued their quest for happiness, but without finding it, either in wealth, or in knowledge, or in power, or in pleasure, or in resignation, or in a good conscience, or in culture. And the result was pessimism. Neither did the gospel of progress satisfy. What end did progress serve? Man would not accommodate himself to rationalism; the _Kulturkampf_ did not suffice him; he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I call the final finality is the real _hontôs hon_. And the famous _maladie du siècle_, which announced itself in Rousseau and was exhibited more plainly in Sénancour's _Obermann_ than in any other character, neither was nor is anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul, in the human finality of the Universe. The truest symbol of it is to be found in a creation of fiction, Dr. Faustus. This immortal Dr. Faustus, the product of the Renaissance and the Reformation, first comes into our ken at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when in 1604 he is introduced to us by Christopher Marlowe. This is the same character that Goethe was to rediscover two centuries later, although in certain respects the earlier Faust was the fresher and more spontaneous. And side by side with him Mephistopheles appears, of whom Faust asks: "What good will my soul do thy lord?" "Enlarge his kingdom," Mephistopheles replies. "Is that the reason why he tempts us thus?" the Doctor asks again, and the evil spirit answers: "_Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris_," which, mistranslated into Romance, is the equivalent of our proverb--"The misfortune of many is the consolation of fools." "Where we are is hell, and where hell is there must we ever be," Mephistopheles continues, to which Faust answers that he thinks hell's a fable and asks him who made the world. And finally this tragic Doctor, tortured with our torture, meets Helen, who, although no doubt Marlowe never suspected it, is none other than renascent Culture. And in Marlowe's _Faust_ there is a scene that is worth the whole of the second part of the _Faust_ of Goethe. Faust says to Helen: "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss"--and he kisses her-- Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies! Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for Helen is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena. Give me my soul again!--the cry of Faust, the Doctor, when, after having kissed Helen, he is about to be lost eternally. For the primitive Faust has no ingenuous Margaret to save him. This idea of his salvation was the invention of Goethe. And is there not a Faust whom we all know, our own Faust? This Faust has studied Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine, and even Theology, only to find that we can know nothing, and he has sought escape in the open country (_hinaus ins weite Land_) and has encountered Mephistopheles, the embodiment of that force which, ever willing evil, ever achieves good in its own despite. This Faust has been led by Mephistopheles to the arms of Margaret, child of the simple-hearted people, she whom Faust, the overwise, had lost. And thanks to her--for she gave herself to him--this Faust is saved, redeemed by the people that believes with a simple faith. But there was a second part, for that Faust was the anecdotical Faust and not the categorical Faust of Goethe, and he gave himself again to Culture, to Helen, and begot Euphorion upon her, and everything ends among mystical choruses with the discovery of the eternal feminine. Poor Euphorion! And this Helen is the spouse of the fair Menelaus, the Helen whom Paris bore away, who was the cause of the war of Troy, and of whom the ancient Trojans said that no one should be incensed because men fought for a woman who bore so terrible a likeness to the immortal gods. But I rather think that Faust's Helen was that other Helen who accompanied Simon Magus, and whom he declared to be the divine wisdom. And Faust can say to her: Give me my soul again! For Helen with her kisses takes away our soul. And what we long for and have need of is soul--soul of bulk and substance. But the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution came, bringing Helen to us, or, rather, urged on by Helen, and now they talk to us about Culture and Europe. Europe! This idea of Europe, primarily and immediately of geographical significance, has been converted for us by some magical process into a kind of metaphysical category. Who can say to-day--in Spain, at any rate--what Europe is? I only know that it is a shibboleth (_vide_ my _Tres Ensayos_). And when I proceed to examine what it is that our Europeanizers call Europe, it sometimes seems to me that much of its periphery remains outside of it--Spain, of course, and also England, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia--and hence it is reduced to the central portion, Franco-Germany, with its annexes and dependencies. All this is the consequence, I repeat, of the Renaissance and the Reformation, which, although apparently they lived in a state of internecine war, were twin-brothers. The Italians of the Renaissance were all of them Socinians; the humanists, with Erasmus at their head, regarded Luther, the German monk, as a barbarian, who derived his driving force from the cloister, as did Bruno and Campanella. But this barbarian was their twin-brother, and though their antagonist he was also the antagonist of the common enemy. All this, I say, is due to the Renaissance and the Reformation, and to what was the offspring of these two, the Revolution, and to them we owe also a new Inquisition, that of science or culture, which turns against those who refuse to submit to its orthodoxy the weapons of ridicule and contempt. When Galileo sent his treatise on the earth's motion to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he told him that it was meet that that which the higher authorities had determined should be believed and obeyed, and that he considered his treatise "as poetry or as a dream, and as such I desire your highness to receive it." And at other times he calls it a "chimera" or a "mathematical caprice." And in the same way in these essays, for fear also--why not confess it?--of the Inquisition, of the modern, the scientific, Inquisition, I offer as a poetry, dream, chimera, mystical caprice, that which springs from what is deepest in me. And I say with Galileo, _Eppur si muove!_ But is it only because of this fear? Ah, no! for there is another, more tragic Inquisition, and that is the Inquisition which the modern man, the man of culture, the European--and such am I, whether I will or not--carries within him. There is a more terrible ridicule, and that is the ridicule with which a man contemplates his own self. It is my reason that laughs at my faith and despises it. And it is here that I must betake me to my Lord Don Quixote in order that I may learn of him how to confront ridicule and overcome it, and a ridicule which perhaps--who knows?--he never knew. Yes, yes--how shall my reason not smile at these dilettantesque, would-be mystical, pseudo-philosophical interpretations, in which there is anything rather than patient study and--shall I say scientific?--objectivity and method? And nevertheless ... _eppur si muove!_ _Eppur si muove!_ And I take refuge in dilettantism, in what a pedant would call _demi-mondaine_ philosophy, as a shelter against the pedantry of specialists, against the philosophy of the professional philosophers. And who knows?... Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and the theology of the theologians. Let them talk to us of Europe! The civilization of Thibet is parallel with ours, and men who disappear like ourselves have lived and are living by it. And over all civilizations there hovers the shadow of Ecclesiastes, with his admonition, "How dieth the wise man?--as the fool" (ii. 16). Among the people of my country there is an admirable reply to the customary interrogation, "How are you?"[59] and it is "Living." And that is the truth--we are living, and living as much as all the rest. What can a man ask for more? And who does not recollect the verse?-- _Coda vez que considero que me tengo de morir, tiendo la capa en el suelo y no me harto de dormir._[60] But no, not sleeping, but dreaming--dreaming life, since life is a dream. Among us Spaniards another phrase has very rapidly passed into current usage, the expression "It's a question of passing the time," or "killing the time." And, in fact, we make time in order to kill it. But there is something that has always preoccupied us as much as or more than passing the time--a formula which denotes an esthetical attitude--and that is, gaining eternity, which is the formula of the religious attitude. The truth is, we leap from the esthetic and the economic to the religious, passing over the logical and the ethical; we jump from art to religion. One of our younger novelists, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, in his recent novel, _La Pata de la Raposa_, has told us that the idea of death is the trap, and spirit the fox or the wary virtue with which to circumvent the ambushes set by fatality, and he continues: "Caught in the trap, weak men and weak peoples lie prone on the ground ...; to robust spirits and strong peoples the rude shock of danger gives clear-sightedness; they quickly penetrate into the heart of the immeasurable beauty of life, and renouncing for ever their original hastiness and folly, emerge from the trap with muscles taut for action and with the soul's vigour, power, and efficiency increased a hundredfold." But let us see; weak men ... weak peoples ... robust spirits ... strong peoples ... what does all this mean? I do not know. What I think I know is that some individuals and peoples have not yet really thought about death and immortality, have not felt them, and that others have ceased to think about them, or rather ceased to feel them. And the fact that they have never passed through the religious period is not, I think, a matter for either men or peoples to boast about. The immeasurable beauty of life is a very fine thing to write about, and there are, indeed, some who resign themselves to it and accept it as it is, and even some who would persuade us that there is no problem in the "trap." But it has been said by Calderón that "to seek to persuade a man that the misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, does not console him for them, but is another misfortune in addition."[61] And, furthermore, "only the heart can speak to the heart," as Fray Diego de Estella said (_Vanidad del Mundo_, cap. xxi.). A short time ago a reply that I made to those who reproached us Spaniards for our scientific incapacity appeared to scandalize some people. After having remarked that the electric light and the steam engine function here in Spain just as well as in the countries where they were invented, and that we make use of logarithms as much as they do in the country where the idea of them was first conceived, I exclaimed, "Let others invent!"--a paradoxical expression which I do not retract. We Spaniards ought to appropriate to ourselves some of those sage counsels which Count Joseph de Maistre gave to the Russians, a people not unlike ourselves. In his admirable letters to Count Rasoumowski on public education in Russia, he said that a nation should not think the worse of itself because it was not made for science; that the Romans had no understanding of the arts, neither did they possess a mathematician, which, however, did not prevent them from playing their part in the world; and in particular we should take to heart everything that he said about that crowd of arrogant sciolists who idolize the tastes, the fashions, and the languages of foreign countries, and are ever ready to pull down whatever they despise--and they despise everything. We have not the scientific spirit? And what of that, if we have some other spirit? And who can tell if the spirit that we have is or is not compatible with the scientific spirit? But in saying "Let others invent!" I did not mean to imply that we must be content with playing a passive rôle. No. For them their science, by which we shall profit; for us, our own work. It is not enough to be on the defensive, we must attack. But we must attack wisely and cautiously. Reason must be our weapon. It is the weapon even of the fool. Our sublime fool and our exemplar, Don Quixote, after he had destroyed with two strokes of his sword that pasteboard visor "which he had fitted to his head-piece, made it anew, placing certain iron bars within it, in such a manner that he rested satisfied with its solidity, and without wishing to make a second trial of it, he deputed and held it in estimation of a most excellent visor."[62] And with the pasteboard visor on his head he made himself immortal--that is to say, he made himself ridiculous. For it was by making himself ridiculous that Don Quixote achieved his immortality. And there are so many ways of making ourselves ridiculous I ... Cournot said _(Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales_, etc., § 510): "It is best not to speak to either princes or peoples of the probabilities of death; princes will punish this temerity with disgrace; the public will revenge itself with ridicule." True, and therefore it is said that we must live as the age lives. _Corrumpere et corrumpi sæculum vocatur_ (Tacitus: _Germania_ 19). It is necessary to know how to make ourselves ridiculous, and not only to others but to ourselves. And more than ever to-day, when there is so much chatter about our backwardness compared with other civilized peoples, to-day when a parcel of shallow-brained critics say that we have had no science, no art, no philosophy, no Renaissance, (of this we had perhaps too much), no anything, these same critics being ignorant of our real history, a history that remains yet to be written, the first task being to undo the web of calumniation and protest that has been woven around it. Carducci, the author of the phrase about the _contorcimenti dell'affannosa grandiositá spagnola_, has written (in _Mosche Cochiere_) that "even Spain, which never attained the hegemony of the world of thought, had her Cervantes." But was Cervantes a solitary and isolated phenomenon, without roots, without ancestry, without a foundation? That an Italian rationalist, remembering that it was Spain that reacted against the Renaissance in his country, should say that Spain _non ebbe egemonia mai di pensiero_ is, however, readily comprehended. Was there no importance, was there nothing akin to cultural hegemony, in the Counter-Reformation, of which Spain was the champion, and which in point of fact began with the sack of Rome by the Spaniards, a providential chastisement of the city of the pagan popes of the pagan Renaissance? Apart from the question as to whether the Counter-Reformation was good or bad, was there nothing akin to hegemony in Loyola or the Council of Trent? Previous to this Council, Italy witnessed a nefarious and unnatural union between Christianity and Paganism, or rather, between immortalism and mortalism, a union to which even some of the Popes themselves consented in their souls; theological error was philosophical truth, and all difficulties were solved by the accommodating formula _salva fide_. But it was otherwise after the Council; after the Council came the open and avowed struggle between reason and faith, science and religion. And does not the fact that this change was brought about, thanks principally to Spanish obstinacy, point to something akin to hegemony? Without the Counter-Reformation, would the Reformation have followed the course that it did actually follow? Without the Counter-Reformation might not the Reformation, deprived of the support of pietism, have perished in the gross rationalism of the _Aufklärung_, of the age of Enlightenment? Would nothing have been changed had there been no Charles I., no Philip II., our great Philip? A negative achievement, it will be said. But what is that? What is negative? what is positive? At what point in time--a line always continuing in the same direction, from the past to the future--does the zero occur which denotes the boundary between the positive and the negative? Spain, which is said to be the land of knights and rogues--and all of them rogues--has been the country most slandered by history precisely because it championed the Counter-Reformation. And because its arrogance has prevented it from stepping down into the public forum, into the world's vanity fair, and publishing its own justification. Let us leave on one side Spain's eight centuries of warfare against the Moors, during which she defended Europe from Mohammedanism, her work of internal unification, her discovery of America and the Indies--for this was the achievement of Spain and Portugal, and not of Columbus and Vasco da Gama--let us leave all this, and more than this, on one side, and it is not a little thing. Is it not a cultural achievement to have created a score of nations, reserving nothing for herself, and to have begotten, as the Conquistadores did, free men on poor Indian slaves? Apart from all this, does our mysticism count for nothing in the world of thought? Perhaps the peoples whose souls Helen will ravish away with her kisses may some day have to return to this mysticism to find their souls again. But, as everybody knows, Culture is composed of ideas and only of ideas, and man is only Culture's instrument. Man for the idea, and not the idea for man; the substance for the shadow. The end of man is to create science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be handed back to God in order, as I wrote years ago in my novel, _Amor y Pedagogia_. Man, apparently, is not even an idea. And at the end of all, the human race will fall exhausted at the foot of a pile of libraries--whole woods rased to the ground to provide the paper that is stored away in them--museums, machines, factories, laboratories ... in order to bequeath them--to whom? For God will surely not accept them. That horrible regenerationist literature, almost all of it an imposture, which the loss of our last American colonies provoked, led us into the pedantry of extolling persevering and silent effort--and this with great vociferation, vociferating silence--of extolling prudence, exactitude, moderation, spiritual fortitude, synteresis, equanimity, the social virtues, and the chiefest advocates of them were those of us who lacked them most. Almost all of us Spaniards fell into this ridiculous mode of literature, some more and some less. And so it befell that that arch-Spaniard Joaquín Costa, one of the least European spirits we ever had, invented his famous saying that we must Europeanize Spain, and, while proclaiming that we must lock up the sepulchre of the Cid with a sevenfold lock, Cid-like urged us to--conquer Africa! And I myself uttered the cry, "Down with Don Quixote!" and from this blasphemy, which meant the very opposite of what it said--such was the fashion of the hour--sprang my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_ and my cult of Quixotism as the national religion. I wrote that book in order to rethink _Don Quixote_ in opposition to the Cervantists and erudite persons, in order to make a living work of what was and still is for the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to me what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it and what he actually did put into it? What is living in it is what I myself discover in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and under and over it, and what we all put into it. I wanted to hunt down our philosophy in it. For the conviction continually grows upon me that our philosophy, the Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our life, in our action, in our mysticism, above all, and not in philosophical systems. It is concrete. And is there not perhaps as much philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel? The poetry of Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, _Don Quijote_, _La Vida es Sueño_, the _Subida al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept of life (_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_). And it was difficult for this philosophy of ours to formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist, technicist, devoted to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially materialist and pessimist. Our language itself, like every cultured language, contains within itself an implicit philosophy. A language, in effect, is a potential philosophy. Platonism is the Greek language which discourses in Plato, unfolding its secular metaphors; scholasticism is the philosophy of the dead Latin of the Middle Ages wrestling with the popular tongues; the French language discourses in Descartes, the German in Kant and in Hegel, and the English in Hume and in Stuart Mill. For the truth is that the logical starting-point of all philosophical speculation is not the I, neither is it representation (_Vorstellung_), nor the world as it presents itself immediately to the senses; but it is mediate or historical representation, humanly elaborated and such as it is given to us principally in the language by means of which we know the world; it is not psychical but spiritual representation. When we think, we are obliged to set out, whether we know it not and whether we will or not, from what has been thought by others who came before us and who environ us. Thought is an inheritance. Kant thought in German, and into German he translated Hume and Rousseau, who thought in English and French respectively. And did not Spinoza think in Judeo-Portuguese, obstructed by and contending with Dutch? Thought rests upon prejudgements, and prejudgements pass into language. To language Bacon rightly ascribed not a few of the errors of the _idola fori_. But is it possible to philosophize in pure algebra or even in Esperanto? In order to see the result of such an attempt one has only to read the work of Avenarius on the criticism of pure experience (_reine Erfahrung_), of this prehuman or inhuman experience. And even Avenarius, who was obliged to invent a language, invented one that was based upon the Latin tradition, with roots which carry in their metaphorical implications a content of impure experience, of human social experience. All philosophy is, therefore, at bottom philology. And philology, with its great and fruitful law of analogical formations, opens wide the door to chance, to the irrational, to the absolutely incommensurable. History is not mathematics, neither is philosophy. And how many philosophical ideas are not strictly owing to something akin to rhyme, to the necessity of rightly placing a consonant! In Kant himself there is a great deal of this, of esthetic symmetry, rhyme. Representation is, therefore, like language, like reason itself--which is simply internal language--a social and racial product, and race, the blood of the spirit, is language, as Oliver Wendell Holmes has said, and as I have often repeated. It was in Athens and with Socrates that our Western philosophy first became mature, conscious of itself, and it arrived at this consciousness by means of the dialogue, of social conversation. And it is profoundly significant that the doctrine of innate ideas, of the objective and normative value of ideas, of what Scholasticism afterwards knew as Realism, should have formulated itself in dialogues. And these ideas, which constitute reality, are names, as Nominalism showed. Not that they may not be more than names (_flatus vocis_), but that they are nothing less than names. Language is that which gives us reality, and not as a mere vehicle of reality, but as its true flesh, of which all the rest, dumb or inarticulate representation, is merely the skeleton. And thus logic operates upon esthetics, the concept upon the expression, upon the word, and not upon the brute perception. And this is true even in the matter of love. Love does not discover that it is love until it speaks, until it says, I love thee! In Stendhal's novel, _La Chartreuse de Parme_, it is with a very profound intuition that Count Mosca, furious with jealousy because of the love which he believes unites the Duchess of Sanseverina with his nephew Fabrice, is made to say, "I must be calm; if my manner is violent the duchess, simply because her vanity is piqued, is capable of following Belgirate, and then, during the journey, chance may lead to a word which will give a name to the feelings they bear towards each other, and thereupon in a moment all the consequences will follow." Even so--all things were made by the word, and the word was in the beginning. Thought, reason--that is, living language--is an inheritance, and the solitary thinker of Aben Tofail, the Arab philosopher of Guadix, is as absurd as the ego of Descartes. The real and concrete truth, not the methodical and ideal, is: _homo sum, ergo cogito_. To feel oneself a man is more immediate than to think. But, on the other hand, History, the process of culture, finds its perfection and complete effectivity only in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man, each individual. _Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de Unamuno_. The individual is the end of the Universe. And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end of the Universe. The introspective individuality of the Spaniard was pointed out by Martin A.S. Hume in a passage in _The Spanish People_,[63] upon which I commented in an essay published in _La España Moderna_.[64] And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism which has not permitted the growth on Spanish soil of strictly philosophical--or, rather, metaphysical--systems. And this in spite of Suárez, whose formal subtilties do not merit the name of philosophy. Our metaphysics, if we can be said to possess such a thing, has been metanthropics, and our metaphysicians have been philologists--or, rather, humanists--in the most comprehensive sense of the term. Menéndez de Pelayo, as Benedetto Croce very truly said (_Estetica_, bibliographical appendix), was inclined towards metaphysical idealism, but he appeared to wish to take something from other systems, even from empirical theories. For this reason Croce considers that his work (referring to his _Historia de las ideas estéticas de España_) suffers from a certain uncertainty, from the theoretical point of view of its author, Menéndez de Pelayo, which was that of a perfervid Spanish humanist, who, not wishing to disown the Renaissance, invented what he called Vivism, the philosophy of Luis Vives, and perhaps for no other reason than because he himself, like Vives, was an eclectic Spaniard of the Renaissance. And it is true that Menéndez de Pelayo, whose philosophy is certainly all uncertainty, educated in Barcelona in the timidities of the Scottish philosophy as it had been imported into the Catalan spirit--that creeping philosophy of common sense, which was anxious not to compromise itself and yet was all compromise, and which is so well exemplified in Balmes--always shunned all strenuous inward combat and formed his consciousness upon compromises. Angel Ganivet, a man all divination and instinct, was more happily inspired, in my opinion, when he proclaimed that the Spanish philosophy was that of Seneca, the pagan Stoic of Cordoba, whom not a few Christians regarded as one of themselves, a philosophy lacking in originality of thought but speaking with great dignity of tone and accent. His accent was a Spanish, Latino-African accent, not Hellenic, and there are echoes of him in Tertullian--Spanish, too, at heart--who believed in the corporal and substantial nature of God and the soul, and who was a kind of Don Quixote in the world of Christian thought in the second century. But perhaps we must look for the hero of Spanish thought, not in any actual flesh-and-bone philosopher, but in a creation of fiction, a man of action, who is more real than all the philosophers--Don Quixote. There is undoubtedly a philosophical Quixotism, but there is also a Quixotic philosophy. May it not perhaps be that the philosophy of the Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and above all, in the order of abstract but deeply felt thought, that of our mystics, was, in its essence, none other than this? What was the mysticism of St. John of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the divine warfare? And the philosophy of Don Quixote cannot strictly be called idealism; he did not fight for ideas. It was of the spiritual order; he fought for the spirit. Imagine Don Quixote turning his heart to religious speculation--as he himself once dreamed of doing when he met those images in bas-relief which certain peasants were carrying to set up in the retablo of their village church[65]--imagine Don Quixote given up to meditation upon eternal truths, and see him ascending Mount Carmel in the middle of the dark night of the soul, to watch from its summit the rising of that sun which never sets, and, like the eagle that was St. John's companion in the isle of Patmos, to gaze upon it face to face and scrutinize its spots. He leaves to Athena's owl--the goddess with the glaucous, or owl-like, eyes, who sees in the dark but who is dazzled by the light of noon--he leaves to the owl that accompanied Athena in Olympus the task of searching with keen eyes in the shadows for the prey wherewith to feed its young. And the speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like the practical Quixotism, madness, a daughter-madness to the madness of the Cross. And therefore it is despised by the reason. At bottom, philosophy abhors Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius prove it. The tragedy of Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross. Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, by making a mockery of it, sought to convert it into a comedy; he conceived the farcical idea of the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, and cried "Behold the man!" But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts for tragedy, shouted, "Crucify him! crucify him!" And the human, the intra-human, tragedy is the tragedy of Don Quixote, whose face was daubed with soap in order that he might make sport for the servants of the dukes and for the dukes themselves, as servile as their servants. "Behold the madman!" they would have said. And the comic, the irrational, tragedy is the tragedy of suffering caused by ridicule and contempt. The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule. I have already spoken of the forceful sonnets of that tragic Portuguese, Antero de Quental, who died by his own hand. Feeling acutely for the plight of his country on the occasion of the British ultimatum in 1890, he wrote as follows:[66] "An English statesman of the last century, who was also undoubtedly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and a comedy for those who think. Very well, then, if we are destined to end tragically, we Portuguese, we who _feel_, we would far rather prefer this terrible, but noble, destiny, to that which is reserved, and perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that _thinks_ and _calculates_, whose destiny it is to finish miserably and comically." We may leave on one side the assertion that the English are a thinking and calculating people, implying thereby their lack of feeling, the injustice of which is explained by the occasion which provoked it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying that they do not think or calculate--for we twin-brothers of the Atlantic seaboard have always been distinguished by a certain pedantry of feeling; but there remains a basis of truth underlying this terrible idea--namely, that some peoples, those who put thought above feeling, I should say reason above faith, die comically, while those die tragically who put faith above reason. For the mockers are those who die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery. The mockery that underlies the career of Don Quixote is what we must endeavour to discover. And shall we be told yet again that there has never been any Spanish philosophy in the technical sense of the word? I will answer by asking, What is this sense? What does philosophy mean? Windelband, the historian of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy (_Was ist Philosophie_? in the first volume of his _Präludien_) tells us that "the history of the word 'philosophy' is the history of the cultural significance of science." He continues: "When scientific thought attains an independent existence as a desire for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, it takes the name of philosophy; when subsequently knowledge as a whole divides into its various branches, philosophy is the general knowledge of the world that embraces all other knowledge. As soon as scientific thought stoops again to becoming a means to ethics or religious contemplation, philosophy is transformed into an art of life or into a formulation of religious beliefs. And when afterwards the scientific life regains its liberty, philosophy acquires once again its character as an independent knowledge of the world, and in so far as it abandons the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory of knowledge itself." Here you have a brief recapitulation of the history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including the medieval scholasticism upon which it endeavoured to establish religious beliefs. But has philosophy no other office to perform, and may not its office be to reflect upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason and faith, between science and religion, and deliberately to perpetuate this conflict? Later on Windelband says: "By philosophy in the systematic, not in the historical, sense, I understand the critical knowledge of values of universal validity (_allgemeingiltigen Werten_)." But what values are there of more universal validity than that of the human will seeking before all else the personal, individual, and concrete immortality of the soul--or, in other words, the human finality of the Universe--and that of the human reason denying the rationality and even the possibility of this desire? What values are there of more universal validity than the rational or mathematical value and the volitional or teleological value of the Universe in conflict with one another? For Windelband, as for Kantians and neo-Kantians in general, there are only three normative categories, three universal norms--those of the true or the false, the beautiful or the ugly, and the morally good or evil. Philosophy is reduced to logics, esthetics, and ethics, accordingly as it studies science, art, or morality. Another category remains excluded--namely, that of the pleasing and the unpleasing, or the agreeable and the disagreeable: in other words, the hedonic. The hedonic cannot, according to them, pretend to universal validity, it cannot be normative. "Whosoever throws upon philosophy," wrote Windelband, "the burden of deciding the question of optimism and pessimism, whosoever demands that philosophy should pronounce judgement on the question as to whether the world is more adapted to produce pain than pleasure, or _vice versa_--such a one, if his attitude is not merely that of a dilettante, sets himself the fantastic task of finding an absolute determination in a region in which no reasonable man has ever looked for one." It remains to be seen, nevertheless, whether this is as clear as it seems, in the case of a man like myself, who am at the same time reasonable and yet nothing but a dilettante, which of course would be the abomination of desolation. It was with a very profound insight that Benedetto Croce, in his philosophy of the spirit in relation to esthetics as the science of expression and to logic as the science of pure concept, divided practical philosophy into two branches--economics and ethics. He recognizes, in effect, the existence of a practical grade of spirit, purely economical, directed towards the singular and unconcerned with the universal. Its types of perfection, of economic genius, are Iago and Napoleon, and this grade remains outside morality. And every man passes through this grade, because before all else he must wish to be himself, as an individual, and without this grade morality would be inexplicable, just as without esthetics logic would lack meaning. And the discovery of the normative value of the economic grade, which seeks the hedonic, was not unnaturally the work of an Italian, a disciple of Machiavelli, who speculated so fearlessly with regard to _virtù_, practical efficiency, which is not exactly the same as moral virtue. But at bottom this economic grade is but the rudimentary state of the religious grade. The religious is the transcendental economic or hedonic. Religion is a transcendental economy and hedonistic. That which man seeks in religion, in religious faith, is to save his own individuality, to eternalize it, which he achieves neither by science, nor by art, nor by ethics. God is a necessity neither for science, nor art, nor ethics; what necessitates God is religion. And with an insight that amounts to genius our Jesuits speak of the grand business of our salvation. Business--yes, business; something belonging to the economic, hedonistic order, although transcendental. We do not need God in order that He may teach us the truth of things, or the beauty of them, or in order that He may safeguard morality by means of a system of penalties and punishments, but in order that He may save us, in order that He may not let us die utterly. And because this unique longing is the longing of each and every normal man--those who are abnormal by reason of their barbarism or their hyperculture may be left out of the reckoning--it is universal and normative. Religion, therefore, is a transcendental economy, or, if you like, metaphysic. Together with its logical, esthetic, and ethical values, the Universe has for man an economic value also, which, when thus made universal and normative, is the religious value. We are not concerned only with truth, beauty, and goodness: we are concerned also and above all with the salvation of the individual, with perpetuation, which those norms do not secure for us. That science of economy which is called political teaches us the most adequate, the most economical way of satisfying our needs, whether these needs are rational or irrational, beautiful or ugly, moral or immoral--a business economically good may be a swindle, something that in the long run kills the soul--and the supreme human _need_ is the need of not dying, the need of enjoying for ever the plenitude of our own individual limitation. And if the Catholic eucharistic doctrine teaches that the substance of the body of Jesus Christ is present whole and entire in the consecrated Host, and in each part of it, this means that God is wholly and entirely in the whole Universe and also in each one of the individuals that compose it. And this is, fundamentally, not a logical, nor an esthetic, nor an ethical principle, but a transcendental economic or religious principle. And with this norm, philosophy is able to judge of optimism and pessimism. _If the human soul is immortal, the world is economically or hedonistically good; if not, it is bad_. And the meaning which pessimism and optimism give to the categories of good and evil is not an ethical sense, but an economic or hedonistic sense. Good is that which satisfies our vital longing and evil is that which does not satisfy it. Philosophy, therefore, is also the science of the tragedy of life, a reflection upon the tragic sense of it. An essay in this philosophy, with its inevitable internal contradictions and antinomies, is what I have attempted in these essays. And the reader must not overlook the fact that I have been operating upon myself; that this work partakes of the nature of a piece of self-surgery, and without any other anesthetic than that of the work itself. The enjoyment of operating upon myself has ennobled the pain of being operated upon. And as for my other claim--the claim that this is a Spanish philosophy, perhaps _the_ Spanish philosophy, that if it was an Italian who discovered the normative and universal value of the economic grade, it is a Spaniard who announces that this grade is merely the beginning of the religious grade, and that the essence of our religion, of our Spanish Catholicism, consists precisely in its being neither a science, nor an art, nor an ethic, but an economy of things eternal--that is to say, of things divine: as for this claim that all this is Spanish, I must leave the task of substantiating it to another and an historical work. But leaving aside the external and written tradition, that which can be demonstrated by reference to historical documents, is there not some present justification of this claim in the fact that I am a Spaniard--and a Spaniard who has scarcely ever been outside Spain; a product, therefore, of the Spanish tradition of the living tradition, of the tradition which is transmitted in feelings and ideas that dream, and not in texts that sleep? The philosophy in the soul of my people appears to me as the expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between what the world is as scientific reason shows it to be, and what we wish that it might be, as our religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy is to be found the explanation of what is usually said about us--namely, that we are fundamentally irreducible to _Kultur_--or, in other words, that we refuse to submit to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics, or to morality or ethics. "And the upshot of all this," so I have been told more than once and by more than one person, "will be simply that all you will succeed in doing will be to drive people to the wildest Catholicism." And I have been accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it so! And what then? Yes, I know, I know very well, that it is madness to seek to turn the waters of the river back to their source, and that it is only the ignorant who seek to find in the past a remedy for their present ills; but I know too that everyone who fights for any ideal whatever, although his ideal may seem to lie in the past, is driving the world on to the future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present. Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is a dream, something imperfectly known, so much the better. The march, as ever, is towards the future, and he who marches is getting there, even though he march walking backwards. And who knows if that is not the better way!... I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution--learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance which was the offspring of the Middle Ages. And if some accuse me of subserving the cause of Catholic reaction, others perhaps, the official Catholics.... But these, in Spain, trouble themselves little about anything, and are interested only in their own quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor folk, they have neither eyes nor ears! But the truth is that my work--I was going to say my mission--is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire. Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote believe in the immediate apparential efficacy of his work? It is very doubtful, and at any rate he did not by any chance put his visor to the test by slashing it a second time. And many passages in his history show that he did not look with much confidence to the immediate success of his design to restore knight-errantry. And what did it matter to him so long as thus he lived and immortalized himself? And he must have surmised, and did in fact surmise, that his work would have another and higher efficacy, and that was that it would ferment in the minds of all those who in a pious spirit read of his exploits. Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's battlefield to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to preserve the treasure of his infancy; imagine him an inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho, at his side, inward and heroical too--and tell me if you find anything comic in the tragedy. And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer, he has left himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and all philosophies. Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books; we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any _Critique of Pure Reason_. But Don Quixote was converted. Yes--and died, poor soul. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives amongst us, animating us with his spirit--this Don Quixote was not converted, this Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die. And the conversion of the other Don Quixote--he who was converted only to die--was possible because he was mad, and it was his madness, and not his death nor his conversion that immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for the crime of having been born.[67] _Felix culpa!_ And neither was his madness cured, but only transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he stormed heaven, which suffereth violence. This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he had freed the galley slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that Dante saw there and replaced it by one on which was written "Long live hope!" and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at him, he went to heaven. And God laughed paternally at him, and this divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness. And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with desperation. And does he not fight out of despair? How is it that among the words that English has borrowed from our language, such as _siesta, camarilla, guerrilla_, there is to be found this word _desperdo_? Is not this inward Don Quixote that I spoke of, conscious of his own tragic comicness, a man of despair (_desesperado_). A _desperado_--yes, like Pizarro and like Loyola. But "despair is the master of impossibilities," as we learn from Salazar y Torres (_Elegir al enemigo_, Act I.), and it is despair and despair alone that begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope. _Spero quia absurdum_, it ought to have been said, rather than _credo_. And Don Quixote, who lived in solitude, sought more solitude still; he sought the solitudes of the Peña Pobre, in order that there, alone, without witnesses, he might give himself up to greater follies with which to assuage his soul. But he was not quite alone, for Sancho accompanied him--Sancho the good, Sancho the believing, Sancho the simple. If, as some say, in Spain Don Quixote is dead and Sancho lives, then we are saved, for Sancho, his master dead, will become a knight-errant himself. And at any rate he is waiting for some other mad knight to follow again. And there is also a tragedy of Sancho. The other Sancho, the Sancho who journeyed with the mortal Don Quixote--it is not certain that he died, although some think that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his lance and believing in the truth of all those things which his dying and converted master had denounced and abominated as lies. But neither is it certain that the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, or the curate, or the barber, or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with these that the heroical Sancho has to contend. Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his solitude. And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers, creating for ourselves a Quixotesque Spain which only exists in our imagination? And again we shall be asked: What has Don Quixote bequeathed to _Kultur_? I answer: Quixotism, and that is no little thing! It is a whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole esthetic, a whole logic, a whole ethic--above all, a whole religion--that is to say, a whole economy of things eternal and things divine, a whole hope in what is rationally absurd. For what did Don Quixote fight? For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for survival. Not for Iseult, who is the eternal flesh; not for Beatrice, who is theology; not for Margaret, who is the people; not for Helen, who is culture. He fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he lives. And the greatest thing about him was his having been mocked and vanquished, for it was in being overcome that he overcame; he overcame the world by giving the world cause to laugh at him. And to-day? To-day he feels his own comicness and the vanity of his endeavours so far as their temporal results are concerned; he sees himself from without--culture has taught him to objectify himself, to alienate himself from himself instead of entering into himself--and in seeing himself from without he laughs at himself, but with a bitter laughter. Perhaps the most tragic character would be that of a Margutte of the inner man, who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die of laughter, but of laughter at himself. _E riderá in eterno_, he will laugh for all eternity, said the Angel Gabriel of Margutte. Do you not hear the laughter of God? The mortal Don Quixote, in dying, realized his own comicness and bewept his sins; but the immortal Quixote, realizing his own comicness, superimposes himself upon it and triumphs over it without renouncing it. And Don Quixote does not surrender, because he is not a pessimist, and he fights on. He is not a pessimist, because pessimism is begotten by vanity, it is a matter of fashion, pure intellectual snobbism, and Don Quixote is neither vain nor modern with any sort of modernity (still less is he a modernist), and he does not understand the meaning of the word "snob" unless it be explained to him in old Christian Spanish. Don Quixote is not a pessimist, for since he does not understand what is meant by the _joie de vivre_ he does not understand its opposite. Neither does he understand futurist fooleries. In spite of Clavileño,[68] he has not got as far as the aeroplane, which seems to tend to put not a few fools at a still greater distance from heaven. Don Quixote has not arrived at the age of the tedium of life, a condition that not infrequently takes the form of that topophobia so characteristic of many modern spirits, who pass their lives running at top speed from one place to another, not from any love of the place to which they are going, but from hatred of the place they are leaving behind, and so flying from all places: which is one of the forms of despair. But Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine laughter, and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in life eternal, he has to fight, attacking the modern, scientific, inquisitorial orthodoxy in order to bring in a new and impossible Middle Age, dualistic, contradictory, passionate. Like a new Savonarola, an Italian Quixote of the end of the fifteenth century, he fights against this Modern Age that began with Machiavelli and that will end comically. He fights against the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of mind, reconciliation between reason and faith--this, thanks to the providence of God, is no longer possible. The world must be as Don Quixote wishes it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will fight with it and will, to all appearances, be vanquished, but he will triumph by making himself ridiculous. And he will triumph by laughing at himself and making himself the object of his own laughter. "Reason speaks and feeling bites" said Petrarch; but reason also bites and bites in the inmost heart. And more light does not make more warmth. "Light, light, more light!" they tell us that the dying Goethe cried. No, warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we die of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night kills, but the frost. We must liberate the enchanted princess and destroy the stage of Master Peter.[69] But God! may there not be pedantry too in thinking ourselves the objects of mockery and in making Don Quixotes of ourselves? Kierkegaard said that the regenerate (_Opvakte_) desire that the wicked world should mock at them for the better assurance of their own regeneracy, for the enjoyment of being able to bemoan the wickedness of the world (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, ii., Afsnit ii., cap. 4, sect. 2, b). The question is, how to avoid the one or the other pedantry, or the one or the other affectation, if the natural man is only a myth and we are all artificial. Romanticism! Yes, perhaps that is partly the word. And there is an advantage in its very lack of precision. Against romanticism the forces of rationalist and classicist pedantry, especially in France, have latterly been unchained. Romanticism itself is merely another form of pedantry, the pedantry of sentiment? Perhaps. In this world a man of culture is either a dilettante or a pedant: you have to take your choice. Yes, René and Adolphe and Obermann and Lara, perhaps they were all pedants.... The question is to seek consolation in disconsolation. The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a _demi-mondaine_ philosophy. Leave out the _demi_; call it _mondaine_, mundane. Mundane--yes, a philosophy for the world and not for philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The world desires illusion (_mundus vult decipi_)--either the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed are they who are easily befooled! A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, said that it was the privilege of his countrymen _n'être pas dupe_--not to be taken in. A sorry privilege! Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. "Then let him not make the demand," it will be said, "let him resign himself, let him accept life and truth as they are." But he does not accept them as they are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho, who stands by his side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those understand who talk thus to him, those who succeed in resigning themselves and accepting rational life and rational truth. No, it is that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows!... And in this critical century, Don Quixote, who has also contaminated himself with criticism, has to attack his own self, the victim of intellectualism and of sentimentalism, and when he wishes to be most spontaneous he appears to be most affected. And he wishes, unhappy man, to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he sinks into the despair of the critical century whose two greatest victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through this despair he reaches the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke--that intellectual Don Quixote who escaped from the cloister--and becomes an awakener of sleeping souls (_dormitantium animorum excubitor_), as the ex-Dominican said of himself--he who wrote: "Heroic love is the property of those superior natures who are called insane (_insano_) not because they do not know (_no sanno_), but because they over-know (_soprasanno_)." But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines; at any rate the inscription at the foot of his statue in the Campo dei Fiori, opposite the Vatican, states that it has been dedicated to him by the age which he had foretold (_il secolo da lui divinato_). But our Don Quixote, the inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire alone to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim him king. He left the title of king for the inscription written over the Cross. What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote, to-day, in this world? To cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But though men hear not, the wilderness hears, and one day it will be transformed into a resounding forest, and this solitary voice that goes scattering over the wilderness like seed, will fructify into a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred thousand tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and of death. And now to you, the younger generation, bachelor Carrascos of a Europeanizing regenerationism, you who are working after the best European fashion, with scientific method and criticism, to you I say: Create wealth, create nationality, create art, create science, create ethics, above all create--or rather, translate--_Kultur_, and thus kill in yourselves both life and death. Little will it all last you!... And with this I conclude--high time that I did!--for the present at any rate, these essays on the tragic sense of life in men and in peoples, or at least in myself--who am a man--and in the soul of my people as it is reflected in mine. I hope, reader, that some time while our tragedy is still playing, in some interval between the acts, we shall meet again. And we shall recognize one another. And forgive me if I have troubled you more than was needful and inevitable, more than I intended to do when I took up my pen proposing to distract you for a while from your distractions. And may God deny you peace, but give you glory! SALAMANCA, _In the year of grace_ 1912. FOOTNOTES: [59] "Que tal?" o "como va?" y es aquella que responde: "se vive!" [60] Whenever I consider that I needs must die, I stretch my cloak upon the ground and am not surfeited with sleeping. [61] No es consuelo de desdichas--es otra desdicha aparte--querer a quien las padece--persuadir que no son tales (_Gustos y diogustos no son niés que imaginatión_, Act I., Scene 4). [62] _Don Quijote_, part i., chap, i. [63] Preface. [64] _El individualismo español_, in vol. clxxi., March 1, 1903. [65] See _El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha_, part ii., chap. lviii., and the corresponding chapter in my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_. [66] In an article which was to have been published on the occasion of the ultimatum, and of which the original is in the possession of the Conde do Ameal. This fragment appeared in the Portuguese review, _A Aguía_ (No. 3), March, 1912. [67] An allusion to the phrase in Calderón's _La Vida es Sueño_, "Que delito cometí contra vosotros naciendo?"--J.E.C.F. [68] The wooden horse upon which Don Quixote imagined that he and Sancho had been carried in the air. See _Don Quijote_, part ii., chaps. 40 and 41.--J.E.C.F. [69] _Don Quijote_, part ii., chap. 26. INDEX Æschylus, 246 Alexander of Aphrodisias, 88 Amiel, 18, 68, 228 Anaxagoras, 143 Angelo of Foligno, 289 Antero de Quintal, 240, 315 Ardigo, Roberto, 238 Aristotle, 1, 21, 80, 144, 165, 171, 232, 235 Arnold, Matthew, 103 Athanasius, 63-65 Avenarius, Richard, 144, 310 de Ayala, Ramón Pérez, 303 Bacon, 310 Balfour, A.J., 27 Balmes, 84, 85 Bergson, 144, 328 Berkeley, Bishop, 87, 146 Besant, Mrs. A., 291 Boccaccio, 52 Böhme, Jacob, 227, 297 Bonnefon, 250, 254 Bossuet, 226, 231 Brooks, Phillips, 76, 190 Browning, Robert, 112, 181, 249, 254 Brunetière, 103, 298 Brunhes, B., 235, 237, 238 Bruno, 301, 329 Büchner, 95 Butler, Joseph, 5, 6, 87 Byron, Lord, 94, 102, 103, 132 Calderón, 39, 268, 323 Calvin, 121, 246 Campanella, 301 Carducci, 102, 306 Carlyle, 231, 298 Catherine of Sienna, 289 Cauchy, 236 Cervantes, 220, 306 Channing, W.E., 78 Cicero, 165, 216, 221 Clement of Alexandria, 32 Cortés, Donoso, 74 Costa, Joaquin, 309 Cournot, 192, 217, 222, 306 Cowper, 43 Croce, Benedetto, 313, 318 Dante, 42, 51, 140, 223, 233, 256, 295 Darwin, 72, 147 Descartes, 34, 86, 107, 224, 237, 293, 310, 312 Diderot, 99 Diego de Estella, 304 Dionysius the Areopagite, 160 Domingo de Guzmán, 289 Duns Scotus, 76 Eckhart, 289 Empedocles, 61 Erasmus, 112, 301 Erigena, 160, 167 Fénelon, 224 Fichte, 8, 29 Flaubert, 94, 219 Fouillée, 261 Fourier, 278 Francesco de Sanctis, 220 Francke, August, 120 Franklin, 248 Galileo, 72, 267, 302 Ganivet, Angel, 313 de Gaultier, Jules, 328 Goethe, 218, 264, 288, 299, 309 Gounod, 56 Gratry, Père, 236 Haeckel, 95 Harnack, 59, 64, 65, 69, 75 Hartmann, 146 Hegel, 5, 111, 170, 294, 309, 310 Heraclitus, 165 Hermann, 69, 70, 77, 165, 217 Herodotus, 140 Hippocrates, 143 Hodgson, S.H., 30 Holberg, 109 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 257, 311 Hume, David, 79, 86, 104, 310 Hume, Martin A.S., 312 Huntingdon, A.M., 298 James, William, 5, 81, 86 Jansen, 121 Juan de los Angeles, 1, 207, 286 Juan de la Cruz, 67, 289, 293 Justin Martyr, 63 Kaftan, 68, 222 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 4, 11, 13, 67, 68, 73, 79, 114, 143, 166, 294, 310, 311, 317 à Kempis, 51, 99, 277 Kierkegaard, 3, 109, 115, 123, 153, 178, 198, 257, 287, 327 Krause, 294 Lactantius, 59, 74, 165, 169 Lamarck, 147 Lamennais, 74, 117, 165, 246 Laplace, 161 Leibnitz, 247 Leo XIII., 75 Leopardi, 44, 47, 123, 132, 240, 248 Le Roy, 73 Lessing, 229 Linnæus, 1 Loisy, 72 Loyola, 122, 307, 314, 324 Loyson, Hyacinthe, 116 Lucretius, 94, 102 Luis de León, 289 Luther, 3, 121, 270, 294, 301 Mach, Dr. E., 114 Machado, Antonio, 241 Machiavelli, 296, 326, 328 de Maistre, Count Joseph, 74, 305 Malebranche, 63 Malón de Chaide, 66 Manrique, Jorge, 309 Marcus Aurelius, 315 Marlowe, Christopher, 299 Martins, Oliveira, 68 Mazzini, 153 Melanchthon, 69 Menéndez de Pelayo, 313 Michelet, 45 Miguel de Molinos, 216, 219, 228 Mill, Stuart, 104, 310 Milton, 284 Moser, Johann Jacob, 252, 263 Myers, W.H., 88 Nietzsche, 50, 61, 100, 231, 239, 328 Nimesius, 59 Obermann, 11, 47, 259, 263, 268 Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph, 252, 253 Ordóñez de Lara, 56 Origen, 245 Papini, 238 Pascal, 40, 45, 74, 262, 263 Petrarch, 327 Pfleiderer, 61 Pius IX., 72 Pizarro, 324 Plato, 38, 45, 48, 61, 90, 125, 143, 216, 217, 221, 292, 310 Pliny, 165 Plotinus, 209, 230, 243 Pohle, Joseph, 77 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 88 Renan, 51, 68 Ritschl, Albrecht, 68, 114, 121, 167, 238, 253, 263, 294 Robertson, F.W., 180 Robespierre, 41 Rohde, Erwin, 60, 61 Rousseau, 53, 263, 299, 310 Ruysbroek, 289 Saint Augustine, 74, 192, 247 Saint Bonaventura, 220 Saint Francis of Assissi, 52, 210 Saint Paul, 48, 49, 62, 94, 112, 188, 209, 225, 241, 253, 255, 270 Saint Teresa, 67, 75, 210, 226, 228, 289, 323 Saint Thomas Aquinas, 83, 92, 233 Salazar y Torres, 324 Schleiermacher, 89, 156, 217 Schopenhauer, 146, 147, 247 Seeberg, Reinold, 188 Sénancour, 43, 47, 260, 263, 299 Seneca, 231, 313 Seuse, Heinrich, 75, 289 Shakespeare, 39 Socrates, 29, 143, 145 Solon, 17 Soloviev, 95 Spencer, Herbert, 89, 124, 238, 253 Spener, 253 Spinoza, Benedict, 6, 7, 22, 24, 31, 38, 40, 89, 97-99, 101, 208, 234, 310 Stanley, Dean, 91 Stendhal, 311 Stirmer, Max, 29 Suárez, 312 Swedenborg, 153, 221, 225 Tacitus, 56, 94, 142, 216, 306 Tauler, 289 Tennyson, Lord, 33, 103 Tertullian, 74, 94, 104 Thales of Miletus, 143, 317 Thomé de Jesús, 283 Tolstoi, 328 Troeltsch, Ernst, 70, 112 Velasquez, 70 Vico, Giovanni Baptista, 142, 143 Vinet, A., 93, 113, 160 Virchow, 95 Virgil, 249 Vives, Luis, 313 Vogt, 95 Walpole, Horace, 315 Weizsäcker, 62, 77 Wells, H.G., 265 Whitman, Walt, 125 Windelband, 267, 316, 317 Xenophon, 29, 143 
33524	----	file was made using scans of public domain works from the University of Michigan Digital Libraries.) THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY VOL. II MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AND THE WORSHIP OF THE DEAD BY SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER, F.R.S., F.B.A. FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE HON. D.C.L., OXFORD; HON. LITT.D., CAMBRIDGE AND DURHAM; HON. LL.D., GLASGOW; DOCTOR HONORIS CAUSA OF THE UNIVERSITIES OF PARIS AND STRASBOURG VOL. II THE BELIEF AMONG THE POLYNESIANS MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1922 COPYRIGHT PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN PREFACE The first volume of this work, which comprised the Gifford Lectures given by me at St. Andrews in the years 1911 and 1912, dealt with the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead, as these are found among the aborigines of Australia, the Torres Straits Islands, New Guinea, and Melanesia. In the present volume I take up the subject at the point at which I broke off, and describe the corresponding belief and worship among the Polynesians, a people related to their neighbours the Melanesians by language, if not by blood. The first chapter formed the theme of two lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in 1916; the other chapters have been written for lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1921 and 1922. But in the book the lecture form has been discarded, and the treatment of the subject is somewhat fuller than comports with the limits imposed by oral delivery. Should circumstances allow me to continue the work, I propose in the next volume to treat of the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the Micronesians and Indonesians. J. G. FRAZER. NO. 1 BRICK COURT, TEMPLE, LONDON, _19th July 1922_. CONTENTS PAGES PREFACE v TABLE OF CONTENTS vii-ix CHAP. I. THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE MAORIS 1-51 § 1. The Polynesians 1-5 § 2. The Maoris of New Zealand 5-10 § 3. The Beliefs of the Maoris concerning the Souls of the Living 10-19 § 4. The Beliefs of the Maoris concerning the Souls of the Dead 19-37 § 5. Taboo among the Maoris 37-50 § 6. Conclusion 51 II. THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE TONGANS 52-147 § 1. The Tonga or Friendly Islands 52-57 § 2. The Tonga Islanders, their Character, Mode of Life, and Government 57-63 § 3. The Tongan Religion: its General Principles 64-68 § 4. The Primary or Non-human Gods 68-73 § 5. The Temples of the Gods 73-77 § 6. Priests and their Inspiration 77-79 § 7. The Worship of the Gods, Prayers, and Sacrifices 79-84 § 8. The Doctrine of the Soul and its Destiny after Death 84-91 § 9. The Souls of the Dead as Gods 91-98 § 10. Temples and Tombs: Megalithic Monuments 99-132 § 11. Rites of Burial and Mourning 132-146 § 12. The Ethical Influence of Tongan Religion 146-147 III. THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE SAMOANS 148-218 § 1. The Samoan Islands 148-156 § 2. The Samoan Islanders, their character 156-163 § 3. Houses, Agriculture, and Industries 163-169 § 4. Rights of Property 169-171 § 5. Government, Social Ranks, Respect for Chiefs 171-181 § 6. Religion: Gods of Families, Villages, and Districts 181-192 § 7. Priests and Temples 192-200 § 8. Origin of the Samoan Gods of Families, Villages, and Districts: Relation to Totemism 200-202 § 9. The High Gods of Samoa 202-205 § 10. The Samoan Belief concerning the Human Soul: Funeral Customs 205-213 § 11. The Fate of the Human Soul after Death 213-218 IV. THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE HERVEY ISLANDERS 219-245 § 1. The Hervey or Cook Islands 219-220 § 2. The Islanders and their Mode of Life 220-223 § 3. Social Life: the Sacred Kings 223-225 § 4. Religion, the Gods, Traces of Totemism 225-229 § 5. The Doctrine of the Human Soul 229-231 § 6. Death and Funeral Rites 231-237 § 7. The Fate of the Human Soul after Death 238-245 V. THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE SOCIETY ISLANDERS 246-327 § 1. The Society Islands 246-248 § 2. The Islanders and their Mode of Life 248-256 § 3. The Religion of the Society Islanders 256-278 § 4. The Temples and Images of the Gods 278-291 § 5. The Sacrifices, Priests, and Sacred Recorders 291-296 § 6. The Doctrine of the Human Soul 297-299 § 7. Disease, Death, and Mourning 299-308 § 8. The Disposal of the Dead 308-313 § 9. The Fate of the Soul after Death 313-321 § 10. The Worship of the Dead 322-327 VI. THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE MARQUESANS 328-374 § 1. The Marquesas Islands 328-331 § 2. Physical Appearance of the Natives 331-333 § 3. Food, Weapons, Tools, Houses, Canoes, Fishing 333-337 § 4. Polyandry, Adoption, Exchange of Names 337-339 § 5. Amusements, Dancing-places, Banqueting-halls 339-344 § 6. Social Ranks, Taboo 344-347 § 7. Religion and Mythology 348-352 § 8. The Soul, Death, and Funeral Customs 352-363 § 9. Fate of the Soul after Death 363-374 VII. THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE HAWAIIANS 375-431 § 1. The Sandwich or Hawaiian Islands 375-377 § 2. The Natives and their Mode of Life 377-380 § 3. Houses, Mechanical Arts 380-383 § 4. Government, Social Ranks, Taboo 383-390 § 5. Religion, the Gods 390-404 § 6. Priests, Sorcerers, Diviners 404-406 § 7. Temples, Images, Human Sacrifices 406-414 § 8. Festivals 414-416 § 9. Death and Funeral Rites 417-427 § 10. Fate of the Soul after Death 427-431 INDEX 433-447 CHAPTER I THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE MAORIS § 1. _The Polynesians_ The Polynesians are the tall brown race of men who inhabit the widely scattered islands of the Pacific, from Hawaii on the north to New Zealand on the south, and from Tonga on the west to Easter Island on the east.[1] Down to the eighteenth century they remained practically unknown to Europe; the first navigator to bring back comparatively full and accurate information concerning them was our great English explorer, Captain James Cook. Thus at the date of their discovery the natives were quite unaffected by European influence: of our civilisation they knew nothing: of Christianity, though it had existed in the world for nearly eighteen hundred years, they had never heard: they were totally ignorant of the metals, and had made so little progress in the arts of life that in most of the islands pottery was unknown,[2] and even so simple an invention as that of bows and arrows for use in war had not been thought of.[3] Hence their condition was of great interest to students of the early history of man, since it presented to their observation the spectacle of a barbaric culture evolved from an immemorial past in complete independence of those material, intellectual, and moral forces which have moulded the character of modern European nations. The lateness of their discovery may also be reckoned a fortunate circumstance for us as well as for them, since it fell at a time when scientific curiosity was fully awakened among us, and when scientific methods were sufficiently understood to allow us to study with profit a state of society which differed so widely from our own, and which in an earlier and less enlightened age might have been contemplated only with aversion and disgust. [1] Horatio Hale, _The United States Exploring Expedition, Ethnography and Philology_ (Philadelphia, 1846), pp. 4 _sqq_., 9 _sqq._; J. Deniker, _The Races of Man_ (London, 1900), pp. 500 _sqq._ [2] J. Deniker, _The Races of Man_ (London, 1900), pp. 154, 501; _British Museum, Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections_ (1910), p. 147. [3] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_ (London, 1809), v. 416; W. Mariner, _Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands_, Second Edition (London, 1818), i. 67; W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, Second Edition (London, 1832-1836), i. 220; E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, Second Edition (London, 1856), p. 212; J. Deniker, _The Races of Man_, p. 501. In Polynesia "the bow was not a serious weapon; it was found in some islands, _e.g._ in Tahiti and Tonga, but was principally used for killing rats or in shooting matches" (_British Museum, Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections_, p. 153). As to the limited use of bows and arrows in Polynesia, see further E. Tregear, "The Polynesian Bow," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. i. no. 1 (April 1892), pp. 56-59; W. H. R. Rivers, _The History of Melanesian Society_ (Cambridge, 1914), ii. 446 _sqq._ The question of the origin of the Polynesian race is still unsettled, but the balance both of evidence and of probability seems to incline in favour of the view that the people are descended from one of the yellow Mongoloid races of South-Eastern Asia, who gradually spread eastward over the Indian Archipelago and intermingling to some extent with the black aboriginal inhabitants of the islands formed the lighter-tinted brown race which we call the Polynesian.[4] A strong argument in favour of this theory is drawn from the Polynesian language, which belongs essentially to the same family of speech as the Melanesian and Malay languages spoken by the peoples who occupy the islands that intervene between Polynesia and the south-eastern extremity of the Asiatic continent.[5] The black Melanesian race occupies the south-eastern portion of New Guinea and the chain of islands which stretches in a great curve round the north-eastern coasts of New Guinea and Australia. The brown Malays, with the kindred Indonesians and a small admixture of negritoes, inhabit the islands westward from New Guinea to the Malay Peninsula.[6] Of the two kindred languages, the Polynesian and the Melanesian, the older in point of structure appears unquestionably to be the Melanesian; for it is richer both in sounds and in grammatical forms than the Polynesian, which may accordingly be regarded as its later and simplified descendant.[7] [4] Compare (Sir) E. B. Tylor, _Anthropology_ (London, 1881), p. 102; R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesian Languages_ (Oxford, 1885), pp. 33 _sqq._; S. Percy Smith, _Hawaiki, the Original Home of the Maori_ (Christchurch, etc., New Zealand, 1910), pp. 85 _sqq._; A. C. Haddon, _The Wanderings of Peoples_ (Cambridge, 1919), pp. 34 _sqq._; A. H. Keane, _Man Past and Present_, revised by A. Hingston-Quiggin and A. C. Haddon (Cambridge, 1920), p. 552. [5] On the affinity of the Polynesian, Melanesian, and Malay languages, see R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesian Languages_ (Oxford, 1885), pp. 10 _sqq._; S. H. Ray, "The Polynesian Language in Melanesia," _Anthropos_, xiv.-xv. (1919-1920), pp. 46 _sqq._ [6] J. Deniker, _The Races of Man_, pp. 482 _sqq._ [7] _Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. iii. _Linguistics_, by Sydney H. Ray (Cambridge, 1907), p. 528 (as to the relation of the Polynesian to the Melanesian language). As to the poverty of the Polynesian language in sounds and grammatical forms by comparison with the Melanesian, see R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesian Languages_, p. 11. But whereas the three peoples, the Polynesians, the Melanesians, and the Malays speak languages belonging to the same family, their physical types are so different that it seems impossible to look on the brown straight-haired Polynesians and Malays as pure descendants of the swarthy frizzly-haired Melanesians. Accordingly in the present state of our knowledge, or rather ignorance, the most reasonable hypothesis would appear to be that the Melanesians, who occupy a central position in the great ocean, between the Polynesians on the east and the Malays on the west, represent the original inhabitants of the islands, while the Polynesians and Malays represent successive swarms of emigrants, who hived off from the Asiatic continent, and making their way eastward over the islands partially displaced and partially blent with the aborigines, modifying their own physical type in the process and exchanging their original language for that of the islanders, which, through their inability to assimilate it, they acquired only in corrupt or degenerate forms.[8] Yet a serious difficulty meets us on this hypothesis. For both the Polynesians and the Malays, as we know them, stand at a decidedly higher level of culture, socially and intellectually, than the Melanesians, and it is hard to understand why with this advantage they should have fallen into a position of linguistic subordination to them, for as a rule it is the higher race which imposes its language on its inferiors, not the lower race which succeeds in foisting its speech on its superiors. [8] This seems to be the hypothesis favoured by Dr. R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesian Languages_, pp. 33 _sqq._ Compare J. Deniker, _The Races of Man_, p. 505. On the other hand Sir E. B. Tylor says (_Anthropology_, pp. 163 _sq._), "The parent language of this family may have belonged to Asia, for in the Malay region the grammar is more complex, and words are found like _tasik_ = sea and _langit_ = sky, while in the distant islands of New Zealand and Hawaii these have come down to _tai_ and _lai_, as though the language became shrunk and formless as the race migrated further from home, and sank into the barbaric life of ocean islanders." Dr. W. H. R. Rivers suggests that the Polynesian language "arose out of a pidgin Indonesian" (_The History of Melanesian Society_, ii. 584). But these are intricate questions which await future investigation. I cannot enter into them now, but must confine myself to my immediate subject, the beliefs of the Polynesians concerning the human soul and the life after death. In spite of their diffusion over a multitude of islands separated from each other by hundreds and even thousands of miles of ocean, the Polynesians are on the whole a remarkably homogeneous race in physical type, language, and forms of society and religion. The differences of language between them are inconsiderable, amounting to little more than some well-marked dialectical variations: all dwell in settled homes and subsist partly by fishing partly by the fruits of the earth, tilling the soil and gathering coconuts and bread-fruit from the trees:[9] all are bold and expert mariners, making long voyages in large well-built canoes: all possess a copious and comparatively well developed mythology; and all at the time of their discovery enjoyed, or perhaps we should rather say suffered from, a singular institution, half social, half religious, which may be summed up in the single Polynesian word taboo. Hence it would no doubt be possible to give a general account of the belief in human immortality which would hold good in outline for all the different branches of the Polynesian race; but such an account would necessarily be somewhat meagre, inexact in detail, and liable to many exceptions. Accordingly I shall not attempt it, but shall describe the creed of each group of islanders separately. As the beliefs of the various islanders on this momentous topic are characterised by a general similarity, the method I have adopted will no doubt involve a certain sameness and repetition, but for the serious student of comparative religion I hope that these disadvantages may be more than outweighed by the greater accuracy and fulness of detail which this mode of treating the subject renders possible. [9] J. Deniker, _The Races of Man_, p. 501. On the apparent homogeneity of the Polynesian race see W. H. R. Rivers, _The History of Melanesian Society_ (Cambridge, 1914), ii. 280, who, however, argues (ii. 280 _sqq._) that the race has been formed by the fusion of two distinct peoples. The principal groups of islands included in Polynesia are New Zealand, the Friendly or Tonga Islands, the Samoan or Navigators Islands, the Hervey or Cook Islands, the Society Islands, including Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, and Hawaii or the Sandwich Islands.[10] All of them, except New Zealand, are within the tropics; and all of them, except Hawaii, lie to the south of the equator. I shall deal with them in the order I have mentioned, beginning with New Zealand. [10] Horatio Hale, _United States Exploring Expedition, Ethnography and Philology_ (Philadelphia, 1846), pp. 4 _sqq._ § 2. _The Maoris of New Zealand_ The Maoris of New Zealand are not aborigines of the islands which they inhabit: they possess long and apparently in the main trustworthy traditions of their migration to New Zealand many generations ago. The circumstances which led to the migration, the names of the canoes in which it was accomplished, the names and genealogies of the chiefs who conducted it, are all recorded, having been handed on by word of mouth from generation to generation, till they were finally written down from the lips of the natives by English enquirers.[11] The place from which the Maoris came is unanimously designated as Hawaiki, an island or group of islands lying far to the north or north-east of New Zealand. Among English scholars there is some difference of opinion whether Hawaiki is to be identified with Hawaii, that is, the Sandwich Islands, or with Savaii, one of the Samoan or Navigators Islands, since Hawaii and Savaii are both dialectical variations of the New Zealander's pronunciation of Hawaiki.[12] Though Hawaii is more than twice as far as Savaii from New Zealand, being separated from it by almost the whole breadth of the tropics and a great stretch of ocean besides, some good authorities have inclined to regard it as the original home of the Maoris, but the balance of opinion appears now to preponderate in favour of the view that Savaii was the centre from which the Polynesians dispersed all over the Pacific.[13] However, the question is one that hardly admits of a positive answer. [11] E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_ (London, 1843), ii. 85 _sqq._; Horatio Hale, _United States Exploring Expedition, Ethnography and Philology_ (Philadelphia, 1846), pp. 146 _sqq._; Sir George Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_ (London, 1855), pp. 123 _sqq._, 136 _sqq._, 162 _sqq._, 202 _sqq._; E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, Second Edition (London, 1856), pp. 1 _sqq._; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants_, Second Edition (London, 1870), pp. 26, 27, 289 _sqq._; John White, _The Ancient History of the Maori, his Mythology and Traditions_ (London, 1887-1889), ii. 176 _sqq._; Elsdon Best, "The Peopling of New Zealand," _Man_, xiv. (1914) pp. 73-76. The number of generations which have elapsed since the migration to New Zealand is variously estimated. Writing about the middle of the nineteenth century Shortland reckoned the number at about eighteen; Mr. Elsdon Best, writing in 1914, variously calculated it at about twenty-eight or twenty-nine (on p. 73) and from eighteen to twenty-eight (on p. 74). [12] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, p. 33. [13] H. Hale, _Ethnography and Philology of the U.S. Exploring Expedition_, pp. 119 _sq._; E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_ (London, 1843), ii. 85 _sqq._; E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 33 _sqq._; A. S. Thomson, _The Story of New Zealand_ (London, 1859), i. 57 _sqq._; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 26; E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_ (Wellington, N.Z., 1891), pp. 56 _sqq._, _s.v._ "Hawaiki"; A. C. Haddon, _The Wanderings of Peoples_ (Cambridge, 1919), p. 36. Of these writers, Dieffenbach, Shortland, and Taylor decide in favour of Hawaii; Thomson, Hale, and Haddon prefer Savaii; Tregear seems to leave the question open, pointing out that "the inhabitants of those islands themselves believe in another Hawaiki, neither in Samoa nor Hawaii." The Maoris are not a pure-blooded Polynesian race. Among them even at the present day two distinct racial types may be distinguished, one of them the comparatively fair Polynesian type with straight nose and good features, the other the swarthy, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, frizzly-haired Melanesian type. They have a tradition that on their arrival in New Zealand they found the country in the possession of a dark-skinned folk of repulsive appearance, tall, spare, and spindle-shanked, with flat faces, overhanging brows, and noses of which little but the upturned nostrils could in some cases be discerned. These savages wore little clothing and built no good houses, nothing but rude shelters against the inclemency of the weather. They were ignorant and treacherous, and the Maoris regarded them with dislike and contempt; but their women looked with favour on the handsome Maori men, and a mixture of the two races was the result. This tradition both explains and is confirmed by the two different racial types which still exist side by side or blent together among the Maoris. It seems, therefore, highly probable that before the advent of the Maoris the North Island of New Zealand was occupied by a people of inferior culture belonging to the Melanesian stock, who may themselves have had a strain of Polynesian blood in their veins and some Polynesian words in their language. This at least is suggested by some features in the Maori traditions about them. For these savages told the Maoris that they were the descendants of the crews of three fishing canoes which had been driven to sea from their own land in past times, and that their original home was a much warmer country than New Zealand. All these various indications may perhaps be reconciled by supposing that the dark predecessors of the Maoris in New Zealand were a Melanesian people, who had accidentally drifted from Fiji, the inhabitants of which have long been in contact with their Polynesian neighbours on the east, the Tongans.[14] They received from the Maoris the name of Maruiwi,[15] and were perhaps of the same stock as the Moriori of the Chatham Islands; for two skulls of the Moriori type have been found in an old deposit at Wanganui, near the south end of the North Island of New Zealand.[16] [14] Elsdon Best, "The Peopling of New Zealand," _Man_, xiv. (1914) pp. 73-76. The Melanesian strain in the Maoris was recognised by previous writers. See J. S. Polack, _Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders_ (London, 1840), i. 6, "The nation consists of two aboriginal and distinct races, differing, at an earlier period, as much from each other as both are similarly removed in similitude from Europeans. A series of intermarriages for centuries has not even yet obliterated the marked difference that originally stamped the descendant of the now amalgamated races. The first may be known by a dark-brown complexion, well formed and prominent features, erect muscular proportions, and lank hair, with a boldness in the gait of a warrior, wholly differing from that of the second and inferior race, who have a complexion brown-black, hair inclining to the wool, like the Eastern African, stature short, and skin exceeding soft." The writer rightly connects the latter people with the stock which we now call Melanesian. Compare also R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 13 _sqq._, who says (p. 13), "The Melanesian preceded the Polynesian.... The remains of this race are to be seen in every part of New Zealand, especially among the Nga-ti-ka-hunu, to which the derisive name of Pokerekahu--Black Kumara--is applied. The Maori traditions preserve both the names of the canoes which brought them to New Zealand, as well as of the chiefs who commanded them; several of these records make mention of their having found this black race in occupation of the country on their arrival." The blending of two distinct races, a light-brown and a dark race, among the Maoris is clearly recognised by E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 8-11. The dark race, he says (pp. 9 _sq._), "has undoubtedly a different origin. This is proved by their less regularly shaped cranium, which is rather more compressed from the sides, by their full and large features, prominent cheek-bones, full lips, small ears, curly and coarse, although not woolly, hair, a much deeper colour of the skin, and a short and rather ill-proportioned figure. This race, which is mixed in insensible gradations with the former, is far less numerous; it does not predominate in any one part of the island, nor does it occupy any particular station in a tribe, and there is no difference made between the two races amongst themselves; but I must observe that I never met any man of consequence belonging to this race, and that, although free men, they occupy the lower grades; from this we may perhaps infer the relation in which they stood to the earliest native immigrants into the country, although their traditions and legends are silent on the subject." [15] Elsdon Best, "The Peopling of New Zealand," _Man_, xiv. (1914) pp. 73 _sq._ [16] (Sir) Arthur Keith, "Moriori in New Zealand," _Man_, xiii. (1913) pp. 171 _sq._ At the time of their discovery the Maoris had attained to a fair level of barbaric culture. They lived in comfortable houses ornamented with carved work and with scrolls painted in red and white on the posts and beams. Their villages were fortified with earthworks, palisades, and trenches, and surrounded by large gardens planted with sweet potatoes, taro, and melons.[17] "They excel in tillage," says Captain Cook, as might naturally be expected, where the person that sows is to eat the produce, and where there is so little besides that can be eaten: when we first came to Tegadoo, a district between Poverty Bay and East Cape, their crops were just covered, and not yet begun to sprout; the mould was as smooth as in a garden, and every root had its small hillock, ranged in a regular quincunx, by lines, which with the pegs were still remaining in the field.[18] They understood the arts of irrigating their gardens[19] and of manuring them so as to render the soil light and porous and therefore better suited for the growth of the sweet potato, their favourite food. For this purpose they used sand, and in the Waikatoo district, where the root was formerly much cultivated, deep excavations, like the gravel pits of England, may still be seen, from which the natives extracted sand to fertilise their gardens.[20] Moreover, they cultivated various species of native flax and used the fibre for the manufacture of garments, first scraping it and drying it in the sun, then steeping it in water, and afterwards beating it with wooden mallets. Thus prepared the flax was dyed black or reddish brown and woven into cloth with broad borders of neat and varied patterns. The stronger and coarser fibres were made into string, lines, and cordage of all sorts.[21] The Maoris also built large and magnificently adorned canoes,[22] in which they made long voyages; for example, they invaded and conquered the Chatham Islands, which lie to the eastward across the open sea about five hundred miles distant from the nearest coast of New Zealand.[23] In hunting they had little opportunity to shine, for the simple reason that in their country there were no beasts to hunt except rats;[24] even birds they could not shoot, because they had no bows and arrows to shoot them with,[25] but they made some amends by catching them in ingeniously constructed snares.[26] They caught fish both with nets, some of which were of enormous size, and with hooks made of bone or shell.[27] They displayed great skill and infinite patience in fashioning, sharpening, and polishing their stone implements and weapons.[28] In council they were orators, and in the battlefield warriors whose courage has merited the respect, and whose military skill has won the admiration of the British troops opposed to them.[29] In short, the Maoris were and are one of the most highly gifted among the many uncivilised peoples which the English race, in its expansion over the world, has met and subdued. It is therefore of peculiar interest to learn what conceptions they had formed of man's spiritual nature and his relations to the higher powers. [17] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the Maoris_, p. 202. The elaborate system of fortification employed by the Maoris, of which the remains may be seen by thousands, seems to have no exact parallel in Polynesia. See Elsdon Best, "The Peopling of New Zealand," _Man_, xiv. (1914) p. 75. These native forts or _pas_, as they were called, had often a double or even quadruple line of fence, the innermost formed by great poles twenty or thirty feet high, which were tightly woven together by the fibrous roots of a creeper. They were built by preference on hills, the sides of which were scarped and terraced to assist the defence. Some of them were very extensive and are said to have contained from one to two thousand inhabitants. Many of them were immensely strong and practically impregnable in the absence of artillery. It is believed that the habit of fortifying their villages was characteristic of the older race whom the Maoris, on landing in New Zealand, found in occupation of the country. See W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_ (London, 1835), pp. 122 _sqq._; G. F. Angas, _Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand_ (London, 1847), i. 332 _sq._; Elsdon Best, "Notes on the Art of War as conducted by the Maoris of New Zealand," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xii. no. 4 (December 1903), pp. 204 _sqq._; W. H. Skinner, "The Ancient Fortified _Pa_," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xx. no. 78 (June 1911), pp. 71-77. [18] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_ (London, 1809), ii. 50. [19] The ruins of native irrigation works are to be found in New Zealand as well as in other parts of Polynesia (J. Deniker, _The Races of Man_, p. 501). [20] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 202 _sq._ [21] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, ii. 30 _sq._, 40 _sq._; W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_ (London, 1835), pp. 157 _sqq._; E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 204 _sqq._; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 5. [22] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, ii. 47 _sq._; W. Yate, _op. cit._ pp. 161 _sqq._ [23] A. Shand, "The Occupation of the Chatham Islands by the Maoris in 1835," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. i. no. 2 (July 1892), pp. 83 _sqq._ [24] R. Taylor, _op. cit._ p. 496; A. R. Wallace, _Australasia_ (London, 1913), pp. 442 _sq._ [25] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, p. 212; Elsdon Best, "Notes on the Art of War as conducted by the Maori of New Zealand," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xi. no. 4 (December 1902), p. 240. [26] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 212 _sqq._; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 442 _sq._ [27] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, i. 49 _sq._; W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, p. 160. [28] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, ii. 49; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 4. [29] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 4. The Maoris delivered set speeches composed according to certain recognised laws of rhetoric, and their oratory was distinguished by a native eloquence and grace. See E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 186 _sqq._ § 3. _The Beliefs of the Maoris concerning the Souls of the Living_ Like most other peoples, whether savage or civilised, the Maoris explained the mystery of life in man by the presence of an invisible spirit or soul, which animates his body during life and quits it at death to survive the separation for a longer or shorter time either in this world or another. But like many others who have sought to fathom this profound subject, the Maoris would seem to have experienced some difficulty in ascertaining the precise nature of the human soul. When the natural man, on the strength of his native faculties, essays to explore these dark abysses and to put his vague thoughts into words, he commonly compares his soul either to his breath or to his shadow and his reflection, and not content with a simple comparison he is led, by a natural confusion of thought, to identify more or less closely the imperceptible entity which he calls his soul with one or both of these perceptible objects. To this general rule the Maori is apparently no exception. He has two words which he specially uses to designate the human spirit or soul: one is _wairua_, the other is _hau_.[30] Of these words, _wairua_, the more usual name, is said to mean also a shadow, an unsubstantial image, a reflection, as of a person's face from a polished surface;[31] and we may surmise that these were the original and proper meanings of the term. Similarly _hau_, which is described as "the vital essence or life principle" in man,[32] appears primarily to mean "wind,"[33] from which we may infer that in its application to man it denotes properly the breath. The idea of the soul as a breath appears in the explanation which was given to Dumont d'Urville of the Maori form of salutation by rubbing noses together. The French traveller was told that the real intention of this salute was to mingle the breath and thereby the souls of the persons who gave each other this token of friendship. But as his informant was not a Maori but a certain Mr. Kendall, the truth of the explanation remains doubtful, though the Frenchman believed that he obtained confirmation of it from his own observation and the testimony of a native.[34] On the other hand the comparison of the soul to a shadow comes out in the answer given by a Maori to an Englishman who had asked him why his people did not prevent their souls from passing away to the nether world. The Maori replied by pointing to the Englishman's shadow on the wall and asking him whether he could catch it.[35] [30] Elsdon Best, "Spiritual Concepts of the Maori," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. ix. no. 4 (December 1900), pp. 177 _sqq._, 189 _sqq._ [31] E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, pp. 591 _sq._, _s.v._ "wairua." [32] Elsdon Best, _op. cit._ p. 189. [33] E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 52, _s.v._ "hau"; Elsdon Best, _op. cit._ p. 190. [34] J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage autour du Monde et à la recherche de la Pérouse, Histoire du Voyage_ (Paris, 1832-1833), ii. 558 _sq._ [35] William Brown, _New Zealand and its Aborigines_ (London, 1845), p. 81. Thus far the Maori conception of the soul does not perhaps differ very materially from the popular notion of it current among ourselves. But we come now to a marked difference between the Maori idea of the soul and our own. For whereas the European commonly believes his soul to be fixed during life immovably in his body, and only to depart from it once for all at death, the soul of the Maori is under no such narrow restrictions, but is free to quit its bodily mansion at pleasure and to return to it without prejudice to the life and health of its owner. For example, the Maori explains a dream by supposing that the soul of the sleeper has left his body behind and rambled away to places more or less distant, where it converses with the spirits of other people, whether alive or dead. Hence no well-bred Maori would waken a sleeper suddenly by shaking him or calling out to him in a loud voice. If he must rouse him, he will do it gradually, speaking to him at first in low tones and then raising his voice by degrees, in order to give the truant soul fair warning and allow it to return at leisure.[36] Believing in the power of the soul to wander far away and converse with other spiritual beings in sleep, the Maoris naturally paid great attention to dreams, which they fancied were often sent them by the gods to warn them of coming events. All dreams were supposed to have their special significance, and the Maoris had framed a fanciful system for interpreting them. Sometimes, as with ourselves, the interpretation went by contraries. For example, if a man dreamed that he saw a sick relative at the point of death, it was a sign that the patient would soon recover; but if, on the contrary, the sufferer appeared in perfect health, it was an omen of his approaching end. When a priest was in doubt as to the intentions of the higher powers, he usually waited for his god to reveal his will in a dream, and accepted the vagaries of his slumbering fancy as an infallible intimation of the divine pleasure. Spells were commonly recited in order to annul the effect of ill-omened dreams.[37] [36] Elsdon Best, "Spiritual Concepts of the Maori," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. ix. no. 4 (December 1900), pp. 177 _sq._ [37] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 333-335. As to omens derived from dreams see Elsdon Best, "Omens and Superstitious Beliefs of the Maori," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. vii. no. 27 (September 1898), pp. 124 _sqq._ But the departure of the soul from the body in life was not always voluntary; it might take place under the compulsion of a hostile sorcerer or magician. In a Maori legend called _The curse of Manaia_ we read that "the priests next dug a long pit, termed the pit of wrath, into which by their enchantments they might bring the spirits of their enemies, and hang them and destroy them there; and when they had dug the pit, muttering the necessary incantations, they took large shells in their hands to scrape the spirits of their enemies into the pit with, whilst they muttered enchantments; and when they had done this, they scraped the earth into the pit again to cover them up, and beat down the earth with their hands, and crossed the pit with enchanted cloths, and wove baskets of flax-leaves to hold the spirits of the foes which they had thus destroyed, and each of these acts they accompanied with the proper spells."[38] [38] Sir George Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_ (London, 1855), pp. 168 _sq._ This mode of undoing an enemy by extracting and killing his soul was not with the Maoris a mere legendary fiction; it was practised in real life by their wizards. For we are told that when a priest desired to slay a person by witchcraft, he would often dig a hole in the ground, and standing over it with a cord in his hand would let one end of the cord hang down into the hole. He then recited an incantation which compelled the soul of the doomed man to swarm down the cord into the pit, whereupon another potent spell chanted by the magician speedily put an end to the poor soul for good and all.[39] [39] Elsdon Best, "Spiritual Concepts of the Maori," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. ix. no. 4 (December 1900), p. 187. It seems obvious that spells of this sort may be used with great advantage in war, for if you can only contrive to kill the souls of your foes, their mere bodies will probably give you little or no trouble. Nor did this practical application of the magic art escape the sagacity of the Maoris. When they marched to attack an enemy's stronghold, it was an ancient custom to halt and kindle a fire, over which the priest recited certain spells to cause the souls of his adversaries to be drawn into the fire and there to perish miserably in the flames. In theory the idea was admirable, but unfortunately it did not always work out in practice. For magic is a game at which two can play, and it sometimes happened that the spells of the besieged proved more powerful than those of the besiegers and enabled the garrison to defy all the attempts of the enemy to filch their souls from their bodies.[40] But even when the assailants were obliged to retire discomfited, they did not always lose heart, the resources of the magic art were not yet exhausted. On their return home the priest, nothing daunted by a temporary discomfiture, might betake himself again to his spells, and by crooning his incantations over a garment or a weapon belonging to one of his party, might dash in pieces the arms of the enemy and cause their souls to perish. Thus by his ghostly skill would he snatch victory from defeat, and humble the pride of the insolent foe in the very moment of his imaginary triumph.[41] One way in which he effected his purpose was to take a bag or basket containing some sacred food, hold it to the fire, and then opening the bag point the mouth of it in the direction of the enemy. The simple recitation of a spell then sufficed to draw the souls of the adversaries into the bag, after which nothing was easier for him than to destroy them utterly by means of the appropriate incantation.[42] [40] Elsdon Best, "Spiritual Concepts of the Maori," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. ix. no. 4 (December 1900), p. 181. [41] Elsdon Best, "Notes on the Art of War as conducted by the Maori of New Zealand," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xi. no. 3 (September 1902), p. 141. [42] Elsdon Best, "Notes on the Art of War as conducted by the Maori of New Zealand," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xii. no. 2 (June 1903), p. 72. But valuable as are these applications of magic to practical life, the art, like every good thing, is liable to abuse; and even where it is employed with the best intentions, the forces which it controls are so powerful that in spite of all precautions an accident will sometimes happen. For example, in sickness the patient often had recourse to a priest, who would lead him down to the nearest water, whether a pool or a stream, and there perform the magical rites necessary for the relief of his particular malady. While the wizard was engaged in this beneficent task, all the people in the village kept strictly indoors, lest their souls should wander forth to the water-side and there colliding, if I may be allowed the expression, with the mystic forces of the priest's spells be damaged or even annihilated by the collision.[43] In such a case the fatal consequences were the result of a pure accident, but sometimes they were intentional. For this fell purpose a malignant wizard would dig a hole, invoke the spirit of the man against whom he had a grudge, and when the spirit appeared over the hole in the form of a light, he would curse it, and the man whose soul was cursed would be sure to die, sooner or later; nothing could save him. The Uriwera, who dwelt dispersed among the forests and lonely hills of a wild mountainous region in the North Island, were reputed to be the greatest warlocks in all New Zealand. When they descended from their mountains to the coast, the lowlanders scarcely dared refuse them anything for fear of incurring their displeasure. It is said that in their magical rites they made a special use of the spittle of their destined victims; hence all visitors to their country were careful to conceal their spittle lest they should give these wicked folk a handle against them.[44] Another mode in which a Maori wizard could obtain power over a man's soul was by working magic on the footprints of his intended victim. The thing was done in this way. Suppose you are walking and leave your footprints behind you on the ground. I come behind you, take up the earth from your footprints, and deposit it on the sacred _whata puaroa_, that is, a post or pillar set up in the holy place of a village and charged in a mysterious manner with the vitality both of the people and of the land. Having laid the earth from your footprints on the sacred post, I next perform a ceremony of consecration over it, and then bury it with a seed of sweet potato in the ground. After that you are doomed. You may consider yourself for all practical purposes not only dead but buried, like the earth from your footprints.[45] [43] Elsdon Best, "Maori Medical Lore," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xiii. no. 4 (December 1904), p. 225. [44] E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_ (London, 1843), ii. 58 _sq._; E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 116 _sq._; _id._, _Maori Religion and Mythology_ (London, 1882), p. 31. [45] Elsdon Best, "Spiritual Concepts of the Maori," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. ix. no. 4 (December 1900), pp. 194 _sq._, 196. From some of the foregoing facts it seems to follow that the souls of the Maoris are not, so to say, constitutionally immortal, but that they are of a brittle and perishable nature, and that in particular they are liable to be cut short in their career and totally exterminated by the insidious arts of magicians. So frequently, indeed, did this happen in former days that the Maoris of old apparently recognised no other cause of death, but imagined that every man and woman would naturally live for ever, if the thread of his or her life were not prematurely snipped by the abhorred shears of some witch or wizard. Hence after every death it was customary to hold an inquest in order to discover the wretch who had brought about the catastrophe by his enchantments; a sage presided at the solemn enquiry, and under his direction the culprit was detected, hunted down, and killed.[46] [46] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 51. The Maoris tell a story to explain how death first came into the world, or at least how men were prevented from enjoying the boon of immortality. The story runs as follows. The great mythical hero of Polynesia is Maui, a demigod or man of marvellous powers, who lived in the early ages of the world, and whose mighty deeds are the theme of tales of wonder told far and wide among the islands of the Pacific.[47] In his childhood his mother prophesied that he should thereafter climb the threshold of his great ancestress Hine-nui-te-po, and that death should have no more dominion over men. A happy prediction, but alas! never destined to be fulfilled, for even the would-be saviour Maui himself did not escape the doom of mortality. The way in which he became subject to death was this. His father took him to the water to be baptized, for infant baptism was a regular part of Maori ritual.[48] But when the baptism was over and the usual prayers had been offered for making the lad sacred and clean from all impurity, his father bethought him that through haste or forgetfulness he had omitted some of the prayers and purifications of the baptismal service. It was a fatal oversight, and the anxious father was struck with consternation at the thought, for too well he knew that the gods would punish the omission by causing his son Maui to die.[49] Yet did his son make a brave attempt to rescue all men from the doom of death and to make them live for ever. One day, after he had performed many feats and returned to his father's house, his father, heavy at heart and overcome with a foreboding of evil, said to him, "Oh, my son, I have heard from your mother and others that you are very valiant, and that you have succeeded in all feats that you have undertaken in your own country, whether they were small or great; but now that you have arrived in your father's country, you will perhaps be overcome." Then Maui asked his father, "What do you mean? what things are there that I can be vanquished by?" And his father answered him, "By your great ancestress, by Hine-nui-te-po, who, if you look, you may see flashing, and, as it were, opening and shutting there, where the horizon meets the sky." And Maui answered, "Lay aside such idle thoughts, and let us both fearlessly seek whether men are to die or live for ever." And his father said, "My child, there has been an ill omen for us; when I was baptizing you, I omitted a portion of the fitting prayers, and that I know will be the cause of your perishing." Then Maui asked his father, "What is my ancestress Hine-nui-te-po like?" and he answered, "What you see yonder shining so brightly red are her eyes, and her teeth are as sharp and hard as pieces of volcanic glass; her body is like that of a man, and as for the pupils of her eyes, they are jasper; and her hair is like the tangles of long sea-weed, and her mouth is like that of a barracouta." [47] E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, pp. 233 _sqq._, _s.v._ "Maui"; Horatio Hale, _United States Exploring Expedition, Ethnography and Philology_ (Philadelphia, 1846), p. 23. [48] J. L. Nicholas, _Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand_ (London, 1817), i. 61 _sq._, "The New Zealanders make it an invariable practice, when a child is born among them, to take it to the _Tohunga_, or priest, who sprinkles it on the face with water, from a certain leaf which he holds in his hand for that purpose; and they believe that this ceremony is not only beneficial to the infant, but that the neglect of it would be attended with the most baneful consequences. In the latter case, they consider the child as either doomed to immediate death, or that, if allowed to live, it will grow up with a most perverse and wicked disposition." Before or after sprinkling the child with water the priest bestowed on the infant its name. See W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_ (London, 1835), pp. 82-84; A. S. Thomson, _The Story of New Zealand_ (London, 1859), i. 118 _sqq._; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, Second Edition (London, 1870), pp. 184 _sqq_. Compare J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage autour du Monde et à la recherche de la Pérouse, Histoire du Voyage_ (Paris, 1832-1833), ii. 443 _sq_. (who says that the baptism was performed by women); E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_ (London, 1843), ii. 28-30 (who, in contradiction to all the other authorities, says that the naming of the child was unconnected with its baptism). [49] Sir George Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_ (London, 1855), p. 32. Now Hine-nui-te-po was the Great Woman of Night, the Goddess of Death, who dwelt in the nether world and dragged down men to herself. But Maui was not afraid, for he had caught the great Sun himself in a snare and beaten him and caused him to go so tardily as we now see him creeping across the sky with leaden steps and slow; for of old the Sun was wont to speed across the firmament like a young man rejoicing to run a race. So forth fared the hero on his great enterprise to snatch the life of mortals from the very jaws of death. And there came to him to bear him company the small robin, and the large robin, and the thrush, and the yellow hammer, and the pied fantail (_tiwakawaka, Rhipidura flabellifora_), and every kind of little bird; and these all assembled together, and they started with Maui in the evening, and arrived at the dwelling of Hine-nui-te-po, and found her fast asleep. Then Maui addressed them all, and said, "My little friends, now if you see me creep into this old chieftainess, do not laugh at what you see. Nay, nay, do not, I pray you, but when I have got altogether inside her, and just as I am coming out of her mouth, then you may shout with laughter if you please." But his little friends were frightened at what they saw, and they answered, "Oh, sir, you will certainly be killed." And he answered them again, saying, "If you burst out laughing at me as soon as I get inside her, you will wake her up, and she will certainly kill me at once; but if you do not laugh until I am quite inside her, and am on the point of coming out of her mouth, I shall live, and Hine-nui-te-po will die." And his little friends answered, "Go on then, brave sir, but pray take good care of yourself." Then the young hero started off, and twisted the strings of his weapon tight round his wrist, and went into the house, and stripped off his clothes, and the skin on his hips was as mottled and beautiful as the skin of a mackerel by reason of the tattoo marks cut on it with the chisel of Uetongo, and he entered the old chieftainess. The little birds now screwed up their little mouths to keep back their laughter when they saw him disappearing into the body of the giantess; their cheeks swelled up and grew purple, and they almost choked with suppressed emotion. At last the pied fantail could bear it no longer, and he suddenly exploded with a loud guffaw. That woke the old woman, she opened her eyes, and shut her jaws with a snap, cutting the hero clean through the middle, so that his legs dropped out of her mouth. Thus died Maui, but before he died he begat children, and sons were born to him, and some of his descendants are alive to this day. That, according to Maori tradition, is how death came into the world; for if only Maui had passed safely through the jaws of the Goddess of Death, men would have died no more and death itself would have been destroyed. Thus the Maoris set down human mortality at the door of the pied fantail, since but for his unseasonable merriment we might all have lived for ever.[50] [50] Sir George Grey, _Polynesian Mythology_, pp. 56-58; John White, _The Ancient History of the Maori_ (Wellington and London, 1887-1889), ii. 98, 105-107. For another version of the myth, told with some minor variations, see S. Percy Smith, _The Lore of the Whare-w[=a]nanga_, Part I. (New Plymouth, N.Z., 1913), pp. 145 _sq._, 176-178. For the identification of the bird _tiwakawaka_ see E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 519, _s.v._ "Tiwaiwaka." § 4. _The Beliefs of the Maoris concerning the Souls of the Dead_ When a chief died, a loud howl or wail announced the melancholy event, and the neighbours flocked to the scene of death to testify their sorrow. The wives and near relations, especially the women, of the deceased displayed their anguish by cutting their faces, arms, legs, and breasts with flints or shells till the blood flowed down in streams; it was not wiped off, for the more the person of a mourner was covered with clotted gore, the greater was esteemed his or her respect for the dead. Sometimes relatives would hack off joints of their fingers as a token of grief. Mourners likewise cut their hair, the men generally contenting themselves with clipping or shaving it on one side only, from the forehead to the neck. The eyes of the dead were closed by the nearest relative; and the body dressed in the finest mats, decked with feathers, and provided with weapons, lay in state for a time. After the first day a brother of the deceased used to beat the body with fresh flax gathered for the purpose; this he did to drive away any evil thing that might be hovering about the corpse. In the olden time one or more of the chief's wives would strangle themselves, that their souls might accompany their dead lord and wait upon him in the other world, and with the same intentions slaves were killed, lest the great man should lack attendants in the spirit land.[51] [51] W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, pp. 135 _sqq._; J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage autour du Monde et à la recherche de la Pérouse, Histoire du Voyage_ (Paris, 1832-1833), ii. 541 _sq._; Servant, "Notice sur la Nouvelle-Zélande," _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xv. (1843) p. 25; E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 62, 118; W. Brown, _New Zealand and its Inhabitants_, pp. 15 _sqq._; G. F. Angas, _Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand_, i. 331; A. S. Thomson, _The Story of New Zealand_, i. 185 _sqq._; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants_, Second Edition (London, 1870), pp. 217 _sq._; E. Tregear, "The Maoris of New Zealand," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xix. (1890) pp. 104 _sq._ The body was kept for three days because, we are told, the soul was believed not to quit its mortal habitation till the third day.[52] The mode of disposing of the corpse differed in different districts and according to the rank of the deceased. In some places a grave was dug in the house and the body buried in a sitting posture, the legs being kept in that position by bandages or doubled up against the chest. In the grave the dead man retained the fine garments in which he had been dressed together with the family ornaments of jade and shark's teeth. With him also was usually interred his property, especially the clothes which he had worn and everything else that had touched him during his last illness. The weapons of a warrior were laid near him that he might be able to fight his battles in the spirit land. In other places the corpse was laid in a box on a stage; or two pieces of an old canoe were set upright in the earth, and in the hollow between them the body was seated on a grating so as to allow the products of decomposition to drip through on the ground. In other places again, the corpse was laid in a sort of canoe-shaped coffin and deposited among the branches of a tree in a grove, where it remained for several months. This burial in the branches of a tree seems to have been usually adopted for the bodies of commoners; the corpses of chiefs, enclosed in coffins, were placed in mausoleums, carved and painted red, which were raised on pillars. Whether buried in the earth or placed in a tree or on a stage, the body was left until the flesh had so far decayed as to permit of the bones being easily detached; there was no fixed time allowed for decomposition, it might vary from three months to six months, or even a year. When decay was thought to have proceeded far enough, the bones were dug up or taken down from the stage or tree and scraped; the ornaments also were removed from the skeleton and worn by the relatives. In the south, where the custom was to bury the dead in the ground, this disinterment took place four weeks after the burial; the bones were then buried again, but only to be dug up again after a longer interval, it might be two years, for the final ceremony. When this took place, all the friends and relatives of the dead were summoned to assist, and a great feast was given: the bones were scraped, painted red, decked with feathers, and wrapped up in mats. The precious bundle was then deposited in a small canoe or a miniature house elevated on a pole; or it was carried to the top of some sacred tree and there left on a small stage. Sometimes the bones were concealed in a hollow tree in a secret place of the forest, or hidden away in one of the numerous limestone caverns or in some lonely and inaccessible chasm among the rocks. The motive for secret burial was a fear lest an enemy should get possession of the bones and profane them by making fish-hooks out of them or converting the skull into a baler for his canoe. Such a profanation was deemed a deadly insult to the surviving relatives. After a burial the persons who had dressed or carried the corpse, and all indeed who had had anything to do with it, repaired to the nearest stream and plunged themselves several times over head in the water.[53] [52] J. Dumont d'Urville, _op. cit._ ii. 541. [53] J. Dumont d'Urville, _op. cit._ ii. 543 _sq._; W. Yate, _op. cit._ p. 137; Servant, "Notice sur la Nouvelle-Zélande," _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xv. (1843) p. 25; E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 62 _sqq._; G. F. Angas, _Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand_, i. 331; A. S. Thomson, _The Story of New Zealand_, i. 188; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 218 _sqq._; E. Tregear, "The Maori of New Zealand," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xix. (1890) p. 105; Elsdon Best, "Cremation among the Maori Tribes of New Zealand," _Man_, xiv. (1914) p. 110. In some districts the removal of the bones from their temporary to their final resting-place was the occasion of a grand annual festival in which several neighbouring tribes took part. The bones of all members of the tribes who had died within the year were taken down from the stages or trees where the bodies had been temporarily deposited. The grave-clothes having been removed, the mouldering remains were wrapped in new blankets and carried in procession, attended by the crowd, to a place where they were deposited on a carpet of leaves. Should any putrid flesh be found still adhering to the bones, it was scraped off and buried on the spot. A few old women, dressed in their best, oiled from head to foot, and plastered with raddle, received the skulls into their laps. While they held them thus, a funeral ode was sung and speeches, loud and long, were delivered. Then the bones were tied up, decked with feathers of the gannet, rolled up in blankets, and carried to their last place of rest in a sacred grove, where they were left, securely fastened up and gaudily decorated with red and white. Having thus discharged their duty to the dead, the living gave themselves up to festivity; they ate and drank, danced, sang, whistled, wrestled, quarrelled, bought and sold. This Holy Fair, which went by the name of Hahunga, lasted several days. At the end of it the mourners, or revellers, dispersed and returned to their homes, laden with food which had been made ready for them by their hosts.[54] Great importance was attached to the final disposal of the remains of the dead. According to one account, the soul of the dead man could not rest till his bones were laid in the sepulchre of his ancestors, which was often a natural cave or grotto. There they were deposited on a shelf or platform a few feet above the floor of the cavern.[55] [54] W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, pp. 137-139; Servant, "Notice sur la Nouvelle-Zélande," _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xv. (1843) pp. 26 _sq._ The name _Hahunga_ is doubtless connected with the verb _hahu_ which means "to exhume the bones of dead persons before depositing them in their final resting-place." See E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 42, _s.v._ "hahu." [55] J. Dumont d'Urville, _op. cit._ ii. 543, 545. Not uncommonly the bones of the dead, instead of being preserved, were burned.[56] But cremation, though not unusual, seems never to have been a general custom with the Maoris. They resorted to it only in exceptional circumstances, for example, in order to stay the spread of disease, or in cases where a tribe occupied open country and found no suitable place where to lay the bones of their dead after exhumation. Cremation for the latter reason is said to have been practised by the Ngati-apa tribe in the Rangatikikei District, and also by the tribes who occupied the Waimate Plains. An old earthwork fort near the present township of Manaia was the scene of many cremations of the Maori dead in former days. Again, it was a common custom for a raiding party to cremate their dead in the enemy's country, when there was no time to carry them home for the usual obsequies. The intention of burning them was to prevent the enemy from eating the bodies and making fish-hooks out of the bones. For a similar reason even the wounded, whom they could not carry with them, were sometimes thrown into great fires and burnt alive. If the slain man was a chief, only his body would be consumed in the flames; his head would be cut off, steamed, cured, and carried home, to be wept over by his friends. In the Bay of Plenty district the bodies of persons who died of a certain disease called _Kai uaua_, apparently consumption, used to be burnt to prevent the spread of the malady, and all the ashes were carefully buried.[57] [56] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 220. This was called _tahunga_, "burning," a word no doubt derived from _tahu_, "to set on fire, kindle." See E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 444, _s.v._ "tahu." [57] Elsdon Best, "Cremation amongst the Maori tribes of New Zealand," _Man_, xiv. (1914) pp. 110 _sq._ Often enough the heads of dead relatives were cut off, dried, and preserved by the family for many years in order to be occasionally brought forth and mourned over. Sometimes a widow would sleep with her husband's severed head at her side. After a victory, too, it was customary to decapitate the slain foes and dry their heads, which were then carried home and used as scarecrows or stuck on short stakes in the village, where they were jeered at and reviled. When the time came to plant the sweet potatoes, and the priests recited their spells for the sake of the crops, the dried heads were sometimes brought out and placed at the edge of the field, for this was believed to promote the growth of the sweet potatoes.[58] Apparently the spirits of the dead were thought able to quicken the fruits of the earth. [58] Elsdon Best, "Notes on the Art of War as conducted by the Maori of New Zealand," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xii. no. 4 (December 1903), pp. 195-197. Compare W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, pp. 130 _sqq._; E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 66. At all events the Maoris undoubtedly believed that the souls of the departed survive the death of their bodies for a longer or shorter time and in their disembodied state can influence the living for weal or woe. The belief in the survival of the soul is strikingly manifested in their old custom of killing widows and slaves to serve dead chiefs in the other world. It found expression in the more harmless custom of laying food beside a dead person or burying it with him in the grave; but, as usually happens in such cases, the ghost only consumed the spiritual essence of the victuals, considerately leaving the gross material substance to be despatched by the priest.[59] A dying Maori, unable to eat a loaf which a missionary had offered to him, begged that it might be kept for his ghost, who, after his death, would come and fortify himself with it for the journey to his long home.[60] At Tanaraki the child of a chief was buried in its father's house, grasping in each of its little fists a taro for consumption in the other world. Over the grave were laid boards, and the family slept on them. When they thought that the child's body was sufficiently decayed, they dug it up, scraped the bones, and hung them in the verandah, where from time to time the priest recited spells to assist the soul in its ascent to heaven. Every spell was supposed to raise the soul one stage nearer to the abode of bliss. But the ascent was long and tedious, for there were no less than ten heavens one above the other; the tenth was believed to be the principal abode of the gods. When the parents of the child who had been despatched to the happy land with taro in each hand were asked, "Why taro, if the little one is gone to heaven?" they answered that they were not quite sure whether it went up or down, and therefore as an additional precaution they planted a seed of taro in the grave, so that their offspring might find something to eat either above or below.[61] [59] J. Dumont d'Urville, _op. cit._ ii. 542; G. F. Angas, _op. cit._ ii. 71; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 220. [60] J. Dumont d'Urville, _l.c._ [61] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 220. Similar ceremonies were performed to facilitate the ascension of the souls of chiefs and priests. Before the body was taken to the place of burial, it was laid out with its feet towards the north, and all the blood-relations of the deceased, men, women, and children, assembled round it. Then the priest, standing at the head of the corpse, between the rows of the people, chanted two incantations, of which the second was supposed to assist the soul to ascend to heaven. The priest next put a bulb of taro in the left hand of the corpse and chanted another incantation. After that, flaxen cords were tied with a slip-knot to a tassel of the mat in which the body was enshrouded, and a cord was placed in the hand of each child, boy and girl, present at the ceremony. When the priest had chanted one more incantation, each child pulled the cord with a jerk, to disconnect the soul from the body, lest it should remain and afflict the relatives.[62] This last rite, with the reason assigned for it, is significant at once of the dread which the Maoris felt for departed spirits, and of the very materialistic conception which they entertained of the human soul, since they appear to have imagined that it could be detached from the body by jerking at a cord. [62] John White, "A Chapter from Maori Mythology," _Report of the Third Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Christchurch, New Zealand, in January 1891_, pp. 362 _sq._ The wish to raise the soul to heaven was perhaps the motive for another curious rite performed at the obsequies of a chief. When the body had been buried, the chief returned to the village; but the men who had carried the body went to the nearest swamp, and having caught a swamp-sparrow (_matata_) sent word to the priest, who forthwith rejoined them. Each of the bearers was then provided with a stick to which certain of the feathers of the bird were tied. Then, holding the sticks in their hands, they sat on their heels in a row opposite the priest, who stood facing the east with a stick similarly adorned in his left hand. Next he moved to the south end of the row of men and chanted, and as he chanted he gradually raised his stick, while at the same time all the bearers, holding their sticks at arm's length, gradually raised them and their bodies simultaneously, keeping perfect time, till the priest had concluded his chant, when they all stood erect with outstretched arms. After that the priest collected the sticks and threw them down in front of the _mua_, which seems to have been a kind of altar.[63] We may surmise that the ceremony was intended to waft the soul of the dead chief upward, the feathers of the bird being naturally fitted to facilitate its heavenward flight. [63] John White, "A Chapter from Maori Mythology," _op. cit._ p. 363. As to the meaning of _mua_, see E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 267, _s.v._ "mua." At other times, however, with the inconsistency so common in such matters, it appears to have been supposed that the soul set out on its far journey across the sea, and steps were accordingly taken to equip it for the voyage. Thus we hear of a _wahi tapu_ or sacred repository of the property of a deceased chief, which contained, among other things, a little canoe with sail and paddles, "to serve as a ferry-boat for the spirit to enter in safety into the eternal abodes." Nevertheless in the same enclosure, which was fenced with a double set of palings, "calabashes of food and water, and a dish prepared from the pigeon, were placed for the ghost to regale itself when visiting the spot; and the heathen natives aver that at night the spirit comes and feeds from the sacred calabashes."[64] [64] G. F. Angas, _Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand_, ii. 70 _sq._ Many people in the Taranaki district thought that souls went neither up nor down, but always stayed near their mouldering bodies. Hence the sacred grove in which their remains were buried was full of disembodied spirits; and when a man died a violent death his soul wandered about disconsolate, till a priest by his spells and enchantments had brought the poor ghost within the spiritual fold.[65] [65] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 220 _sq._ When a chief was killed in battle and eaten by his foes, as often happened, his departed spirit entered the stones of the oven in which his body had been cooked, and the stones retained their heat so long as the ghost was in them. Meanwhile his sorrowing friends at home recited their most potent spells to draw his soul out of the oven and back to the sacred grove (_wahi tapu_) the burial-place of his people; for otherwise the soul could find no repose, but must roam about for ever, wreaking its spite on the living, for all disembodied spirits were deemed malicious. Hence after a battle, if people could not obtain the body of a slain friend, they sought to procure at least some drops of his blood or shreds of his raiment, that by crooning over them the appropriate spell they might draw home the vagrant spirit to his place of rest. The burial-grounds were regarded with awe and fear, for sometimes a restless ghost would break bounds and spread sickness among the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. Within their sacred precincts stood altars or stages for offerings to the gods, and any living man who entered them did so at his peril. For the same reason no one would set foot in a house where a dead man or woman had been buried. Hence in nearly every village half the houses stood empty and deserted, falling into decay, tenanted only by ghosts. The living had constantly before their eyes the mansions of the dead.[66] [66] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 221. The common belief of the Maoris seems to have been that the souls of the dead pass away to a region of the underworld, which was sometimes called Po and sometimes Reinga. Properly speaking, Po was night or the primaeval darkness out of which all forms of life and light were evolved or created;[67] and Reinga was not so much the spirit land itself as the leaping-off place where the souls bade good-bye to earth and took their departure for the far country. This leaping-off place was at the North Cape, the Land's End of New Zealand. The cape terminates in a steep cliff with a sea-cave at its foot, into which the tide rushes with a thunderous roar. There the evil spirit Wiro is thought to dwell, lurking for his prey; for he battens on such of the passing souls of the dead as he can get into his clutches. On their passage to the North Cape the ghosts stop by the way at two hills; at the first, which is called Wai-hokimai, they wail, cut themselves, and strip off their clothes; at the second, which is called Wai-otioti, they turn their backs on the land of the living and set their faces to the land of the dead. Arrived at the cape they pass outward over a long narrow ledge of rock and then leap down on a flat stone. There they see a mass of sea-weed floating on the water, its roots hidden in the depth, its upper branches clinging to a _pohutukawa_ tree. When they perceive an opening in the sea-weed they dive and soon find themselves in the lower world. But before they reach the abode of spirits they must cross a river by a plank; the river is called Waiorotane or the River of the Water of Life; and sometimes the warden of the plank will not suffer the ghosts to pass the river, but drives them back with friendly violence and bids them return to their friends on earth. Such souls come back to the bright world of light and life, and tell their friends what they have seen and heard on the journey to that bourne from which so many travellers return no more. Hence when any one has recovered from a dangerous sickness or escaped some great peril, they say of him that he has come back from the River of the Water of Life. Even if a soul has crossed that sombre stream, he may still return to the land of the living, if only he refuses to partake of the food set before him by the ghosts; but should he taste of it, he cannot come back. They say that people living near the North Cape can hear the spirits of the dead passing through the air on their way to the spirit land; and in the old days, when a battle had been fought and before the news of it could reach them by word of mouth, the natives near the cape were made aware of what had happened by the rushing sound of a great multitude flitting by overhead in the darkness.[68] Perhaps the sighing of the night-wind or the clangour of birds of passage winging their way out to sea may have contributed to create or foster these fancies. [67] E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 342, _s.v._ "Po." [68] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 150 _sqq._; _id._, _Maori Religion and Mythology_, p. 45; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 52, 231; W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, p. 140; E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 66 _sq._; E. Tregear, "The Maoris of New Zealand," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xix. (1890) pp. 118 _sq._; _id._, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, pp. 407 _sq._, 591, _s.vv._ "Reinga" and "Waiora"; John White, "A Chapter from Maori Mythology," _Report of the Third Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Christchurch, New Zealand, in January 1891_, pp. 361 _sq._ On the day after a burial the priest used to perform a ceremony to facilitate the passage of the soul to its final rest. For this purpose some men would go out in the morning and kill a small bird of the swamps called _kokata_ and pluck up some reeds of a certain sort (_wiwi_). These they brought to the priest at the grave. He asked them, "Whence came ye?" They answered, "From the seeking, from the searching." He asked them again, "Ah! what have you got? ah! what have you gained?" Then the men threw the bird and the reeds on the ground. Next the priest chose a stalk of grass or fern and put it near the grave in a direction pointing towards Hawaiki, the land far away from which the forefathers of the Maoris came long ago. Another stalk of grass or fern was laid near the place of death, and along these stalks the soul of the dead man travelled to rejoin his friends and kinsfolk who had gone before.[69] [69] E. Shortland, _Maori Religion and Mythology_, p. 44. Such a stalk to aid the spirit on its passage was called a _tiri_. Compare E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 517, _s.v._ "Tiri." The ceremony described in the text resembles in some points the one which seems intended to raise the soul of the deceased to heaven. See above, p. 25. As might be anticipated, the accounts which the Maoris gave of the spirit world and of life in it were neither clear nor consistent. According to one account, while the heavens increase in beauty as they ascend one above the other, the lower regions increase in darkness and horror as they descend, each being darker and worse than the one above it, till in the lowest of all complete darkness reigns. There the souls, deprived alike of light and food, wasted away and ultimately ceased to exist; or according to another account they assumed the shape of worms and in that guise returned to earth, where they died a second death and so finally perished. But it was only the souls of common folk which came to this melancholy end. Chiefs and priests were believed to be descended from the gods, and at death their souls ascended to heaven, there to live for ever.[70] [70] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 232; John White, "A Chapter from Maori Mythology," _Report of the Third Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Christchurch, New Zealand, in January 1891_, pp. 361 _sq._ Other reports, however, paint the nether world in more cheerful colours. We are told that the souls of the dead live there very much as people do on earth, but all good things are more plentiful there than here. The staple food of the ghosts is sweet potatoes, and the quality of the potatoes appears to be remarkably fine; for once a woman, who had the good fortune to go to the spirit land and come back, received from her dead father in the nether regions two roots of sweet potatoes of a most prodigious size. These the ghost told her to take back to earth and plant for the benefit of his grandchild. So she hurried away with them and arriving at the foot of the North Cape had begun to clamber up the face of the cliff, when two infant spirits overtook her and attempted to drag her back to dead land by tugging at her cloak. To divert their attention she threw the two roots of sweet potato behind her, and while the sprites were munching them she made good her escape up the cliff and succeeded in reaching home. Her friends were very glad to see her again, but they always lamented that she had not brought back at least one of those gigantic roots of sweet potato, since it would unquestionably have done much to improve the quality of sweet potatoes grown here on earth.[71] [71] E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 48 _sq._, 67, 118; E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 153 _sqq._; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 233 _sq._ But the spirits of the dead are by no means strictly confined to the lower world; they can quit it from time to time and return to earth, there to influence the actions and fortunes of the living and to communicate with them through the priest, who can hear their voices. They speak in whistling tones, which even common folk can sometimes distinguish as they walk about in the dark. Often their communications are made to the priest or chief in dreams, and he announces the glad or mournful tidings to other people in the morning. Any commands conveyed in this manner from the other world are, or used to be, implicitly obeyed and might decide the course to be pursued in the most important affairs of life.[72] In some tribes, especially among the natives of Wangunui, it used to be customary to keep in the houses small carved images of wood, each of them dedicated to an ancestor of the family, who was believed occasionally to enter into the image in order to hold converse with his living descendants.[73] But even without the intervention of such images the priest could summon up the spirits of the dead and converse with them in the presence of the relatives or of strangers; at these interviews, which were held within doors and in the dark, the voices of the ghosts, or perhaps of the priestly ventriloquist, were sometimes distinctly audible even to sceptical Europeans. Nor was the art of necromancy confined to men; for we read of an old woman who, like the witch of Endor, professed to exercise this ghostly office, and treated an English visitor to an exhibition of her powers.[74] [72] E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 67, 118; E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, ii. 83, 84. [73] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, p. 83. [74] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 84 _sqq._; _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori (London, 1884), pp. 122 _sqq._ As to the belief in the reappearance of the dead among the living compare R. A. Cruise, _Journal of a Ten Months' Residence in New Zealand_ (London, 1823), p. 186: "The belief in the reappearance of the dead is universal among the New Zealanders: they fancy they hear their deceased relatives speaking to them when the wind is high; whenever they pass the place where a man has been murdered, it is customary for each person to throw a stone upon it; and the same practice is observed by all those who visit a cavern at the North Cape, through which the spirits of departed men are supposed to pass on their way to a future world." The spirits of the dead were sometimes useful to the living, for commonly enough they would appear to their kinsfolk in dreams and warn them of approaching foes or other dangers. Again, they might be and were invoked by spells and enchantments to avenge a murder or even to slay an innocent person against whom the enchanter had a grudge.[75] But for the most part the ghosts were greatly dreaded as malicious demons who worked harm to man.[76] Even the nearest and dearest relations were believed to have their natures radically changed by death and to hate those whom they had loved in life.[77] And so powerful were these malignant beings supposed to be that they were confused with the gods, or rather the spirits of the dead became themselves gods to all intents and purposes, and played a much more important part in the religious life of the Maoris than the high primaeval deities, the personifications of nature, who figured in Maori mythology and cosmogony.[78] The gods whom the Maoris feared, we are told, were the spirits of the dead, who were believed to be constantly watching over the living with jealous eyes, lest they should neglect any part of the law relating to persons or things subject to the sacred restriction called taboo (_tapu_). These spirits, however, confined their care almost exclusively to persons among the living with whom they were connected by ties of relationship, so that every tribe and every family had its own worshipful ancestral spirit or god, whom members of the tribe or family invoked with appropriate prayers or spells (_karakias_). Ancestral spirits who lived in the flesh before the Maoris emigrated to New Zealand were invoked by all the tribes in New Zealand without distinction, so far as their names and memories survived in tradition. Thus the worship of these remote ancestors constituted what may be called the national religion of the Maoris as distinguished from the tribal and family religions, which consisted in the worship of nearer and better remembered progenitors. The great importance attached by the Maoris to the worship of ancestors may account, we are told, for the care with which they preserved their genealogies; since the names of ancestors often formed the groundwork of their religious formulas (_karakias_), and any error or even hesitation in repeating these prayers or incantations was deemed fatal to their efficacy.[79] "Ancestor worship, or rather the deification of ancestors, was essentially a Maori cult. It was a form of necrolatry, or hero worship. A man would placate the spirit of his father, grandfather, or ancestor, and make offerings to the same, that such spirit might protect his life principle, warn him of approaching danger, and give force or effectiveness to his rites and charms of black or white magic."[80] [75] Elsdon Best, "Spiritual Concepts of the Maori," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. ix. no. 4 (December 1900), p. 182. [76] Elsdon Best, _op. cit._ p. 184. [77] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 104. [78] E. Shortland, _The Southern Districts of New Zealand_ (London, 1851), p. 294; _id._, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 80, 81; _id._, _Maori Religion and Mythology_, pp. 10 _sq._; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 108, "Maori gods are so mixed up with the spirits of ancestors, whose worship entered largely into their religion, that it is difficult to distinguish one from the other." [79] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, p. 81; _id._, _Maori Religion and Mythology_, p. 11. As to the _karakias_, which were prayers or invocations, spells or incantations, addressed to gods or ancestral spirits, see E. Shortland, _Maori Religion and Mythology_, pp. 28 _sqq._; E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 128, _s.v._ "karakia." Apparently the _karakia_ partook of the nature of a spell rather than of a prayer, since it was believed to be so potent that the mere utterance of it compelled the gods to do the will of the person who recited the formula. See R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 180 _sq._: "The Maori, in his heathen state, never undertook any work, whether hunting, fishing, planting, or war, without first uttering a _karakia_; he would not even take a journey without repeating a spell to secure his safety; still he could not be said to pray, for, properly speaking, they had no such thing as prayer. As in war, they armed themselves with the most formidable weapons they could procure, and laid their plans with the greatest skill they possessed, so to secure the fruition of their desires, they used their most powerful means to compel the gods to be obedient to their wishes, whether they sought for victory over their foes, fruitful crops, successful fishings, or huntings, they called in the aid of potent incantations; when they planted their _kumara_ [sweet potatoes], they sought to compel the god who presided over them to yield a good increase; when they prepared their nets and their hooks, they must force the ocean god to let his fish enter them; as the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by storm, so the heathen Maori sought, by spells and incantations, to compel the gods to yield to their wishes; they added sacrifices and offerings at the same time, to appease as it were their anger, for being thus constrained to do what they wished them. Their ancestors were addressed as powerful familiar friends; they gave them offerings, and if it can be said that any prayers were offered up, it was to them they were made. The word _karakia_, which we use for prayer, formerly meant a spell, charm, or incantation." [80] Elsdon Best, "Maori Religion," _Report of the Twelfth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Brisbane, 1909_, p. 459. The ancestral spirits who particularly watched over the fortunes of a tribe were the souls of its dead warriors and great men. In war these powerful, though invisible, beings were thought to attend the army and direct its movements on the march by communicating advice or warning through some one or other of their nearest living kinsmen. In battle they hovered over the combatants and inspired courage into the hearts of their own tribe. Hence when, on the eve of battle, any young man showed signs of the white feather, recourse was immediately had to the family priest, who repeated a charm, invoking the aid of his friendly spirit; for the sensation of fear was ascribed to the baneful influence of a hostile spirit. If the friendly spirit prevailed, and the craven spirit was expelled, the young man would rush into the thickest of the fight and prove himself the bravest of the brave.[81] [81] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 81 _sq._ The interest taken by the spirits of the dead in mundane affairs seldom extended beyond the limits of the tribe to which they belonged. Hence a captive in war, who was carried away and enslaved by another tribe, ceased from that moment to be under the protection and care of any ancestral spirit or god. For the ancestral spirits of his own tribe did not trouble themselves to follow him among a hostile tribe and hostile spirits, and the ancestral spirits of the tribe whom he served as a slave would not deign to give him a thought. Hence being forsaken of god and left to their own devices, slaves were relieved from many of the burdensome restrictions which the Maori gods laid upon their worshippers; they were therefore free to perform many menial offices, particularly in regard to carrying and cooking food, which no free Maori could discharge without sinning against the sacred law of taboo and incurring the wrath of the ancestral spirits, who for such a transgression might punish the sinner with sickness or death.[82] [82] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 82 _sq._; _id._, _The Southern Districts of New Zealand_, pp. 296 _sq._ In addition to their deified ancestors, who had lived as men of flesh and blood on earth, the Maoris believed in certain great primaeval deities, who had existed before the human race came into being, and whose doings were the theme of many mythical stories. These mighty beings appear to have been personifications of the various forces or elements of nature, such as the sky and the earth. But though fancy wove round them a glistering web of myth and fable, they were apparently believed to stand aloof in cold abstraction from human affairs and to take no interest in the present race of men. The practical religion of the Maori was concentrated on the souls of his deceased kinsfolk and forefathers: "neither in any existing superstition nor tradition, purely such, is there to be found internal evidence that an idea of God existed more exalted than that of the spirit of a dead ancestor."[83] [83] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, p. 80. Compare _id._, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, p. 81; _id._, _The Southern Districts of New Zealand_, p. 294; _id._, _Maori Religion and Mythology_, pp. 10 _sq._ In Maori mythology Rangi is the personification of the sky, and Papa of earth. They were the primal parents, and the other great gods were their offspring. See Elsdon Best, "The Maori Genius for Personification," _Transactions of the New Zealand Institute_, liii. (1921) p. 2. Among the great primordial deities who were worshipped by all tribes of New Zealand may be mentioned Tane, Tu, Tangaroa, and Rongo. Of the four, Tane was the origin and tutelary deity of forests and birds: no tree might be felled and no bird caught till certain rites had been performed to placate him. Tu was the god of war. Tangaroa was the god of the ocean, the origin and tutelary deity of fish. Rongo was the god of peace, and presided over agriculture. See Elsdon Best, "Maori Religion," _Report of the Twelfth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Brisbane, 1909_, p. 458. The same four gods, with names only dialectically different, were, as we shall see later on, the principal deities of the Sandwich Islanders, the most distant geographically from the Maoris of all the Polynesians. The coincidence furnishes an example of the homogeneity of religion which prevailed among the various branches of the Polynesian race. The word which the Maoris applied to a god, whether a personification of nature or the spirit of a dead ancestor, was _atua_. The name is not confined to the Maori language, but is the common word for god throughout Polynesia.[84] When the Maoris attempt to define the nature of an _atua_, they have recourse to the same comparisons with a shadow and with breath which appear to underlie their conception of the human soul.[85] But though "god" is the nearest English equivalent of the word _atua_, we must beware of assuming that the Maori idea of godhead coincided with ours. On this subject one of our best authorities tells us that the term "god" is really not applicable to the _Atua Maori_, the so-called gods of the Maoris. For these beings, he says, "were, with few exceptions, malignant demons, to be feared and placated or conciliated, but not worshipped. Their principal task seems to have been the inflicting upon mankind of diverse evils, pains, and penalties. Of the few good offices performed by them, the warning of the people in regard to coming troubles, seems to have been the most important. The vast majority of the so-called gods of the Maori were simply deified ancestors."[86] [84] E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, pp. 30 _sq._, _s.v._ "Atua." [85] J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage autour du Monde et à la recherche de la Pérouse, Histoire du Voyage_ (Paris, 1832-1833), ii. 516 _sq._ [86] Elsdon Best, "Notes on the Art of War as conducted by the Maori of New Zealand," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xi. no. 2 (June 1902). pp. 63 _sq._ In order to illustrate the difference between the Maori conception of deity and our own, I will quote the words of another eminent authority on the native religion of the New Zealanders. He says, "Before the mythology of the Maori is further considered, it will be necessary briefly to state what were the ideas of God entertained by the natives. The word _atua_, or spirit, which is used for God, formerly had various significations; a plague or disease was also _he atua_, or God; a thief was an _atua_, thus also a thievish dog was _he kuri atua_, a god-like dog, so also _he tangata atua ki te muru_, a man equal to a god in stealing; a child who pilfered was _he tamaiti atua_, a divine child; there were great spirits and small ones, a man's spirit was an _atua pore pore_, a little spirit, but Maru Rongomai and other gods were _Atua nui_, great gods; there were _atua ika_, reptile or fish gods; a great chief was called _He ika_, a fish, sea monster, or reptile, and was regarded as a malignant god in life, and a still worse one after death; there were likewise _Atua marau_, as the _toroa_, albatross, the _ruru_, owl; and _karu karu_, the film which shades its eye from the light, was also an _atua_; male and female spirits presided over dreams, and were regarded as _atuas, Ko nga atua moe moea o te poko_, the gods of dreams; _Tunui a rangi_, a male, _Pare kewa_, a female deity, both were prayed to as gods; the _atua kore_ and _atua kiko kiko_ were inferior gods. The _Atua ngarara_ or reptile gods were very abundant, and were supposed to be the cause of all diseases and death, being always ready to avail themselves of every opportunity of crawling down the throat during sleep, and thus preying upon the lives of unfortunate creatures. _Atuas_ or spirits of the deceased were thought to be able to revisit the earth and reveal to their friends the cause of their sickness. Everything that was evil or noxious was supposed especially to belong to the gods; thus a species of euphorbium, whose milk or juice is highly poisonous, is called _wai u atua_, the milk of the gods."[87] "In fact, in the accounts which the natives give of their gods and their exploits, we have but a magnified history of their chiefs, their wars, murders, and lusts, with the addition of some supernatural powers; they were cannibals; influenced by like feelings and passions as men, and were uniformly bad; to them were ascribed all the evils incident to the human race; each disease was supposed to be occasioned by a different god, who resided in the part affected; thus, Tonga, the god who caused headache, took up his abode in the forehead; Moko Titi, a lizard god, was the source of all pains in the breast; Tu-tangata-kino was the god of the stomach; Titihai occasioned pains in the ankles and feet; Rongomai and Tuparitapua were the gods of consumption, and the wasting away of the legs and arms; Koro-kio-ewe presided over childbirth, and did his worst to unfortunate females in that state. In fact, the entire human body appears to have been shared out amongst those evil beings, who ruled over each part, to afflict and pain the poor creatures who worshipped them."[88] [87] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 134 _sq._ [88] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 137. Anything, indeed, whether good or evil, which excited the fear or wonder of the Maoris would seem in the old days to have been dubbed by them an _atua_ and invested with the attributes of divinity. For example, when a traveller in the early years of the nineteenth century showed his watch to some Maoris, the ticking struck them with such astonishment that they deemed it nothing less than the voice of a god; and the watch itself, being looked upon as a deity (_atua_) in person, was treated by the whole of them with profound reverence.[89] Other travellers have had similar experiences among the Maoris,[90] and compasses and barometers have also been accorded divine honours by these ignorant savages.[91] [89] J. L. Nicholas, _Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand_ (London, 1817), i. 254. [90] J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage autour du Monde et à la recherche de la Pérouse, Histoire du Voyage_ (Paris, 1832-1833), ii. 516. [91] E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 118. § 5. _Taboo among the Maoris_ But the most momentous practical consequence which flowed from their belief in the spirits of the dead was the enormous influence which that creed wielded in establishing and maintaining the system of taboo, the most remarkable and characteristic institution in the life of the Maoris and of the Polynesians in general. I shall first give some account of the taboo or _tapu_, as the Maoris called it, and afterwards show how this extraordinary system of society and religion was directly based on a belief in the existence of ghosts and their mighty power over human destiny. First, then, as to taboo or _tapu_ itself. This curious institution, as I have said, prevailed throughout all the widely scattered islands of Polynesia, but nowhere to a greater extent than in New Zealand. It pervaded the whole life of the natives, affected their plans, influenced their actions, and in the absence of an efficient police provided a certain security both for their persons and their property. Sometimes it was used for political, and sometimes for religious purposes; sometimes it was the means of saving life, and at other times it was the ostensible reason for taking life away.[92] It may be defined as a system of consecration which made any person, place, or thing sacred either permanently or for a limited time.[93] The effect of this consecration was to separate the sacred person or thing from all contact with common (_noa_)[94] persons and things: it established a sort of quarantine for the protection not only of the sacred persons themselves, but of common folk, who were supposed to be injured or killed by mere contact with a tabooed person or object. For the sanctity which the taboo conferred on people and things was conceived of as a sort of dangerous atmosphere, charged with a spiritual electricity, which discharged itself with serious and even fatal effect on all rash intruders. A tabooed person might not be touched by any one, so long as the taboo or state of consecration lasted; he might not even put his own hand to his own head; and he was most stringently forbidden to touch food with his hands. Hence he was either fed like a child by another, who put the food into his mouth; or he had to lap up his victuals like a dog from the ground, with his hands held behind his back; or lastly he might convey the nourishment by means of a fern stalk to his mouth. When he wished to drink, somebody else poured water into his mouth from a calabash without allowing the vessel to touch his lips; for mere contact with the lips of the tabooed man would have rendered the vessel itself sacred or tabooed and therefore unfit for common use. Similarly, when he desired to wash his hands, water had to be poured on them from a distance by his attendant. This state of consecration or defilement, as we might be tempted rather to call it, was incurred by any person who had touched either a young child or a corpse or had assisted at a funeral. The taboo contracted by association with the dead was the strictest and most virulent of all. It extended not only to the persons who had handled the corpse or paid the last offices of respect to the departed; it applied to the place where the body was buried or the bones deposited. So sacred, indeed, was deemed the spot where a chief had died that in the old days everything upon it was destroyed by fire. Hence in order to avoid the destruction of a house, which a death in it would have entailed, it was customary to remove a sick or dying man to a temporary shed just large enough to shelter him from the sun or screen him from the rain; for if the man died in it, the destruction of the wretched hovel was no great loss to the survivors.[95] A widow was tabooed and had to observe the aforesaid restrictions from the death of her husband until his bones had been scraped and deposited in their last resting-place; and the same rule applied to a widower.[96] These taboos were temporary and could be removed by a priest, who performed certain rites and repeated certain spells (_karakias_), and thereby relieved the tabooed person from the state of sanctity or consecration under which he had laboured. The performance of the ceremony put an end to the spiritual quarantine; the man ceased to be sacred, he became common (_noa_) once more, and could mingle freely with his fellows. One of the ceremonies of desecration, as we may call it, was to pass a consecrated piece of wood over the right shoulder of the tabooed person, then round his loins, and back again over the left shoulder, after which the stick was broken in two and buried, burned, or cast into the sea.[97] Again, a temporary taboo was laid on all persons who were engaged in planting sweet potatoes, or in sorting the seed, or in digging and preparing the ground; they might not leave the fields where they were at work nor undertake any other labour. The fields themselves were sacred during these operations; none but the persons who were tabooed for the purpose might set foot on the ground or pluck up the weeds which grow rankly round the roots of the vegetable.[98] Similarly, in their great fishing-expeditions to catch mackerel, all concerned in making or mending the nets were under a taboo: the ground where the nets were made was sacred, and so was the river on the banks of which the work went on. No man but the tabooed persons might walk over the land or pass up or down the river in a canoe: no fire might be lighted within a prescribed distance: no food might be dressed while the taboo lasted. Not till the net had been finished and wetted with the sacred water, and the owner had caught and eaten a fish, did these burdensome restrictions come to an end by the removal of the taboo.[99] Once more, the men who took part in a warlike expedition were under a severe taboo and had to observe very strictly the customs which that mysterious state of consecration rendered obligatory.[100] Even after their return home they were not allowed to enter their houses or to hold any direct communication with their families who had remained there, till they had been rendered common (_noa_) by a ceremony of desecration. Before that ceremony took place, the warriors were obliged to throw away the remains of the bodies of their foes on which, as usual, they had been feasting; for being sacred food the flesh could only be touched by sacred or tabooed persons. One woman only, the _wahine ariki_, as she was called, that is the elder female of the elder branch of the stock from which the tribe traced their descent, was permitted to touch the sanctified meat; indeed, in order to carry out the ritual of desecration in due form she was expected and required to swallow an ear of the first enemy killed in battle.[101] A warlike expedition might lay even people at home under a taboo; for all who remained behind, including old men, women, and slaves, were often required to observe a rigid fast and to abstain from smoking till the return of the warriors.[102] [92] W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, pp. 84 _sq._ [93] W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, p. 84; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 163. [94] E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, pp. 268 _sq._, _s.v._ "Noa." [95] W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, pp. 85 _sq._; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 163, 164. [96] E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 40. [97] J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage autour du Monde et à la recherche de la Pérouse, Histoire du Voyage_ (Paris, 1832-1833), iii. 685; W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, p. 86; E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 104 _sq._; Servant, "Notice sur la Nouvelle-Zélande," _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xv. (1843) p. 23; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 166 _sq._; _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori, pp. 104 _sqq._ The taboo could be got rid of more simply by the tabooed man touching his child or grandchild and taking food or drink from the child's hands. But when that was done, the taboo was transferred to the child, who retained it for the rest of the day. See E. Dieffenbach, _op. cit._ ii. 105. [98] W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, p. 85; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 165 _sq._; _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori, pp. 103 _sq._ [99] W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, p. 85. [100] _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori, pp. 96, 114 _sq._ [101] E. Shortland, _The Southern Districts of New Zealand_, pp. 68 _sq._ [102] _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori, pp. 114 _sq._ But in contrast to the temporary taboos which affected common folk and debarred them for a time from familiar intercourse with their fellows, a perpetual and very stringent taboo was laid on the persons and property of chiefs, especially of those high hereditary chiefs who bore the title of _Ariki_ and were thought to be able at any time to hold visible converse with their dead ancestors.[103] Strictly speaking, "the _ariki_ of a Maori tribe is the senior male descendant of the elder branch of the tribe, that is, he is a descendant of the elder son of the elder son of each generation from the time of the original ancestor down to the present day. As such, he was of old regarded almost as a god, inasmuch as he represented all that there was of _m[)a]na_ and sacredness of his tribe. That he should have been regarded in this light is not astonishing, for the Maoris believed he was something more than human, in that he was the shrine of an hereditary _Atua_, the guardian spirit of the tribe, and could therefore at any time communicate with the tribal gods.... Such a man was not only _tapu_ in person but he made everything he touched so dangerously sacred as to be a source of terror to the tribe. To smoke his pipe, or drink from any vessel he had touched, was death speedy and certain at the hands of the gods, who avenge breaches of the _tapu_."[104] "The gods being no more than deceased chiefs, the _arikis_ were regarded as living ones, and thus were not to be killed by inferior men, but only by those who had more powerful _atuas_ in them; the victorious chief who had slain numbers, swallowed their eyes, and drunk their blood, was supposed to have added the spirits of his victims to his own, and thus increased his _mana_ or power; to keep up this idea, and hinder the lower orders from trying whether it were possible to kill such corporeal and living gods, was the grand work of the _tapu_."[105] The godhead of a chief was thought to reside in his eyes, especially in his left eye; that was why by swallowing the eye or eyes of a slain chief a living chief was believed to absorb the divine spirit of the dead man and thereby to strengthen his own divinity; the more eyes he swallowed, the greater god he became.[106] [103] E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 40, 112 _sq._, 356; E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, p. 104; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 149, 164, 212 _sq._; E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, pp. 23 _sq._, _s.v._ "Ariki." The word _ariki_ signifies properly the first-born or heir, whether male or female, of a family. [104] Lieut.-Col. W. E. Gudgeon, "Maori Religion," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xiv. no. 3 (September 1905), p. 130. Compare _id._, "The Tipua-Kura and other Manifestations of the Spirit World," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xv. no. 57 (March 1906), p. 38. [105] R. Taylor, _Te Ika a Maui_, p. 173. _Mana_ means authority, especially divine authority or supernatural power. See E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 203, _s.v._ "Mana"; and for a full discussion of the conception see Lieut.-Col. W. E. Gudgeon, "Mana Tangata," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xiv. no. 2 (June 1905), pp. 49-66. "_Mana_ plays a leading part in the ability of a leader, or successes in war of celebrated warriors. When a man frequently undertakes daring deeds, which ought under ordinary circumstances to fail, but none the less prove successful, he is said to possess _mana_, and thereafter is regarded as one peculiarly favoured by the gods, and in such cases it is held that he can only be overcome by some act or default; such as a disregard or neglect of some religious or warlike observance, which has been shown by experience to be essential to success in war, but which our warrior, spoiled by a long career of good fortune, had come to regard as necessary to ordinary mortals only and of but little consequence to men of _mana_" (W. E. Gudgeon, _op. cit._ p. 62). "There were cases in which the _mana_ of a man depended upon the facility with which he could communicate with the spirits of departed ancestors, that is, upon his capacity to enforce the aid and attendance of these minor deities. To this end every man with any pretension to _mana_ had a knowledge of certain forms of invocation by which he could summon the spirits of long departed heroes and ancestors, but it must not be supposed that these invocations would necessarily have power in the mouths of all men, for such was not the case. The efficacy of a _karakia_ or invocation depended in part on its method of delivery, and in part on the _mana_ of the man who used it" (W. E. Gudgeon, _op. cit._ p. 50). Compare R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 172, 173; _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori, p. 100. [106] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 147, 352. The soul was thought to reside especially in the left eye; accordingly it was the left eye of an enemy which was most commonly swallowed by a victorious chief who desired to increase his spiritual power. See J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage autour du Monde et à la recherche de la Pérouse, Histoire du Voyage_ (Paris, 1832-1833), ii. 527; E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 118, 128 _sq._ Every such divine chief was under a permanent taboo; he was as it were surrounded by an atmosphere of sanctity which attached to his person and never left him; it was his birthright, a part of himself of which he could not be divested, and it was well understood and recognised by everybody at all times. And the sanctity was not confined to his person, it was an infection which extended or was communicated to all his movable property, especially to his clothes, weapons, ornaments, and tools, indeed to everything which he touched. Even the petty chiefs and fighting men, everybody indeed who could claim the title of _rangatira_ or gentleman, possessed in some degree this mysterious quality.[107] However, in young people of rank the sanctity which appertained to them by virtue of their birth was supposed to be only latent; it did not develop or burst into full bloom till they had reached mature age and set up house on their own account. Hence noble boys and lads were under none of the irksome restrictions to which in their adult years they were afterwards bound to submit; they mixed freely with the profane vulgar and did not even disdain to carry fuel or provisions on their backs, a thing which no man of any standing could possibly do; at all events, if he did so demean himself, the food was thereby rendered taboo and could accordingly be used by nobody but himself. "If he went into the shed used as a kitchen (a thing, however, he would never think of doing except on some great emergency), all the pots, ovens, food, etc., would be at once rendered useless--none of the cooks or inferior people could make use of them, or partake of anything which had been cooked in them. He might certainly light a little fire in his own house, not for cooking, as that never by any chance could be done in his house, but for warmth; but that, or any other fire, if he should have blown upon it with his breath in lighting it, became at once _tapu_, and could be used for no common or culinary purpose. Even to light a pipe at it would subject any inferior person, or in many instances an equal, to a terrible attack of the _tapu morbus_, besides being a slight or affront to the dignity of the person himself. I have seen two or three young men fairly wearing themselves out on a wet day and with bad apparatus trying to make fire to cook with, by rubbing two sticks together, when on a journey, and at the same time there was a roaring fire close at hand at which several _rangatira_ and myself were warming ourselves, but it was _tapu_, or sacred fire--one of the _rangatira_ had made it from his own tinder-box, and blown upon it in lighting it, and as there was not another tinder-box amongst us, fast we must, though hungry as sharks, till common culinary fire could be obtained."[108] [107] _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori, p. 94. [108] _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori, p. 98. The head of a chief was always and at all times deemed most sacred, and in consequence he might not even touch it with his own hand; if he chanced to commit the sacrilege, he was obliged at once to apply his fingers to his sacred nose and to snuff up the odour of sanctity which they had abstracted, thus restoring the holy effluvium to the place from which it had been taken.[109] For the same reason the cutting of a chief's hair was a most difficult and delicate operation. While it lasted neither the great man himself nor the barber who operated on him was allowed to do anything or partake of any food except under the restrictions imposed on all sacred or tabooed persons; to use the scissors or the shell, with which the operation was performed, for any other purpose or any other person would have been a terrible profanation of sacred things, and would have rendered the rash sacrilegious wretch, who had dared so to appropriate it, liable to the severest punishment. The severed hair was collected and buried or hung up on a tree,[110] probably to put it out of the way of common folk, who might have been struck dead by contact with the holy locks. But apparently the dangers incident to hair-cutting were by no means confined to chiefs, but extended to any one who was bold enough to submit his head to the barber's shears; for one of the early writers on the Maoris tells us that "he who has had his hair cut is in the immediate charge of the _Atua_; he is removed from the contact and society of his family and his tribe; he dare not touch his food himself; it is put into his mouth by another person; nor can he for some days resume his accustomed occupations, or associate with his fellow-men."[111] The hair of the first-born of a family in particular, on account of his extreme sanctity, might be cut by nobody but a priest; and for many days after the operation had been performed the priestly barber was in a state of strict taboo. He could do nothing for himself, and might not go near anybody. He might not touch food with his hands, and no less than three persons were required to feed him. One of them prepared the food at a safe distance, took it to a certain place, and retired; a second came forward, picked up the victuals, carried them to another spot and left them; finally, a third, venturing into the danger zone, actually brought the food to the priest and put it into his mouth.[112] [109] W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, p. 87; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 165. [110] W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, p. 87; E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 104. [111] Richard A. Cruise, _Journal of a Ten Months' Residence in New Zealand_ (London, 1823), pp. 283 _sq._ Compare J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage autour du Monde et à la recherche de la Pérouse, Histoire du Voyage_ (Paris, 1832-1833), ii. 533. [112] Elsdon Best, "Maori Religion," _Report of the Twelfth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Brisbane, 1909_, p. 463. The atmosphere of taboo or sanctity which thus surrounded Maori chiefs and gentlemen not only imposed many troublesome and inconvenient restraints on the men themselves, it was also frequently a source of very real danger, loss, and annoyance to other people. For example, it was a rule that a chief should not blow on a fire with his mouth, because his breath being sacred would communicate its sanctity to the fire, and if a slave or a common man afterwards cooked food at the fire or merely took a brand from it, the chief's holiness would cause that man's death.[113] Again, if the blood of a high chief flowed on anything, though it were but a single drop, it rendered the thing sacred to him, so that it could be used by nobody else. Thus it once happened that a party of natives came in a fine new canoe to pay their respects to an eminent chief; the great man stepped into the canoe, and in doing so he chanced to strike a splinter into his foot, which bled. That sufficed to consecrate the canoe to him. The owner at once leaped out, drew the canoe ashore opposite to the chief's house and left it there.[114] Again, a Maori gentleman, visiting a missionary, knocked his head against a beam in the house, and his sacred blood was spilt. The natives present thereupon told the missionary that in former times his house would after such an accident have belonged to his noble visitor.[115] Even the cast garments of a chief had acquired, by contact with his holy body, so virulent a degree of sanctity that they would kill anybody else who might happen in ignorance to find and wear them. On a journey, when a chief found his blanket too heavy to carry, he has been known to throw it very considerately down a precipice where nobody would be likely to light on it, lest some future traveller should be struck dead by appropriating the sacred garment. Once a chief's lost tinder-box actually caused the death of several persons; for having found it and used it to light their pipes, they literally died of fright on learning the sacrilege which they had committed.[116] Such fatal effects consequent on the discovery of a breach of taboo were not uncommon among the Maoris. For instance, a woman once ate some peaches which, though she did not know it, had been taken from a tabooed place. As soon as she heard where the fruit had come from, the basket which she was carrying dropped from her hands, and she exclaimed in agony that the spirit (_atua_) of the chief whose sanctuary had thus been profaned would kill her. That happened in the afternoon, and next day by twelve o'clock she was dead.[117] Again, a slave, a strong man in the prime of life, once found the remains of a chief's dinner beside the road, and being hungry ate it up without asking any questions. No sooner, however, did he hear to whom the food had belonged than he was seized with the most extraordinary convulsions and cramps in the stomach, which never ceased till he died about sundown the same day. The English eyewitness who reports the case adds, that any European freethinker who should have denied that the man was killed by the chief's taboo would have been listened to by the Maoris with feelings of contempt for his ignorance and inability to understand plain and direct evidence.[118] [113] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 165. [114] E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 101; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 164 _sq._ [115] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 165. [116] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, pp. 164 _sq._ [117] W. Brown, _New Zealand and its Aborigines_ (London, 1845), p. 76. [118] _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori, pp. 95-97. In order that a thing should be consecrated or tabooed to the exclusive use and possession of a chief, it was not necessary that his sacred blood should flow on it, or that he should merely touch it; he had only to call it his head, or his back-bone, or any other part of his body, and at once the thing, by a legal fiction, became his and might be appropriated by nobody else under pain of violating the taboo which the chief had laid upon it. For example, when a chief desired to prevent a piece of ground from being cultivated by any one but himself, he often resorted to the expedient of calling it his back-bone; after that if any man dared to set foot on the land so consecrated, the transgression was equivalent to a declaration of war. In this simple and easy fashion a chief might acquire anything that took his fancy from an axe or a canoe to a landed estate, and the rightful owner of the property dared not complain nor dispute the claim of his superior.[119] [119] E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, p. 111; _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori, pp. 137 _sqq._; R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 168. Nevertheless in daily life even ordinary people used the taboo to secure their property or to acquire for themselves what had hitherto been common to all. For example, if a man found a piece of drift timber, he could make it his own by tying something to it or giving it a chop with his axe; he thereby set his taboo on the log, and as a general rule the taboo would be respected. Again, with a simple piece of flax he might bar the door of his house or his store of food; the contents of the house or store were thus rendered inviolable, nobody would meddle with them.[120] [120] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui_, p. 171. It is easy to see that this form of taboo must have greatly contributed to create and confirm respect for the rights of private property. The most valuable articles might, we are told, under ordinary circumstances be left to its protection in the absence of the owners for any length of time.[121] Indeed so obvious and so useful is this function of taboo that one well-informed writer supposes the original purpose of the institution to have been no other than the preservation of private property;[122] and another observer, after eulogising its beneficent effects, declares that "it was undoubtedly the ordinance of a wise legislator."[123] But to say this is greatly to overrate the wisdom and foresight of primitive man in general and of the Polynesians in particular; it implies a fundamental misconception of the real nature and history of taboo. That curious institution was not the creation of a prudent and sagacious legislator, who devised this system of checks and restrictions for the purpose of curbing the passions of a savage race and inducing them to submit to the salutary restraints of law and morality. It was in its origin, I believe, simply a crude and barbarous form of superstition, which, like many other superstitions, has accidentally led to good results that were never contemplated by its ignorant and foolish votaries. It is thus that in the long history of mankind things which to a contemporary spectator might seem to be almost unmitigated evils turn out in the end to be fraught with incalculable good to humanity. This experience, often repeated, enables students of the past to look forward, even in the darkest hours, with cheerful confidence to the future. [121] _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori, p. 97. [122] _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori, p. 94. [123] E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 100, "Ridiculous as this custom of the _tapu_ has appeared to some, and as many of its applications really are, it was, notwithstanding, a wholesome restraint, and, in many cases, almost the only one that could have been imposed; the heavy penalties attached to the violation of its laws serving in one tribe, or in several not in actual hostility with each other, as moral and legal commandments. It was undoubtedly the ordinance of a wise legislator." Compare G. F. Angas, _Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand_, i. 330, "Doubtless this law is the result of some wise regulation for the protection of property and individuals, and it has in many things a beneficial influence amongst a people who have no written or regularly established code of laws of their own." To the same effect another authority on the Maoris observes: "The most politic and useful of all the superstitious institutions of the Maori people is that which involves the rites of _tapu_. It has always seemed to me that this institution, with its far-reaching ramifications, must have been the conception of a very gifted mind, for, as a governing factor, it is very superior to the Hindu institution of caste. It must, moreover, have been initiated during a period of civilisation, to which the Polynesians have long been strangers, but with which at one period of their history they were sufficiently familiar." See Lieut.-Colonel Gudgeon, "The Tipua-Kura and other Manifestations of the Spirit World," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xv. no. 57 (March 1906), p. 49. The particular superstition which lies at the root of taboo and has incidentally exercised a beneficent influence by inspiring a respect for law and morality appears to be a belief in the existence of ghosts and their power to affect the fortunes of the living for good or evil. For the ultimate sanction of the taboo, in other words, that which engaged the people to observe its commandments, was a firm persuasion that any breach of these commandments would surely and speedily be punished by an _atua_ or ghost, who would afflict the sinner with a painful malady till he died. From youth upwards the Maori was bred in the faith that the souls of his dead ancestors, jealous of any infraction of the traditionary rites, would commission some spirit of their kin to enter into the transgressor's body and prey on a vital part. The visible signs of this hidden and mysterious process they fancied to be the various forms of disease. The mildest ailments were thought to be caused by the spirits of those who had known the sufferer on earth, and who accordingly were imagined to be more merciful and more reluctant to injure an old friend and relation. On the other hand the most malignant forms of disease were attributed to the spirits of dead infants, who having never learned to love their living friends, would rend and devour the bowels of their nearest kin without compunction. With these ideas as to the origin of disease the Maoris naturally did not attempt to heal the sick through the curative properties of herbs and other drugs; their remedies consisted not in medicine but in exorcism: instead of a physician they sent for a priest, who by his spells and incantations undertook to drive the dangerous sprite from the body of the patient and to appease the ancestral spirit, whose wrath was believed to be the cause of all the mischief. If the deity proved recalcitrant and obstinately declined to accept this notice to quit, they did not hesitate to resort to the most threatening and outrageous language, sometimes telling him that they would kill and eat him, and at others that they would burn him to a cinder if he did not take himself off at once and allow the patient to recover.[124] Curiously enough, the spirit which preyed on the vitals of a sick man was supposed to assume the form of a lizard; hence these animals, especially a beautiful green species which the Maoris called _kakariki_, were regarded with fear and horror by the natives.[125] Once when a Maori of Herculean thews and sinews was inadvertently shown some green lizards preserved in a bottle of spirits, his massive frame shrank back as from a mortal wound, and his face betrayed signs of extreme horror. An aged chief in the room, on learning what was the matter, cried out, "I shall die! I shall die!" and crawled away on hands and knees; while the other man gallantly interposed himself as a bulwark between the fugitive and the green gods (_atuas_) in the bottle, shifting his position adroitly so as to screen the chief till he was out of range of the deities.[126] An old man once assured a missionary very seriously that in attending to a sick person he had seen the god come out of the sufferer's mouth in the form of a lizard, and that from the same moment the patient began to mend and was soon restored to perfect health.[127] [124] E. Shortland, _The Southern Districts of New Zealand_, pp. 30 _sq._, 294 _sq._; _id._, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 114 _sqq._; _id._, _Maori Religion and Mythology_, 31 _sq._; W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, pp. 141 _sq._ Most malignant and dangerous of all appear to have been thought the spirits of abortions or still-born infants. See Elsdon Best, "The Lore of the _Whare-Kohanga_," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xv. no. 57 (March 1906), pp. 12-15; _Reise der Oesterreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde, Anthropologischer Theil, Dritte Abtheilung, Ethnographie_, bearbeitet von Dr. Fr. Müller (Vienna, 1868), pp. 59 _sq._ Even more dangerous than the spirits of dead infants were supposed to be the spirits of human germs, which the Maoris imagined to exist in the menstrual fluid. See E. Shortland, _Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders_, pp. 115, 292; _id._, _Maori Religion and Mythology_, pp. 107 _sq._ As to disease inflicted by ancestral spirits (_atuas_) for breaches of taboo, see further J. L. Nicholas, _Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand_ (London, 1817), i. 272 _sq._, ii. 176 _sq._; E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 105, "The breaking of the _tapu_, if the crime does not become known, is, they believe, punished by the _Atua_, who inflicts disease upon the criminal; if discovered, it is punished by him whom it regards, and often becomes the cause of war." [125] Richard A. Cruise, _Journal of a Ten Months' Residence in New Zealand_ (London, 1823), p. 320; J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage autour du Monde et à la recherche de la Pérouse, Histoire du Voyage_ (Paris, 1832-1833), ii. 517; W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, pp. 141 _sq._; E. Dieffenbach, _Travels in New Zealand_, ii. 117; Elsdon Best, "Maori Medical Lore," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, vol. xiii. no. 4 (December 1904), p. 228. As to the superstitious veneration of lizards among the peoples of the Malay-Polynesian stock, see G. A. Wilken, _Verspreide Geschriften_ (The Hague, 1912), iv. 125 _sqq._ [126] G. F. Angas, _Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand_, ii. 67. [127] W. Yate, _An Account of New Zealand_, p. 142. § 6. _Conclusion_ If now we attempt to sum up the effects which the belief in human immortality exercised on the life of the Maoris we may perhaps conclude that these effects were partly good and partly evil. On the one hand by ascribing to the chiefs the special protection of the powerful spirits of the dead, it invested the governing class with a degree of authority to which on merely natural or rational grounds they could have laid no claim; hence it tended to strengthen the respect for government and to ensure the maintenance of law and order. Moreover, by lending a supernatural sanction to the rights of private property among all classes it further contributed to abolish one of the most fruitful sources of discord and crime in the community and thereby to foster economic progress, which cannot exist without some measure of peace and security for life and possessions. These were great gains, and so far as the faith in immortality helped to win them for the Maoris, it certainly ameliorated their condition and furthered the cause of civilisation among them. But on the other hand the belief in the essential malignancy of the spirits of the dead and in their great power to harm the living added a host of purely imaginary terrors to the real evils with which man's existence on earth is naturally and inevitably encompassed: it imposed a regular system of needless and vexatious restrictions on social intercourse and the simplest acts of daily life; and it erected an almost insuperable barrier to the growth of science, and particularly of that beneficent branch of science which has for its object the alleviation of human suffering, since by concentrating the whole attention of the people on a false and absurd theory of supernatural agency it diverted them from that fruitful investigation of natural causes which alone can strengthen and extend man's control over matter. This was a heavy toll to pay for the advantages incidental to a belief in immortality; and if we were asked to strike a balance between the good and the evil which that belief entailed on the Maoris, we might well hesitate to say to which side the scales of judgment should incline. CHAPTER II THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE TONGANS § 1. _The Tonga or Friendly Islands_ The Tonga or Friendly Islands form an archipelago of about a hundred small islands situated in the South Pacific, between 18° and 22° South latitude and between 173° and 176° East longitude. The archipelago falls into three groups of islands, which lie roughly north and south of each other. The southern is the Tonga group, the central is the Haabai or Haapai group, and the northern is the Vavau group. In the southern group the principal islands are Tongataboo and Eua; in the central group, Namuka and Lifuka (Lefooga); in the northern group, Vavau. The largest island of the archipelago, Tongataboo, is about twenty-two miles long by eight miles wide; next to it in importance are Vavau and Eua, and there are seven or eight other islands not less than five miles in length. The rest are mere islets. Most of the islands are surrounded by dangerous coral reefs, and though the soil is deep and very fertile, there is a great lack of flowing water; running streams are almost unknown. Most of the islands consist of coral and are very low; the highest point of Tongataboo is only about sixty feet above the level of the sea.[1] However, some of the islands are lofty and of volcanic formation. When Captain Cook visited the islands in 1773 and 1777 there was apparently only one active volcano in the archipelago; it was situated in the small island of Tufoa, which lies to the west of Namuka. Cook saw the island smoking at the distance of ten leagues, and was told by the natives that it had never ceased smoking in their memory, nor had they any tradition of its inactivity.[2] In the hundred and fifty years which have elapsed since Cook's time volcanic action has greatly increased in the archipelago. A considerable eruption took place at Tufoa in 1885: the small but lofty island of Kao (5000 feet high) has repeatedly been in eruption: the once fertile and populous island of Amargura, or Funua-lai, in about 18° South latitude, was suddenly devastated in 1846 or 1847 by a terrific eruption, which reduced it to a huge mass of lava and burnt sand, without a leaf or blade of grass of any kind. Warned by violent earthquakes, which preceded the explosion, the inhabitants escaped in time to Vavau. The roar of the volcano was heard one hundred and thirty miles off; and an American ship sailed through a shower of ashes, rolling like great volumes of smoke, for forty miles. For months afterwards the glare of the tremendous fires was visible night after night in the island of Vavau, situated forty miles away.[3] Another dreadful eruption occurred on the 24th of June 1853, in Niua Foöu, an island about two hundred miles to the north-north-west of Funua-lai. The entire island seems to be the circular ridge of an ancient and vast volcano, of which the crater is occupied by a lake of clear calm water. On the occasion in question the earth was rent in the centre of a native village; the flames of a new volcano burst forth from the fissure, belching a sea of molten lava, under which ten miles of country, once covered with the richest verdure, have been encased in solid rock, averaging from eight to fifteen feet in thickness. The lake boiled like a cauldron, and long after the more powerful action of the volcano had ceased, the waters of the lake were often rent by tongues of flame, which shot up from them as well as from the clefts in the surrounding precipices.[4] In the island of Late, lying to the west of Vavau, a new volcano broke out with great violence in 1854; the roar of the volcano was heard at Lifuka, fifty miles away; the immense pillar of smoke was visible by day and the fire by night. The central portion of one side of the mountain (about 2500 feet high) was completely blown out by the explosion.[5] [1] Horatio Hale, _U.S. Exploring Expedition, Ethnography and Philology_ (Philadelphia, 1846), pp. 4 _sq._; F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. (London, 1894) pp. 497, 499. As to the scarcity of running water, see Captain James Cook, _Voyages_ (London, 1809), iii. 206, v. 389. He was told that there was a running stream on the high island of Kao. As to the soil of Tongataboo, see Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_ (London, 1899), p. 280, "The soil is everywhere prolific, and consists of a fine rich mould, upon an average about fourteen or fifteen inches deep, free from stones, except near the beach, where coral rocks appear above the surface. Beneath this mould is a red loam four or five inches thick; next is a very strong blue clay in small quantities; and in some places has been found a black earth, which emits a very fragrant smell resembling bergamot, but it soon evaporates when exposed to the air." [2] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 277. For descriptions of the volcano see W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, Second Edition (London, 1818), i. 240 _sq._; and especially Thomas West, _Ten Years in South-Eastern Polynesia_ (London, 1865), pp. 89 _sqq._ Both these writers ascended the volcano. [3] Thomas West, _op. cit._ pp. 79 _sqq._; J. E. Erskine, _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_ (London, 1853), p. 120; F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. p. 497. [4] T. West, _op. cit._ pp. 82 _sqq._; George Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_ (London, 1910), pp. 4 _sq._ [5] T. West, _op. cit._ pp. 88 _sq._ But not only have new volcanoes appeared or long extinct volcanoes resumed their activity within the last century in the existing islands, new islands have been formed by volcanic action. One such island, emitting volumes of fire, smoke, and steam, issued from the surface of the sea, and was discovered by the missionary ship _John Wesley_ in August 1857; its appearance had been heralded some years before by a strange agitation of the sea and by fire and smoke ascending from the water. This new volcanic island lies about midway between the two other volcanic islands of Tufoa and Late.[6] A third new volcanic island seems to have been formed to the south of Tufoa in 1886.[7] Another new island was thrown up from the sea about the beginning of the twentieth century; it was partly washed away again, but has again materially increased in size.[8] It is noteworthy that the volcanoes, new or old, all occur in a line running roughly north and south at a considerable distance to the west of, but parallel to, the main body of the Tongan archipelago. They clearly indicate the existence of submarine volcanic action on a great scale. Even in the coralline islands traces of volcanic agency have come to light in the shape of pumice-stones, which have been dug out of the solid coral rock at considerable depths.[9] In the lofty island of Eua an extensive dyke of basalt is found inland underlying the coral formation.[10] [6] T. West, _op. cit._ pp. 92-93. [7] I infer this from the entry "Volcanic island, 1886," in Mr. Guillemard's map of the Pacific Islands. He does not mention it in the text (_Australasia_, ii. p. 497). [8] George Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 6. [9] T. West, _op. cit._ p. 94. [10] George Brown, _op. cit._ p. 4. These facts lend some countenance to the view that the whole archipelago forms the summit or visible ridge of a long chain of submarine volcanoes, and that the islands, even those of coralline formation, have been raised to their present level by volcanic action.[11] That very acute observer, Captain Cook, or one of the naturalists of the expedition, noticed that in the highest parts of Tongataboo, which he estimated roughly at a hundred feet above sea-level, he often met with "the same coral rock, which is found at the shore, projecting above the surface, and perforated and cut into all those inequalities which are usually seen in rocks that lie within the wash of the tide."[12] Again, on ascending the comparatively lofty island of Eua, Captain Cook observes: "We were now about two or three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and yet, even here, the coral was perforated into all the holes and inequalities which usually diversify the surface of this substance within the reach of the tide. Indeed, we found the same coral till we began to approach the summits of the highest hills; and, it was remarkable, that these were chiefly composed of a yellowish, soft, sandy stone."[13] In the island of Vavau it was remarked by Captain Waldegrave that the coral rock rises many feet above the present level of the sea, and he adds: "The action of fire is visible on it, and we saw several instances of its crystallisation."[14] [11] T. West, _op. cit._ 95. [12] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 344. [13] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 381. [14] Captain the Hon. W. Waldegrave, R.N., "Extracts from a Private Journal," _Journal of the Royal Geographical Society_, iii. (1833) p. 193. The view that even the coralline islands of the Tongan archipelago have been elevated by volcanic agency is not necessarily inconsistent with Darwin's theory that coral reefs are formed during periods of subsidence, not of elevation;[15] for it is quite possible that, after being raised ages ago by volcanic forces, these islands may be now slowly subsiding, and that it has been during the period of subsidence that they have become incrusted by coral reefs. Yet the occurrence of coral rocks, bearing all the marks of marine action, at considerable heights above the sea, appears indubitably to prove that such a general subsidence has been in some places varied by at least a temporary elevation. [15] Charles Darwin, _Journal of Researches, etc., during the Voyage of the "Beagle"_ (London, 1912), pp. 471 _sqq._; Sir Charles Lyell, _Principles of Geology_, Twelfth Edition (London, 1875), ii. 602 _sqq._; T. H. Huxley, _Physiography_ (London, 1881), pp. 256 _sqq._ In thus postulating elevation by volcanic action, as well as subsidence, to explain the formation of the Tongan islands I am glad to have the support of a good observer, the late Rev. Dr. George Brown, who spent the best years of his life in the Pacific, where his experience both of the larger and the smaller islands was varied and extensive. He writes: "I have seen islands composed of true coralline limestone, the cliffs of which rise so perpendicularly from the blue ocean that the natives have to ascend and descend by ladders in going from the ocean to the top, or vice versa. A large steamer can go so close to some of these cliffs that she could be moored alongside of them in calm weather. It is not at all improbable, I think, that in these islands we have the two factors in the formation of islands, viz. subsidence, during which these immense cliffs were formed, and subsequent upheaval. This is the only way, I think, in which we can account for these perpendicular cliffs in the midst of deep blue ocean."[16] [16] George Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_ (London, 1910), pp. 13 _sq._ I have dwelt at what may seem undue length on the volcanic phenomena of the Tonga islands because the occurrence of such phenomena in savage lands has generally influenced the beliefs and customs of the natives, quite apart from the possibility, which should always be borne in mind, that man first obtained fire from an active volcano. But even if, as has been suggested, the Tonga islands formed the starting-point from which the Polynesian race spread over the islands of the Pacific,[17] it seems very unlikely that the Polynesians first learned the use of fire when they reached the Tongan archipelago. More probably they were acquainted, not only with the use of fire, but with the mode of making it long before they migrated from their original home in Southern Asia. A people perfectly ignorant of that prime necessity could hardly have made their way across such wide stretches of sea and land. But it is quite possible that the myth which the Tongans, in common with many other Polynesians, tell of the manner in which their ancestors procured their first fire, was suggested to them by the spectacle of a volcano in eruption. They say that the hero Maui Kijikiji, the Polynesian Prometheus, first procured fire for men by descending into the bowels of the earth and stealing it from his father, Maui Atalanga, who had kept it there jealously concealed.[18] [17] John Crawfurd, _Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language_ (London, 1852), _Preliminary Dissertation_, p. 253, quoted by Thomas West, _Ten Years in South-Central Polynesia_, pp. 248 _sqq._ But the more usual view is that the starting-point of the dispersal of the Polynesian race in the Pacific was Samoa. [18] Sarah S. Farmer, _Tonga and the Friendly Islands_ (London, 1855), pp. 134-137; Le P. Reiter, "Traditions Tonguiennes," _Anthropos_, xii.-xiii. (1917-1918), pp. 1026-1040; E. E. Collcott, "Legends from Tonga," _Folk-lore_, xxxii. (1921) pp. 45-48. Miss Farmer probably obtained the story from the Rev. John Thomas, who was a missionary in the islands for twenty-five years (from 1826 to 1850). She acknowledges her obligations to him for information on the religion of the natives (p. 125). For the period of Mr. Thomas's residence in Tonga, see Miss Farmer's book, p. 161. The story is told in closely similar forms in many other islands of the Pacific. For some of the evidence see my edition of Apollodorus, _The Library_, vol. ii. p. 331 _sqq._ § 2. _The Tonga Islanders, their Character, Mode of Life, and Government_ Physically the Tonga islanders are fine specimens of the Polynesian race and generally impress travellers very favourably. Captain Cook, the first to observe them closely, describes them as very strong and well made, some of them really handsome, and many of them with truly European features and genuine Roman noses.[19] At a later date Commodore Wilkes, the commander of the United States Exploring Expedition, speaks of them as "some of the finest specimens of the human race that can well be imagined, surpassing in symmetry and grace those of all the other groups we had visited"; and farther on he says: "A larger proportion of fine-looking people is seldom to be seen, in any portion of the globe; they are a shade lighter than any of the other islanders; their countenances are generally of the European cast; they are tall and well made, and their muscles are well developed."[20] Still later, in his account of the voyage of the _Challenger_, Lord George Campbell expressed himself even more warmly: "There are no people in the world," he says, "who strike one at first so much as these Friendly Islanders. Their clear, light, copper-brown coloured skins, yellow and curly hair, good-humoured, handsome faces, their _tout ensemble_, formed a novel and splendid picture of the genus _homo_; and, as far as physique and appearance go, they gave one certainly an impression of being a superior race to ours."[21] A Catholic missionary observes that "the natives of Tonga hardly differ from Europeans in stature, features, and colour; they are a little sallower, which may be set down to the high temperature of the climate. It is difficult to have a very fresh complexion with thirty degrees of heat, Réaumur, as we have it during four or five months of the year."[22] In appearance the Tonga islanders closely resemble the Samoans, their neighbours on the north; some find them a little lighter, but others somewhat darker in colour than the Samoans.[23] According to the French explorer, Dumont d'Urville, who passed about a month in Tongataboo in 1827, the Polynesian race in Tonga exhibits less admixture with the swarthy Melanesian race than in Tahiti and New Zealand, there being far fewer individuals of stunted stature, flat noses, and frizzly hair among the Tongans than among the other Polynesians.[24] Even among the Tongans the physical superiority of the chiefs to the common people is said to be conspicuous; they are taller, comelier, and lighter in colour than the lower orders. Some would explain the difference by a difference in upbringing, noblemen being more carefully nursed, better fed, and less exposed to the sun than commoners;[25] but it is possible that they come of a different and better stock. [19] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 401 _sq._ [20] Charles Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 10, 25. [21] Quoted by F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. p. 488. [22] Jérôme Grange, in _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xvii. (1845) p. 8. [23] Horatio Hale, _United States Exploring Expedition, Ethnography and Philology_, pp. 10 _sq._; Charles Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, iii. 25; J. E. Erskine, _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_, pp. 116, 155. The naturalist J. R. Forster thought the Tongans darker than the Tahitians. See his _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_ (London, 1778), p. 234. [24] J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage de la corvette Astrolabe, Histoire du Voyage_, iv. (Paris, 1832) p. 229. [25] J. E. Erskine, _op. cit._ pp. 155 _sq._; Sarah S. Farmer, _Tonga and the Friendly Islands_, p. 140. Intellectually the Tongans are reported to "surpass all the other South Sea islanders in their mental development, showing great skill in the structure of their dwellings and the manufacture of their implements, weapons, and dress."[26] They are bold navigators,[27] and Captain Cook observes that "nothing can be a more demonstrative evidence of their ingenuity than the construction and make of their canoes, which, in point of neatness and workmanship, exceed everything of this kind we saw in this sea."[28] However, the Tongans appear to have acquired much of their skill in the art of building and rigging canoes through intercourse with the Fijians, their neighbours to the west, who, though their inferiors in seamanship and the spirit of marine adventure, originally surpassed them in naval architecture.[29] Indeed we are told that all the large Tongan canoes are built in Fiji, because the Tongan islands do not furnish any timber fit for the purpose. Hence a number of Tongans are constantly employed in the windward or eastern islands of the Fiji group building these large canoes, a hundred feet or more in length, a process which, it is said, lasts six or seven years.[30] The debt which in this respect the Tongans owe to the Fijians was necessarily unknown to Captain Cook, since he never reached the Fijian islands and knew of them only by report, though he met and questioned a few Fijians in Tongataboo.[31] [26] F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. pp. 498 _sq._ [27] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 264. [28] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 197. [29] W. Mariner, _The Tonga Islands_, ii. 263 _sqq._ [30] J. E. Erskine, _op. cit._ p. 132. [31] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 396 _sq._ When Captain Cook visited the Tonga islands he found the land almost everywhere in a high state of cultivation. He says that "cultivated roots and fruits being their principal support, this requires their constant attention to agriculture, which they pursue very diligently, and seem to have brought almost to as great perfection as circumstances will permit."[32] The plants which they chiefly cultivated and which furnished them with their staple foods were yams and plantains. These were disposed in plantations enclosed by neat fences of reeds about six feet high and intersected by good smooth roads or lanes, which were shaded from the scorching sun by fruit-trees.[33] Walking on one of these roads Cook tells us, "I thought I was transported into the most fertile plains in Europe. There was not an inch of waste ground; the roads occupied no more space than was absolutely necessary; the fences did not take up above four inches each; and even this was not wholly lost, for in many places were planted some useful trees or plants. It was everywhere the same; change of place altered not the scene. Nature, assisted by a little art, nowhere appears in more splendour than at this isle."[34] Interspersed among these plantations irregularly were bread-fruit trees and coco-nut palms, of which the palms in particular, raising their tufted heads in air above the sea of perpetual verdure, formed a pleasing ornament of the landscape.[35] There were no towns or villages; most of the houses were built in the plantations, generally surrounded by trees or ornamental shrubs, whose fragrancy perfumed the air.[36] [32] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 411 _sq._ [33] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 184, 195, v. 274, 316, 357, 416. [34] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 184. [35] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 274, 357. [36] _Id._ iii. 196. When Captain Cook surveyed this rich and beautiful country, the islands were and had long been at peace, so that the natives were able to devote themselves without distraction to the labour of tilling the soil and providing in other ways for the necessities of life. Unhappily shortly after his visit to the islands wars broke out among the inhabitants and continued to rage more or less intermittently for many years. Even the introduction of Christianity in the early part of the nineteenth century, far from assuaging the strife, only added bitterness to it by furnishing a fresh pretext for hostilities, in which apparently the Christians were sometimes the aggressors with the connivance or even the encouragement of the missionaries.[37] In consequence cultivation was neglected and large portions of land were allowed to lie waste.[38] [37] This is affirmed by the Catholic missionary, Jérôme Grange (_Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xvii. (1845) pp. 15 _sqq._), and though he writes with a manifest prejudice against his rivals the Protestant missionaries, his evidence is confirmed by Commodore Wilkes, the commander of the United States Exploring Expedition, who on his visit to Tongataboo found the Christians and heathens about to go to war with each other. He attempted to make peace between them, but in vain. The heathen were ready to accept his overtures, but "it was evident that King George and his advisers, and, indeed, the whole Christian party, seemed to be desirous of continuing the war, either to force the heathen to become Christians, or to carry it on to extermination, which the number of their warriors made them believe they had the power to effect. I felt, in addition, that the missionaries were thwarting my exertions by permitting warlike preparations during the pending of the negotiations." See Charles Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, iii. 7 _sqq._ (my quotation is from p. 16). The story is told from the point of view of the Protestant (Wesleyan) missionaries by Miss S. S. Farmer, _Tonga and The Friendly Islands_, pp. 293 _sqq._ [38] John Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprise in the South Seas_ (London, 1838), p. 264; Charles Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 32 _sq._ Like all the Polynesians the natives of Tonga were ignorant of the metals, and their only tools were made of stone, bone, shells, shark's teeth, and rough fish-skins. They fashioned axes, or rather adzes, out of a smooth black stone, which they procured from the volcanic island of Tufoa; they used shells as knives; they constructed augers out of shark's teeth, fixed on handles; and they made rasps of the rough skin of a fish, fastened on flat pieces of wood. With such imperfect tools they built their canoes and houses, reared the massive tombs of their kings; and did all their other work.[39] The wonder is that with implements so imperfect they could accomplish so much and raise themselves to a comparatively high level among savages. [39] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 199, v. 414 _sq._ Captain Cook says that the only piece of iron he found among the Tongans was a small broad awl, which had been made of a nail. But this nail they must have procured either from a former navigator, perhaps Tasman, or from a wreck. A feature of the Tongan character in which the islanders evinced their superiority to most of the Polynesians was their regard for women. In most savage tribes which practise agriculture the labour of tilling the fields falls in great measure on the female sex, but it was not so in Tonga. There the women never tilled the ground nor did any hard work, though they occupied themselves with the manufacture of bark-cloth, mats, and other articles of domestic use. Natives of Fiji, Samoa, and Hawaii, who resided in Tonga, used to remark on the easy lives led by the Tongan women, and remonstrated with the men on the subject, saying that as men underwent hardships and dangers in war and other masculine pursuits, so women ought to be made to labour in the fields and to toil for their living. But the Tongan men said that "it is not _gnale fafíne_ (consistent with the feminine character) to let them do hard work; women ought only to do what is feminine: who loves a masculine woman? besides, men are stronger, and therefore it is but proper that they should do the hard labour."[40] [40] W. Mariner, _The Tonga Islands_, ii. 287. Compare _id._ ii. 124, note *; Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 410 _sq._ Further, it is to the credit of the Tongans that, unlike many other Polynesians, they were not generally cannibals, and indeed for the most part held in abhorrence the practice of eating human bodies. Still young warriors occasionally devoured the corpses of their enemies in imitation of the Fijians, imagining that in so doing they manifested a fierce, warlike, and manly spirit. On one occasion, returning from such a repast, they were shunned by every one, especially by the women, who upbraided them, saying, "Away! you are a man-eater."[41] [41] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 194; compare _id._ i. 317-320. The government of the Tongan islanders was eminently monarchical and aristocratic. A strict subordination of ranks was established which has been aptly compared to the feudal system. At the head of the social edifice were two chiefs who bore some resemblance to the Emperor and the Pope of mediaeval Europe, the one being the civil and military head of the State, while the other embodied the supreme spiritual power. Nominally the spiritual chief, called the Tooitonga, ranked above the civil chief or king, who paid him formal homage; but, as usually happens in such cases, the real government was in the hands of the secular rather than of the religious monarch. The Tooitonga was acknowledged to be descended from one of the chief gods; he is spoken of by Mariner, our principal authority, as a divine chief of the highest rank, and he is said to have enjoyed divine honours. The first-fruits of the year were offered to him, and it was supposed that if this ceremony were neglected, the vengeance of the gods would fall in a signal manner upon the people. Yet he had no power or authority in matters pertaining to the civil king.[42] The existence of such a double kingship, with a corresponding distribution of temporal and spiritual functions, is not uncommon in more advanced societies; its occurrence among a people so comparatively low in the scale of culture as the Tongans is remarkable. [42] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 424 _sqq._; W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 74 _sqq._, 132 _sqq._; J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage de l'Astrolabe, Histoire du Voyage_, iv. (Paris, 1832) pp. 90 _sq._, "_Si tout était suivant l'ordre légal à Tonga-Tabou, on verrait d'abord à la tête de la société le toui-tonga qui est le véritable souverain nominal des îles Tonga, et qui jouit même des honneurs divins_." Below the two great chiefs or kings were many subordinate chiefs, and below them again the social ranks descended in a succession of sharply marked gradations to the peasants, who tilled the ground, and whose lives and property were entirely at the mercy of the chiefs.[43] Yet the social system as a whole seems to have worked well and smoothly. "It does not, indeed, appear," says Captain Cook, "that any of the most civilised nations have ever exceeded this people, in the great order observed on all occasions; in ready compliance with the commands of their chiefs; and in the harmony that subsists throughout all ranks, and unites them, as if they were all one man, informed with, and directed by, the same principle."[44] According to the American ethnographer, Horatio Hale, the mass of the people in the Tonga islands had no political rights, and their condition in that respect was much inferior to that of commoners in the Samoan islands, since in Tonga the government was much stronger and better organized, as he puts it, for the purpose of oppression. On the other hand, he admitted that government in Tonga was milder than in Tahiti, and infinitely preferable to the debasing despotism which prevailed in Hawaii or the Sandwich Islands.[45] [43] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 424 _sq._, 429 _sq._; W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 83 _sqq._ [44] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 426. [45] Horatio Hale, _United States Exploring Expedition, Ethnography and Philology_, p. 32. § 3. _The Tongan Religion: its General Principles_ For our knowledge of the religion and the social condition of the Tongans before they came under European influence, we are indebted chiefly to an English sailor, William Mariner, who lived as a captive among them for about four years, from 1806 to 1810.[46] His account of the natives, carefully elicited from him and published by a medical doctor, Mr. John Martin, M.D., is one of the most valuable descriptions of a savage people which we possess. Mariner was a good observer and endowed with an excellent memory, which enabled him to retain and record his experiences after his return to England. He spoke the Tongan language, and he was a special favourite of the two Tongan kings, named Finow, who reigned successively in Tonga during his residence in the islands. The kings befriended and protected him, so that he had the best opportunities for becoming acquainted with the customs and beliefs of the people. His observations have been confirmed from independent sources, and we have every reason to regard them as trustworthy. So far as we can judge, they are a simple record of facts, unbiassed by theory or prejudice. In the following notice of the Tongan religion and doctrine of the human soul I shall draw chiefly on the evidence of Mariner. [46] Mariner was captured by the Tongans on December 1, 1806, and he escaped from the islands in 1810, apparently in November, but the exact date of his escape is not given. See W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 43, ii. 15 _sqq._, 68, 69. According to him, the religion of the Tonga islanders rests, or rather used to rest, on the following notions.[47] [47] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 97 _sqq._ They believed that there are _hotooas_,[48] gods, or superior beings, who have the power of dispensing good and evil to mankind, according to their merit, but of whose origin the Tongans formed no idea, rather supposing them to be eternal. [48] The word is commonly spelled _atua_ in the Polynesian languages. See E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_ (Wellington, N.Z. 1891), pp. 30 _sq._, who gives _otua_ as the Tongan form. They believed that there are other _hotooas_ or gods, who are the souls of all deceased nobles and _matabooles_, that is, the companions, ministers, and counsellors of the chiefs, who form a sort of inferior nobility.[49] The souls of all these dead men were held to possess a power of dispensing good and evil to mankind like the power of the superior gods, but in a lesser degree. [49] As to the _matabooles_ see W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 84 _sqq._ They believed that there are besides several _hotooa pow_, or mischievous gods, who never dispense good, but only petty evils and troubles, not as a punishment, but indiscriminately to anybody, from a purely mischievous disposition. They believed that all these superior beings, although they may perhaps have had a beginning, will have no end. They believed that the world also is of uncertain origin, having coexisted with the gods. The sky, which they regard as solid, the heavenly bodies, and the ocean were in being before the habitable earth. The Tonga islands were drawn up out of the depth of the sea by the god Tangaloa one day when he was fishing with a line and a hook. They believed that mankind, according to a partial tradition, came originally from Bolotoo, the chief residence of the gods, a fabulous island situated to the north-west of the Tongan archipelago. The first men and women consisted of two brothers, with their wives and attendants. They were commanded by the god Tangaloa to take up their abode in the Tonga islands, but of their origin or creation the Tongans professed to know nothing.[50] [50] According to a later account, "on Ata were born the first men, three in number, formed from a worm bred by a rotten plant, whose seed was brought by Tangaloa from heaven. These three were afterwards provided by the Maui with wives from the Underworld." See E. E. V. Collocot, "Notes on Tongan Religion," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, xxx. (1921) p. 154. They believed that all human evil was inflicted by the gods upon mankind on account of some neglect of religious duty, whether the neglect is the fault of the sufferers or of the chief whom they serve. In like manner the Tongans apparently referred all human good to the gods, regarding it as a reward bestowed by the divine beings on men who punctually discharged the offices of religion.[51] [51] So apparently we must interpret Mariner's brief statement "and the contrary of good" (_Tonga Islands_, ii. 98). They believed that nobles had souls, which existed after death in Bolotoo, not according to their moral merit, but according to their rank in this world; these had power like that of the original gods, but less in degree. The _matabooles_, or ministers of the nobles, also went after death to Bolotoo, where they existed as _matabooles_, or ministers of the gods, but they had not, like the gods and the souls of dead noblemen, the power of inspiring the priests with superhuman knowledge. Some thought that the _mooas_, who ranked next below the _matabooles_ in the social hierarchy, also went after death to Bolotoo; but this was a matter of great doubt. As for the _tooas_ or commoners, who formed the lowest rung in the social ladder, they had either no souls at all or only such as dissolved with the body after death, which consequently ended their sentient existence. They believed that the human soul during life is not an essence distinct from the body, but only the more ethereal part of the corporeal frame, and that the moment after death it exists in Bolotoo with the form and likeness of the body which it had on earth. They believed that the primitive gods and deceased nobles sometimes appear visibly to mankind to warn or to afford comfort and advice; and that the primitive gods also sometimes come into the living bodies of lizards, porpoises, and a species of water snake, hence these animals are much respected. When the gods thus entered into the bodies of porpoises, it was for the sake of safeguarding canoes or for other beneficent purposes. They believed that the two personages in the Tonga islands known by the titles of Tooitonga and Veachi were descendants in a right line from two chief gods, and that all respect and veneration are therefore due to them. They believed that some persons are favoured with the inspiration of the gods, and that while the inspiration lasts the god actually exists in the body of the inspired person or priest, who is then capable of prophesying. They believe that human merit or virtue consists chiefly in paying respect to the gods, nobles, and aged persons; in defending one's hereditary rights; in honour, justice, patriotism, friendship, meekness, modesty, fidelity of married women, parental and filial love, observance of all religious ceremonies, patience in suffering, forbearance of temper, and so on. They believed that all rewards for virtue or punishments for vice happen to men in this world only, and come immediately from the gods. They believed that several acts which civilised nations regard as crimes are, under certain circumstances, matters of indifference. Such acts included the taking of revenge on an enemy and the killing of a servant who had given provocation, or indeed the killing of anybody else, always provided that the victim were not a very superior chief or noble. Further, among indifferent acts was reckoned rape, unless it were committed on a married woman or on one whom the offender was bound to respect on the score of her superior rank. Finally, the list of venial offences included theft, unless the stolen object were consecrated property; for in that case the action became sacrilege and was, as we shall see presently, a very serious crime. They believed that omens are the direct intimations of the future vouchsafed by the gods to men. "Charms or superstitious ceremonies to bring evil upon any one are considered for the most part infallible, as being generally effective means to dispose the gods to accord with the curse or evil wish of the malevolent invoker; to perform these charms is considered cowardly and unmanly, but does not constitute a crime."[52] One such charm consisted in hiding on a grave (_fytoca_) some portion of the wearing apparel of an inferior relation of the deceased. The person whose garment was so hidden was believed to sicken and die. An equally effectual way of working the charm and ensuring the death of the victim was to bury the garment in the house consecrated to the tutelary god of the family. But when a grave was made use of for the malignant purpose, it was thought essential that the deceased should be of a rank superior to that of the person against whom the charm was directed; otherwise it was supposed that the charm would have no effect.[53] In either case the fatal result was clearly held to be brought about by the power of the ghost or of the god, who used the garment as an instrument for putting the charm in operation. These charms or superstitious ceremonies are what we should now call magical rites, and they were apparently supposed to effect their purpose indirectly by constraining the gods to carry out the malevolent intention of the magician. If I am right in so interpreting them, we seem driven to conclude that in Tonga magic was supposed to be ineffectual without the co-operation of the gods, although its power to compel them was deemed for the most part irresistible. Even so its assumed dependence on the consent, albeit the reluctant consent, of the deities implies a certain decadence of magic and a growing predominance of religion. Moreover, the moral reprehension of such practices for the injury of enemies is another sign that among the Tongans magic was being relegated to that position of a black art which it generally occupies among more civilised peoples. Be that as it may, certain it is that we hear extremely little about the practice of magic among the Tongans. [52] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 101. [53] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 424, note *. § 4. _The Primary or Non-human Gods_ Such are, or rather used to be, the principal articles of the old Tongan creed. We may now examine some of them a little more at large. But first we may observe that on this showing the Tongans were an eminently religious people. They traced all the good and ill in human affairs to the direct intervention of the gods, who rewarded or punished mankind for their deeds in this life, bestowing the reward or inflicting the punishment in the present world and not deferring either to a distant and more or less uncertain future in a world beyond the grave. Thus with the Tongans the fear of the gods was a powerful incentive to lead a virtuous life; morality was placed under the immediate guardianship of the deities. It is true that according to their notions morality consisted largely in the performance of religious ceremonies, but it was by no means limited to a simple observance of the prescribed rites; for we have seen that their conception of a virtuous life included compliance with the dictates of justice, modesty, and friendship, the fidelity of wives to their husbands, the mutual affection of parents and children, patience in suffering, and other modes of conduct which we too should not hesitate to rank among the virtues. When we consider the nature of the Tongan gods, we perceive that they are sharply discriminated into two classes, namely, the primitive and superior gods on the one side and the secondary and inferior gods on the other side. The primitive and superior gods are those who have always been gods and whose origin and beginning are unknown; the secondary and inferior gods are the souls of dead men, who consequently have not always been gods, because they were human beings before death elevated them to the rank of deities. The distinction between these two classes of gods is highly important, not merely for Tongan religion in particular, but for the history of religion in general. For whatever we may think of Euhemerism as a universal explanation of the gods, there can be no doubt that in many lands the ranks of the celestial hierarchy have been largely recruited by the ghosts of men of flesh and blood. But there appears to be a general tendency to allow the origin of the human gods to fall into the background and to confuse them with the true original deities, who from the beginning have always been deities and nothing else. The tendency may sometimes be accentuated by a deliberate desire to cast a veil over the humble birth and modest beginning of these now worshipful beings; but probably the obliteration of the distinction between the two classes of divinities is usually a simple result of oblivion and the lapse of time. Once a man is dead, his figure, which bulked so large and so clear to his contemporaries, begins to fade and melt away into something vague and indistinct, until, if he was a person of no importance, he is totally forgotten; or, if he was one whose actions or thoughts deeply influenced his fellows for good or evil, his memory lingers in after generations, growing ever dimmer and it may be looming ever larger through the long vista of the ages, as the evening mist appears to magnify the orb of the descending sun. Thus naturally and insensibly, as time goes on, our mortal nature fades or brightens into the immortal and divine. As our subject is the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead, we are not directly concerned with the original Tongan deities who were believed never to have been men. But since their functions and worship appear to have been in certain respects closely analogous to those of the inferior deities, the souls of the dead, some notice of them may not be out of place, if it helps to a fuller understanding of what we may call the human gods. Besides, we must always bear in mind that some at least of the so-called original gods may have been men, whose history and humanity had been forgotten. We can hardly doubt that the celestial hierarchy has often been recruited by the souls of the dead. The original and superior gods, Mariner tells us, were thought to be rather numerous, perhaps about three hundred all told; but the names of very few of them were known, and even those few were familiar only to some of the chiefs and their ministers, the _matabooles_; "for it may easily be supposed," says Mariner, "that, where no written records are kept, only those (gods) whose attributes particularly concern the affairs of this world should be much talked of; as to the rest, they are, for the most part, merely tutelar gods to particular private families, and having nothing in their history at all interesting, are scarcely known to anybody else."[54] [54] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 104. Among these original and superior deities was Tali-y-Toobo, the patron god of the civil king and his family. He was the god of war and was consequently always invoked in time of war by the king's family; in time of peace prayers were sometimes offered to him for the general good of the nation as well as for the particular interest and welfare of the royal house. He had no priest, unless it was the king himself, who was occasionally inspired by him; but sometimes a whole reign would pass without the king being once favoured with the divine afflatus.[55] [55] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 105. Another god was Tooi fooa Bolotoo, whose name means "Chief of all Bolotoo." From this it might be supposed that he was the greatest god in Bolotoo, the home of the gods and of the deified spirits of men; but in fact he was regarded as inferior to the war god, and the natives could give no explanation of his high-sounding title. He was the god of rank in society, and as such he was often invoked by the heads of great families on occasion of sickness or other trouble. He had several priests, whom he occasionally inspired.[56] [56] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 105 _sq._ Another great god was Toobo Toty, whose name signifies "Toobo the mariner." He was the god of voyages, and in that capacity was invoked by chiefs or anybody else at sea; for his principal function was to preserve canoes from accidents. Without being himself the god of wind, he had great influence with that deity, and was thus enabled no doubt to save many who were in peril on the great deep.[57] [57] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ ii. 106 _sq._ Another god was Alo Alo, whose name means "to fan." He was the god of wind and weather, rain, harvest, and vegetation in general. When the weather was seasonable, he was usually invoked about once a month to induce him to keep on his good behaviour; but when the weather was unseasonable, or the islands were swept by destructive storms of wind and rain, the prayers to him were repeated daily. But he was not supposed to wield the thunder and lightning, "of which, indeed," says Mariner, "there is no god acknowledged among them, as this phenomenon is never recollected to have done any mischief of consequence."[58] From this it would appear that where no harm was done, the Tongans found it needless to suppose the existence of a deity; they discovered the hand of a god only in the working of evil; fear was the mainspring of their religion. In boisterous weather at sea Alo Alo was not invoked; he had then to make room for the superior god, Toobo Toty, the protector of canoes, who with other sea gods always received the homage of storm-tossed mariners. However, Alo Alo, the weather god, came to his own when the yams were approaching maturity in the early part of November. For then offerings of yams, coco-nuts, and other vegetable products were offered to him in particular, as well as to all the other gods in general, for the purpose of ensuring a continuation of favourable weather and consequent fertility. The offering was accompanied by prayers to Alo Alo and the other gods, beseeching them to extend their bounty and make the land fruitful. Wrestling and boxing matches formed part of the ceremony, which was repeated eight times at intervals of ten days. The time for the rite was fixed by the priest of Alo Alo, and a curious feature of the ceremony was the presence of a girl of noble family, some seven or eight years old, who represented the wife of Alo Alo and resided in his consecrated house during the eighty days that the festal season lasted.[59] [58] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ ii. 108. [59] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 205-208; compare _id._ 7, note *, 108. Another god named Móooi was believed to support the earth on his prostrate body. In person he was bigger than any other of the gods; but he never inspired anybody, and had no house dedicated to his service. Indeed, it was supposed that this Atlas of the Pacific never budged from his painful and burdensome post beneath the earth. Only when he felt more than usually uneasy, he tried to turn himself about under his heavy load; and the movement was felt as an earthquake by the Tongans, who endeavoured to make him lie still by shouting and beating the ground with sticks.[60] Similar attempts to stop an earthquake are common in many parts of the world.[61] [60] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ ii. 112 _sq._ Compare Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_ (London, 1799), pp. 277 _sq._ Móooi is the Polynesian god or hero whose name is usually spelled Maui. See Horatio Hale, _United States Exploring Expedition, Ethnography and Philology_, p. 23; E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, pp. 233 _sqq._ _s.v._ "Maui." [61] _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, i. 197 _sqq._ Tangaloa was the god of artificers and the arts. He had several priests, who in Mariner's time were all carpenters. It was he who was said to have brought up the Tonga islands from the bottom of the sea at the end of his fishing line;[62] though in some accounts of Tongan tradition this feat is attributed to Maui.[63] The very hook on which he hauled up the islands was said to be preserved in Tonga down to about thirty years before Mariner's time. It was in the possession of the divine chief Tooitonga; but unfortunately, his house catching fire, the basket in which the precious hook was kept perished with its contents in the flames. When Mariner asked Tooitonga what sort of hook it was, the chief told him that it was made of tortoise-shell, strengthened with a piece of whalebone, and that it measured six or seven inches from the curve to the point where the line was attached, and an inch and a half between the barb and the stem. Mariner objected that such a hook could hardly have been strong enough to support the whole weight of the Tonga islands; but the chief replied that it was a god's hook and therefore could not break. The hole in the rock in which the divine hook caught on the memorable occasion was shown down to Mariner's time in the island of Hoonga. It was an aperture about two feet square.[64] [62] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 109, 114 _sq._; Horatio Hale, _United States Exploring Expedition, Ethnography and Philology_, pp. 24 _sq._ [63] Jérôme Grange, in _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xvii. (1845) p. 11; Charles Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, iii. 23; Sarah S. Farmer, _Tonga and the Friendly Islands_, p. 133. According to this last writer it was only the low islands that were fished up by Maui; the high islands were thrown down from the sky by the god Hikuleo. [64] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 272, ii. 114 _sq._ The Catholic missionary Jérôme Grange was told that the hook in question existed down to his time (1843), but that only the king might see it, since it was certain death to anybody else to look on it. See _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xvii. (1845) p. 11. § 5. _The Temples of the Gods_ Some of the primitive gods had houses dedicated to them. These sacred houses or temples, as we may call them, were built in the style of ordinary dwellings; but generally more than ordinary care was taken both in constructing them and in keeping them in good order, decorating their enclosures with flowers, and so on. About twenty of the gods had houses thus consecrated to them; some of them had five or six houses, some only one or two. For example, Tali-y-Toobo, the patron god of the royal family, had four houses dedicated to him in the island of Vavau, two in the island of Lefooga (Lifuka), and two or three others of smaller importance elsewhere.[65] Another patron god of the royal family, called Alai Valoo, had a large consecrated enclosure in the island of Ofoo; he had also at least one priest and was very frequently consulted in behalf of sick persons.[66] [65] W. Mariner, _Tonga Island_, ii. 104 _sq._ [66] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii, 107 _sq._ To desecrate any of these holy houses or enclosures was a most serious offence. When Mariner was in the islands it happened that two boys, who had belonged to the crew of his ship, were detected in the act of stealing a bale of bark-cloth from a consecrated house. If they had been natives, they would instantly have been punished with death; but the chiefs, taking into consideration the youth and inexperience of the offenders, who were foreigners and ignorant of native customs, decided that for that time the crime might be overlooked. Nevertheless, to appease the anger of the god, to whom the house was consecrated, it was deemed necessary to address him humbly on the subject. Accordingly his priest, followed by chiefs and their ministers (_matabooles_), all dressed in mats with leaves of the _ifi_ tree[67] round their necks in token of humility and sorrow, went in solemn procession to the house; they sat down before it, and the priest addressed the divinity to the following purport: "Here you see the chiefs and _matabooles_ that have come to thee, hoping that thou wilt be merciful: the boys are young, and being foreigners, are not so well acquainted with our customs, and did not reflect upon the greatness of the crime: we pray thee, therefore, not to punish the people for the sins of these thoughtless youths: we have spared them, and hope that thou wilt be merciful and spare us." The priest then rose up, and they all retired in the same way they had come. The chiefs, and particularly the king, severely reprimanded the boys, endeavouring to impress on their minds the enormity of their offence, and assuring them that they owed their lives only to their presumed ignorance of the heinousness of the crime.[68] [67] The _ifi_ tree, of which the leaves were used by the Tongans in many religious ceremonies, is a species of chestnut (_Inocarpus edulis_) which grows in Indonesia, but is thought to be a native of America. It is supposed that the Polynesians brought the seeds of this tree with them into the Pacific, where it is said to be a cultivated plant. See S. Percy Smith, _Hawaiki, the Original Home of the Maori_ (Christchurch, etc., New Zealand, 1910), p. 146. To wear a wreath of the leaves round the neck, and to sit with the head bowed down, constituted the strongest possible expression of humility and entreaty. See E. E. V. Collocot, "Notes on Tongan Religion," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, xxx. (1921) p. 159. [68] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 163 _sq._ Another case of sacrilege, which occurred in Mariner's time, was attended with more tragic consequences. He tells us that consecrated places might not be the scene of war, and that it would be highly sacrilegious to attack an enemy or to spill his blood within their confines. On one occasion, while Mariner was in the islands, four men, pursued by their enemies, fled for refuge to a consecrated enclosure, where they would have been perfectly safe. One of them was in the act of scrambling over the reed fence, and had got a leg over it, when he was overtaken by a foe, who struck him such a furious blow on the head that he fell dead within the hallowed ground. Conscience-stricken, the slayer fled to his canoe, followed by his men; and on arriving at the fortress where the king was stationed he made a clean breast of his crime, alleging in excuse that it had been committed in hot blood when he had lost all self-command. The king immediately ordered kava to be taken to the priest of his own tutelary god, that the divinity might be consulted as to what atonement was proper to be made for so heinous a sacrilege. Under the double inspiration of kava and the deity, the priest made answer that it was necessary a child should be strangled to appease the anger of the gods. The chiefs then held a consultation and determined to sacrifice the child of a high chief named Toobo Toa. The child was about two years old and had been born to him by a female attendant. On such occasions the child of a male chief by a female attendant was always chosen for the victim first, because, as a child of a chief, he was a worthier victim, and second, because, as a child of a female attendant, he was not himself a chief; for nobility being traced in the female line only those children were reckoned chiefs whose mothers were chieftainesses; the rank of the father, whether noble or not, did not affect the rank of his offspring. On this occasion the father of the child was present at the consultation and consented to the sacrifice. The mother, fearing the decision, had concealed the child, but it was found by one of the searchers, who took it up in his arms, while it smiled with delight at being noticed. The mother tried to follow but was held back; and on hearing her voice the child began to cry. But on reaching the place of execution it was pleased and delighted with the bandage that was put round its neck to strangle it, and looking up in the face of the executioner it smiled again. "Such a sight," we are told, "inspired pity in the breast of every one: but veneration and fear of the gods was a sentiment superior to every other, and its destroyer could not help exclaiming, as he put on the fatal bandage, _O iaaoé chi vale!_ (poor little innocent!)." Two men then tightened the cord by pulling at each end, and the struggles of the innocent victim were soon over. The little body was next placed upon a sort of hand-barrow, supported on the shoulders of four men, and carried in a procession of priests, chiefs, and _matabooles_, all clothed as suppliants in mats and with wreaths of green leaves round their necks. In this way it was conveyed to various houses dedicated to different gods, before each of which it was placed on the ground, all the company sitting behind it, except one priest, who sat beside it and prayed aloud to the god that he would be pleased to accept of this sacrifice as an atonement for the heinous sacrilege committed, and that punishment might accordingly be withheld from the people. When this had been done before all the consecrated houses in the fortress, the body was given up to its relations, to be buried in the usual manner.[69] [69] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 216-219. As to the rule that nobility descended only in the female line, through mothers, not through fathers, see _id._ ii. 84, 95 _sq._; J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage de l'Astrolabe, Histoire du Voyage_, iv. 239. The consecration of a house or a piece of ground to a god was denoted by the native word _taboo_, the general meaning of which was prohibited or forbidden.[70] It was firmly believed by the Tongans in former days that if a man committed sacrilege or broke a taboo, his liver or some other of his internal organs was liable to become enlarged and scirrhous, that is, indurated or knotty; hence they often opened dead bodies out of curiosity, to see whether the deceased had been sacrilegious in their lifetime. As the Tongans are particularly subject to scirrhous tumours, it seems probable that many innocent persons were thus posthumously accused of sacrilege on the strength of a post-mortem examination into the state of their livers.[71] Another disagreeable consequence of breaking a taboo was a peculiar liability to be bitten by sharks, which thus might be said to act as ministers of justice. As theft was included under the general head of breach of taboo, a simple way of bringing the crime home to the thief in case of doubt was to cause the accused to go into the water where sharks were known to swarm; if they bit him, he was guilty; if they did not, he was innocent.[72] [70] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 220. [71] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 194, note *; compare 434, note *. [72] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ ii. 221. § 6. _Priests and their Inspiration_ Priests were known by the title of _fahe-gehe_, a term which means "split off," "separate," or "distinct from," and was applied to a man who has a peculiar sort of mind or soul, different from that of ordinary men, which disposed some god occasionally to inspire him. Such inspirations frequently happened, and when the fit was on him the priest had the same reverence shown to him as if he were the god himself; at these times even the king would retire to a respectful distance and sit down among the rest of the spectators, because a god was believed to exist at that moment in the priest and to speak from his mouth. But at other times a priest had no other respect paid to him than was due to him for his private rank in society. Priests generally belonged to the lower order of chiefs or to their ministers, the _matabooles_; but sometimes great chiefs were thus visited by the gods, and the king himself has been inspired by Tali-y-Toobo, the chief of the gods.[73] The profession of priest was generally hereditary, the eldest son of a priest becoming, on his father's death, a priest of the same god who had inspired his deceased parent. In their uninspired moments the priests lived indiscriminately with the rest of the people and were treated with no special deference.[74] [73] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 80 _sq._ [74] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ ii. 136-138. The ceremony of inspiration, during which the priest was believed to be possessed by a god and to speak in his name, was regularly accompanied or preceded by a feast, at which the drinking of kava formed the principal feature. The priest himself presided at the feast and the people gathered in a circle round him; or, to be more exact, the people formed an ellipse, of which the priest occupied the place of honour at one of the narrow ends; while opposite him, at the other extremity of the ellipse, sat the man who was charged with the important duty of brewing the kava. At such sessions the chiefs sat indiscriminately among the people on account of the sacredness of the occasion, conceiving that such humble demeanour must be acceptable to the gods. The actual process of inspiration was often witnessed by Mariner, and is described by him in his own words as follows: "As soon as they are all seated, the priest is considered as inspired, the god being supposed to exist within him from that moment. He remains for a considerable time in silence, with his hands clasped before him; his eyes are cast down, and he rests perfectly still. During the time that the victuals are being shared out, and the cava preparing, the _matabooles_ sometimes begin to consult him; sometimes he answers them, at other times not; in either case he remains with his eyes cast down. Frequently he will not utter a word till the repast is finished, and the cava too. When he speaks, he generally begins in a low and very altered tone of voice, which gradually rises to nearly its natural pitch, though sometimes a little above it. All that he says is supposed to be the declaration of the god, and he accordingly speaks in the first person as if he were the god. All this is done generally without any apparent inward emotion or outward agitation; but on some occasions his countenance becomes fierce, and, as it were, inflamed, and his whole frame agitated with inward feeling; he is seized with an universal trembling; the perspiration breaks out on his forehead, and his lips, turning black, are convulsed; at length, tears start in floods from his eyes, his breast heaves with great emotion, and his utterance is choked. These symptoms gradually subside. Before this paroxysm comes on, and after it is over, he often eats as much as four hungry men, under other circumstances, could devour. The fit being now gone off, he remains for some time calm, and then takes up a club that is placed by him for the purpose, turns it over and regards it attentively; he then looks up earnestly, now to the right, now to the left, and now again at the club; afterwards he looks up again, and about him in like manner, and then again fixes his eyes upon his club, and so on, for several times: at length he suddenly raises the club, and, after a moment's pause, strikes the ground, or the adjacent part of the house, with considerable force: immediately the god leaves him, and he rises up and retires to the back of the ring among the people."[75] [75] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 99-101. Compare E. E. V. Collocot, "Notes on Tongan Religion," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, xxx. (1921) pp. 155-157. § 7. _The Worship of the Gods, Prayers, and Sacrifices_ The worship offered to the gods consisted as usual of prayers and sacrifices. Prayers were put up to them, sometimes in the fields, and sometimes at their consecrated houses. On ordinary occasions a simple offering consisted of a small piece of kava root deposited before a god's house.[76] But in the great emergencies of life the favour of the gods was sued with more precious offerings. When the younger daughter of Finow, a girl of six or seven years, was sick to death, the dying princess was carried from her father's house into the sacred enclosure of Tali-y-Toobo, the patron god of the kings, and there she remained for a fortnight. Almost every morning a hog was killed, dressed, and presented before the god's house to induce him to spare the life of the princess. At the same time prayers were addressed to the deity for the recovery of the patient; but as this particular god had no priest, the prayers were offered by a minister (_mataboole_), sometimes by two or three in succession, and they were repeated five, six, or seven times a day. Their general purport was as follows: "Here thou seest assembled Finow and his chiefs, and the principal ministers (_matabooles_) of thy favoured land; thou seest them humbled before thee. We pray thee not to be merciless, but to spare the life of the woman for the sake of her father, who has always been attentive to every religious ceremony. But if thy anger is justly excited by some crime or misdemeanour committed by any other of us who are here assembled, we entreat thee to inflict on the guilty one the punishment which he merits, and not to let loose thy vengeance on one who was born but as yesterday. For our own parts, why do we wish to live but for the sake of Finow? But if his family is afflicted, we are all afflicted, innocent as well as guilty. How canst thou be merciless? Have regard for Finow and spare the life of his daughter." When despite of prayers and the sacrifices of pigs, the girl grew daily worse instead of better, she was removed to many other consecrated enclosures of other gods, one after the other, where the like fond prayers and fruitless offerings were presented in the vain hope of staving off the approach of death.[77] [76] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ ii. 224. [77] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 350-360. But more precious sacrifices than the blood of hogs were often laid at the feet of the angry gods. When a relation of a superior rank was ill, it was a very common practice for one or more of his or her inferior kinsfolk to have a little finger, or a joint of a finger, cut off as a sacrifice to induce the offended deity to spare the sick man or woman. So common was the custom in the old days that there was scarcely a person living in the Tonga islands who had not thus lost one or both of his little fingers, or a considerable portion of both. It does not appear that the operation was very painful. Mariner witnessed more than once little children quarrelling for the honour of having it performed on them. The finger was laid flat upon a block of wood: a knife, axe, or sharp stone was placed with the edge on the joint to be severed, and a powerful blow with a hammer or heavy stone effected the amputation. Sometimes an affectionate relative would perform the operation on his or her own hand. John Williams questioned a girl of eighteen who had hacked off her own little finger with a sharp shell to induce the gods to spare her sick mother. Generally a joint was taken off at a time; but some persons had smaller portions amputated to admit of the operation being often repeated in case they had many superior relations, who might be sick and require the sacrifice. When they had no more joints which they could conveniently spare, they rubbed the stumps of the mutilated fingers till the blood streamed from the wounds; then they would hold up the bleeding hands in hope of softening the heart of the angry god.[78] Captain Cook understood that the operation was performed for the benefit of the sufferers themselves to heal them in sickness,[79] and the same view was apparently taken by the French navigator Labillardière,[80] but in this they were probably mistaken; neither of them had an accurate knowledge of the language, and they may easily have misunderstood their informants. Perhaps the only person in the islands who was exempt from the necessity of occasionally submitting to the painful sacrifice was the divine chief Tooitonga, who, as he ranked above everybody, even above the king, could have no superior relation for whom to amputate a finger-joint. Certainly we know that Tooitonga had not, like the rest of his countrymen, to undergo the painful operations of tattooing and circumcision; if he desired to be tattooed or circumcised, he was obliged to go to other islands, particularly to Samoa, for the purpose.[81] Perhaps, though this is not mentioned by our authorities, it would have been deemed impious to shed his sacred blood in his native land. [78] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 438 _sq._, ii. 210-212; Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 239, 278; John Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, pp. 470 _sq._; Jérôme Grange, in _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xvii. (1845) pp. 12, 26; Sarah S. Farmer, _Tonga and the Friendly Islands_, p. 128. [79] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 204, v. 421 _sq._ However, in a footnote to the latter passage Captain Cook gives the correct explanation of the custom on the authority of Captain King: "It is common for the inferior people to cut off a joint of their little finger, on account of the sickness of the chiefs to whom they belong." [80] Labillardière, _Relation du Voyage à la recherche de la Pérouse_ (Paris, 1800), ii. 151. [81] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 79, 268. But sacrifices to the gods for the recovery of the sick were not limited to the amputation of finger-joints. Not uncommonly children were strangled for this purpose.[82] Thus when Finow the king was grievously sick and seemed likely to die, the prince, his son, and a young chief went out to procure one of the king's own children by a female attendant to sacrifice it as a vicarious offering to the gods, that their anger might be appeased and the health of its father restored. They found the child sleeping in its mother's lap in a neighbouring house; they took it away by force, and retiring with it behind an adjacent burial-ground (_fytoca_) they strangled it with a band of bark-cloth. Then they carried it before two consecrated houses and a grave, at each place gabbling a short but appropriate prayer to the god, that he would intercede with the other gods in behalf of the dying king, and would accept of this sacrifice as an atonement for the sick man's crimes.[83] When, not long afterwards, the divine chief Tooitonga, in spite of his divinity, fell sick and seemed like to die, one or other of his young relations had a little finger cut off every day, as a propitiatory offering to the gods for the sins of the saintly sufferer. But these sacrifices remaining fruitless, recourse was had to greater. Three or four children were strangled at different times, and prayers were offered up by the priests at the consecrated houses and burial-grounds (_fytocas_) but all in vain. The gods remained deaf to the prayers of the priests; their hearts were not touched by the cutting off of fingers or the strangling of children; and the illness of the sacred chief grew every day more alarming. As a last resort and desperate remedy, the emaciated body of the dying man was carried into the kitchen, the people imagining that such an act of humility, performed on behalf of the highest dignitary of the Tonga islands, would surely move the deities to compassion and induce them to spare a life so precious to his subjects.[84] The same curious remedy had shortly before been resorted to for the benefit of the dying or dead king, Finow the First: his body was carried into the kitchen of the sacred chief, the Tooitonga, and there placed over the hole in the ground where the fire was lighted to cook victuals: "this was thought to be acceptable to the gods, as being a mark of extreme humiliation, that the great chief of all the Hapai islands and Vavaoo, should be laid where the meanest class of mankind, the cooks, were accustomed to operate."[85] [82] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 208 _sq._ [83] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 366. [84] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 438 _sq._; compare _id._ ii. 214. [85] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 367 _sq._ The custom of strangling the relations of a sick chief as a vicarious sacrifice to appease the anger of the deity and ensure the recovery of the patient was found in vogue by the first missionaries to Tonga before the arrival of Mariner. When King Moom[=o]oe lay very sick and his death was hourly expected, one of his sons sent for a younger brother under pretence of wishing to cut off his little fingers as a sacrifice to save the life of their dying father. The young man came, whereupon his elder brother had him seized, strangled, and buried within a few yards of the house where the missionaries were living. Afterwards the fratricide came and mourned over his murdered brother by sitting on the grave with his elbows on his knees and covering his face with his hands. In this posture he remained for a long time in silence, and then departed very thoughtful. His motive for thus mourning over the brother whom he had done to death is not mentioned by the missionaries and was probably not known to them. We may conjecture that it was not so much remorse for his crime as fear of his brother's ghost, who otherwise might have haunted him.[86] Morality, or at all events a semblance of it, has often been thus reinforced by superstitious terrors. [86] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 238-240. In recording this incident the missionaries make use of an expression which seems to set the strangling of human beings for the recovery of sick relations in a somewhat different light. They say that "the prince of darkness has impressed the idea on them, that the strength of the person strangled will be transferred into the sick, and recover him."[87] On this theory the sacrifice acts, so to say, mechanically without the intervention of a deity; the life of the victim is transfused into the body of the patient as a sort of tonic which strengthens and revives him. Such a rite is therefore magical rather than religious; it depends for its efficacy on natural causes, and not on the pity and help of the gods. Yet the missionaries, who record this explanation of the custom, elsewhere implicitly accept the religious interpretation of such rites as vicarious sacrifices; for they say that among the superstitious notions of the natives concerning spirits was one that "by strangling some relations of the chief when he is sick, the deity will be appeased, and he (that is, the sick chief) will recover."[88] Perhaps both explanations, the religious and the magical, were assigned by the Tongans: consistency of thought is as little characteristic of savage as of civilised man: provided he attains his ends, he recks little of the road by which he reaches them. An English sailor named Ambler, who had resided for thirteen months in Tonga before the arrival of the missionaries, told them, "that when a great chief lay sick they often strangled their women, to the number of three or four at a time."[89] Such a sacrifice is more likely to have been religious than magical; we may suppose that the victims were rather offered to the gods as substitutes for the chief than killed to recruit his failing strength by an infusion of their health and vigour. A chief would probably have disdained the idea of drawing fresh energy from the bodies of women, though he might be ready enough to believe that the gods would consent to accept their life as a proxy for his own. It is true that elsewhere, notably in Uganda, human beings have been killed to prolong the life of the king by directly transferring their strength to him;[90] but in such cases it would seem that the victims have invariably been men and not women. [87] Captain James Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 240. [88] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, p. 257. [89] Captain James Wilson, _op. cit._, p. 278. This Ambler was a man of very indifferent, not to say infamous, character, but he rendered the missionaries considerable service by instructing them in the Tongan language, which he spoke fluently. See Captain James Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 98, 244 _sq._ [90] See _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, Third Edition, ii. 219 _sqq._ § 8. _The Doctrine of the Soul and its Destiny after Death_ Thus far we have dealt with the primary or superior gods, who were believed to have been always gods, and about whose origin nothing was known. We now pass to a consideration of the secondary or inferior gods, whose origin was perfectly well known, since they were all of them the souls of dead chiefs or nobles, of whom some had died or been killed in recent years. But before we take up the subject of their worship, it will be well to say a few words on the Tongan doctrine of the human soul, since these secondary deities were avowedly neither more nor less than human souls raised to a higher power by death. The Tongans, in their native state, before the advent of Europeans, did not conceive of the soul as a purely immaterial essence, that being a conception too refined for the thought of a savage. They imagined it to be the finer or more aeriform part of the body which leaves it suddenly at the moment of death, and which may be thought to stand in the same relation to the body as the perfume of a flower to its solid substance. They had no proper word to express this fine ethereal part of man; for the word _loto_, though it might sometimes be used for that purpose, yet rather means a man's disposition, inclination, passion, or sentiment. The soul was supposed to exist throughout the whole of the body, but to be particularly present in the heart, the pulsation of which they regarded as the strength and power of the soul. They did not clearly distinguish between the life and the soul, but said that the right auricle of the heart was the seat of life. They took the liver to be the seat of courage, and professed to have remarked, on opening dead bodies, that the largest livers belonged to the bravest men, in which observation they were careful to make allowance for the enlargement of livers consequent on disease.[91] [91] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 127 _sq._ They acknowledged that the _tooas_ or lower order of people had minds or souls; but they firmly believed that these vulgar souls died with their bodies and consequently had no future existence. In this aristocratic opinion the generality of the commoners acquiesced, though some were vain enough to think that they had souls like their betters, and that they would live hereafter in Bolotoo. But the orthodox Tongan doctrine restricted immortality to chiefs and their ministers (the _matabooles_); at most, by a stretch of charity, it extended the privilege to the _mooas_ or third estate; but it held out no hope of salvation to _tooas_, who formed the fourth and lowest rank of society.[92] [92] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 419, ii. 99, 128 _sq._ Mariner's account, which I have followed, of the sharp distinction which the Tongans drew between the immortality of chiefs and the mortality of common people is confirmed by the testimony of other and independent observers. According to Captain Cook, while the souls of the chiefs went immediately after death to the island of Boolootoo (Bolotoo), the souls of the lower sort of people underwent a sort of transmigration or were eaten by a bird called _loata_, which walked upon their graves for that purpose.[93] The first missionaries, who landed in Tongataboo in 1797, report that the natives "believe the immortality of the soul, which at death, they say, is immediately conveyed in a very large fast-sailing canoe to a distant country called Doobludha, which they describe as resembling the Mahometan paradise. They call the god of this region of pleasure Higgolayo, and esteem him as the greatest and most powerful of all others, the rest being no better than servants to him. This doctrine, however, is wholly confined to the chiefs, for the _tooas_ (or lower order) can give no account whatever; as they reckon the enjoyments of Doobludha above their capacity, so they seem never to think of what may become of them after they have served the purposes of this life."[94] One of these first missionaries was a certain George Veeson, who had been a bricklayer before he undertook to convert the heathen to Christianity. Wearying, however, of missionary work, he deserted his brethren and betook himself to the heathen, among whom he lived as one of them, adopting the native garb, marrying native women, and eagerly fighting in the wars of the natives among themselves. In this way he acquired a considerable knowledge of the Tongan language and customs, of which he made some use in the account of his experiences which he published anonymously after his return to England. Speaking of Tongan ideas concerning the immortality of the soul he says that he heard the chiefs speak much of Bulotu (Bolotoo). "Into this region, however, they believed none were admitted but themselves. The Tuas, or lower class, having no hope of sharing such bliss, seldom speculate upon a futurity, which to them appears a subject lost in shadows, clouds, and darkness."[95] The missionaries reported to Commodore Wilkes that the spirits of all chiefs were supposed to go to Bolotoo, while the souls of poor people remained in this world to feed upon ants and lizards.[96] With regard to the fate of the soul after death, the Tongans universally and positively believed in the existence of a great island, lying at a considerable distance to the north-west, which they considered to be the abode of their gods and of the souls of their dead nobles and their ministers (the _matabooles_). This island they supposed to be much larger than all their own islands put together, and to be well stocked with all kinds of useful and ornamental plants, always in a high state of perfection, and always bearing the richest fruits and the most beautiful flowers according to their respective natures; they thought that when these fruits or flowers were plucked, others immediately took their place, and that the whole atmosphere was filled with the most delightful fragrance that the imagination can conceive, exhaled from these immortal plants. The island, too, was well stocked with the most beautiful birds, of all imaginable kinds, as well as with abundance of hogs; and all of these creatures were immortal, except when they were killed to provide food for the gods. But the moment a hog or a bird was killed, another live hog or bird came into existence to supply its place, just as happened with the fruits and flowers; and this, so far as they could ascertain, was the only way in which plants and animals were propagated in Bolotoo. So far away was the happy island supposed to be that it was dangerous for living men to attempt to sail thither in their canoes; indeed, except by the express permission of the gods, they could not find the island, however near they might come to it. They tell, however, of a Tongan canoe which, returning from Fiji, was driven by stress of weather to Bolotoo. The crew knew not the place, and being in want of provisions and seeing the country to abound in all sorts of fruits, they landed and proceeded to pluck some bread-fruit. But to their unspeakable astonishment they could no more lay hold of the fruit than if it were a shadow; they walked through the trunks of the trees and passed through the substance of the houses without feeling any shock or resistance. At length they saw some of the gods, who passed through the men's bodies as if they were empty space. These gods recommended them to go away immediately, as they had no proper food for them, and they promised them a fair wind and a speedy passage. So the men put to sea, and sailing with the utmost speed they arrived at Samoa, where they stayed two or three days. Thence, again sailing very fast, they returned to Tonga, where in the course of a few days they all died, not as a punishment for having been at Bolotoo, but as a natural consequence, the air of that place, as it were, infecting mortal bodies with speedy death. The gods who dwell in Bolotoo have no canoes, not requiring them; for if they wish to be anywhere, there they are the moment the wish is felt.[97] [93] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 423. [94] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 278 _sq._ [95] Quoted by Miss Sarah S. Farmer, _Tonga and the Friendly Islands_, p. 131. As to Veeson, see _id._ pp. 78, 85 _sqq._ The title of his book is given (p. 87) as _Authentic Narrative of a Four Years' Residence in Tongataboo_ (London: Longman & Co., 1815). I have not seen the book. The man's name is given as Vason by (Sir) Basil Thomson in his _Diversions of a Prime Minister_ (Edinburgh and London, 1894), pp. 326, 327, 329, 331; but his real name seems to have been George Veeson. See Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 6, 230. [96] Charles Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, iii. 22. [97] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 101-103. It is said that in order to people Bolotoo the god Hikuleo used to carry off the first-born sons of chiefs and other great men, whom he transported to the island of the gods. To such lengths did he go in this system of abduction that men on earth grew very uneasy. Their ranks became thinner and thinner. How was all this to end? At last the other gods were moved to compassion. The two gods Tangaloa and Maui laid hold of brother Hikuleo, passed a strong chain round his waist and between his legs, and then taking the chain by the ends they fastened one of them to the sky and the other to the earth. Thus trussed up, the deity still made many attempts to snatch away first-born sons; but all his efforts were thwarted and baffled by the chain, for no sooner did he dart out in one direction, than the chain pulled him back in another. According to another, or the same story, the excursions of the deity were further limited by the length of his tail, the end of which was tethered to the cave in which he resided; and though the tail was long and allowed him a good deal of rope, do what he would, he could not break bounds or obtain more than a very partial view of what was going on in the rest of the world.[98] [98] Sarah S. Farmer, _Tonga and the Friendly Islands_, pp. 132 _sq._ As to Hikuleo and his long tail, see also Charles Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, iii. 23, "Hikuleo is the god of spirits, and is the third in order of time; he dwells in a cave in the island. Bulotu is most remarkable for a long tail, which prevents him from going farther from the cave in which he resides than its length will admit of." Here the god Hikuleo appears to be confused with the island of Bulotu (Bulotoo) in which he resided. Tradition wavers on the question whether Hikuleo was a god or goddess, "but the general suffrage seems in favour of the female sex." See E. E. V. Collocot, "Notes on Tongan Religion," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, xxx. (1921) pp. 152, 153. In this curious story we may perhaps detect a tradition of a time when among the Tongans, as among the Semites, religion or superstition demanded the sacrifice of all first-born sons, a barbarous custom which has been practised by not a few peoples in various parts of the earth.[99] [99] As to a custom of putting the first-born to death, see _The Dying God_, pp. 178 _sqq._; and for other reported instances of the custom, see Mrs. James Smith, _The Booandik Tribe of South Australia_ (Adelaide, 1880), pp. 7 _sq._; C. E. Fox, "Social Organisation in San Cristoval, Solomon Islands," _Journal of the R. Anthropological Institute_, xlix. (1919) p. 100; E. O. Martin, _The Gods of India_ (London and Toronto, 1914), p. 215; N. W. Thomas, _Anthropological Report on the Ibo-speaking peoples of Nigeria_, Part i. (London, 1913) p. 12. Compare E. Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_ (London, 1906), i. 458 _sqq._ The human soul after its separation from the body at death was termed a _hotooa_ or _atua_, that is, a god or spirit, and was believed to exist in the shape of the body and to have the same propensities as in life, but to be corrected by a more enlightened understanding, by which it readily distinguished good from evil, truth from falsehood, and right from wrong. The souls dwelt for ever in the happy regions of Bolotoo, where they bore the same names as in life and held the same rank among themselves as they had held during their mortal existence. But their lot in Bolotoo was in no way affected by the good or evil which they had done on earth; for the Tongans did not believe in a future state of retribution for deeds done in the body; they thought that the gods punished crime in this present world, without waiting to redress the balance of justice in the world to come. As many of the nobles who passed at death to Bolotoo had been warlike and turbulent in their life, it might naturally be anticipated that they should continue to wage war on each other in the land beyond the grave; but that was not so, for by a merciful dispensation their understandings were so much enlightened, or their tempers so much improved, by their residence in Bolotoo, that any differences they might have between themselves, or with the primitive gods, they adjusted by temperate discussion without resort to violence; though people in Tonga sometimes heard an echo and caught a glimpse of these high debates in the rumble of thunder and the flash of lightning.[100] In the blissful abode of Bolotoo the souls of chiefs and nobles lived for ever, being not subject to a second death, and there they feasted upon all the favourite productions of their native country, which grew also abundantly in the happy island.[101] [100] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 110 _sq._, 130, 131, 139, 140. [101] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 423. A less cheerful picture, however, of the state of souls in the other world was painted for Commodore Wilkes by the missionaries who furnished him with information on the native religion of the Tongans. According to them, the souls were forced to become the servants, or rather slaves, of the long-tailed deity Hikuleo, whose commands they had no choice but to execute. His house and all things in it were even constructed of the souls of the dead; and he went so far as to make fences out of them and bars to his gates, an indignity which must have been deeply resented by the proud spirits of kings and nobles.[102] How this gloomy picture of the fate of souls in Bolotoo is to be reconciled with the bright descriptions of it which I have drawn from the pages of Mariner and Cook, it is not easy to say. Apparently we must acquiesce in the discrepancy. That savages should entertain inconsistent views on the life after death need not surprise us, when we remember how little accurate information even civilised peoples possess on that momentous subject. [102] Charles Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, iii. 23. The writer here speaks of Bulotu, where he should have said Hikuleo. See above, p. 89, note^1. § 9. _The Souls of the Dead as Gods_ We have seen that according to Mariner, our best authority on Tongan religion, the souls of dead nobles ranked as gods, possessing all the powers and attributes of the primary or original deities, though in an inferior degree.[103] Thus, like the primary gods, they had the power of returning to Tonga to inspire priests, relations, or other people.[104] For example, the son of Finow, the King, used to be inspired by the spirit of Toogoo Ahoo, a former king of Tonga, who had been assassinated with the connivance of his successor, Finow. One day Mariner asked this young chief how he felt when he was visited by the spirit of the murdered monarch. The chief replied that he could not well describe his feelings, but the best he could say of it was, that he felt himself all over in a glow of heat and quite restless and uncomfortable; he did not feel his personal identity, as it were, but seemed to have a mind differing from his own natural mind, his thoughts wandering upon strange and unusual topics, though he remained perfectly sensible of surrounding objects. When Mariner asked him how he knew it was the spirit of Toogoo Ahoo who possessed him, the chief answered impatiently, "There's a fool! How can I tell you how I knew it? I felt and knew it was so by a kind of consciousness; my mind told me that it was Toogoo Ahoo." Similarly Finow himself, the father of this young man, used occasionally to be inspired by the ghost of Moomooi, a former king of Tonga.[105] [103] W. Mariner, _Tongan Islands_, ii. 97, 99, 103, 109 _sq._ See above, pp. 64 _sq._, 66. [104] W. Mariner, ii. 130 _sq._; compare _id._ pp. 99, 103 _sq._, 109 _sq._ [105] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 104 _sq._ Again, the souls of dead nobles, like gods, had the power of appearing in dreams and visions to their relatives and others to admonish and warn them. It was thought, for example, that Finow the king was occasionally visited by a deceased son of his; the ghost did not appear, but announced his presence by whistling. Mariner once heard this whistling when he was with the king and some chiefs in a house at night; it was dark, and the sound appeared to come from the loft of the house. In Mariner's opinion the sound was produced by some trick of Finow's, but the natives believed it to be the voice of a spirit.[106] Once more, when Finow the king was himself dead, a noble lady who mourned his death and generally slept on his grave, communicated to his widow a dream which she had dreamed several nights at the graveyard. She said that in her dream the late king appeared to her, and, with a countenance full of sorrow, asked why there yet remained so many evil-designing persons in the islands; for he declared that, since he had been at Bolotoo, he had been disturbed by the plots of wicked men conspiring against his son; therefore was he come to warn her of the danger. Finally, he bade her set in order the pebbles on his grave, and pay every attention to his burial-ground. With that he vanished.[107] In such dreams of the reappearance of the recent dead we may discover one source of the belief in the survival of the soul after death. [106] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 110, 130 _sq._ [107] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 423 _sq._ But the gods appeared to mankind to warn, comfort, and advise, not only in their own divine form but also in the form of animals. Thus the primitive gods, according to Mariner, sometimes entered into the living bodies of lizards, porpoises, and a species of water snake. Hence these creatures were much respected. The reason why gods entered into porpoises was to take care of canoes. This power of assuming the form of living animals, says Mariner, belonged only to the original gods, and not to the deified souls of chiefs.[108] In thus denying that the spirits of the dead were supposed sometimes to revisit the earth in animal shapes Mariner was perhaps mistaken, for a different view on the subject was apparently taken at a later time by Miss Farmer, who had access to good sources of information. She writes as follows: "Bulotu (Bolotoo) was peopled with the spirits of departed chiefs and great persons of both sexes; and it was to these chiefly that worship was paid and that sacrifices were offered. These spirits in Bulotu were supposed to act as intercessors with the supreme gods, who were too highly exalted to be approached by men except in this way. The spirits were in the habit of revisiting earth. They would come in birds, or in fish as their shrines. The tropic-bird, king-fisher, and sea-gull, the sea-eel, shark, whale, and many other animals were considered sacred, because they were favourite shrines of these spirit-gods. The heathen never killed any of these creatures; and if, in sailing, they chanced to find themselves in the neighbourhood of a whale, they would offer scented oil or kava to him. To some among the natives the cuttle-fish and the lizard were gods; while others would lay offerings at the foot of certain trees, with the idea of their being inhabited by spirits. A rainbow or a shooting star would also command worship."[109] [108] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ ii. 99, 131. [109] Sarah S. Farmer, _Tonga and the Friendly Islands_, pp. 126 _sq._ This account seems to imply that the spirits which took the form of these animals, birds, and fish were believed to be the souls of the dead returning from the spirit world to revisit their old homes on earth. But even if we suppose that herein the writer was mistaken, and that, as Mariner affirmed, only the original and superior gods were deemed capable of incarnation in animal shape, the account is still valuable and interesting because it calls attention to a side of Tongan religion on which our principal authority, Mariner, is almost silent. That side comprises the worship of natural objects, and especially of animals, birds, and fish, regarded as embodiments of spirits, whether gods or ghosts. This worship of nature, and particularly of animated nature, was highly developed among the Samoans; it would be natural, therefore, to find the same system in vogue among their neighbours and near kinsmen the Tongans, though our authorities on Tongan religion say little about it. The system may with some appearance of probability be regarded as a relic of a former practice of totemism.[110] [110] See below, pp. 182 _sqq._, 200 _sqq._ In recent years a considerable amount of evidence bearing on the subject has been collected by Mr. E. E. V. Collocot. He distinguishes the national Tongan gods from the gods of tribes, clans, and small groups of allied households; such a group of households, it appears, formed the ordinary social unit. Indeed, he tells us that there was nothing to prevent a man from setting up a tutelary deity of his own, if he were so disposed; he might adopt almost any object for the religious reverence of his household and himself. Thus there was "a gradation in the divine hierarchy from gods of populous tribes down to deities the private possession of a very few."[111] Further, Mr. Collocot found that most of the gods had sacred animals or other natural objects associated with them,[112] and that the worshippers were generally forbidden to eat the sacred animals of their gods. He concludes that "in the period of which we have information totemism has given way to a more highly developed polytheism, but there are indications that the development was by way of totemism."[113] Among the facts which appear to support this conclusion we may note the following. [111] E. E. V. Collocot, "Notes on Tongan Religion," _Journal of the Polynesian Society_, xxx. (1921) pp. 154 _sq._, 159. [112] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ pp. 160, 161. [113] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ pp. 159 _sq._ There was a great god called Boolotoo Katoa, that is, "the whole of Boolotoo (Bolotoo)," who had the dog for his sacred animal; while the deity was being worshipped, a dog lay at the side of the priest. This god had his principal shrine at Boha in the eastern part of Tongataboo: the district was of old the centre of government and the residence of the Tooitonga.[114] Another god, whose name was the King of the tribe or clan of Fonua (_Tui-Haafakafonua_), had for his sacred animal a lizard, and for the convenience of his departure, and presumably arrival, a tree or post was always provided for him to crawl along. A handy post or tree-stump was a regular part of his temple furnishings.[115] Another god, whose name signifies "Proud Boastfulness of the Season" (_Mofuta-ae-ta'u_), had for his sacred animal a great sea-eel, which dwelt in an opening of the reef opposite the village. This deity used to take it very ill if anybody appeared on the beach near his abode wearing a turban or whitened with lime; and should a man rashly disregard the feelings of the divine eel in these respects, it was believed that the deity would carry him off to his hole in the rock.[116] Another god, named Haele-feke, used to manifest himself in the form of an octopus (_feke_). Whenever an octopus appeared in a certain pool, it was at once recognised as the god, and the priestess immediately went and awaited him at the shrine, which seems to have been a small raised platform. Thither the people presently resorted, bringing bunches of coco-nuts and coco-nut leaves and earth. The priestess thereupon spoke as in the person of the octopus, and apparently imitated the creature, presumably by sprawling in the ungainly manner of an octopus. The worshippers of this deity abstained from eating the flesh of the octopus, and even from approaching a place where other people were eating it. If any of them transgressed the taboo, he was afflicted with complete baldness. Should any of the worshippers find a dead octopus, they buried it with all due ceremony in Teekiu, their principal village.[117] The rail bird (_kalae_) was worshipped by some people, who used to tie bunches of the birds together and carry them about with them when they travelled; and the priest had a bunch of the sacred birds tattooed as a badge on his throat.[118] The clan Fainga'a had for its sacred animal the mullet; and it is said that young mullets were tabooed to the men of the clan.[119] A family group in Haapai had the owl for their sacred creature; if an owl hooted near a house in the afternoon, it was a sign that there was a pregnant woman in the household.[120] The god of Uiha in Haapai was the Eel-in-the-Open-Sea (_Toke-i-Moana_); as usual, the worshippers might not eat the flesh of eels or approach a place where an eel was being cooked.[121] The clan Falefa worshipped two goddesses, Jiji and Fainga'a, whose sacred creature was the heron. Jiji was supposed to be incarnate in the dark-coloured heron, and Fainga'a in the light-coloured heron. When a pair of herons, one dark and the other light-coloured, were seen flying together, people said that it was the two goddesses Jiji and Fainga'a.[122] In the island of Tofua there was a clan called the King of Tofua (_Tui Tofua_), which had the shark for its god; members of the clan might not eat the flesh of sharks, because they believed themselves to be related to the fish; they said that long ago some of the clansmen leaped from a canoe into the sea and were turned into sharks.[123] Another god who appeared in the form of a shark was Taufa of the Sea (_Taufa-tahi_); but in another aspect he was a god of the land (_Taufa-uta_) and a notable protector of gardens. To secure his aid the husbandman had only to plait a coco-nut leaf in the likeness of a shark and to hang it up in his plantation; a garden thus protected was under a taboo which no one would dare to violate. A Christian, who ventured to thrust his hand in mockery into the maw of the sham shark, had both his arms afterwards bitten off by a real shark.[124] Other gods were recognised in the shape of flying-foxes, shell-fish, and little blue and green lizards.[125] We hear of two Tongan gods who had black volcanic pebbles for their sacred objects,[126] and of one whose shrine was the tree called _fehi_, the hard wood of which was commonly used for making spears and canoes.[127] The gods of Niua Fo'ou, one of the most distant islands of the Tongan group, were three in number, to wit, the octopus, pig's liver, and a large lump of coral. The worshippers of the two former deities might not eat the divine octopus and the divine pig's liver.[128] Christianity itself appears not to have wholly extinguished the reverence of the natives for the sacred animals of their clans. A much-respected native minister of the Methodist Church informed Mr. Collocot that to this day he gets a headache if he eats the sacred animal of his clan, though other people may partake of the creature, not only with impunity, but with relish.[129] [114] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ p. 162. [115] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ p. 227. [116] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ pp. 227 _sq._ [117] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ pp. 231 _sq._ [118] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ pp. 161, 233. [119] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ p. 234. [120] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ p. 234. [121] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ pp. 234 _sq._ [122] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ p. 232. [123] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ pp. 238 _sq._ [124] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ p. 229. [125] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ pp. 230, 231, 233. [126] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ pp. 230, 233. [127] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ p. 232. [128] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ p. 239. [129] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ p. 160. Thus the worship of natural objects, and especially of animals, fish, and birds, presents a close analogy to the Samoan system, as we shall see presently;[130] and it is not without significance that tradition points to Samoa as the original home from which the ancestors of the Tongans migrated to their present abode.[131] On the question of the nature of the divine beings who presented themselves to their worshippers in the form of animals, the evidence collected by Mr. Collocot seems to confirm the statement of Mariner, that only the primary or non-human gods were believed capable of thus becoming incarnate; at least Mr. Collocot gives no hint that the worshipful creatures were supposed to be tenanted by the souls of the human dead; in other words, there is nothing to show that the Tongan worship of animals was based on a theory of transmigration. [130] See below, pp. 154 _sq._ [131] E. E. V. Collocot, _op. cit._ p. 239. The statement of Miss Farmer, which I have quoted, that among the Tongans the souls of the dead were the principal object of worship and received the most sacrifices, is interesting and not improbable, though it is not confirmed by Mariner. It may indeed, perhaps, be laid down as a general principle that the worship of the dead tends constantly to encroach on the worship of the high gods, who are pushed ever farther into the background by the advent of their younger rivals. It is natural enough that this should be so. The affection which we feel for virtue, the reverence and awe inspired by great talents and powerful characters, persist long after the objects of our love and admiration have passed away from earth, and we now render to their memories the homage which we paid, or perhaps grudged, to the men themselves in their lifetime. For us they seem still to exist; with their features, their characteristic turns of thought and speech still fresh in our memories, we can hardly bring ourselves to believe that they have utterly ceased to be, that nothing of them remains but the lifeless dust which we have committed to the earth. The heart still clings fondly to the hope, if not to the belief, that somewhere beyond our ken the loved and lost ones are joined to the kindred spirits who have gone before in that unknown land, where, in due time, we shall meet them again. And as with affection, so with reverence and fear; they also are powerful incentives to this instinctive belief in the continued existence of the dead. The busy brain that explored the heights and depths of this mysterious universe--the glowing imagination that conjured up visions of beauty born, as we fondly think, for immortality--the aspiring soul and vaulting ambition that founded or overturned empires and shook the world--are they now no more than a few mouldering bones or a handful of ashes under their marble monuments? The mind of most men revolts from a conclusion so derogatory to what they deem the dignity of human nature; and so to satisfy at once the promptings of the imagination and the impulse of the heart, men gradually elevate their dead to the rank of saints and heroes, who in course of time may easily pass by an almost insensible transition to the supreme place of deities. It is thus that, almost as far back as we can trace the gropings of the human mind, man has been perpetually creating gods in his own likeness. In a pantheon thus constantly recruited by the accession of dead men, the recruits tend to swamp the old deities by sheer force of numbers; for whereas the muster-roll of the original gods is fixed and unchangeable, the newcomers form a great host which is not only innumerable but perpetually on the increase, for who can reckon up the tale of the departed or set bounds to the ravages of death? Indeed, where the deification of the dead is carried to its logical limit, a new god is born for every man that dies; though in Tonga against such an extreme expansion of the spiritual hierarchy, and a constant overcrowding of Bolotoo, a solid barrier was interposed by the Tongan doctrine which opened the gates of paradise only to noblemen.[132] [132] We have seen (p. 70) that according to Mariner the number of the original gods was about three hundred; but as to the deified noblemen he merely says that "of these there must be a vast number" (_Tonga Islands_, ii. 109). In his "Notes on Tongan Religion" (_Journal of the Polynesian Society_, xxx. (1921) p. 159) Mr. E. E. V. Collocot remarks: "The number of the gods, moreover, was liable to constant augmentation by the deification of the illustrious or well-beloved dead." As a notable instance he cites the case of a certain chief named Fakailoatonga, a native of Vavau, who subdued or overran a large part of Tongataboo. He was a leper, but for a long time did not know the true nature of his malady. When he learned the truth, he in disgust buried himself alive, and after his death he was elevated to the godhead. But in this deification, if Mariner is right, there was nothing exceptional; as a chief he became a god after death in the course of nature. § 10. _Temples and Tombs: Megalithic Monuments_ On the whole it seems reasonable to conclude that in Tonga the distinction between the original superhuman deities and the new human gods tended to be obliterated in the minds of the people. More and more, we may suppose, the deified spirits of dead men usurped the functions and assimilated themselves to the character of the ancient divinities. Yet between these two classes of worshipful beings Mariner draws an important distinction which we must not overlook. He says that these new human gods, these souls of deified nobles, "have no houses dedicated to them, but the proper places to invoke them are their graves, which are considered sacred, and are therefore as much respected as consecrated houses."[133] If this distinction is well founded, the consecrated house or temple, as we may call it, of an original god was quite different from the grave at which a new god, that is, a dead man or woman, was worshipped. But in spite of the high authority of Mariner it seems doubtful whether the distinction which he makes between the temples of the old gods and the tombs of the new ones was always recognised in practice, and whether the two were not apt to be confounded in the minds even of the natives. The temples of the gods, as we have seen, did not differ in shape and structure from the houses of men, and similar houses, as we shall see, were also built on the graves of kings and chiefs and even of common people. What was easier than to confuse the two classes of spirit-houses, the houses of gods and the houses of dead kings or chiefs, especially when the memory of these potentates had grown dim and their human personality had been forgotten? Certainly European observers have sometimes been in doubt as to whether places to which the natives paid religious reverence were temples or graves. In view of this ambiguity I propose to examine some of the descriptions which have been given by eye-witnesses of the sacred structures and enclosure which might be interpreted either as temples or tombs. The question has a double interest and importance, first, in its bearing on the theory, enunciated by Herbert Spencer, that temples are commonly, if not universally, derived from tombs,[134] and gods from dead men; and secondly, in its bearing on the question of the origin and meaning of megalithic monuments; for not a few of the tombs of Tongan kings and sacred chiefs are constructed in part of very large stones. [133] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 110 [134] Herbert Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_, vol. i (London, 1904) pp. 249 _sqq._ I will begin with the evidence of Captain Cook, an excellent observer and faithful witness. He paid two visits to the Tonga islands, a short one in 1773, and a longer one of between two and three months in 1777. Speaking of his first visit to Tongataboo in 1773, he writes as follows: "After sitting here some time, and distributing some presents to those about us, we signified our desire to see the country. The chief immediately took the hint, and conducted us along a lane that led to an open green, on the one side of which was a house of worship built on a mount that had been raised by the hand of man, about sixteen or eighteen feet above the common level. It had an oblong figure, and was inclosed by a wall or parapet of stone, about three feet in height. From this wall the mount rose with a gentle slope, and was covered with a green turf. On the top of it stood the house, which had the same figure as the mount, about twenty feet in length, and fourteen or sixteen broad. As soon as we came before the place, every one seated himself on the green, about fifty or sixty yards from the front of the house. Presently came three elderly men; who seated themselves between us and it, and began a speech, which I understood to be a prayer, it being wholly directed to the house. This lasted about ten minutes; and then the priests, for such I took them to be, came and sat down along with us, when we made them presents of such things as were about us. Having then made signs to them that we wanted to view the premises, my friend Attago immediately got up, and going with us, without showing the least backwardness, gave us full liberty to examine every part of it. "In the front were two stone steps leading to the top of the wall; from this the ascent to the house was easy, round which was a fine gravel walk. The house was built, in all respects, like to their common dwelling-houses; that is, with posts and rafters; and covered with palm thatch. The eaves came down within about three feet of the ground, which space was filled up with strong matting made of palm leaves, as a wall. The floor of the house was laid with fine gravel; except in the middle, where there was an oblong square of blue pebbles, raised about six inches higher than the floor. At one corner of the house stood an image rudely carved in wood, and on one side lay another; each about two feet in length. I, who had no intention to offend either them or their gods, did not so much as touch them, but asked Attago, as well as I could, if they were _Eatuas_, or gods. Whether he understood me or no, I cannot say; but he immediately turned them over and over, in as rough a manner as he would have done any other log of wood, which convinced me that they were not there as representatives of the Divinity. I was curious to know if the dead were interred there, and asked Attago several questions relative thereto; but I was not sure that he understood me; at least I did not understand the answers he made, well enough to satisfy my inquiries. For the reader must know, that at our first coming among these people, we hardly could understand a word they said. Even my Otaheitean youth, and the man on board the _Adventure_, were equally at a loss: but more of this by and by. Before we quitted the house we thought it necessary to make an offering at the altar. Accordingly we laid down upon the blue pebbles, some medals, nails, and several other things; which we had no sooner done than my friend Attago took them up, and put them in his pocket. The stones with which the walls were made that inclosed this mount, were some of them nine or ten feet by four, and about six inches thick. It is difficult to conceive how they can cut such stones out of the coral rocks. "This mount stood in a kind of grove open only on the side which fronted the high road, and the green on which the people were seated. At this green or open place, was a junction of five roads, two or three of which appeared to be very public ones. The groves were composed of several sorts of trees. Among others was the _Etoa_ tree, as it is called at Otaheite, of which are made clubs, etc., and a kind of low palm, which is very common in the northern parts of New Holland. "After we had done examining this place of worship, which in their language is called _a-fiat-tou-ca_, we desired to return."[135] [135] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 182-184. A little farther on, still speaking of his first visit to Tonga, Captain Cook observes: "So little do we know of their religion, that I hardly dare mention it. The buildings called _afiatoucas_, before mentioned, are undoubtedly set apart for this purpose. Some of our gentlemen were of opinion, that they were merely burying-places. I can only say, from my own knowledge, that they are places to which particular persons directed set speeches, which I understood to be prayers, as hath been already related. Joining my opinion with that of others, I was inclined to think that they are set apart to be both temples and burying-places, as at Otaheite, or even in Europe. But I have no idea of the images being idols; not only from what I saw myself, but from Mr. Wales's informing me that they set one of them up, for him and others to shoot at."[136] [136] Captain James Cook, _op. cit._ iii. 206. Thus Captain Cook and his party were divided in opinion as to whether the house on the mound, within its walled enclosure built of great stones, was a temple or a tomb. Captain Cook himself called it simply a "house of worship" and a "place of worship," but he inclined to the view that it was both a temple and a burying-place, and in this opinion he was probably right. The native name which he applied to it, _afiatouca_, means a burial-place; for it is doubtless equivalent to _fytoca_, a word which Mariner explains to mean "a burying-place, including the grave, the mount in which it is sunk, and a sort of shed over it."[137] Moreover, the oblong square of blue pebbles, which Captain Cook observed on the floor of the house on the mound, and which he regarded as the altar, speaks also in favour of the house being a tomb; for Mariner has described how the mourners brought white and black pebbles to the house which stood over the grave of King Finow, and how they "strewed the inside of the house with the white ones, and also the outside about the _fytoca_, as a decoration to it: the black pebbles they strewed only upon those white ones, which covered the ground directly over the body, to about the length and breadth of a man, in the form of a very eccentric ellipse. After this, the house over the _fytoca_," continues Mariner, "was closed up at both ends with a reed fencing, reaching from the eaves to the ground, and, at the front and back, with a sort of basket-work, made of the young branches of the cocoa-nut tree, split and interwoven in a very curious and ornamental way, to remain till the next burial, when they are to be taken down, and, after the conclusion of the ceremony, new ones are to be put up in like manner."[138] This description of the house over King Finow's grave agrees so closely with Captain Cook's description of the house in the _afiatouca_, that we may with much probability regard the latter as a tomb, and suppose that the "oblong square of blue pebbles," which Cook regarded as an altar and on which he laid down his offering, marked the place of the body in the grave: it was at once an altar and a tombstone. [137] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 144, note *. However, in another passage (i. 392, note *) Mariner tells us that, strictly speaking, the word _fytoca_ applied only to the mound with the grave in it, and not to the house upon the mound; for there were several _fytocas_ that had no houses on them. For other mentions of _fytocas_ and notices of them by Mariner, see _op. cit._ i. pp. 386, note *, 387, 388, 392, 393, 394, 395, 402, ii. 214-218. [138] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 402. A little farther on (p. 424, note *) Mariner remarks that "mourners were accustomed to smooth the graves of their departed friends, and cover them with black and white pebbles." On his second and more prolonged visit to the Tonga islands, Captain Cook expressed, with more confidence, his opinion that the _fiatookas_, as he calls them, were at once burial-grounds and places of worship. Thus he says: "Their _morais_ or _fiatookas_ (for they are called by both names, but mostly by the latter), are, as at Otaheite, and many other parts of the world, burying-grounds and places of worship; though some of them seemed to be only appropriated to the first purpose; but these were small, and, in every other respect, inferior to the others."[139] Again, in another passage he describes one of the more stately of these temple-tombs. He says: "Some of us, accompanied by a few of the king's attendants, and Omai as our interpreter, walked out to take a view of a _fiatooka_, or burying-place, which we had observed to be almost close by the house, and was much more extensive, and seemingly of more consequence, than any we had seen at the other islands. We were told, that it belonged to the king. It consisted of three pretty large houses, situated upon a rising ground, or rather just by the brink of it, with a small one, at some distance, all ranged longitudinally. The middle house of the three first, was by much the largest, and placed in a square, twenty-four paces by twenty-eight, raised about three feet. The other houses were placed on little mounts, raised artificially to the same height. The floors of these houses, as also the tops of the mounts round them, were covered with loose, fine pebbles, and the whole was inclosed by large flat stones of hard coral rock, properly hewn, placed on their edges; one of which stones measured twelve feet in length, two in breadth, and above one in thickness. One of the houses, contrary to what we had seen before, was open on one side; and within it were two rude, wooden busts of men; one near the entrance, and the other farther in. On inquiring of the natives, who had followed us to the ground, but durst not enter here, What these images were intended for? they made us as sensible as we could wish, that they were merely memorials of some chiefs who had been buried there, and not the representations of any deity. Such monuments, it should seem, are seldom raised; for these had probably been erected several ages ago. We were told, that the dead had been buried in each of these houses; but no marks of this appeared. In one of them, was the carved head of an Otaheite canoe, which had been driven ashore on their coast, and deposited here. At the foot of the rising ground was a large area, or grass-plot, with different trees planted about it; amongst which were several of those called _etoa_, very large. These, as they resemble the cypresses, had a fine effect in such a place. There was also a row of low palms near one of the houses, and behind it a ditch, in which lay a great number of old baskets."[140] [139] Captain Cook, _Voyages_, v. 424. [140] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 342 _sq._ Between the departure of Cook and the arrival of Mariner the first Protestant missionaries were fortunate enough to witness the burial of a king of Tonga, by name Moom[=o]oe. Their description of it and of the royal tomb entirely bears out the observations and conclusions of Captain Cook. The _fiatooka_ or burial-ground, they tell us, "is situated on a spot of ground about four acres. A mount rises with a gentle slope about seven feet, and is about one hundred and twenty yards in circumference at the base; upon the top stands a house neatly made, which is about thirty feet long, and half that in width. The roof is thatched, and the sides and ends left open. In the middle of this house is the grave, the sides, ends, and bottom of which are of coral stone, with a cover of the same: the floor of the house is of small stones. The _etoa_ and other trees grow round the _fiatooka_."[141] Into this grave, or rather stone vault, the missionaries saw the king's body lowered. The stone which covered the vault was eight feet long, four feet broad, and one foot thick. This massive stone was first raised and held in suspense by means of two great ropes, the ends of which were wound round two strong piles driven into the ground at the end of the house. The ropes were held by about two hundred men, who, when the king's body had been deposited in the grave, slowly lowered the great stone and covered the vault.[142] Some years later Mariner witnessed the funeral of another king of Tonga, Finow the First; and he similarly describes how the tomb was a large stone vault, sunk about ten feet deep in the ground, the covering stone of which was hoisted by the main strength of a hundred and fifty or two hundred men pulling at the two ends of a rope; when the bodies of the king and his daughter had been laid side by side in the vault the massive stone was lowered by the men with a great shout.[143] The number of the men required to raise and lower these great stones gives us some idea of their weight. [141] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 240 _sq._ [142] Captain James Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 244. [143] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 387 _sq._ Thus far we have been dealing only with the tombs of the civil kings of Tonga. But far more stately and massive are the tombs of the sacred kings or pontiffs, the Tooitongas, which still exist and still excite the curiosity and admiration of European observers. The Tongan name for these tombs is _langi_, which properly means "sky," also "a band of singers"; but there appears to be no connexion between these different meanings of the word.[144] The tombs are situated in Tongataboo, not far from Mooa, the old capital of the island. They stand near the south-eastern shore of the lagoon, which, under the name of the Mooa Inlet, penetrates deeply into the northern side of Tongataboo. Beginning at the northern outskirts of the village of Labaha, they stretch inland for more than half a mile into the forest.[145] They are of various constructions and shapes. Some consist of a square enclosure, on the level of the ground, the boundary walls being formed of large stones; while at each corner of the square two high stones, rising above the wall, are placed upright at right angles to each other and in a line with their respective sides.[146] But apparently the more usual and characteristic type of tomb has the form of a truncated pyramid or oblong platform raised in a series of steps or terraces, which are built of massive blocks of coral. The number of steps or terraces seems to vary from one to four according to the height of the monument.[147] It is much to be regretted that no one has yet counted and mapped out these tombs and recorded the names of their royal or divine occupants, so far as they are remembered; but a trace of the religious awe which once invested this hallowed ground still avails to keep it inviolate. A proposal which Sir Basil Thomson made to clear away the forest and preserve the tombs was very coldly received; in the eyes of the natives, professing Christians as they are, it probably savoured of sacrilege. The ancient custom was to clear the ground about every new tomb, and after the interment to suffer the tropical undergrowth to swallow it up for ever. Nowadays no holy pontiffs are borne to their last resting-place in these hallowed shades; so the forest is never cleared, and nature is left free to run wild. In consequence the tombs are so overgrown and overshadowed that it is difficult to photograph them in the gloomy and tangled thicket. Great _ifi_ trees[148] overhang them: banyan-trees have sprouted on the terraces and thrust their roots into every crevice, mantling the stones with a lacework of tendrils, which year by year rend huge blocks asunder, until the original form of the terrace is almost obliterated. Sir Basil Thomson followed the chain of tombs for about half a mile, but on each occasion his guides told him that there were other smaller tombs farther inland. The tombs increase in size and in importance as they near the shore of the lagoon, and to seven or eight of the larger ones the names of the occupants can be assigned; but the names of the sacred chiefs who sleep in the smaller tombs inland are quite forgotten. Some of them are mere enclosures of stones, not squared, but taken haphazard from the reef.[149] [144] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 213 _sq._ [145] (Sir) Basil Thomson, "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) p. 86. [146] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 283 _sq._ [147] The tomb described and illustrated by the first missionaries had four massive and lofty steps, each of them five and a half feet broad and four feet or three feet nine inches high. See Captain James Wilson, _l.c._, with the plate facing p. 284. One such tomb, rising in four tiers, is ascribed traditionally to a female Tooitonga, whose name has been forgotten. See (Sir) Basil Thomson, "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) p. 88 n.^2. [148] The Tahitian chestnut (_Inocarpus edulis_); see above, p. 74, note^2. [149] (Sir) Basil Thomson, _Diversions of a Prime Minister_ (Edinburgh and London, 1894), pp. 379 _sq._; _id._ "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) p. 86. According to an earlier authority, the Tongans could name and point out the tombs of no less than thirty Tooitongas. See the letter of Mr. Philip Hervey, quoted in _Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London_, Second Series, vol. ii. p. 77. The tombs were built in the lifetime of the sacred chiefs who were to lie in them, and their size accordingly affords a certain measure of the power and influence of the great men interred in them. Among the largest is the tomb which goes by the name of Telea, though it is said to contain no body, Telea himself being buried in the tomb next to it. We are told that, dissatisfied with the first sepulchre that was built for him, he replaced it by the other, which is also of great size. The most modern of the tombs is that of Laufilitonga, the last to bear the title of Tooitonga. He died a Christian about 1840 and was buried in the tomb of very inferior size which crowns the village cemetery. The most ancient cannot be dated; but that some are older than A.D. 1535 may be inferred from the tradition that Takalaua, a Tooitonga, was assassinated about that time because he was a tyrant who compelled his people to drag great stones from Liku, at the back of the island, to the burial ground at Mooa; the distance is about a mile and a half.[150] [150] (Sir) Basil Thomson, "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) pp. 86 _sq._, 88 n.^2. As to the legend of the tyrant Takalaua, see _id._ _Diversions of a Prime Minister_, pp. 294-302. The first, so far as I know, to see and describe these remarkable tombs were the earliest missionaries to Tonga about the end of the eighteenth century. Speaking of the burial ground at Mooa, where lay interred the divine chiefs whose title was Tooitonga and whose family name was Futtaf[=a]ihe or Fatafehi, the missionaries observe that "the _fiatookas_ are remarkable. There lie the Futtaf[=a]ihes for many generations, some vast and ruinous, which is the case with the largest; the house on the top of it is fallen, and the area and tomb itself overgrown with wood and weeds."[151] Later on they had the advantage of being conducted over the august cemetery by the Futtaf[=a]ihe or Tooitonga of the day in person, who gave them some explanations concerning these sepulchres of his ancestors. To quote their description, they say that the tombs "lie ranged in a line eastward from his house, among a grove of trees, and are many in number, and of different constructions: some, in a square form, were not in the least raised above the level of the common ground; a row of large stones formed the sides, and at each corner two high stones were placed upright at right angles to each other, and in a line with their respective sides: others were such as the brethren describe that of Moom[=o]oe to be: and a third sort were built square like the first; the largest of which was at the base one hundred and fifty-six feet by one hundred and forty; it had four steps from the bottom to the top, that run quite round the pile: one stone composed the height of each step, a part of it being sunk in the ground; and some of these stones in the wall of the lower are immensely large; one, which I measured, was twenty-four feet by twelve, and two feet thick; these Futtaf[=a]ihe informed me were brought in double canoes from the island of Lefooga. They are coral stone, and are hewn into a tolerably good shape, both with respect to the straightness of their sides and flatness of their surfaces. They are now so hardened by the weather, that the great difficulty we had in breaking a specimen of one corner made it not easy to conjecture how the labour of hewing them at first had been effected; as, by the marks of antiquity which some of them bear, they must have been built long before Tasman showed the natives an iron tool. Besides the trees which grow on the top and sides of most of them, there are the _etooa_, and a variety of other trees about them; and these, together with the thousands of bats which hang on their branches, all contribute to the awful solemnity of those sepulchral mansions of the ancient chiefs. On our way back Futtaf[=a]ihe told us that all the _fiatookas_ we had seen were built by his ancestors, who also lay interred in them; and as there appeared no reason to doubt the truth of this, it proves that a supreme power in the government of the island must for many generations have been in the family of the Futtaf[=a]ihes: for though there were many _fiatookas_ in the island, the brethren, who had seen most of them, said they were not to be compared to these for magnitude, either in the pile or the stones which compose them."[152] [151] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean,_ p. 252. As to Futtaf[=a]ihe, the Tooitonga or divine chief of their time, the missionaries remark (_l.c._) that "Futtaf[=a]ihe is very superstitious, and himself esteemed as an _odooa_ or god." Here _odooa_ is the Polynesian word which is usually spelled _atua_. Mariner tells us (_Tonga Islands_, ii. 76) that the family name of the Tooitonga was Fatafehi, which seems to be only another way of spelling Futtaf[=a]ihe, the form adopted by the missionaries. Captain Cook similarly gives Futtaf[=a]ihe as the family name of the sacred kings or Tooitongas, deriving the name "from the God so called, who is probably their tutelary patron, and perhaps their common ancestor." See Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 425. [152] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 283-285. The description is accompanied by an engraved plate, which illustrates the three types of tombs mentioned in the text. In the foreground is the stepped pyramid, a massive and lofty structure, its flat top surmounted by a hut. To the right, in the distance, is seen the square walled enclosure, with high stones standing upright at the corners of the walls, and with a hut enclosed in the middle of the square. In the background appears a mound enclosed by a wall and surmounted by a hut. Thus a hut figures as an essential part in each type of tomb. However, Mariner tells us that "they have several _fytocas_ which have no houses on them" (_Tonga Islands_, i. 392 note *). Top. ____________ | | 3 ft. 9 in. | 5-1/2 feet. | _____________| | | 3 ft. 9 in. | 5-1/2 feet. | _____________| | | 3 ft. 9 in. | 5-1/2 feet. | PROFILE OF THE STEPS. _____________| | | 4 feet. | | | | Some thirty years later the tombs of the Tooitongas were visited and described by the French explorer, J. Dumont d'Urville. His description is worth quoting. He says: "I directed my steps to the splendid _faï-tokas_ of the Fata-Faïs. As these monuments are essentially taboo, in the absence of the Tooi-tonga no one looks after their upkeep, and they are now buried on every side among dark masses of trees and almost impenetrable thickets. Hence we had some difficulty in approaching them, and it was impossible for us to get a single general view of the whole of these structures, which must have a somewhat solemn effect when the ground is properly cleared. "For the most part these mausoleums have the form of great rectangular spaces surrounded by enormous blocks of stone, of which some are as much as from fifteen to twenty feet long by six or eight broad and two feet thick. The most sumptuous of these monuments have four or five rows of steps, making up a total height of eighteen or twenty feet. The interior is filled up with shingle and fragments of unhewn coral. One of these _faï-tokas_, which I measured, was a hundred and eighty feet long by a hundred and twenty broad. At one of the upper angles I observed a block of considerable size with a deep cutting in it. I was told that it was the seat of the Tooi-tonga-fafine[153]; it was there that she sat to preside at the ceremony of the funeral of the Tooi-tonga. [153] The Tooi-tonga-fafine (or fefine) was the Tooitonga's sister and ranked above him. Her title means "the lady Tooi-tonga." "Her dignity is very great. She is treated as a kind of divinity. Her rank is too high to allow of her uniting herself in marriage with any mortal: but it is not thought wrong or degrading for her to have a family, and in case of the birth of a daughter the child becomes the _Tamaha_. This lady rises higher than her mother in rank, and is nearer the gods. Every one approaches her with gifts and homage. Her grandfather will bring his offerings and sit down before her, with all humility, like any of the common people. Sick people come to her for cure" (Miss Sarah S. Farmer, _Tonga and the Friendly Islands_, p. 145, apparently from the information of Mr. John Thomas). Captain Cook learned with surprise that Poulaho, the Tooitonga of his time (whom Cook speaks of as the king) acknowledged three women as his superiors. "On our inquiring, who these extraordinary personages were, whom they distinguish by the name and title of _Tammaha_, we were told that the late king, Poulaho's father, had a sister of equal rank, and elder than himself; that she, by a man who came from the island of Feejee, had a son and two daughters; and that these three persons, as well as their mother, rank above Futtafaihe the king. We endeavoured, in vain, to trace the reason of this singular pre-eminence of the _Tammahas_; for we could learn nothing besides this account of their pedigree. The mother and one of the daughters called Tooeela-Kaipa, live at Vavaoo. Latoolibooloo, the son, and the other daughter, whose name is Moungoula-Kaipa, reside at Tongataboo. The latter is the woman who is mentioned to have dined with me on the 21st of June. This gave occasion to our discovering her superiority over the king, who would not eat in her presence, though she made no scruple to do so before him, and received from him the customary obeisance, by touching her foot." See Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 430 _sq._ "Some of these edifices were of an oval form, but they were much smaller. Each of them was surmounted by a small hut, which served as an oratory or house for the spirit of the dead; most of them have been destroyed by the lapse of time, and only traces of them are left scattered on the ground. "The enormous blocks of coral employed in the construction of these monuments have all been brought by sea from Hifo to Mooa. They were got on the shore of the sea at Hifo, were hewn on the spot, and were transported in great canoes; then they were landed at Mooa and drawn on rollers to the place of their destination. These monuments are astonishing evidence of the patience which they must have demanded on the part of these islanders; they were ocular testimony to me of the high degree of civilisation which the natives had reached. Man must have risen to ideas of a much higher order than those of a simple savage before he would take so great pains for the single object of consecrating the memory of his chiefs. "Such tombs are no longer built in Tongataboo: people content themselves with simple mounds surrounded by a row of posts or even an ordinary palisade. However, Singleton assured me that Finow the Younger had erected two great _faï-tokas_ of stone in Vavao, one for the last Tooitonga, and one for his father."[154] [154] J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage de l'Astrolabe, Histoire du Voyage_, iv. (Paris, 1832) pp. 106-108. Singleton was an Englishman, one of the crew of the _Port-au-Prince_, the ship in which Mariner sailed. When Dumont d'Urville visited Tonga, Singleton had lived as a native among the natives for twenty-three years; he was married and had children, and he hoped to end his days in Tongataboo. See J. Dumont d'Urville, _op. cit._ iv. 23 _sq._ The Frenchman, De Sainson, who accompanied Dumont d'Urville on his visit to Tongataboo, has also described the tombs of the Tooitongas at Mooa from personal observation. I will quote his description: "It is in the heart of the forest that the ancient inhabitants of these countries, who idolized their Kings (Tooi-tongas), placed the tombs of that sacred race. These monuments of a more enterprising age still astonish the beholder by their mass and their extent. The _fai-tokas_, as these burial-places are called, are artificial eminences, on the top of which, in the form of a square, are three or four crosses of great granitic blocks arranged as steps, of which each block may be four or five feet high. If there is only a single step on the top of the mound, it is because only a single Tooi-tonga sleeps there in the grave; if the bones of a whole family are deposited in a common tomb, three or four steps, one above the other, mark their union in death. Some of these monuments which contain only a single body are arranged in an oval. I counted more than twelve of these immense structures, and yet we left a great many aside. I counted more than one stone between eight and fifteen feet long; and I conceived a high idea of those men of ancient days who erected over the remains of their kings these imperishable mausoleums, in an island based on coral, where it would be difficult to find a stone of two feet square. I imagined them to be very different from their effeminate descendants, those men of old who went in their canoes more than a hundred and fifty leagues to look for the enormous blocks of which these tombs are built, who cut them without the help of iron, and succeeded, by means unknown, in planting them on these hillocks, where by their own weight they are fixed for ever, like the Druidical monuments of Brittany, which one would say were dropped on earth rather by the magic of talismans than by the power of man. "The present inhabitants of Tonga contemplate with a pious awe the fruit of the labours and patience of their forefathers, without dreaming for a moment of imitating them in their noble enterprises. A distant voyage affrights these degenerate scions of a hardy race, and the great canoes which still survive, sheltered under sheds very skilfully built, are little more than the useless encumbrance of chiefs grown languid in the long peace which has infected the whole people with habits of indolence. "The most recent tombs consist of a small house enclosed on all sides, built on a rising ground, and shaded by a circle of mimosas, a tree sacred to the dead. Most of the illustrious graves are clustered together at Mafanga, a large village of which the whole territory is sacred on account of the hallowed relics which it contains. Along with the corpse they bury at the depth of a few inches small wooden effigies representing persons of both sexes. I had occasion to unearth a few of these little statues, and I remarked in them an astonishing feeling for artistic design."[155] [155] "Extrait du Journal de M. de Sainson," in J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage de l'Astrolabe, Histoire du Voyage_, iv. (Paris, 1832) pp. 361 _sq._ Some sixteen years later a Catholic missionary, living among the heathen population of Tongataboo, wrote thus: "Nothing equals the care which they take in the burial of their dead. As soon as a native has breathed his last, the neighbours are informed, and immediately all the women come to weep about the corpse. Here the men never weep. The body is kept thus for a day or two, during which they are busy building a tomb near the dwelling of the deceased's family. The sepulchral house is neat, built on an eminence, surrounded by a pretty fence of choice bamboos; the enclosure is planted with all kinds of odoriferous shrubs, especially evergreens. Finally, the monument is covered by a roof artistically constructed. For the tombs of kings and the greatest chiefs they go to distant islands to find huge stones to crown the grave. I have seen one twenty-four feet long by eight broad and at least eighteen inches thick. One of these tombs was built by the natives of Wallis Island, who brought the enormous blocks in immense canoes. It is wonderful for these peoples."[156] [156] Jérôme Grange, in _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xvii. (1845) pp. 12 _sq._ Captain Erskine, who visited Tongataboo in 1849, says that "near the landing-place at the village of Holobeka, off which we were lying, we saw overshadowed with trees, one of the _faitokas_, or old burial-places of the country, which, although no longer 'tabu,' are still in some cases used as places of sepulture, and very carefully kept. This one was an oblong square platform a few feet high, surrounded by a stone wall, the interior being beautifully paved with coloured corals and gravel; the house or temple, which Captain Cook and others describe as occupying the centre, having been, I suppose, removed. I saw but one other of these monuments during our stay among the islands, the largest of which stands on several rows of steps, as described by all former visitors."[157] [157] J. E. Erskine, _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_ (London, 1853), p. 130. Thomas West, who lived as a missionary in the Tongan islands from 1846 to 1855, tells us that "chiefs were usually interred in tombs, constructed of blocks of sandstone, cut from suitable localities by the seashore, where, at a little depth from the surface, layers of hard and durable sandstone are found, even on many of the coralline islands. In several of the ancient burial-places, similar stones, arranged in terraces, surround the whole enclosure. Some of these are of immense size, and seem to indicate the possession, on the part of former inhabitants, either of greater energy than the present race, or of better tools and appliances. The burial-places of the Tonguese are always surrounded by the most imposing foliage of the tropics, and placed in sequestered spots. A mound of earth is raised, of dimensions varying with the necessities of the place; and, whenever a grave is opened within the limits of this mound, it is always filled up with beautiful white sand, and never contains more than one body. No particle of clay or earthy mould is allowed to touch the remains of the dead. The sand is brought in baskets by the chief mourners, who sometimes sail or journey many miles to procure it; and each person pours the contents into the grave until it is sufficiently filled up. The top of the grave is, afterwards, carefully tended and decorated with black pebbles and red coral, arranged in various devices, which have a very pretty effect. Small houses are also placed over the tombs of the chiefs and gentry."[158] [158] Thomas West, _Ten Years in South-Central Polynesia_ (London, 1865), pp. 268 _sq._ In more recent years the tombs of the Tooitongas at Mooa have been visited by Sir Basil Thomson, who has described and discussed them.[159] From an anonymous pamphlet called _The Wairarapa Wilderness_, written by the passengers of the s.s. _Wairarapa_ and published in 1884, Sir Basil Thomson quotes a passage containing a description of the tombs, with measurements which, he tells us, are accurate as far as they go. From it I will extract a few particulars. The writers inform us that the tombs are built of blocks of coral which vary in length and thickness; some of the largest they found to be from fifteen to eighteen feet long and from one and a half to two feet thick. The largest measured by them is twenty-two feet long and two feet thick and stands between seven and eight feet above the ground. This great stone, now split in two, is at the middle of the lowest step of one of the pyramidal tombs. The height of the steps varies much in the different pyramids; one step was found to be four feet high. The breadth of each step is three feet or more: it has been carefully levelled and covered with coral gravel. The stones fit very closely and are very regular at top and bottom throughout the tiers. The corners of one pyramid observed by the writers are formed of huge rectangular stones, which seem to have been put in position before they were finally faced. On the upper surface of the largest stone is a deep hollow about the size and shape of a large chestnut mortar. Sir Basil Thomson, who has examined this hollow, believes it to be a natural cavity which has been artificially smoothed by a workman. He suggests that it may have been lined with leaves and used as a bowl for brewing kava at the funeral ceremonies. On one mound the writers of the pamphlet remarked a large flat stone, some five and a half feet square; and in several of the tombs they noticed huge slabs of volcanic stone placed indiscriminately side by side with blocks of coral. The writers measured the bases of three of the tombs and found them to be about two chains (one hundred and thirty-two feet) long by a chain and a half (ninety-nine feet) broad; the base of a fourth was even larger.[160] [159] (Sir) Basil Thomson, _Diversions of a Prime Minister_, pp. 379 _sq._; _id._ "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) pp. 86-88. [160] (Sir) Basil Thomson, "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) pp. 87 _sq._ Surveying these various accounts of the tombs of the Tooitongas or sacred chiefs, we may perhaps conclude that, while the type of tomb varied in different cases, the most characteristic, and certainly the most remarkable, type was that of a stepped or terraced pyramid built of such large blocks of stone as to merit the name of megalithic monuments. So far as I have observed in the accounts given of them, this type of tomb was reserved exclusively for the sacred chiefs, the Tooitongas, whom the Tongans regarded as divine and as direct descendants of the gods. The civil kings, so far as appears, were not buried in these massive pyramids, but merely in stone vaults sunk in the summits of grassy mounds. It is natural, with Sir Basil Thomson,[161] to compare the pyramids of the Tooitongas with the similar structures called _morais_ or _marais_ which are found in Tahiti and the Marquesas islands. Indeed, the very name _morai_ was sometimes applied to them by the Tongans themselves, though more usually they called them _fiatookas_, which was simply the common word for burying-ground.[162] In Tahiti and the Marquesas islands these _marais_ were in like manner truncated pyramids, rising in a series of steps or tiers, built of stones, some of which were large, but apparently not so large as in the corresponding Tongan edifices; for in describing one of the largest of the Tahitian _morais_ or _marais_ Cook mentions only one stone measuring as much as four feet seven inches in length by two feet four in breadth, though he found several three and a half feet long by two and a half feet broad. These dimensions can hardly compare with the size of the blocks in the tombs of the Tooitongas, some of which, as we have seen, measure fifteen, eighteen, and even twenty-two or twenty-four feet in length by eight or twelve feet in height. These Tahitian and Marquesan pyramids are commonly described as temples, and justly so, because the gods were worshipped there and human sacrifices were offered on them.[163] But they were also, like the similar structures in Tonga, used in certain cases for the burial of the dead, or at all events for the preservation of their embalmed bodies. Captain Cook seems even to have regarded the Tahitian _morais_ primarily as burying-grounds and only secondarily as places of worship.[164] In the island of Huahine, one of the Society Islands, the sovereign chiefs were buried in a _marai_, where they lay, we are told, in more than Oriental state.[165] William Ellis, one of our best authorities on the religion of the Tahitians, tells us that "the family, district, or royal _maraes_ were the general depositories of the bones of the departed, whose bodies had been embalmed, and whose skulls were sometimes preserved in the dwelling of the survivors. The _marae_ or temple being sacred, and the bodies being under the guardianship of the gods, were in general considered secure when deposited there. This was not, however, always the case; and in times of war, the victors sometimes not only despoiled the temples of the vanquished, and bore away their idol, but robbed the sacred enclosure of the bones of celebrated individuals."[166] Moerenhout, another good authority on the Tahitian religion, informs us that the _marais_ which belonged to individuals often served as cemeteries and were only the more respected on that account; but he says that in the public _marais_ almost the only persons buried were the human victims offered in sacrifice, and sometimes the priests, who were laid face downwards in the grave, for the curious reason that otherwise the gaze of the dead men would blight the trees and cause the fruit to fall to the ground.[167] [161] (Sir) Basil Thomson, _Diversions of a Prime Minister_, p. 379. [162] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 424. Elsewhere (v. 364) he speaks of "a _morai_ or _fiatooka_"; and shortly afterwards, referring to the same structure, he mentions it as "this _morai_, or what I may as well call temple" (p. 365). As to the equivalence of the words _morai_ and _marai_ (_marae_), see J. A. Moerenhout, _Voyages aux Îles du Grand Océan_ (Paris, 1837), i. 466; and as to the significance of the word in its various dialectical forms, see E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 213, _s.v._ "malae." [163] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, i. 157 _sqq._; J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_ (London, 1788), pp. 543 _sqq._; Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 207 _sqq._; David Porter, _Journal of a Cruise made to the Pacific Ocean_ (New York, 1822), ii. 38 _sq._; D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _Journal of Voyages and Travels_ (London, 1831), i. 240-248, 265 _sqq._, 271, 274, 529 _sq._, ii. 13 _sq._, 38 _sq._; W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, Second Edition (London, 1832-1836), i. 340, 405; J. A. Moerenhout, _Voyages aux Îles du Grand Océan_, i. 466-470; G. H. von Langsdorff, _Reise um die Welt_ (Frankfurt am Mayn, 1812), i. 115, 134; H. Melville, _Typee_ (London, N.D.), pp. 166-169 (_Everyman's Library_); Matthias G----, _Lettres sur les Îles Marquises_ (Paris, 1843), pp. 54 _sq._; C. E. Meinicke, _Die Inseln des Stillen Oceans_ (Leipzig, 1875-1876), i. 49, ii. 180, 183 _sq._; G. Gerland, in Th. Waitz, _Anthropologie_, vi (Leipzig, 1872) pp. 376 _sqq._ [164] Capt. James Cook, _Voyages_, i. 157 _sq._, "Their name for such burying-grounds, which are also places of worship, is _Morai_." Compare _id._, i. 217, 219, 220, 224, vi. 37, 41; J. Turnbull, _Voyage round the World_ (London, 1813), p. 151, "the _morais_, which serve the double purpose of places of worship and receptacles for the dead." Compare J. R. Forster, _Observations_, p. 545, "To ornament the _marais_ and to honour by it the gods and the decayed buried there, the inhabitants plant several sorts of trees near them." [165] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 271. [166] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 405. Elsewhere (p. 401), speaking of the Tahitian burial customs, Ellis observes that "the skull was carefully kept in the family, while the other bones, etc., were buried within the precincts of the family temple." [167] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 470. As to the Tahitian custom of burying the dead in the _marais_, see also C. E. Meinicke, _Die Inseln des Stillen Oceans_, ii. 183 _sq._, according to whom only the bodies of persons of high rank were interred in these sanctuaries. In the Marquesas islands the _morais_ appear to have been also used occasionally or even regularly as burial-places. Langsdorff, one of our earliest authorities on these islands, speaks of a _morai_ simply as a place of burial.[168] He tells us that the mummified bodies of the dead were deposited on scaffolds in the _morai_ or family burial-place, and that the people of neighbouring but hostile districts used to try to steal each other's dead from the _morais_, and deemed it a great triumph when they succeeded in the attempt. To defeat such attempts, when the inhabitants of a district expected to be attacked in force by their enemies, they were wont to remove their dead from the _morai_ and bury them in the neighbourhood.[169] Again, in their monograph on the Marquesas islands, the French writers Vincendon-Dumoulin and Desgraz recognise only the mortuary aspect of the _morais_. They say: "The _morais_, funeral monuments where the bodies are deposited, are set up on a platform of stone, which is the base of all Nukahivan constructions. They are to be found scattered in the whole extent of the valleys; no particular condition seems to be required in the choice of the site. Near the shore of Taïohae is the _morai_ which contains the remains of a brother of the _atepeïou Patini_, an uncle of Moana, who died some years ago, as they tell us."[170] [168] G. H. von Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 115. [169] G. H. von Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 134. [170] Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _Îles Marquises ou Nouka-hiva_ (Paris, 1843), p. 253. Thus to some extent, in function as well as in form, these pyramidical temples of Tahiti and the Marquesas islands corresponded to the megalithic monuments of the Tooitongas or sacred chiefs of Tonga; in fact, they were mausoleums as well as temples. We are not at liberty to assume, with one authority on the Polynesians, that they were mausoleums first and foremost, and that they only developed into temples at a later time.[171] It is possible, on the contrary, that from the outset they were temples dedicated to the worship of the high gods, and that the custom of depositing the dead in them was a later practice adopted for the sake of the protection which these holy places might be expected to afford against the efforts of enemies to carry off and desecrate the remains of the departed. Dr. Rivers propounded a theory that the custom of building these megalithic monuments in the form of pyramids was introduced into the Pacific by a people who brought with them a secret worship of the sun, and he apparently inclined to regard the monuments themselves as at least associated with that worship.[172] The theory can hardly apply to the megalithic monuments of the Tooitongas in Tongataboo; for the evidence which I have adduced seems to render it certain that these monuments were erected primarily as tombs to receive the bodies of the sacred chiefs. It is true that these tombs enjoyed a sacred character and were the scene of worship which justly entitles them to rank as temples; but so far as they were temples, they were devoted to the worship, not of the sun, but of the dead. [171] C. E. Meinicke, _Die Inseln des Stillen Oceans_, ii. 180. [172] W. H. R. Rivers, "Sun-cult and Megaliths in Oceania," _American Anthropologist_, N.S. xvii. (1915) pp. 431 _sqq._ Thus our enquiry into the meaning and origin of these interesting monuments entirely confirms the view of the shrewd and observant Captain Cook that the _fiatookas_, as the Tongans called them, were both places of burial and places of worship. Finally, the evidence which I have cited appears to render it highly probable that these imposing monuments were built, not by a prehistoric people, predecessors of the Tongans in the islands, but by the Tongans themselves; for not only do the people affirm that the tombs were erected by their ancestors, but they have definite traditions of some of the chiefs who built them, and are buried in them; and they still profess to remember some of the islands from which the huge stones were brought to Tongataboo in great double canoes. That the graves of the great chiefs were, like temples, regarded by the people with religious reverence appears plainly from a statement of Mariner. He tells us that a place called Mafanga, in the western part of Tongataboo, being a piece of land about half a mile square, was consecrated ground. "In this spot," he says, "are the graves where the greatest chiefs from time immemorial have been buried, and the place is therefore considered sacred; it would be a sacrilege to fight here, and nobody can be prevented from landing: if the most inveterate enemies meet upon this ground, they must look upon each other as friends, under penalty of the displeasure of the gods, and consequently an untimely death, or some great misfortune. There are several of these consecrated places on different islands."[173] Thus the reverence paid to the tombs of the chiefs was like the reverence paid to the consecrated houses and enclosures of the gods; we have already seen what a sacrilege it was deemed to fight or to pursue an enemy within the consecrated enclosure of a god,[174] and we now learn that it was equally a sacrilege to fight within the ground that was hallowed by the graves of the chiefs. [173] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 88. [174] Above, pp. 74 _sqq._ Mariner has described for us the worship paid by the king and his chiefs to one of the sacred graves at Mafanga. One morning Finow the king, accompanied by several of his chiefs and their ministers (the _matabooles_), landed at Mafanga and immediately proceeded to his father's grave to perform a ceremony called _toogi_. Mariner attended the party and witnessed the ceremony. All who went to participate in it assumed the attire of mourners or suppliants, that is, they wore mats instead of their usual dress and they had wreaths, made of the leaves of the _ifi_ tree, round their necks. They sat down before the grave, and the king and all of them beat their cheeks with their fists for about half a minute without speaking a word. One of the principal ministers (_matabooles_) then addressed the spirit of the king's father to the following effect: "Behold the man (meaning Finow, the king) who has come to Tonga to fight his enemies. Be pleased with him, and grant him thy protection. He comes to battle, hoping he is not doing wrong. He has always held Tooitonga in the highest respect, and has attended to all religious ceremonies with exactness." One of the attendants then went to the king and received from him a piece of kava root, which he laid down on the raised mount before the burial-place (_fytoka_). Several others, who had pieces of kava root in their bosoms, went up to the grave in like manner and deposited them there.[175] [175] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 88 _sq._ Thus the king prayed to the spirit of his dead father at his grave and made an offering at the tomb. What more could he do to a god at his temple? And in general we are told that when a great blessing was desired, or a serious evil deprecated, if the people wished to enjoy health or beget children, to be successful at sea, or victorious in war, they would go to the burial grounds of their great chiefs, clean them up thoroughly, sprinkle the floor with sand, and lay down their offerings.[176] When Finow the king was dying, his friends carried him on a bier, not only to the temples of the great gods Tali-y-Toobo and Tooi-fooa-Bolotoo, where prayers for his recovery were offered; they bore him also to the grave of a chieftainess and invoked her spirit in like manner to pity and spare the expiring monarch.[177] Apparently they thought that the ghost of the chieftainess was quite as able as the great gods to heal the sick and restore the dying. [176] Sarah S. Farmer, _Tonga and the Friendly Islands_, p. 127. [177] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 367. But on no occasion, perhaps, was the assimilation of dead men to gods so conspicuous as at the annual offering of first-fruits, which seems to have been the most impressive of all the yearly rites observed by the Tongans. The ceremony was observed once a year just before the yams in general had arrived at a state of maturity; the yams offered at it were of a kind which admitted of being planted sooner than the others, and which consequently, ripening earlier, were the first-fruits of the yam season. The object of the offering was to ensure the protection of the gods, that their favour might be extended to the welfare of the nation generally, and in particular to the productions of the earth, of which in Tonga yams are the most important. At this solemn ceremony the new yams, slung on poles, were brought from distant islands, carried in procession to the grave of the late Tooitonga, and deposited in front of it, their bearers sitting down beside them. Thereupon one of the ministers (_matabooles_) of the living Tooitonga arose, advanced, and sat down before the grave, a little in front of the men who had brought the yams. Next he addressed the gods generally, and afterwards particularly, mentioning the late Tooitonga and the names of several others. In doing so he returned thanks for their divine bounty in favouring the land with the prospect of a good harvest, and prayed that their beneficence might be continued in future. In this harvest thanksgiving the spirit of the dead Tooitonga seems to have ranked on an equality with the original or superhuman gods; indeed, in a sense he took precedence of them, since the offerings were presented at his grave. The first-fruits, we are told, were offered to the gods in the person of the divine chief Tooitonga.[178] [178] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 196-202, compare p. 78. The ceremony was also witnessed, though not understood, by Captain Cook (_Voyages_, v. 363 _sqq._) and by the first English missionaries (Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 264 _sq._). On the whole we may conclude that, however sharp a distinction was drawn in theory between the old gods, who had always been gods, and the new gods, who had once been men, the line which divided them in practice was wavering and blurred. The dead men and women were fast rising, if they had not already risen, to an equality with the ancient deities. We may even surmise that some of these old gods themselves were human beings, whose original humanity was forgotten. The tombs of the kings and sacred chiefs may be described as megalithic monuments in so far as immense stones were often employed in the construction either of the enclosing walls or of the high steps which led up to the summit of the mound where the grave was dug. It is possible, and indeed probable, that great stones were similarly employed as ornaments or accessories of the consecrated houses or temples of the primary gods, but of such an employment I have met with no express notice among our authorities. So far as their descriptions allow us to judge, these megalithic monuments of the Tongans were purely sepulchral in character; they were dedicated only to the worship of the dead. But there exists at least one other remarkable megalithic monument in these islands of which the original meaning is quite uncertain, and of which consequently we cannot confidently say that it was erected for the sake of honouring or propitiating the spirits of the departed. The monument in question is situated near the eastern extremity of Tongataboo, at a distance of three or four hundred yards from the beach and facing towards the island of Eua. The land on which it stands was the private property of the Tooitongas, whose megalithic tombs are situated some eight or nine miles away to the west. In the intervening country, which is perfectly flat and partly covered with forest, partly under cultivation, there are said to be no other monuments or ruins. It is remarkable that this imposing monument, which naturally impresses the observer by its resemblance to the trilithons or gate-like structures of Stonehenge, should have apparently escaped the observation of Europeans down to the middle of the nineteenth century. It is not mentioned by Cook and Mariner, nor even by those who, like the first missionaries and Dumont d'Urville, described in some detail the tombs of the Tooitongas not many miles off. Perhaps the solitariness of the surrounding country may partly account for their ignorance and silence; for there are said to be few inhabitants in this part of the island and none at all in the immediate neighbourhood of the monument. It seems to have been first discovered by Mr. Philip Hervey of Sydney in 1850 or 1851, but his description of it was not published for some ten years. In August 1852 it was seen by Dr. Charles Forbes, Surgeon of H.M.S. _Calliope_, and his description of it was published by the Society of Antiquaries of London in the following year. In 1865 it was seen and briefly described by Mr. Foljambe of H.M.S. _Curaçoa_. Some twenty years later the passengers of the s.s. _Wairarapa_, on a yachting cruise from New Zealand, visited the spot and published an account of the structure. Still later Sir Basil Thomson examined the monument and discussed its history.[179] [179] See the letter of Dr. Charles Forbes, in _Archaeologia, or Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Antiquity_, xxxv. (London, 1853) p. 496 (with a woodcut); _Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London_ [First Series], iii. 19; _id._ Second Series, i. 287; letter of Philip Hervey, quoted by Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, in _Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London_, Second Series, ii. 75-77; Julius L. Brenchley, _Jottings during the Cruise of H.M.S. "Curaçoa" among the South Sea Islands in 1865_ (London, 1873), p. 132 (with a woodcut); (Sir) Basil Thomson, _Diversions of a Prime Minister_ (Edinburgh and London, 1894), pp. 380-382 (with a woodcut on p. 393); _id._ "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) pp. 81-84 (with a photograph). Views of the monument, taken apparently from photographs, have also been published by Dr. F. H. H. Guillemard (_Australasia_, vol. ii. London, 1894, p. 501), Dr. George Brown (_Melanesians and Polynesians_, London, 1910, plate facing p. 410), and by Mr. S. Percy Smith (_Hawaiki_, Third Edition, Christchurch, N.Z., 1910, pp. 157 _sq._). Dr. W. H. R. Rivers spoke as if there were several trilithons in Tongataboo (_History of Melanesian Society_, ii. 430 _sq._; _id._ "Sun-cult and Megaliths in Oceania," _American Anthropologist_, N.S. xvii., 1915, p. 444); but in this he seems to have been mistaken. So far as I can gather, there is only one of these remarkable monuments in Tongataboo or indeed in the whole of the Pacific. The monument in question is a structure of the type known as a trilithon; that is, it is composed of three large stones, of which two stand upright, while the third rests horizontally on their tops. All three stones are monoliths of hardened coral, rough and much weathered on the surface, and precisely similar to the coral of the neighbouring reefs. Indeed, about halfway between the monument and the beach the coral rock is exposed in a hollow, from which it seems probable that the great blocks were hewn and brought to their present situation. The statement of Mr. Brenchley, that the stone of which the monument consists is not to be found elsewhere on the island, is erroneous. The uprights are quadrangular monoliths neatly squared. No measurements of the stones appear to be on record, but the two uprights are variously estimated to measure from fourteen to sixteen feet in height; their breadth or depth from front to back is variously given as from eight to ten or even twelve feet; but they seem to taper somewhat upwards, for the estimate which assigns twelve feet for the depth of the uprights at their base, mentions seven feet or probably more as their breadth at the top. The thickness of the uprights seems to be four feet. The space between them is variously stated at ten and twelve feet. The cross-stone, which rests on the two uprights, is reported to measure twenty-four feet in length, by four or five feet in depth, and two feet in thickness. Each of the uprights is estimated by Sir Basil Thomson to weigh not less than fifty tons. The tops of both are deeply mortised to receive the cross-stone, the ends of which are sunk into them instead of being laid flat on the top. The cross-stone lies east and west, so that the opening between the uprights faces north and south. On the upper surface of the cross-stone, and at about the middle of it, is a cup-like hollow, very carefully cut, about the size of a coco-nut shell. A large bowl of the same material is said to have formerly stood on the cross-stone, but the statement is not made by an eyewitness and is probably mistaken.[180] [180] For the authorities, see the preceding note. The measurements, to some extent discrepant, are given by Dr. Charles Forbes, Mr. Philip Hervey, and the passengers of s.s. _Wairarapa_, as reported by Sir Basil Thomson _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. 82 _sq._), who had unfortunately mislaid his own notes containing the measurements. The statement that the monument was surmounted by a large bowl is made by Mr. Brenchley, in whose sketch of the structure the bowl figures. But Mr. Brenchley did not himself see the monument, and nobody else appears to have seen the bowl. I suspect that the report of the bowl may have originated in a hasty reading of Mr. Hervey's statement that "on the centre of it [the cross-stone] a small cava bowl is scooped out," though in Mr. Brenchley's account the bowl has seemingly increased in size. Similarly in his report the height of the uprights has grown to about thirty feet, which appears to be just double of their real size. Perhaps Mr. Brenchley's erroneous allegation as to the material of the monument similarly originated in a misunderstanding of Mr. Hervey's statement that "the material is the coral rock, or coral rag which are formed of stone brought from Wallis's Island." The name which the natives give to this megalithic monument is _Haamonga_ or _Ho ha Mo-nga Maui_, which is said to mean "Maui's burden." The name is explained by a story that the god or hero Maui brought the massive stones in a gigantic canoe from Uea (Wallis Island), where the great holes in the rock from which he quarried them may still be seen. From the canoe he bore them on his back to the spot where they now stand.[181] This story can hardly be thought to throw much light on the origin of the monument; for the natives are in the habit of referring the marvels which they do not understand to the action of the god or hero Maui, just as the ancient Greeks fathered many natural wonders on the deified hero Hercules.[182] But from Mateialona, Governor of Haapai and cousin of the King of Tonga, Sir Basil Thomson obtained a tradition of the origin of the stones which is at least free from the miraculous element and connects the monument with Tongan history. The account runs thus: "Concerning the Haamonga of Maui, they say forsooth that a Tui Tonga (the sacred line of chiefs), named Tui-ta-tui, erected it, and that he was so named because it was a time of assassination.[183] And they say that he had it built for him to sit upon during the Faikava (ceremony of brewing kava), when the people sat round him in a circle, and that the king so dreaded assassination that he had this lordly seat built for himself that he might sit out of the reach of his people. And this, they say, is the origin of the present custom of the Faikava, it being now forbidden for any one to sit behind the king." At such wassails the presiding chief sits at the apex of an oval. To this tradition Sir Basil Thomson adds: "Mr. Shirley Baker told me that he believed the Haamonga to have been erected as a _fakamanatu_ (memorial) to the son of some Tui Tonga, a view that finds support in the fondness of Tongan chiefs for originality in the burial ceremonies of their near relations--witness Mariner's account of the funeral of Finau's daughter--but on the other hand native traditions generally have a kernel of truth, and the legend of Tui-ta-tui and its consequences finds an analogy in our own custom of guarding against an assassin's dagger at the drinking of the loving cup."[184] The tradition receives some confirmation from the bowl-like hollow on the upper surface of the cross-stone; for the hollow might have served as the king's drinking-cup to hold his kava at the customary wassails. Indeed, Mr. Philip Hervey, the first to examine the monument, describes the hollow in question as "a small cava bowl";[185] and after giving an account of the monument Mr. Brenchley adds: "Its history seems to be entirely unknown, but it is very natural to suppose from its form that it was connected with some ancient kava ceremonies."[186] [181] Charles Forbes, in _Archaeologia_, xxxv. 496 (who gives _Ho ha Mo-nga Maui_ as the name of the stones); (Sir) Basil Thomson, _Diversions of a Prime Minister_, p. 382; _id._, "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) p. 81 (who gives _Haamonga_ as the native name of the stones). [182] (Sir) Basil Thomson, "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) p. 81. Maui is the great hero of Polynesia, known in nearly every group of islands, generally regarded as a demigod or deified man, but sometimes and in some places rising to the dignity of full godhead. He appears, says Mr. E. Tregear, to unite the classical attributes of Hercules and Prometheus. See E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 233, _s.v._ "Maui." [183] "_Tui-ta-tui, lit._ 'King-strike-King.'" [184] (Sir) Basil Thomson, "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) p. 82. [185] _Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London_, Second Series, ii. 77. [186] Julius L. Brenchley, _Jottings during the Cruise of H.M.S. "Curaçoa" among the South Sea Islands in 1865_ (London, 1873), p. 132. The tradition which connects the erection of the monument with the reign of a Tooitonga named Tui-ta-tui is further countenanced, if not confirmed, by a list of the Tooitongas, in which the name of Tui-ta-tui occurs as the eleventh in descent from the great god Tangaloa.[187] This Tui-ta-tui is believed to have reigned in the thirteenth or fourteenth century of our era.[188] From the size and style of the masonry Sir Basil Thomson is disposed to assign the monument to a later date. He points out that for the quarrying and mortising of stones that weigh some fifty tons apiece the craft of stone-cutting must have been fully developed; and from a comparison of the megalithic tombs of the Tooitongas which can be approximately dated, he infers that the craft of stone-cutting in Tonga reached its culmination at the end of the seventeenth century, though it was still practised down to the beginning of the nineteenth century; for Mariner tells us that in his time a professional class of masons was set apart for building the stone sepulchral vaults of chiefs.[189] Yet on the whole Sir Basil Thomson concludes that "when one is left to choose between a definite native tradition on the one hand and probability on the other for the assignment of a date, I would prefer the tradition. If the Tongans had invented the story as a mere expression for antiquity they would not have pitched upon Tui-ta-tui, about whom nothing else is recorded, in preference to Takalaua, Kau-ulu-fonua-fekai, or any of the kings who loom large in traditionary history. Whether the Haamonga was built for a throne or for a memorial, doubtless it is connected with the reign of Tui-ta-tui, who lived in the fourteenth century."[190] [187] (Sir) Basil Thomson, _Diversions of a Prime Minister_, p. 395. In this work the author prints a list of the Tooitongas "as given by Mr. E. Tregear on the authority of the Rev. J. E. Moulton." [188] (Sir) Basil Thomson, "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) p. 83; S. Percy Smith, _Hawaiki_, p. 158. [189] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 266. As to the size of the stones, Mariner says, "The stones used for this purpose are about a foot in thickness, and are cut of the requisite dimensions, out of the stratum found on the beaches of some of the islands." [190] (Sir) Basil Thomson, "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) pp. 83 _sq._ As an alternative to the view that the hollow on the cross-stone was a kava bowl Dr. Rivers suggests that it "may have been destined to receive the skull and other bones of the dead, so often preserved in Polynesia."[191] The suggestion accords well with the opinion that the monument is a memorial of the dead, and it might be supported by the Samoan practice of severing a dead chief's head from his body and burying it separately, to save it from being dug up and desecrated by enemies in time of war.[192] However, Dr. Rivers is careful to add that such a practice is not recorded in Tonga and appears to be incompatible with the mode of sepulture which prevails there. [191] W. H. R. Rivers, _History of Melanesian Society_, ii. 431. [192] See below, p. 212. In this connexion another megalithic monument of the Tonga islands deserves to be considered, though it appears to have been commonly overlooked. It was observed by Captain Cook in the island of Lefooga (Lifuka). He says: "Near the south end of the island, and on the west side, we met with an artificial mount. From the size of some trees that were growing upon it, and from other appearances, I guessed that it had been raised in remote times. I judged it to be about forty feet high; and the diameter of its summit measured fifty feet. At the bottom of this mount stood a stone, which must have been hewn out of coral rock. It was four feet broad, two and a half thick, and fourteen high; and we were told by the natives present, that not above half its length appeared above ground. They called it _Tangata Arekee_;[193] and said, that it had been set up, and the mount raised, by some of their forefathers, in memory of one of their kings; but how long since, they could not tell."[194] [193] "_Tangata_, in their language, is man; _Arekee_, king." [194] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 298 _sq._ To this description of the monument Sir Basil Thomson has called attention; he rightly classes it with the tombs of the chiefs. See his "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) p. 85. When we remember that Tongan kings were commonly buried in such mounds as Captain Cook here describes, and further that these mounds were commonly enclosed or faced with great blocks of hewn stone, we may be disposed to accept as reasonable and probable the explanation which the natives gave of this great monolith, which, if the reported measurements of it are correct, must have been no less than twenty-eight feet high. If it was indeed a memorial of a dead king, it might be thought to strengthen the view that the great trilithon was also set up as a monument to a deceased monarch or Tooitonga. Another possible explanation of the trilithon is, as Sir Basil Thomson points out, that it served as a gateway to some sacred spot inland. But against this view he observes that he examined the bush for some distance in the neighbourhood without finding any trace of ruins or stones of any kind. He adds that the memory of sacred spots dies very hard in Tonga, and that the natives do not believe the trilithon to have been a gateway.[195] [195] (Sir) Basil Thomson, "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) pp. 81 _sq._ It is natural to compare the trilithon of Tongataboo with the famous trilithons of Stonehenge, which it resembles in plan and to which it is comparable in size. The resemblance struck Dr. Charles Forbes, the first to publish a description of the monument based on personal observation. He says: "The route we pursued led us over a country perfectly level, with the exception of occasional mounds of earth, apparently artificial, and reminding one very much of the barrows of Wilts and Dorset, which idea is still more strongly impressed upon the mind on coming in sight of the monument, which bears a most striking resemblance to the larger gateway-looking stones at Stonehenge."[196] But at the same time, as Dr. Forbes did not fail to note, the Tongan trilithon differs in some respects from those of Stonehenge. In the first place the interval (ten or twelve feet) between the uprights of the Tongan trilithon appears to be much greater than the interval between the uprights of the trilithons at Stonehenge.[197] In the second place, the cross-stone of the Tongan trilithon is mortised much more deeply into the uprights than are the cross-stones at Stonehenge. For whereas at Stonehenge these cross-stones present the appearance of being laid flat on the top of the uprights, the cross-stone of the Tongan trilithon is sunk deeply into the uprights by means of mortises or grooves about two feet wide which are cut into the uprights, so that the top of the cross-stone is nearly flush with their tops, while its ends also are nearly flush with their outside surfaces.[198] [196] Dr. Charles Forbes, in _Archaeologia_, xxxv. p. 496. [197] I have no measurements of these intervals, but write from the impression of a recent visit to Stonehenge. [198] (Sir) Basil Thomson, "Notes upon the Antiquities of Tonga," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) p. 82, quoting the anonymous pamphlet _The Wairarapa Wilderness_. As the origin and purpose of Stonehenge are still unknown, its massive trilithons can hardly be cited to explain the similar monument of Tongataboo. The rival theories which see in Stonehenge a memorial of the dead and a temple of the sun[199] are equally applicable or inapplicable to the Tongan monument. In favour of the mortuary character of this solitary trilithon it might be urged that the Tongans were long accustomed to erect megalithic monuments, though of a different type, at the tombs of their sacred kings, which are situated not many miles away; but against this view it may be argued that there are no traces of burial or graves in the immediate neighbourhood, and that native tradition, not lightly to be set aside, assigns a different origin to the monument. Against the solar interpretation of the trilithon it may be alleged, first, that the monument faces north and south, not east and west, as it might be expected to do if it were a temple of the sun or a gateway leading into such a temple; second, that, while a circle of trilithons, as at Stonehenge, with an opening towards the sunrise may be plausibly interpreted as a temple of the sun, such an interpretation cannot so readily be applied to a solitary trilithon facing north and south; and, third, that no trace of sun-worship has been discovered in the Tonga islands. So far as I have observed, the Tongan pantheon is nowhere said to have included a sun-god, and the Tongans are nowhere reported to have paid any special respect to the sun. Savages in general, it may be added, appear to be very little addicted to sun-worship; it is for the most part among peoples at a much higher level of culture, such as the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Peruvians, that solar worship becomes an important, or even the predominant, feature of the national faith.[200] Perhaps the impulse to it came rather from the meditations of priestly astronomers than from the random fancies of common men. Some depth of thought was needed to detect in the sun the source of all life on earth; the immutable regularity of the great luminary's movements failed to rouse the interest or to excite the fear of the savage, to whom the elements of the unusual, the uncertain, and the terrible are the principal incentives to wonder and awe, and hence to reflexion. We are all naturally more impressed by extraordinary than by ordinary events; the fine edge of the mind is dulled by familiarity in the one case and whetted by curiosity in the other. [199] Lord Avebury, _Prehistoric Times_, Seventh Edition (London, 1913), pp. 132 _sqq._; Sir Norman Lockyer, _Stonehenge and other British Stone Monuments astronomically considered_ (London, 1906); C. Schuchhardt, "Stonehenge," _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, xlii. (1910), pp. 963-968; _id._ in _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, xliii. (1911) pp. 169-171; _id_., in _Sitzungsberichte der königl. preuss. Akademie der Wissenschaften_, 1913, pp. 759 _sqq._ (for the sepulchral interpretation); W. Pastor, "Stonehenge," _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, xliii. (1911) pp. 163-(for the solar interpretation). [200] Adolph Bastian observed that "sun-worship, which people used to go sniffing about to discover everywhere, is found on the contrary only in very exceptional regions or on lofty table-lands of equatorial latitude." See his book, _Die Voelker des Oestlichen Asien_, iv. (Jena, 1868) p. 175. Nobody, probably, has ever been better qualified than Bastian to pronounce an opinion on such a subject; for his knowledge of the varieties of human thought and religion, acquired both by reading and travel, was immense. It is only to be regretted that through haste or negligence he too often gave out the fruits of his learning in a form which rendered it difficult to sift and almost impossible to digest them. Yet from his storehouse he brought forth a treasure, of which we may say what Macaulay said of the scholarship of Parr, that it was "too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious, massive, and splendid." Bearing in mind the numerous other stone monuments scattered widely over the islands of the Pacific, from the Carolines to Easter Island, Dr. Guillemard concludes that some race, with a different, if not a higher civilisation preceded the Polynesian race in its present homes, and to this earlier race he would apparently refer the erection of the trilithon in Tongataboo.[201] He may be right. Yet when we consider, first, the native tradition of the setting up of the trilithon by one of the sacred kings of Tonga; second, the practice of the Tongans of building megalithic tombs for these same sacred kings; and, third, the former existence in Tonga of a professional class of masons whose business it was to construct stone vaults for the burial of chiefs,[202] we may hesitate to resort to the hypothesis of an unknown people in order to explain the origin of a monument which the Tongans, as we know them, appear to have been quite capable of building for themselves. [201] F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. 500. [202] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 266. § 11. _Rites of Burial and Mourning_ The only mode of disposing of the dead which was practised in the Tonga islands seems to have been burial in the earth. So far as appears, the corpse was not doubled up, but laid at full length in the grave; at all events I have met with no mention of burying a corpse in a contracted posture; and Captain Cook says that "when a person dies, he is buried, after being wrapped up in mats and cloth, much after our manner." He adds that, while chiefs had the special burial-places called _fiatookas_ appropriated to their use, common people were interred in no particular spot.[203] So far as I have observed, none of our authorities speak of a practice of embalming the dead or of giving the bodies any particular direction in the grave. [203] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 421. After a death the mourners testified their sorrow by dressing in old ragged mats and wearing green leaves of the _ifi_ tree round their necks. Thus attired they would repair to the tomb, where, on entering the enclosure, they would pull off the green twigs from their necks and throw them away; then sitting down they would solemnly drink kava.[204] Further, they accompanied their cries and ejaculations of grief and despair by inflicting on their own bodies many grievous wounds and injuries. They burned circles and scars on their bodies, beat their teeth with stones, struck shark's teeth into their heads till the blood flowed in streams, and thrust spears into the inner part of the thigh, into their sides below the arm-pits, and through the cheeks into the mouth.[205] Women in wailing would cut off their fingers, and slit their noses, their ears, and their cheeks.[206] At the funerals of the kings especially the mourners indulged in frantic excesses of self-torture and mutilation. Of two such funerals we have the detailed descriptions of eye-witnesses who resided in the islands at a time when the natives were as yet practically unaffected by European influence. King Moom[=o]oe died in April 1797, and the first missionaries to Tonga witnessed and described his funeral. They have told how, when the corpse was being carried in procession to a temporary house near the royal burial-ground (_fiatooka_), it was preceded by relatives of the deceased in the usual mourning garb, who cut their heads with shark's teeth till the blood streamed down their faces. A few days later, when the burial was to take place, the missionaries found about four thousand people assembled at the mound where the body was to be interred. In a few minutes they heard a great shouting and blowing of conch-shells, and soon after there appeared about a hundred men, armed with clubs and spears, who, rushing into the area, began to cut and mangle themselves in a most dreadful manner. Many struck their heads such violent blows with their clubs that the sound could be heard thirty or forty yards off, and they repeated them till the blood ran down in streams. Others, who had spears, thrust them through their thighs, arms, and cheeks, all the while calling on the deceased in a most affecting manner. A native of Fiji, who had been a servant of the late king, appeared quite frantic; he entered the area with fire in his hand, and having previously oiled his hair, he set it ablaze, and ran about with it all on flame. When they had satisfied or exhausted themselves with this manner of torment, they sat down, beat their faces with their fists, and then retired. A second party then inflicted on themselves the same cruelties. A third party next entered, shouting and blowing shells; four of the foremost held stones, which they used to knock out their teeth, while those who blew the shells employed them as knives with which they hacked their heads in a shocking manner. A man who had a spear pierced his arm with it just above the elbow, and with it sticking fast in his flesh ran about the area for some time. Another, who seemed to be a principal chief, acted as if quite bereft of his senses; he ran to every corner of the area, and at each station beat his head with a club till the blood flowed down on his shoulders. At this point the missionary, unable to bear the sight of these self-inflicted tortures, quitted the scene. When his colleagues visited the place some hours later in the afternoon, they found the natives of both sexes still at the dreadful work of cutting and mangling themselves. In the course of these proceedings a party of mourners entered the area, sixteen of whom had recently cut off their little fingers. They were followed by another party with clubs and spears, who battered and wounded themselves in the usual fashion, and also disfigured their faces with coco-nut husks, which they had fastened to the knuckles of both hands. The missionaries noticed that the mourners who were either related to the dead king or had held office under him, were the most cruel to themselves; some of them thrust two, three, and even four spears into their arms, and so danced round the area, while others broke off the spear-heads in their flesh.[207] [204] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 345 _sq._ As to the mourning costume of mats and leaves, see also Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, p. 240; W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 380, 392, 431, ii. 214 _sq._ [205] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_ v. 420. [206] Jérôme Grange, in _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xvii. (1845) p. 13. [207] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 242-244. Similar scenes were witnessed some years later by Mariner at the death and burial of Finow, another king of Tonga; and the Englishman has described from personal observation how on this occasion the mourners cut and wounded their heads and bodies with clubs, stones, knives, or sharp shells. This they did on one or other of the _malais_[208] or ceremonial grounds in the presence of many spectators, vying apparently with each other in the effort to surpass the rest in this public manifestation of their sorrow for the death of the king and their respect for his memory. As one ran out into the middle of the ground he would cry, "Finow! I know well your mind; you have departed to Bolotoo, and left your people under suspicion that I, or some of those about you, were unfaithful; but where is the proof of infidelity? where is a single instance of disrespect?" Then, inflicting violent blows and deep cuts on his head with a club, stone, or knife, he would again exclaim at intervals, "Is this not a proof of my fidelity? does this not evince loyalty and attachment to the memory of the departed warrior?" Some more violent than others cut their heads to the skull with such heavy and repeated blows that they reeled and lost their reason for a time.[209] The king's successor, Finow the Second, not content with the usual instruments of torture, employed a saw for the purpose, striking his skull with the teeth so violently that he staggered for loss of blood; but this he did, not at the time of the burial and in presence of the multitude, but some weeks later at a more private ceremony of mourning before the grave.[210] At the public ceremony the late king's fishermen varied the usual breaking of heads and slashing of bodies by a peculiar form of self-torment. Instead of clubs they appropriately carried the paddles of canoes, with which they battered their heads in the orthodox style; but besides every man of them had three arrows stuck through each cheek in a slanting direction, so that, while the points pierced through the cheeks into the mouth, the other ends went over the shoulder and were kept in position by another arrow, the point of which was tied to the ends of the arrows passing over one shoulder, while the other end was tied to the ends of the other arrows which passed over the other shoulder. Thus each fisherman was decorated with a triangle of arrows, of which the apex consisted of six arrow-heads in his mouth, while the base dangled on his back. With this remarkable equipment they walked round the grave, beating their faces and heads with their paddles, or pinching up the skin of the breast and sticking a spear right through it.[211] [208] Mariner defines a _malai_ as "a piece of ground, generally before a large house, or chief's grave, where public ceremonies are principally held" (_Tonga Islands_, vol. ii., "Vocabulary" _s.v._). It is the same word as _malae_ or _marae_, noticed above, p. 116, note^3. [209] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 379-384. [210] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 440-442. [211] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 404 _sq._ The grave of a chief's family was a vault paved with a single large stone, while the four walls were formed each of a single block. The vault was about eight feet long, six feet broad, and eight feet deep, and was covered at the top by one large stone.[212] So heavy was this covering stone that, as we have seen, from a hundred and fifty to two hundred men were required to lift and lower it.[213] Mariner estimated that the family vault in which King Finow was interred was large enough to hold thirty bodies. When the king's corpse was being deposited in it, Mariner saw two dry and perfectly preserved bodies lying in the vault, together with the bones of several others; and he was told by old men that the well-preserved bodies had been buried when they, his informants, were boys, which must have been upwards of forty years before; whereas the bodies of which nothing but the bones remained had been buried later. The natives attributed the exceptional preservation of the two to the better constitution of their former owners; Mariner, or more probably his editor, Dr. Martin, preferred to suppose that the difference was due to the kind or duration of the disease which had carried them off. Apparently the natives did not suggest that the bodies had been embalmed, which they would almost certainly have done if they had known of such a custom.[214] No sooner was the king's body deposited in the grave, and the great stone lowered over it, than certain ministers (_matabooles_) and warriors ran like men frantic round and round the burial-ground, exclaiming, "Alas! how great is our loss! Finow! you are departed; witness this proof of our love and loyalty!" At the same time they cut and bruised their own heads with clubs, knives, and axes in the usual fashion.[215] Afterwards the grave was filled up with earth and strewed with sand, which a company of women and men had brought for the purpose in baskets from a place at the back of the island; what remained of the sand was scattered over the sepulchral mound (_fytoca_), of which it was deemed a great embellishment. The inside of the burial-ground was then spread with mats made of coco-nut leaves.[216] [212] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 144 note *. [213] See above, p. 105. [214] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 388 note *. [215] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 388 _sq._ [216] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 389-392. Meantime the company of mourners had been seated on the green before the burial-ground, still wearing their mourning garb of mats, with leaves of the _ifi_ tree strung round their necks. They now arose and went to their homes, where they shaved their heads and burnt their cheeks with a lighted roll of bark-cloth, by applying it once upon each cheek-bone; next they rubbed the place with an astringent berry, which caused it to bleed, and afterwards they smeared the blood in a broad circle round the wound, giving themselves a very ghastly appearance. They repeated this friction with the berry every day, making the wound bleed afresh; and the men meanwhile neglected to shave and to oil themselves during the day, though they indulged in these comforts at night. Having burnt their cheeks and shaved their heads, they built for themselves small temporary huts, where they lived during the time of mourning, which lasted twenty days.[217] [217] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 392 _sq._ The women who had become tabooed, that is, in a state of ceremonial pollution, by touching the king's dead body, remained constantly within the burial-ground for the twenty days of mourning, except when they retired to one of the temporary huts to eat,[218] or rather to be fed by others. For it was a rule that no ordinary person, man or woman, could touch a dead chief without being tabooed, that is ceremonially polluted, for ten lunar months, during which time he or she might not touch food with their own hands. But for chiefs the period of pollution was limited to three, four, or five months, according to the superiority of the dead chief. Only when the dead body which they had touched was that of the sacred chief, the Tooitonga, they were all tabooed for ten months, however high their rank; for example, the king's wife was tabooed for that length of time during the residence of Mariner, because she had touched the dead body of the Tooitonga. During the time that a person was tabooed, he might not feed himself with his own hands, but must be fed by somebody else: he might not even use a toothpick himself, but might guide another person's hand holding the toothpick. If he was hungry and had no one to feed him, he must go down on his hands and knees, and pick up his victuals with his mouth; and if he infringed any of these rules, it was firmly expected that he would swell up and die.[219] Captain Cook observed this custom in operation at Tongataboo. On one of his walks he met with a party of women at supper, and noticed that two of them were being fed by others. On asking the reason, he was answered _taboo mattee_, that is, "Death taboo." It was explained to him that one of the women had washed the dead body of a chief two months before, and that consequently she might not handle any food for five months. The other had performed the same office for the corpse of another person of inferior rank, and was now under the same restriction, but not for so long a time.[220] The tabooed women at Finow's grave were supplied with food by the new king, Finow the Second. The food was brought and placed on the ground at some distance from the grave, or else it was deposited before the temporary house to which the chief of the tabooed women retired to be fed. With the provisions was also sent every day a supply of torches to light up the burial-ground by night. The torches were held up by a woman of inferior rank, who, when she was tired, was relieved in her office by another. During the twenty days of mourning, if any one passed the burial-ground, he had to go at a slow pace, with his head bowed down, and his hands clasped before him; and if he carried a burden, he must lower it from his shoulder and carry it in his hands or on his bended arms; but if he could not do so conveniently, he had to make a circuit to avoid the grave. [218] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 393. [219] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 141 note *. [220] Captain James Cook, _Voyages_, v. 336. The writer does not translate the expression _taboo mattee_; but _mate_ is the regular Tongan word for "death" or "to die." See Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, Vocabulary, _s.v._ "Mate." Compare E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 228, _s.v._ "Mate." Such were the regular observances at the death and burial of chiefs; they were not peculiar to the obsequies of Finow the king.[221] [221] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 394 _sq._ The twentieth day of mourning concluded the ceremonies in honour of the deceased monarch. Early in the morning all his relations, together with the members of his household, and also the women who were tabooed on account of having touched his dead body in the process of oiling and preparing it, went to the back of the island to procure a quantity of flat pebbles, principally white, but a few black, which they brought back in baskets to the grave. There they strewed the inside of the house and the outside of the burial-ground (_fytoca_) with the white pebbles as a decoration; the black pebbles they laid only on the top of those white ones which covered the ground directly over the body, to about the length and breadth of a man, in the form of a very eccentric ellipse. After that, the house on the burial mound was closed up at both ends with a reed fencing, which reached from the eaves to the ground; while at the front and the back the house was closed with a sort of basket-work, made of the young branches of the coco-nut tree, split and interwoven in a very curious and ornamental way. These fences were to remain until the next burial, when they would be taken down and, after the conclusion of the ceremony, replaced by new ones of similar pattern. A large quantity of food and kava was now sent by the chiefs and the king to the public place (_malai_) in front of the burial mound, and these provisions were served out among the people in the usual way. The company then separated and repaired to their respective houses, to prepare for the dances and the grand wrestling-match, which were to conclude the funeral rites.[222] [222] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ i. 401-403. During the intervals of the dances, which followed, several warriors and ministers (_matabooles_) ran before the grave, cutting and bruising their heads with axes, clubs, and so forth as proofs of fidelity to their late chief, the dead and buried King Finow. It was on this occasion that the deceased king's fishermen demonstrated their loyalty and attachment to his memory by the self-inflicted tortures which I have already described.[223] When these exhibitions of cruelty were over, the day's ceremonies, which altogether lasted about six hours, were terminated by a grand wrestling-match. That being over, the people dispersed to their respective houses or occupations, and the obsequies of Finow, king of the Tonga islands, came to an end.[224] [223] Above, pp. 135 _sq._ [224] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 403-405. The wrestling-match which wound up the funeral honours paid to the departed monarch would seem not to have been an isolated case of athletic sports held at this particular funeral. Apparently it was a general custom in Tonga to conclude burial-rites with games of this kind. At least we may infer as much from an expression made use of by the first missionaries to Tongataboo. They say that the chief of their district, after taking to himself a wife in the morning went in the afternoon "to finish the funeral ceremonies for his brother, in celebrating the games usual on that occasion."[225] The practice, which is apt to seem to us incongruous, of holding games at a funeral, was observed by the Greeks in antiquity and by not a few other peoples in modern times.[226] [225] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, p. 265. [226] _The Golden Bough_, Part III., _The Dying God_, pp. 92 _sqq._ On the other hand the obsequies of the sacred or divine chief, the Tooitonga, differed in certain remarkable particulars from the posthumous honours generally paid to chiefs. It is true that his burial-place was of the same form as that of other chiefs, and that the mode of his interment did not differ essentially from theirs, except that it was customary to deposit some of his most valuable property with him in the grave, including his beads, whale's teeth, fine Samoan mats, and other articles. Hence the family burying-place of the Tooitongas in the island of Tongataboo, where the whole line of these pontiffs had been interred, must have become very rich in the course of time; for no native would dare to commit the sacrilege of stealing the treasures at the holy tomb.[227] However, the sacrifice of property to the dead seems not to have been, as Mariner supposed, peculiar to the funeral of the Tooitonga; for at the burial of King Moom[=o]oe, in May 1797, the first missionaries saw files of women and men bringing bags of valuable articles, fine mats, and bales of cloth, which they deposited in the tomb expressly as a present for the dead.[228] Again, the mourning costume worn for the Tooitonga was the same as that for any chief, consisting of ragged old mats on the body and leaves of the _ifi_ tree round the neck; but in the case of the Tooitonga the time of mourning was extended to four months, the mats being generally left off after three months, while the leaves were still retained for another month; and the female mourners remained within the burial-ground (_fytoca, fiatooka_) for about two months, instead of twenty days, only retiring occasionally to temporary houses in the neighbourhood to eat or for other necessary purposes.[229] [227] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 213 _sq._ [228] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, p. 243. [229] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ ii. 214 _sq._ One very remarkable peculiarity in the mourning for a Tooitonga was that, though he ranked above the king and all other chiefs, the mourners strictly abstained from manifesting their grief by wounding their heads and cutting their bodies in the manner that was customary at the funerals of all other great men. Mariner was never able to learn the reason for this abstention.[230] [230] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 213. Other peculiar features in the obsequies of a Tooitonga were the following. In the afternoon of the day of burial, when the body of the Tooitonga was already within the burial-ground, almost every man, woman, and child, all dressed in the usual mourning garb, and all provided with torches, used to sit down about eighty yards from the grave; in the course of an hour a multitude of several thousands would thus assemble. One of the female mourners would then come forth from the burial-ground and call out to the people, saying, "Arise ye, and approach"; whereupon the people would get up, and advancing about forty yards would again sit down. Two men behind the grave now began to blow conch-shells, and six others, with large lighted torches, about six feet high, advanced from behind the burial-ground, descended the mound, and walked in single file several times between the burial-ground and the people, waving their flaming torches in the air. After that they began to ascend the mound, whereupon all the people rose up together and made a loud crashing noise by snapping their _bolatas_, which were pieces of the stem of a banana tree used to receive the ashes falling from lighted torches. Having done so, the people followed the torch-bearers in single file up the mound and walked in procession round about the tomb (_fytoca_). As they passed at the back of the tomb, they all, torch-bearers and people, deposited their extinguished torches on the ground; while the female mourners within thanked them for providing these things. Having thus marched round, the people returned to their places and sat down. Thereupon the master of the ceremonies came forward and ordered them to divide themselves into parties according to their districts; which being done he assigned to one party the duty of clearing away the bushes and grass from one side of the grave, and to another party a similar task in regard to another side of the grave, while a third party was charged to remove rubbish, and so forth. In this way the whole neighbourhood of the burial-ground was soon cleared, and when this was done, all the people returned to the temporary houses which, as mourners, they were bound to occupy.[231] [231] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 215-217. Soon after darkness had fallen, certain persons stationed at the grave began again to sound the conches, while others chanted a song, or rather recitative, partly in the Samoan dialect, partly in an unknown language, of which the natives could give no account. None of them understood the words, nor could they explain how their forefathers came to learn them. All that they knew was that the words had been handed down from father to son among the class of people whose business it was to direct burial ceremonies. According to Mariner, some of the words were Tongan, and he thought that the language was probably an old or corrupt form of Tongan, though he could make no sense out of it. Such traditional repetition of a litany in an unknown tongue is not uncommon among savages; it occurs, for instance, very frequently among some of the aboriginal tribes of Australia, where the chants or recitatives accompanying certain dances or ceremonies are often passed on from one tribe to another, the members of which perform the borrowed dance or ceremony and repeat by rote the borrowed chants or recitatives without understanding a word of them.[232] [232] W. E. Roth, _Ethnological Studies among the North-west-central Queensland Aborigines_ (Brisbane and London, 1897), pp. 117 _sq._; (Sir) Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_ (London, 1904), pp. 234, 235; _id._, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_ (London, 1899), p. 281 note; _id._, _Across Australia_ (London, 1912), i. 244. While the conches were sounding and the voices of the singers broke the silence of night, about sixty men assembled before the grave, where they awaited further orders. When the chanting was over, and the notes of the conches had ceased to sound, one of the women mourners came forward, and sitting down outside the graveyard addressed the men thus: "Men! ye are gathered here to perform the duty imposed on you; bear up, and let not your exertions be wanting to accomplish the work." With these words she retired into the burial-ground. The men now approached the mound in the dark, and, in the words of Mariner, or his editor, performed their devotions to Cloacina, after which they withdrew. As soon as it was daylight the next morning, the women of the first rank, wives and daughters of the greatest chiefs, assembled with their female attendants, bringing baskets and shells wherewith to clear up the deposit of the preceding night; and in this ceremonious act of humility no lady of the highest rank refused to take her part. Some of the mourners in the burial-ground generally came out to assist, so that in a very little while the place was made perfectly clean. This deposit was repeated the fourteen following nights, and as punctually cleared away by sunrise every morning. No persons but the agents were allowed to be witnesses of these extraordinary ceremonies; at least it would have been considered highly indecorous and irreligious to pry upon them. On the sixteenth day, early in the morning, the same women again assembled, but now they were dressed in the finest bark-cloth and beautiful Samoan mats, decorated with ribbons and with wreaths of flowers round their necks; they also brought new baskets, ornamented with flowers, and little brooms very tastefully made. Thus equipped, they approached and acted as if they had the same task to perform as before, pretending to clear up the dirt, and to take it away in their baskets, though there was no dirt to remove. Then they returned to the capital and resumed their mourning dress of mats and leaves. Such were the rites performed during the fifteen days; every day the ceremony of the burning torches was also repeated.[233] [233] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 217-219. For one month from the day of burial, greater or less quantities of provisions were brought every day and shared out to the people. On the first day the quantity supplied was prodigious; but day by day the supply gradually diminished till on the last day it was reduced to very little.[234] Nevertheless the consumption or waste of food on such occasions was so great that to guard against a future dearth of provisions it was deemed necessary to lay a prohibition or taboo on the eating of hogs, fowls, and coco-nuts for a period of eight or ten months, though two or three plantations were exempted from this rigorous embargo, to the end that in the meantime hogs, fowls, and coco-nuts might be furnished for occasional religious rites, and that the higher order of chiefs might be able to partake of these victuals. At the end of the eight or ten months' fast the taboo was removed and permission to eat of the forbidden foods was granted by the king at a solemn ceremony. Immense quantities of yams having been collected and piled up in columns, and some three or four hundred hogs having been killed, the people assembled from all quarters at the king's _malái_ or public place. Of the slaughtered hogs about twenty were deposited, along with a large quantity of yams, at the grave of the deceased Tooitonga. The rest of the provisions were shared out in definite proportions among the gods, the king, the divine chief (the living Tooitonga), the inferior chiefs, and the people, so that every man in the island of Tongataboo got at least a mouthful of pork and yam. The ceremony concluded with dancing, wrestling, and other sports, after which every person retired to his home with his portion of food to share it with his family. The hogs and yams deposited at the dead Tooitonga's grave were left lying till the pork stank and the yams were rotten, whereupon the living Tooitonga ordered that they should be distributed to all who chose to apply for a portion. In strict law they belonged to the principal chiefs, but as these persons were accustomed to feed on meat in a rather less advanced stage of decomposition they kindly waived their claims to the putrid pork and rotten yams in favour of the lower orders, who were less nice in their eating.[235] [234] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, ii. 220. [235] W. Mariner, _Tonga Islands_, i. 112 _sq._, 120-126, ii. 220. It was customary that the chief widow of the Tooitonga should be strangled and interred with his dead body.[236] But the practice of strangling a wife at her husband's funeral was not limited to the widows of the Tooitongas. A similar sacrifice seems to have been formerly offered at the obsequies of a king; for at the funeral of King Moomöoe the first missionaries to Tonga saw two of the king's widows being led away to be strangled.[237] [236] W. Mariner, _op. cit._ ii. 135, 209 _sq._, 214. [237] Captain James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, p. 240. The funeral and mourning customs which we have passed in review serve to illustrate the Tongan conceptions of the soul and of its survival after death. The strangling of widows was probably intended here as elsewhere to despatch their spirits to attend their dead husbands in the spirit land;[238] and the deposition of valuable property in the grave can hardly have had, at least in origin, any other object than to ensure the comfort of the departed in the other world, and incidentally, perhaps, to remove from him any temptation to return to his sorrowing friends in this world for the purpose of recovering the missing articles. The self-inflicted wounds and bruises of the mourners were clearly intended to impress the ghost with the sincerity of their regret at his departure from this sublunary scene; if any doubt could linger in our minds as to the intention of these extravagant proceedings, it would be set at rest by the words with which, as we have seen, the mourners accompanied them, calling on the dead man to witness their voluntary tortures and to judge for himself of the genuineness of their sorrow. In this connexion it is to be borne in mind that all dead noblemen, in the opinion of the Tongans, were at once promoted to the rank of deities; so that it was in their power to visit any disrespect to their memory and any defalcation of their dues with the double terror of ghosts and of gods. No wonder that the Tongans sought to keep on good terms with such mighty beings by simulating, when they did not feel, a sense of the irreparable loss which the world had sustained by their dissolution. [238] This was the reason assigned for the strangling of widows at their husband's funeral in Fiji. See John Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, pp. 478 _sq._ § 12. _The Ethical Influence of Tongan Religion_ Surveyed as a whole, the Tongan religion presents a singular instance of a creed which restricted the hope of immortality to the nobly born and denied it to commoners. According to the doctrine which it inculcated, the aristocratic pre-eminence accorded to chiefs in this world was more than maintained by them in the next, where they enjoyed a monopoly of immortality. And not content with sojourning in the blissful regions of Bolotoo, their departed spirits often returned to earth to warn, to direct, to threaten their people, either in dreams and visions of the night, or by the mouth of the priests whom they inspired. Such beliefs involved in theory and to some extent in practice a subjection of the living to the dead, of the seen and temporal to the unseen and eternal. In favour of the creed it may at least be alleged that, while it looked to spiritual powers, whether ghosts or gods, for the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, it did not appeal to another life to redress the balance of justice which had been disturbed in this one. The Tongan religion inculcated a belief that the good and the bad alike receive a recompense here on earth, thus implicitly repudiating the unworthy notion that men can only be lured or driven into the narrow way of righteousness by the hope of heaven or the fear of hell. So far the creed based morality on surer foundations than any faith which would rest the ultimate sanctions of conduct on the slippery ground of posthumous rewards and punishments. In this respect, if in no other, we may compare the Tongan religion to that of the Hebrew prophets. It has been rightly observed by Renan that whereas European races in general have found in the assurance of a life to come ample compensation for the iniquities of this present life, the Hebrew prophets never appeal to rewards and punishments reserved for a future state of existence. They were not content with the conception of a lame and laggard justice that limps far behind the sinner in this world and only overtakes him in the next. According to them, God's justice is swift and sure here on earth; an unjust world was in their eyes a simple monstrosity.[239] So too, apparently, thought the Tongans, and some Europeans may be inclined to agree with them. [239] E. Renan, _Histoire du peuple d'Israël_, ii. 505. CHAPTER III THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE SAMOANS § 1. _The Samoan Islands_ About three hundred and fifty or four hundred miles nearly due north of Tonga lies Samoa, a group of islands situated between 13° 30' and 14° 30' South latitude and between 168° and 173° West longitude. The native name of the group is Samoa, which has this singularity, that it is apparently the only name that designates a group of islands in the Pacific; native names for all the other groups are wanting, though each particular island has its own individual name. Samoa is also known to Europeans as the Navigators' Islands, a name bestowed on them by the French explorer De Bougainville, who visited the group in 1768. The three most easterly islands were discovered in 1722 by Jacob Roggewein, a Dutch navigator, but he appears not to have sighted the principal islands of the group, which lie a good deal farther to the westward. There is no record of any visit paid by a European vessel to the islands in the interval between the visits of Roggewein and De Bougainville. The whole archipelago was not explored till 1787, when the French navigator La Pérouse determined the position of all the islands.[1] [1] Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), ii. 117; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_ (London, 1897), pp. 21 _sq._; F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. (London, 1894) p. 500; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_ (London, 1910), pp. 1, 360. The islands are disposed in a line running from west to east. The most westerly, Savaii, is also the largest, measuring about forty miles in length. Next follow two small, but important islands, Apolima and Manona. Then about three miles to the east of Manona comes Upolu, the second of the islands in size, but the first in importance, whether we regard population, harbours, or the extent of soil available for cultivation. The channel which divides Upolu from Savaii is from fifteen to twenty miles broad. About forty miles to the east, or rather south-east, of Upolu lies the island of Tutuila, with the fine and almost landlocked harbour of Pangopango. It was in this island that the French navigator La Pérouse lost his second in command and twelve men in a fierce encounter with the natives. The place where the fight took place is now known as Massacre Cove.[2] Some fifty miles to the east of Tutuila is situated a group of three small islands, Tau, Ofu, and Olosenga, which are collectively known as Manua. [2] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 27 _sq._; F. H. H. Guillemard, _op. cit._ pp. 500, 504. The islands are of volcanic formation and for the most part surrounded by coral reefs, but the intervening seas are quite free from danger, and the possession of good harbours renders Samoa politically important. Viewed from the sea the islands are mountainous and for the most part wooded to the water's edge, except where a stretch of fertile plain is interposed between the foot of the mountains and the sea. The whole group presents to the voyager a succession of enchanting views as he sails along the coast. The eye is delighted by the prospect of lofty and rugged mountains, their tops sometimes lost in clouds, their slopes mantled in the verdure of evergreen forests, varied here and there by rich valleys, by grey and lofty cliffs, or by foaming waterfalls tumbling from heights of hundreds of feet and showing like silvery threads against the sombre green of the woods. Along the shore rocks of black lava alternate with white sands dazzling in the sunlight and fringed by groves of coco-nut palms, their feathery tops waving and dancing in the breeze, while the brilliant cobalt blue of the calm lagoon contrasts with the olive-green of the deep sea, which breaks in a long line of seething foam on the barrier reef. The scenery as a whole combines romantic grandeur with wild and rank luxuriance, thus winning for Samoa the reputation of being among the loveliest of the islands which stud like gems the bosom of the Pacific.[3] [3] J. E. Erskine, _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_ (London, 1853), p. 110; T. H. Hood, _Notes of a Cruise in H.M.S. "Fawn" in the Western Pacific_ (Edinburgh, 1863), p. 40; J. L. Brenchley, _Jottings during the Cruise of H.M.S. "Curaçoa" among the South Sea Islands in 1865_ (London, 1873), pp. 37-39, 61 _sq._; F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. 502 _sq._; John B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 26 _sqq._ The island of Upolu in particular is wooded from its summit to the water's edge, where in some places the roots of the trees are washed by the surf, while in many places clumps of mangrove trees spread out into the lagoon. The forests are dense and more sombre even than those of Brazil. The lofty trees shoot up to a great height before sending out branches. At their feet grow ferns of many sorts, while climbing vines and other creepers mantle their trunks and sometimes even their tops. But the gloom of the tropical forest is seldom or never relieved by flowers of brilliant tints; the few flowers that bloom in them are of a white or greyish hue, as if bleached for want of the sunbeams, which are shut out by the thick umbrageous foliage overhead.[4] [4] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 31 _sq._, 52 _sq._ Very different from the aspect presented by this luxuriant vegetation is a great part of the interior of Savaii, the largest island of the group. Here the desolate and forbidding character of the landscape constantly reminds the traveller of the dreadful forces which slumber beneath his feet. Extinct volcanoes tower above him to heights of four and five thousand feet, their steep and almost perpendicular sides formed of volcanic ashes and denuded of vegetation. For miles around these gloomy peaks the ground presents nothing to the eye but black rocks, scoriae, and ashes; the forlorn wayfarer seems to be traversing a furnace barely extinguished, so visible are the traces of fire on the sharp-pointed stones among which he picks his painful way, and which in their twisted and tormented forms seem still to preserve something of the movement of the once boiling flood of molten lava. The whole country is a barren and waterless wilderness, a solitude destitute alike of animal and of vegetable life, alternately parched by the fierce rays of the tropical sun and deluged by hurricanes of torrential rain. Even the natives cannot traverse these dreary deserts; a European who strayed into them was found, after five or six days, prostrate and almost dead on the ground.[5] [5] Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) pp. 71 _sq._; F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. 502 _sq._; J. B. Stair, Old Samoa, p. 34; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 1 _sqq._ In Samoa, as in Tonga, volcanic activity has ominously increased within less than a hundred years. Near the island of Olosenga, in 1866 or 1867, a submarine volcano suddenly burst out in eruption, vomiting forth rocks and mud to a height, as it was estimated, of two thousand feet, killing the fish and discolouring the sea for miles round.[6] Still later, towards the end of 1905, another volcano broke out in the bottom of a deep valley in the island of Savaii, and rose till it attained a height of about four thousand feet. Down at least to the year 1910 this immense volcano was still in full action, and had covered many miles of country under a bed of lava some ten or twelve feet thick, while with the same river of molten matter it completely filled up the neighbouring lagoon and replaced the level shore by an iron-bound coast of volcanic cliffs.[7] [6] F. H. H. Guillemard, _op. cit._ ii. 504; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 43. [7] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 3. A remarkable instance of these volcanic cliffs is furnished by the little island of Apolima between Savaii and Upolu. The islet, which is in fact the crater of an extinct volcano, is only about a mile long by half to three-quarters of a mile in width. On every side but one it presents to the sea a precipitous wall of basaltic rock some thousand feet high, while the interior is scooped out in the likeness of a great cauldron. Only at one place is there a break in the cliffs where a landing can be effected, and there the operation is difficult and dangerous even in fine weather. In bad weather the island is completely isolated. Thus it forms a strong natural fortress, which under the conditions of native warfare was almost impregnable.[8] [8] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 33 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 171. As might be expected from their volcanic formation, the islands are subject to frequent and sometimes severe shocks of earthquake. The veteran missionary, J. B. Stair, has recorded that the shocks increased in number and violence during the last years of his residence in Samoa. The last of them was preceded by loud subterranean noises, which lasted for hours, to the great alarm of the natives. At the north-west of Upolu also, Mr. Stair used often to hear a muffled sound, like the rumble of distant thunder, proceeding apparently from the sea under the reef. This curious noise always occurred on hot, sultry days, and seemed to strike a note of warning, which filled natives and Europeans alike with a sense of awe and insecurity.[9] Thus if, beheld from some points of view, the Samoan islands appear an earthly paradise, from others they present the aspect, and emit the sounds, of an inferno. [9] T. H. Hood, _Notes of a Cruise in H.M.S. "Fawn" in the Western Pacific_ (Edinburgh, 1863), p. 145; J. B. Stair, _op. cit._ pp. 41 _sq._ And with all their natural beauty and charm the islands cannot be said to enjoy a healthy climate. There is much bad weather, particularly during the winter months, when long and heavy rains, attended at times with high winds and gales, are frequent. The air is more moist than in Tahiti, and the vegetation in consequence is more rank and luxuriant. Decaying rapidly under the ardent rays of a tropical sun, it exhales a poisonous miasma. But the heat, oppressive and exhausting at times, is nevertheless tempered by the sea and land breezes, which blow daily, alternating with intervals of calm between them. Besides these daily breezes the trade wind blows regularly from the east during the fine season, when the sky is constantly blue and cloudless. Yet with all these alleviations the climate is enervating, and a long residence in it is debilitating to the European frame.[10] Nor are the natives exempt from the noxious effects of an atmosphere saturated with moisture and impregnated with the fumes of vegetable decay. The open nature of their dwellings, which were without walls, exposed them to the heavy night dews and rendered them susceptible to diseases of the chest and lungs, from which they suffered greatly; consumption in its many forms, coughs, colds, inflammation of the chest and lungs, fevers, rheumatism, pleurisy, diarrh[oe]a, lumbago, diseases of the spine, scrofula, and many other ailments are enumerated among the disorders which afflicted them. But the prevailing disease is elephantiasis, a dreadful malady which attacks Europeans and natives alike. There are many cases of epilepsy, and though idiots are rare, lunatics are less infrequent. Hunchbacks are very common in both sexes, and virulent ophthalmia is prevalent; many persons lose the sight of one eye, and some are totally blinded; not less than a fifth part of the population is estimated to suffer from this malady.[11] Curiously enough, hunchbacks, who are said to be very numerous on account of scrofula, used to be looked on as special favourites of the spirits, and many of them, on growing to manhood, were accordingly admitted to the priesthood.[12] [10] Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, ii. 118; Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) p. 72 (who, however, affirms that the climate is not unhealthy); T. H. Hood, _Notes of a Cruise in H.M.S. "Fawn" in the Western Pacific_ (Edinburgh, 1863), pp. 144 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 16, 35 _sqq._ [11] Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, ii. 124 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 165 _sq._, 169 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 180 _sqq._ [12] S. Ella, "Samoa," _Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Hobart, Tasmania, in January 1892_, p. 622. During the stormy season, which lasts from December to April, hurricanes sometimes occur, and are greatly dreaded by the natives on account of the havoc which they spread both among the crops and the houses. A steady rain, the absence of the sun, a deathlike stillness of the birds and domestic animals, and above all the dark and lowering aspect of the sky, are the premonitory symptoms of the coming calamity and inspire general consternation, while the thunderous roar of the torrents and waterfalls in the mountains strike on the ear with redoubled distinctness in the prevailing silence which preludes the storm. Warned by these ominous signs, the natives rush to secure their property from being swept away by the fury of the blast. Some hurry their canoes inland to places of comparative safety; others pile trunks of banana-trees on the roofs of their houses or fasten down the roofs by hanging heavy stones over them; while yet others bring rough poles, hastily cut in the forest, and set them up inside the houses as props against the rafters, to prevent the roof from falling in. Sometimes these efforts are successful, sometimes futile, the hurricane sweeping everything before it in its mad career, while the terrified natives behold the fruits of months of toil, sometimes the growth of years, laid waste in an hour. On such occasions the shores have been seen flooded by the invading ocean, houses carried clean away, and a forest turned suddenly into a bare and treeless plain. Men have been forced to fling themselves flat on the ground and to dig their hands into the earth to save themselves from being whirled away and precipitated into the sea or a torrent. In April 1850 the town of Apia, the capital of the islands, was almost destroyed by one of these cyclones. When the rage of the tornado is spent and calm has returned, the shores of a harbour are apt to present a melancholy scene of ruin and desolation, their shores strewn with the wrecks of gallant ships which lately rode there at anchor, their pennons streaming to the wind. So it happened in the harbour of Apia on March 16th, 1889. Before the tempest burst, there were many ships of various nations anchored in the bay, among them five or six American and German warships. When it was over, all were wrecked and their shattered fragments littered the reefs. One vessel alone, the British man-of-war, _Calliope_, was saved by the courage and skill of the captain, who, seconded by the splendid seamanship of the crew, forced his ship, in the very teeth of the hurricane, out into the open sea, where he safely weathered the storm.[13] [13] Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, ii. 72; Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) p. 72; F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. 504; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 38-41. A special interest attaches to Samoa in so far as it is now commonly believed to be the original seat of the Polynesian race in the Pacific, from which their ancestors gradually dispersed to the other islands of that vast ocean, where their descendants are settled to this day. Polynesian traditions point to such a dispersal from Samoa as a centre, and they are confirmed by the name which the various branches of the race give to their old ancestral home. The original form of that name appears to have been Savaiki, which through dialectical variations has been altered to Hawaiki in New Zealand, to Hawaii in the Sandwich Islands, to Havaii in Tahiti, to Havaiki in the Marquesas, and to Avaiki in Rarotonga. In the Samoan dialect, which of all the Polynesian dialects alone retains the letter S, the word presumably appears as Savaii, the name of the largest island of the group, which accordingly may be regarded, with some probability, as the cradle-land of the Polynesians in the Pacific; though native traditions indicate rather Upolu or Manua as the place from which the canoes started on their long and adventurous voyages. On the other hand in favour of Savaii it has been pointed out that the island holds a decided superiority over the other islands of the group in respect of canoe-building; for it possesses extensive forests of hard and durable timber, which is much sought after for the keels and other parts of vessels; indeed, the large sea-going canoes were generally, if not always, built on Savaii, and maritime expeditions appear sometimes to have started from its shores.[14] In proof that the Samoans have long been settled in the islands which they now occupy, it may be alleged that they appear to have no tradition of any other home from which their ancestors migrated to their present abode. With the single exception of a large village called Matautu in Savaii, the inhabitants of which claim that they came originally from Fiji, all the Samoans consider themselves indigenous.[15] The Samoans and Tongans, says Mr. S. Percy Smith, "formed part of the first migration into the Pacific, and they have been there so long that they have forgotten their early history. All the numerous legends as to their origin seem to express their own belief in their being autochthones, created in the Samoan Islands."[16] [14] Horatio Hale, _Ethnography and Philology of the United States Exploring Expedition_ (Philadelphia, 1846), pp. 119 _sqq._; J. E. Erskine, _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_, pp. 102 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 271 _sqq._ (compare _id._ p. 34 as to the timber and canoe-building of Savaii); G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 358, 371 _sq._; A. C. Haddon, _The Wanderings of Peoples_ (Cambridge, 1919), p. 36; A. H. Keane, _Man Past and Present_ (Cambridge, 1920), p. 552. That the Samoan language, alone of the Polynesian dialects, retains the S sound, is affirmed by Ch. Wilkes (_Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, ii. 123). In some of the islands the name of the ancient fatherland of the race (Hawaiki, etc.) has been applied or transferred to the spirit-land to which the souls of the dead are supposed to pass as their final abode. See S. Percy Smith, _Hawaiki_, pp. 46 _sqq._; E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, pp. 56 _sqq._, _s.v._ "Hawaiki." [15] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 360 _sq._ As to the Fijian colony in Savaii, compare T. H. Hood, _Notes of a Cruise in H.M.S. "Fawn" in the Western Pacific_ (Edinburgh, 1863), pp. 117 _sq._ [16] S. Percy Smith, _Hawaiki_, pp. 114 _sq._ § 2. _The Samoan Islanders, their character_ In spite of the many diseases prevalent among them, the Samoans are commonly reckoned among the finest, as well as the purest, specimens of the Polynesian race. Like the Tongans, whom they closely resemble, they are generally tall and shapely, with full rounded faces and limbs, but without that grossness and laxity of fibre common in the Tahitians. The average height of the men is said to be five feet ten inches, but some of them are over six feet with the thews and sinews of a Hercules. Their features, though not always regular, are commonly pleasing; and in particular the forehead is remarkable for its ample development, which, with the breadth between the eyes, gives to the countenance an expression of nobleness and dignity. Some of the young men especially are models of manly beauty; we read of one who, having decked his hair with the flowers of the scarlet hibiscus, might have sat for an Antinous. The women are comely enough, but strikingly inferior to the men in point of personal beauty. The prevailing colour is a light copper or olive brown, but the shade varies a good deal, deepening somewhat in fishermen and others who are much exposed to the sun; but it never approaches the dark chocolate tint, or Vandyke brown, of the Melanesians. Their hair is usually black and wavy, sometimes curly; but hardly a vestige is to be seen among them of the crisped and woolly hair and dusky complexion of the Melanesians, their neighbours on the west.[17] [17] Horatio Hale, _Ethnography and Philology of the United States Exploring Expedition_, pp. 10 _sq._; Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, ii. 125 _sq._; J. E. Erskine, _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_, pp. 41, 51; C. E. Meinicke, _Die Inseln des Stillen Oceans_ (Leipzig, 1875-1876), ii. 110 _sq._; G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 3; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 58; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 55 _sq._ The prepossessing appearance of the Samoans on the whole does not belie their character. They are reputed to be the most refined and civilised of all the native races of the Pacific, and this superiority is said to manifest itself in their social and domestic life.[18] The Samoans, we are told, are a nation of gentlemen and contrast most favourably with the generality of the Europeans who come among them.[19] They are said to carry their habits of cleanliness and decency to a higher point than the most fastidious of civilised nations;[20] and the Samoan women appear to be honourably distinguished by their modest behaviour and fidelity in marriage, qualities which contrast with the profligacy of their sex in other branches of the Polynesian race.[21] Equally honourable to the men are the respect and kindness which, according to the testimony of observers, they pay to their women, whom they are said to regard as their equals.[22] The aged were treated with respect and never abandoned; and strangers were always received in the best house and provided with food specially prepared for them.[23] Infanticide, which was carried to an appalling and almost incredible extent among some of the Polynesians,[24] was unknown in Samoa; abortion, indeed, was not uncommon, but once born children were affectionately cared for and never killed or exposed.[25] Wives and slaves were never put to death at a chief's burial, that their souls might attend their dead lord to the spirit land[26], as was the practice in some of the other islands, even in Tonga. Again, human sacrifices were not offered by the Samoans to the gods within the time during which the islands have been under the observation of Europeans; but in some of the more remote traditions mention is made of such sacrifices offered to the sun. Thus it is said that in the mythical island of Papatea, somewhere away in the east, the sun used to call for two victims every day, one at his rising and another at his setting. This lasted for eighty days. At such a rate of consumption the population of the island was rapidly wasting away. To escape the threatened doom, a brother and sister, named Luama and Ui, fled from Papatea to Manua, the most easterly of the Samoan islands, but they found to their consternation that there too, the sun was demanding his daily victims. Every house had to supply a victim in succession, and, when all had yielded the tribute, it came to the first house in turn to renew the sacrifice. The victim was laid out on a pandanus tree, and there the sun devoured him or her. When the lot fell on Luama, his heroic sister Ui insisted on taking his place, and lying down, she cried, "O cruel sun! come and eat your victim, we are all being devoured by you." But the amorous sun fell in love with her and took her to wife, at the same time putting an end to the human sacrifices. Another story affirms that the heroine was a daughter of the King of Manua, and that he yielded her up as an offering to the sun in order to end the sacrifices by making her the saviour of the people.[27] [18] S. Ella, "Samoa," _Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Hobart, Tasmania, in January 1892_, p. 634. [19] T. H. Hood, _Notes of a Cruise in H.M.S. "Fawn" in the Western Pacific_ (Edinburgh, 1863), pp. 59 _sq._ [20] J. E. Erskine, _op. cit._ p. 110 [21] Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ ii. 125; J. E. Erskine, _op. cit._ p. 110 [22] Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ ii. 148; Violette, " Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) p. 156; J. L. Brenchley, _op. cit._ p. 77; S. Ella, _op. cit._ pp. 628 _sq._; G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 43, 410. [23] G. Brown, _op. cit._ p. 410. [24] For some evidence of the practice see John Turnbull, _Voyage round the World_ (London, 1813), pp. 363 _sq._; C. S. Stewart, _Journal of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands_ (London, 1828), pp. 251 _sqq._; P. Dillon, _Voyage in the South Seas_ (London, 1829), ii. 134; William Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, Second Edition (London, 1832-1836), i. 248 _sqq._; J. Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_ (London, 1838), pp. 479-486. According to Stewart, in those parts of Hawaii to which the influence of the missionaries had not penetrated, two-thirds of the infants born were murdered by their parents within the age of two years. In Tahiti three women, questioned by Mr. Williams, acknowledged that they had killed twenty-one of their children between them. Another, at the point of death, confessed to him, in an anguish of remorse, that she had destroyed sixteen of her children. [25] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 79. Compare J. Williams, _op. cit._ p. 479; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 621; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 47. [26] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 219. [27] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 201 _sq._ Compare G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 230 _sq._; J. Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, p. 471; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 210. The Samoans, when they became known to Europe in the nineteenth century, did not habitually indulge in cannibalism; indeed, according to John Williams, one of the earliest missionaries to the islands, they spoke of the practice with great horror and detestation.[28] But we have the testimony of other early missionaries that in their wars they occasionally resorted to it as a climax of hatred and revenge, devouring some portion of an enemy who had rendered himself peculiarly obnoxious by his cruelty or his provocations. Traditions, too, are on record of chiefs who habitually killed and devoured their fellow-creatures. A form of submission which a conquered party used to adopt towards their conquerors has also been interpreted as a relic of an old custom of cannibalism. Representatives of the vanquished party used to bow down before the victors, each holding in his hands a piece of firewood and a bundle of leaves, such as are used in dressing a pig for the oven. This was as much as to say, "Kill us and cook us, if you please." Criminals, too, were sometimes bound hand and foot, slung on a pole, and laid down before the persons they had injured, like pigs about to be killed and cooked. Combining these and other indications we may surmise that cannibalism was formerly not infrequent among the ancestors of the Samoans, though among their descendants in the nineteenth century the practice had almost wholly died out.[29] It is further to the credit of the Samoans that their public administration of justice was on the whole mild and humane. Torture was never employed to wring the truth from witnesses or the accused, and there seems to be only a single case on record of capital punishment inflicted by judicial sentence. At the same time private individuals were free to avenge the adultery of a wife or the murder of a kinsman by killing the culprit, and no blame attached to them for so doing. The penalties imposed by the sentence of a court or judicial assembly (_fono_) included fines, banishment, and the destruction of houses, fruit-trees, and domestic animals. But a criminal might also be condemned by a court to suffer corporal punishment in one form or another. He might, for example, be obliged to wound himself by beating his head and chest with a stone till the blood flowed freely; if he seemed to spare himself, he would be ordered by the assembled chiefs to strike harder, and if he still faltered, the prompt and unsparing application of a war club to his person effectually assisted the execution of the sentence. Again, he might be condemned to bite a certain acrid and poisonous root (called in the native language _tevi_) which caused the mouth to swell and the culprit to suffer intense agony for a considerable time afterwards. Or he might have to throw up a spiny and poisonous fish into the air and to catch it in his naked hand as it fell; the sharp-pointed spines entered into the flesh and inflicted acute pain and suffering. Or he might be suspended by hands and feet from a pole and in this attitude exposed to the broiling sun for many hours together; or he might be hung by the feet, head downward, from the top of a tall coco-nut tree and left there to expiate his crime for a long time. For certain offences the culprit was condemned to have his nose tattooed or his ears split. In sentences of banishment the term of exile was never specified, but when the sentence had been pronounced in full assembly, and the offence was great, the culprit might live in exile for years. When the punishment consisted in the destruction of houses, plantations, and live stock, it was immediately inflicted by the whole force of the district, under the direction and superintendence of the leading men, who had taken part in the assembly and passed the sentence. A whole family might suffer in this way for the offence of one of its members, and be driven into exile, after witnessing the burning of their house, the killing of their pigs, and the barking of their breadfruit trees.[30] If such penalties seem to us in some cases needlessly severe, they at least testify to a strong sense of public justice developed among the Samoans, who had thus advanced far enough to transfer, in some measure, the redress of wrongs to judicial assemblies instead of leaving it to the caprice of the injured individuals. Nevertheless the transference was but imperfect: the administration of justice was loose and irregular: for the most part every man was a law to himself, and did what was right in his own eyes. An aggrieved party would become his own judge, jury, and executioner. The thirst for vengeance was slaked only by the blood of a victim.[31] [28] J. Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, p. 456. [29] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 108-111; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 149 _sq._, 290; J. E. Erskine, _op. cit._ pp. 39, 101 _sq._; W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_ (London, 1866), pp. 125 _sq._; Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) p. 168; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 240 _sq._ [30] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 91 _sqq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 288-291. Compare Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) pp. 119, 120. [31] S. Ella, "Samoa," _Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Hobart, Tasmania, in January 1892_, p. 633. It is another sign of the intellectual enlightenment of the Samoans that they rose apparently superior to that system of malignant magic, which kept their neighbours the Melanesians in lifelong bondage. The experienced missionary, Dr. George Brown, could not find in Samoa any trace of the practice of that particular form of the black art with which he was familiar in New Britain and other Melanesian islands, the practice of procuring some object which has belonged to an enemy or been touched by him, and taking it to a sorcerer, that he may perform over it a ceremony for the purpose of injuring the person from whom the object has been obtained. The proceeding is one of the commonest forms of sympathetic magic, but the Samoans appear to have ignored or despised it.[32] Again, the silence of our authorities on the subject of amulets and talismans leaves us to infer that the Samoans were equally indifferent to that branch of magic which seeks to ensure the safety and prosperity of the individual by attaching a miscellaneous collection of rubbish to his person, a system of ensurance against evil and misfortune which has attained a prodigious development among some savages, notably in Africa,[33] and is very far from being unknown in Europe at the present day. Again, unlike most savages, the Samoans were close observers of the stars, not only reckoning the time of night by the rising of particular stars, but steering by them when they were out of sight of land.[34] [32] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 245. Compare S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 638. [33] See, for example, E. W. Smith and A. M. Dale, _The Ila-speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia_ (London, 1920), i. 252 _sqq._ [34] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 348. Against these amiable and enlightened traits in the Samoan character must be set their cruelty in war. If they opened hostilities with a great deal of formal politeness, they conducted them with great ferocity. No quarter was given to men in battle, and captives were ruthlessly slaughtered. Women were sometimes spared for the use of their captors. Nor did death save the conquered from the insults and outrages of the insolent victors. The slain on the battlefield were treated with great indignity. Their heads were cut off and carried in triumph to the village, where they were piled up in a heap in the place of public assembly, the head of the most important chief being given the place of honour on the top of the pile. However, they were not kept as trophies, but after remaining for some hours exposed to public gaze were either claimed by the relatives or buried on the spot. The headless trunks were given to children to drag about the village and to spear, stone, or mutilate at pleasure.[35] The first missionary to Samoa was told in Manua that the victors used to scalp their victims and present the scalps, with kava, either to the king or to the relatives of the slain in battle, by whom these gory trophies were highly prized. He mentions as an example the case of a young woman, whose father had been killed. A scalp of a foe having been brought to her, she burnt it, strewed the ashes on the fire with which she cooked her food, and then devoured the meat with savage satisfaction.[36] But the climax of cruelty and horror was reached in a great war which the people of A'ana, in Upolu, waged against a powerful combination of enemies. After a brave resistance they were at last defeated, and the surviving warriors, together with the aged and infirm, the women and children, fled to the mountains, where they endeavoured to hide themselves from their pursuers in the caves and the depths of the forest. But they were hunted out and brought down to the seashore; and an immense pit having been dug and filled with firewood, they were all, men, women, and children, thrown into it and burnt alive. The dreadful butchery went on for days. Four hundred victims are said to have perished. The massacre was perpetrated at the moment when the first missionaries were landing in Samoa. From the opposite shore they beheld the mountains enveloped in the flames and smoke of the funeral pile. The decisive battle had been fought that very morning. For many years a great black circle of charcoal marked the scene and preserved the memory of the fatal transaction.[37] [35] J. Williams, _op. cit._ p. 456; Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ ii. 150 _sq._; W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, p. 61; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 247 _sqq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 170, 172 _sq._ Dr. Brown here speaks as if captive women were regularly spared and married by the victors. As to the elaborate civilities which passed between the vanguards of two hostile armies at their first meeting, see Dr. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 166 _sq._ [36] J. Williams, _op. cit._ p. 458. [37] J. Williams, _op. cit._ pp. 286 _sq._, 456; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 254-258. § 3. _Houses, Agriculture, and Industries_ Like all the Polynesians, the Samoans are not nomadic, but live in settled villages. The typical Samoan house is commonly described as oval or elliptical, though in fact it would seem to be of oblong shape with semicircular ends. But many houses were circular in shape, and with their conical thatched roofs resembled gigantic beehives. From the Tongans the Samoans also borrowed the custom of building oblong quadrangular houses, which were called _afolau_. The best houses, in particular those of important chiefs, were built on raised platforms of stones about three feet high. One of the circular houses would measure about thirty-five feet in diameter by a hundred in circumference. Two or three posts in the centre of the house, some twenty feet high, supported the roof, the lower end of which rested on a series of short posts, four or five feet high, placed at intervals of about four feet all round the house. The intervals between these posts were sometimes closed by thatch neatly tied to sticks, which were planted upright in the ground and fastened to the eaves; but more commonly, it would seem, the intervals between the posts were left open and only closed at night by blinds made of coco-nut leaves, which could be let down or pulled up like Venetian blinds. During the day these blinds were drawn up, so that there was a free current of air all through the house. The roofs of the best houses were made of bread-fruit wood carefully thatched with leaves of the wild sugar-cane; when well made, the thatch might last seven years. The circular roofs were so constructed that they could be lifted clean off the posts and removed anywhere, either by land or on a raft of canoes. The whole house could also be transported; and as Samoan houses were often bartered, or given as presents, or paid as fines, it frequently happened that they were removed from place to place. In the whole house there was not a single nail or spike: all joints were made by exactly corresponding notches and secured by cinnet, that is cordage made from the dried fibre of the coco-nut husk. The timber of the best houses was the wood of the bread-fruit tree; and, if protected against damp, it would last fifty years. The floor of the house was composed of stones, overlaid with fine gravel and sand. In the centre of the floor was the fire-place, a circular hollow two or three feet in diameter and a few inches deep, lined with hardened clay. It was not used for cooking, but for the purpose of lighting up the house by night. The cooking was never done in the house, but always in the open air outside on an oven of hot stones. An ordinary Samoan house consisted of a single apartment, which served as the common parlour, dining-room, and bedroom of the family. But at night small tents made of bark-cloth were hung from the ridge-pole, and under them the various members of the family slept separately, the tents serving them at the same time as curtains to protect them against the mosquitoes. Formerly, the houses of the principal chiefs were surrounded with two fences; the outer of the two was formed of strong posts and had a narrow zigzag entrance, several yards long, leading to an opening in the inner fence, which was made of reeds. But with the advent of a more peaceful epoch these fortified enclosures for the most part disappeared. Houses constructed on the Tongan model were often very substantially built: a double row of posts and cross-beams supported the roof. These houses were found better able to resist the high winds which prevail at one season of the year.[38] [38] Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._. ii. 145 _sqq._; J. E. Erskine, _op. cit._ pp. 45-47; T. H. Hood, _Notes of a Cruise in H.M.S. "Fawn" in the Western Pacific_ (Edinburgh, 1863), p. 32; Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) p. 135; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 152 _sqq._; S. Ella, _op. cit._ pp. 634 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa,_ pp. 105 _sqq._, 153 _sqq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 24 _sqq._ Like the rest of the Polynesians, the Samoans are an agricultural people, and subsist mainly by the fruits of the earth, though the lagoons and reefs furnish them with a large supply of fish and shell-fish, of which they are very fond. They all, but especially persons of rank, occasionally regaled themselves on pigs, fowls, and turtle. But bread-fruit, taro, yams, bananas, and coco-nuts formed the staff of life in Samoa. As the soil is very rich and the hot, damp climate is eminently favourable to the growth of vegetation, food was always abundant, and the natives could procure the necessaries and even the luxuries of life at the cost of very little labour; if they tilled the soil, it was rather to vary their diet than to wring a scanty subsistence from a niggardly nature. Coco-nut palms, bread-fruit and chestnut trees, and wild yams, bananas, and plantains abound throughout the islands, and require little attention to make them yield an ample crop. For about half the year the Samoans have a plentiful supply of food from the bread-fruit trees: during the other half they depend principally upon their taro plantations. While the bread-fruit is in season, every family lays up a quantity of the ripe fruit in a pit lined with leaves and covered with stones. The fruit soon ferments and forms a soft mass, which emits a very vile smell every time the pit is opened. In this state it may be kept for years, for the older and more rotten the fruit is, the better the natives like it. They bake it, with the juice of the coco-nut, into flat cakes, which are eaten when the ripe fruit is out of season or when taro is scarce. For taro is on the whole the staple food of the Samoans; it grows all the year round. The water of the coco-nut furnishes a cool, delicious, slightly effervescing beverage, which is peculiarly welcome to the hot and weary wayfarer far from any spring or rivulet.[39] [39] Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ ii. 147; W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_ (London, 1866), pp. 126-128; Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) pp. 87 _sq._; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 105-107; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 53-55; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 130 _sqq._ According to Dr. Brown, there are generally three crops of bread-fruit in the year, one of them lasting about three months. To obtain land for cultivation the Samoans went into the forest and cut down the brushwood and creeping vines with small hatchets or large knives. The large forest-trees they destroyed by chopping away the bark in a circle round the trunk and then kindling a fire of brushwood at the foot of the tree. Thus in the course of a few days a fair-sized piece of ground would be cleared, nothing of the forest remaining but charred trunks and leafless branches. Then followed the planting. The agricultural instruments employed were of the simplest pattern. A dibble, or pointed stick of hard wood, was used to make the hole in which the plant was deposited. This took the place of a plough, and a branch served the purpose of a harrow. Sometimes the earth was dug and smoothed with the blade of a canoe paddle. The labour of clearing and planting the ground was done by the men, but the task of weeding it generally devolved on the women. The first crop taken from a piece of land newly cleared in the forest was yams, which require a peculiar culture and frequent change of site, two successive crops being seldom obtained from the same land. After the first crop of yams had been cleared off, taro was planted several times in succession; for this root does not, like yams, require a change of site. However, we are told that a second crop of taro grown on the same land was very inferior to the first, and that as a rule the land was allowed to remain fallow until the trees growing on it were as thick as a man's arm, when it was again cleared for cultivation. In the wet season taro was planted on the high land from one to four miles inland from the village; other kinds of taro were planted in the swamps, and these were considered more succulent than the taro grown on the uplands. The growing crops of taro were weeded at least twice a year. The natives resorted to irrigation, when they had the means; and they often dug trenches to drain away the water from swampy ground. Yams also required attention; for sticks had to be provided on which the plants could run. The fruit ripens only once a year, but it was stored up, and with care would keep till the next season. The natives found neither yams nor bread-fruit so nourishing as taro.[40] [40] Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) p. 188; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 635; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 54 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 130 _sqq._, 338 _sqq._ The degree of progress which any particular community has made in civilisation may be fairly gauged by the degree of subdivision of labour among its members; for it is only by restricting his energies to a particular craft that a man can attain to any perfection in it. Judged by this standard the Samoans had advanced some way on the road to civilisation, since among them the division of labour was carried out to a considerable extent: in their native state they had not a few separate trades or professions, some of which may even be said to have developed the stability and organisation of trade guilds. Among them, for example, house-building, canoe-building, tattooing, and the making of nets and fish-hooks were distinct crafts, which, though not strictly hereditary, were usually confined to particular families. Thus by long practice and experience handed down from generation to generation a considerable degree of skill was acquired, and a considerable degree of reputation accrued to the family. Every trade had its particular patron god and was governed by certain well-known rules. The members formed, indeed, we are told, a trade union which was remarkably effective. Thus they had rules which prescribed the time and proportions of payment to be made at different stages of the work, and these rules were strictly observed and enforced by the workmen. For example, in the house-building trade, it was a standing custom that after the sides and one end of a house were finished, the principal part of the payment should be made. If the carpenters were dissatisfied with the amount of payment, they simply left off work and walked away, leaving the house unfinished, and no carpenter in the whole length and breadth of Samoa would dare to finish it, for it would have been as much as his business or even his life was worth to undertake the job. Anyone so foolhardy as thus to set the rules of the trade at defiance would have been attacked by the other workmen and robbed of his tools; at the best he would receive a severe thrashing, at the worst he might be killed. A house might thus stand unfinished for months or even years. Sooner or later, if he was to have a roof over his head, the unfortunate owner had to yield to the trade union and agree to such terms as they might dictate. If it happened that the house was almost finished before the fourth and final payment was made, and the builder at that stage of the proceedings took offence, he would remove a beam from the roof before retiring in dudgeon, and no workman would dare to replace it. The rules in the other trades, such as canoe-building and tattooing, were practically the same. In canoe-building, for example, five separate payments were made to the builders at five stages of the work; and if at any stage the workmen were dissatisfied with the pay, they very unceremoniously abandoned the work until the employer apologised or came to terms. No other party of workmen would have the temerity to finish the abandoned canoe upon pain of bringing down on their heads the wrath of the whole fraternity of canoe-builders; any such rash offenders against the rules of the guild would be robbed of their tools, expelled from their clan, and prohibited from exercising their calling during the pleasure of the guild. Such strides had the Samoans made in the direction of trade unionism.[41] [41] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 157 _sqq._, 162 _sqq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 141 _sqq._, 145 _sqq._, 153 _sqq._, 157 _sqq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 268, 305-308. Compare Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ ii. 143 _sqq._; Violette, _op. cit._ pp. 134 _sq._; S. Ella, _op. cit._ pp. 635 _sq._ In addition to their household duties women engaged in special work of their own, particularly in the manufacture of bark-cloths and of fine mats; but among them there seems to have been no subdivision of labour and consequently no professional guilds. In all families the making of bark-cloth and mats was carried on by the women indifferently, though some no doubt excelled others in the skill of their handiwork. The cloth was made from the bark of the paper-mulberry (_Morus papyrifera_), which was beaten out on boards with a grooved beetle. The sound of these beetles ringing on the boards, though not very musical, was a familiar sound in a Samoan village. The fine mats, on the manufacture of which the Samoans particularly prided themselves, were worn as dresses on ceremonial occasions. They were made from the leaves of a large plant which the natives call _lau ie_; the leaves closely resemble those of the pandanus, but are larger. These mats were of a straw or cream colour, and were sometimes fringed with tufts of scarlet feathers of the paroquet. They were thin and almost as flexible as calico. Many months, sometimes even years, were spent over the making of a single mat. Another kind of fine mat was made from the bark of a plant of the nettle tribe (_Hibiscus tiliaceus_), which grows wild over the islands. Mats of the latter sort were shaggy on one side, and, being bleached white, resembled fleecy sheep-skins. These fine mats, especially those made from the leaves of the pandanus-like plant, were considered by the Samoans to be their most valuable property; they were handed down as heirlooms from father to son, and were so much coveted that wars were sometimes waged to obtain possession of them. The pedigrees of the more famous mats, particularly those fringed with red feathers, were carefully kept, and when they changed hands, their history was related with solemn precision. Age enhanced their value; and their tattered condition, deemed a proof of antiquity, rather added to than detracted from the estimation in which they were held. The wealth of a family consisted of its mats; with them it remunerated the services of carpenters, boat-builders, and tattooers. The mats formed, indeed, a sort of currency or medium of exchange; for while the Samoans were not in general a trading people, and there was little or no actual buying and selling among them, there was nevertheless a considerable exchange of property on many occasions; at marriage, for example, it was customary for the bride's family to give mats and bark-cloth as her dowry, while the bridegroom's family provided a house, canoes, and other articles. But though the fine mats were thus paid away or given in exchange, they had no fixed negotiable value, and thus did not serve the purpose of money.[42] [42] Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, ii. 142 _sq._; J. E. Erskine, _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_, pp. 109 _sq._; W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, pp. 129-132; Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) p. 135; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 119-121; S. Ella, "Samoa," _Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Hobart, Tasmania, in January 1892_, p. 636; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 143 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 304 _sq._, 305, 315, 434. § 4. _Rights of Property_ In Samoa the rights of private property, both personal and landed, were fully recognised, but with certain limitations. The lands were owned alike by chiefs and by heads of families; the laws regulating their possession were very definite. In no case did the whole of the land belong to the chiefs. Every family owned portions of land not only in the village and adjoining gardens, but far away in the unreclaimed forests of the interior. The title, which passed by inheritance, generally vested in the family; but the family was represented by the head, who often claimed the right to dispose of it by sale or otherwise. Yet he dared not do anything without consulting all concerned; were he to persist in thwarting the wishes of the rest, they would take his title from him and give it to another. Sometimes, however, the title to landed property vested in individual owners. The legitimate heir was the oldest surviving brother, but occasionally he waived his right in favour of one of the sons. Women might hold land when the male side of a family was extinct. The boundaries of land were well defined, being marked by pathways, natural limits, such as a river, or by trenches and stones half buried in the ground. Every inch of ground had its owner, even to the tops of the mountains. Trespass by a neighbouring village would be resisted, if necessary, by force of arms.[43] [43] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 176 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 83 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 287 _sq._, 314, 339. In regard to personal property it may be said that, like landed property, it belonged rather to the family than to the individual; for no Samoan could refuse to give, without an equivalent, anything which any member of his family asked for. In this way boats, tools, garments, and so forth passed freely from hand to hand. Nay, a man could enter the plantation of a relative and help himself to the fruit without asking the owner's leave; such an appropriation was not considered to be stealing. Under this communistic system, as it has been called, accumulation of property was scarcely possible, and industry was discouraged. Why should a diligent man toil when he knew that the fruit of his labour might all be consumed by lazy kinsfolk? He might lay out a plantation of bananas, and when they were full-grown, bunch after bunch might be plucked and eaten by his less industrious relations, until, exasperated beyond endurance, the unfortunate owner would cut down all the remaining trees. No matter how hard a man worked, he could not keep his earnings; they all soon passed out of his hands into the common stock of the clan. The system, we are told, ate like a canker-worm at the roots of individual and national progress.[44] [44] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 160 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 247, 262 _sq._, 434. § 5. _Government, Social Ranks, Respect for Chiefs_ The native government of Samoa was not, like that of Tonga, a centralised despotism. Under the form of a monarchy and aristocracy the political constitution was fundamentally republican and indeed democratic. The authority of the king and chiefs was limited and more or less nominal; practically Samoa consisted of a large number of petty independent and self-governing communities, which sometimes combined for defence or common action in a sort of loose federation.[45] [45] J. Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, p. 454; H. Hale, _Ethnography and Philology of the United States Exploring Expedition_, p. 29; T. H. Hood, _Notes of a Cruise in H.M.S. "Fawn" in the Western Pacific_ (Edinburgh, 1863), p. 118; G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 173; S. Ella, "Samoa," _Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Hobart, Tasmania, in January 1892_, p. 631; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 83 _sq._, 89; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 333. To a superficial observer the aristocratic cast of Samoan society might at first sight seem very marked. The social ranks were sharply divided from each other, and the inferior orders paid great formal deference to their superiors. At the head of all ranked the chiefs (_alii_); but even among them the ordinary chiefs were distinct from the sacred chiefs (_alii paia_), who enjoyed the highest honours. These sacred chiefs preserved their pedigrees for twenty or more generations with as great care as the oldest and proudest families in Europe, and they possessed many feudal rights and privileges which were as well known and as fully acknowledged as are, or were, those of any lord of a manor in England. The task of preserving a record of a chief's pedigrees was entrusted to his orator or spokesman, who belonged to a lower social rank (that of the _tulafales_).[46] The influence of chiefs was supported by the belief that they possessed some magical or supernatural power, by which they could enforce their decisions.[47] Their persons were sacred or taboo. They might not be touched by any one. No one might sit beside them. In the public assemblies a vacant place was left on each side of the seat of honour which they occupied. Some chiefs were so holy that they might not even be looked at by day. Their food might not be handed to them, but was thrown to them, and it was so sacred that no one might eat any of it which they had left over.[48] [46] H. Hale, _op. cit._ p. 28; Violette, _op. cit._ p. 168; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 173 _sqq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 65 _sqq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 283, 430. [47] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 431. [48] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 280, 283, 285; Violette, _op. cit._ p. 168 (as to chiefs too holy to be seen by day). "The sacredness attributed to many chiefs of high rank gave rise to observances which were irksome to their families and dependents, since whatever they came in contact with required to undergo the ceremony of _lulu'u_, or sprinkling with a particular kind of cocoanut-water (_niu-ui_); both to remove the sanctity supposed to be communicated to the article or place that had touched the chief, and also to counteract the danger of speedy death, which was believed to be imminent to any person who might touch the sacred chief, or anything that he had touched; so great was the mantle of sanctity thrown around these chiefs, although unconnected with the priesthood. Thus the spot where such a chief had sat or slept was sprinkled with water immediately he had left it, as were also the persons who had sat on either side of him when he received company, as well as all the attendants who had waited upon him. "This remarkable custom was also observed on other occasions. It was always used on the occasion of deposing a chief, and depriving him of his _Ao_, or titles, in which case the ceremony was performed by some of those who had either conferred the titles or had the power to do so. In the case of O le Tamafainga, the usurper who was killed in A'ana in 1829, his body was first sprinkled with cocoanut-water, and his title of _O le Tuia'ana_ recalled from him, before he was hewn in pieces. The ceremony consisted of sprinkling the body with cocoanut-water, and the officiating chief or _Tulafale_ saying, 'Give us back our _Ao_,' by which means the title was recalled, and the sacredness attaching to it was dispelled. It was also used over persons newly tattooed, and upon those who contaminated themselves by contact with a dead body. In each of these cases the ceremony was carefully observed, and reverently attended to, as very dire consequences were considered certain to follow its omission."[49] Thus the sacredness of a chief was deemed dangerous to all persons with whom he might come, whether directly or indirectly, into contact; it was apparently conceived as a sort of electric fluid which discharged itself, it might be with fatal effect, on whatever it touched. And the sacredness of a chief was clearly classed with the uncleanness of a dead body, since contact with a dead body involved the same dangerous consequences as contact with the sacred person of a chief and had to be remedied in precisely the same manner. The two conceptions of holiness and uncleanness, which to us seem opposite and even contradictory, blend in the idea of taboo, in which both are implicitly held as it were in solution. It requires the analytic tendency of more advanced thought to distinguish the two conceptions, to precipitate, as it were, the components of the solution in the testing-tube of the mind. [49] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 127 _sq._ Compare Violette, _op. cit._ p. 168; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 231, 280, 285. In this work Dr. Brown remarks (p. 231) that there is no clear explanation of the custom of sprinkling coco-nut water as a purificatory rite. But the explanation given by Stair, which I have quoted in the text, is clear and satisfactory, and elsewhere (p. 285) Dr. Brown implicitly adopts the same explanation, where he says that the man who had served kava to a sacred chief "sprinkled himself all over to wash away the sacredness (_paia_)." The profound respect which the Samoans entertained for their chiefs manifested itself in yet another fashion. A special form of speech was adopted in addressing a chief, in conversing in his presence, or even in alluding to him in his absence. Thus there arose what is called a chiefs' language, or polite diction, which was used exclusively in speaking to or of a chief, whether the speaker was a common man or a chief of lower rank. But it was never used by a chief when he was speaking of himself. Persons of high rank, in addressing others and alluding to themselves, always employed ordinary language and sometimes the very lowest terms; so that it was often amusing to listen to expressions of feigned humility uttered by a proud man, who would have been indignant indeed if the same terms which he applied to himself had been applied to him by others. Thus, for example, the actions of sitting, talking, eating, sleeping, and dying were expressed by different terms according as the agent was a chief or a common man. The ordinary word for a house was _fale_; but a chief's house was called _maota_. The common word for anger was _ita_; the polite term was _toasa_. To sleep in ordinary language was _moe_, but in polite language it was _tof[=a]_ or _toá_. To be sick in common speech was _mai_, but in polite language it was _ngasengase, faatafa, pulu pulusi_. To die was _mate_ or _pe_ (said of animals), or _oti_ (said of men); but the courtly expressions for death were _maliu_ ("gone"), _folau_ ("gone on a voyage"), _fale-lauasi, ngasololo ao_, and a number of others. The terms substituted in the court language sometimes had a meaning the very opposite of that borne by the corresponding terms in the ordinary language. For example, in the court language firewood was called _polata_, which properly means the stem of the banana plant, a wood that is incombustible. If the use of an ordinary word in the presence of a chief were unavoidable, it had to be prefaced by the apologetic phrase _veaeane_, literally "saving your presence," every time the word was spoken. Nay, the courtly language itself varied with the rank of the chief addressed or alluded to. For example, if you wished to say that a person had come, you would say _alu_ of a common man; _alala_ of a head of a household or landowner (_tulafale_); _maliu_ of a petty chief; _susu_ of a chief of the second class; and _afiu_ of a chief of the highest rank.[50] The same respect which was shown in the use of words descriptive of a chief's actions or possessions was naturally extended to his own name, when he belonged to the class of sacred chiefs. If his name happened to be also the name of a common object, it ceased to be used to designate the thing in question, and a new word or phrase was substituted for it. Henceforth the old name of the object was dropped and might never again be pronounced in the chief's district nor indeed anywhere in his presence. In one district, for example, the chief's name was Flying-fox; hence the ordinary word for flying-fox (_re'a_) was dropped, and that species of bat was known as "bird of heaven" (_manu langi_).[51] Again, when the chief of Pango-pango, in the island of Tutuila, was called Maunga, which means "mountain," that word might never be used in his presence, and a courtly term was substituted for it.[52] This is only one instance of the ways in which the dialects of savages tend to vary from each other under the influence of superstition. [50] H. Hale, _Ethnography and Philology of the United States Exploring Expedition_, pp. 28 _sq._; Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) p. 190; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 67 _sqq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 380 _sq._ Compare G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 175. [51] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 280, 381. [52] J. E. Erskine, _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_, p. 44. Yet despite the extraordinary deference thus paid to chiefs in outward show, the authority which they possessed was for the most part very limited; indeed in the ordinary affairs of life the powers and privileges of a chief were little more than nominal, and he moved about among the people and shared their everyday employments just like a common man. Thus, for example, he would go out with a fishing party, work in his plantation, help at building a house or a canoe, and even lend a hand in cooking at a native oven. So strong was the democratic spirit among the Samoans. The ordinary duties of a chief consisted in administering the law, settling disputes, punishing transgressors, appointing feasts, imposing taboos, and leading his people in war. It was in time of war that a chief's dignity and authority were at their highest, but even then he could hardly maintain strict discipline.[53] However, the influence of chiefs varied a good deal and depended in great measure on their personal character. If besides his hereditary rank a chief was a man of energy and ability, he might become practically supreme in his village or district. Some chiefs even used their power in a very tyrannical manner.[54] [53] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 174 _sq._; S. Ella, "Samoa," _Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Hobart, Tasmania, in January 1892_, pp. 631 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 70; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 286. [54] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 70; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 286. But for the abuse of power by their nominal rulers the Samoans had a remedy at hand. When a chief rendered himself odious to his people by tyranny and oppression, the householders or gentry (_tulafales_) and neighbouring chiefs would not uncommonly depose him and transfer his office to another; in extreme cases they might banish him or even put him to death. The place of banishment for exiled chiefs was the island of Tutuila. Thither the fallen potentate was conveyed under custody in a canoe, and on landing he was made to run the gauntlet between two rows of the inhabitants, who belaboured him with sticks, pelted him with stones, or subjected him to other indignities. He was lucky if he escaped with nothing worse than bruises, for sometimes the injuries inflicted were severe or actually fatal.[55] Chieftainship was hereditary in the male line, but did not necessarily pass from father to son; the usual heir would seem to have been the eldest surviving brother, and next to him one of the sons. But a dying chief might nominate his successor, though the final decision rested with the heads of families. Failing a male heir, a daughter might be appointed to, or might assume, the prerogative of chieftainship.[56] [55] J. Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, p. 454; H. Hale, _Ethnography and Philology of the United States Exploring Expedition_, p. 28; Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) p. 119; G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 177; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 71 _sqq._ [56] Violette, _op. cit._ p. 119; G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 174; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 631; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 282, 286, 430. In addition to their hereditary nobility chiefs might be raised to higher rank by the possession of titles (_ao_), which were in the gift of certain ruling towns or villages. When four or, according to another account, five of these titles were conferred upon a single chief, he was called _o le tupu_, or King of Samoa. But if the constituencies were not unanimous in their choice of a candidate, the throne might remain vacant for long periods. Thus the monarchy of Samoa was elective; the king was chosen by a hereditary aristocracy, and his powers were tempered by the rights and privileges of the nobility. Yet under the show of a limited monarchy the constitution was essentially a federal republic.[57] The ceremony of anointing a King of Samoa in ancient times appears to have curiously resembled a similar solemnity in monarchical Europe. It took place in presence of a large assembly of chiefs and people. A sacred stone was consecrated as a throne, or rather stool, on which the king stood, while a priest, who must also be a chief, called upon the gods to behold and bless the king, and pronounced denunciations against such as should fail to obey him. He then poured scented oil from a native bottle over the head, shoulders, and body of the king, and proclaimed his several titles and honours.[58] [57] Violette, _op. cit._ pp. 118 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 65 _sqq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 283. Compare H. Hale, _Ethnography and Philology of the United States Exploring Expedition_, p. 29. [58] S. Ella, "Samoa," _Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Hobart, Tasmania, in January 1892_, p. 631. Next below the chiefs ranked an inferior order of nobility called _tulafales_ or _faipules_, who are variously described as householders, councillors, and secondary chiefs. They formed a very powerful and influential class; indeed we are told that they generally exercised greater authority than the chiefs, and that the real control of districts often centred in their hands. They usually owned large lands: they were the principal advisers of the chiefs: the orators were usually selected from their number: the _ao_ or titles of districts were always in their gift; and they had the power, which they did not scruple to use, of deposing and banishing an unpopular chief. Sometimes a chief contrived to bring them into subjection to himself; but as a rule they were a sturdy class, who did not shrink from speaking out their minds to their social superiors, often uttering very unpalatable truths and acting with great determination when the conduct of a chief incurred their displeasure. In short, they made laws, levied fines, and generally ruled the village.[59] [59] H. Hale, _op. cit._ p. 28; Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ ii. 152; Violette, _op. cit._ p. 119; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 629; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 70 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 285 _sq._, 287. Below the _tulafales_ ranked the _faleupolu_ or House of Upolu, and the _tangata nuu_ or Men of the Land. The former were considerable landowners and possessed much influence; the latter were the humblest class, bearing arms in time of war, and cultivating the soil, fishing, and cooking in time of peace. But they were far from being serfs; most of them were eligible for the position of head of a family, if, when a vacancy occurred, the choice of the family fell upon them.[60] For the title of head of a family was not hereditary. A son might succeed his father in the dignity; but the members of the family would sometimes pass over the son and confer the title on an uncle, a cousin, or even a perfect stranger, if they desired to increase the numerical strength of the family.[61] [60] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 74 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 432. [61] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 173. The villages of the Samoans were practically self-governing and independent communities, though every village was more or less loosely federated with the other villages of its district. Each district or confederation of villages had its capital (_laumua_) or ruling town. These federal capitals, however, possessed no absolute authority over the other villages of the district; and though great respect was always shown to them, the people of the district, or even of a particular village, would often dissent from the decisions of the capital and assert their independence of action.[62] Of this independence a notable instance occurred when the Catholic missionaries first settled in Samoa. Under the influence of the Protestant missionaries a federal assembly had passed a decree strictly forbidding the admission of Roman Catholics to the islands, and threatening with war any community that should dare to harbour the obnoxious sect. The better to enforce the decree, prayers were publicly offered up in the chapels that God would be pleased to keep all Papists out of Samoa. To these charitable petitions the deity seems to have turned a deaf ear; for, in spite of prayers and prohibitions, two Catholic priests and a lay brother landed and were hospitably received and effectually protected by the people of a village, who paid no heed either to the remonstrances of the chiefs or to the thunders of the federal assembly.[63] [62] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 180; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 333. [63] Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) pp. 119 _sq._ The population of a village might be from two to five hundred persons, and there might be eight or ten villages in a district. Throughout the Samoan islands there were in all eight of these separate districts. The union of the villages in a district was voluntary; they formed by common consent a petty state for their mutual protection. When war was threatened by another district, no single village acted alone; the whole district, or state, assembled at their capital and held a special parliament to concert the measures to be taken.[64] The boundaries of the districts were well known and zealously guarded, if necessary, by force of arms against the aggression of a neighbouring state. The wardenship of the marches was committed to the two nearest villages on either side, the inhabitants of which were called Boundary-Keepers. Between two such villages in former days mutual ill-feeling constantly existed and border feuds were frequent.[65] [64] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 173, 180 _sq._ A third local division, intermediate between the village and the district, is mentioned by Stair, who calls it a settlement (_Old Samoa_, p. 83); but the other authorities whom I have consulted appear not to recognise such an intermediate division. [65] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 83. The form of government both of the village and of the district was parliamentary. Affairs were discussed and settled in a representative assembly (_fono_), composed of the leading men of each village or district. These representatives included the chiefs, together with the householders or landowners (_tulafales_) and the inferior gentry (the _faleupolu_). The more weighty affairs, such as declaring war or making peace, or any matters of importance which concerned the whole district, were debated in the general parliament of the district, while business of purely local interest was transacted in the parliament of the village. It was the privilege of the capital to convene the district parliament, to preside over its deliberations, to settle disputed points, to sum up the proceedings, and to dismiss the assembly. These meetings were usually conducted with much formality and decorum. They were always held in the large public place (_malae_ or _marae_) of the village or town. It was an open green spot surrounded by a circle of trees and houses. The centre was occupied by a large house which belonged to the chief and was set apart as a caravansary for the entertainment of strangers and visitors. Members of all the three orders which composed the parliament had the right to address it; but the speaking was usually left to the householders or landowners (_tulafales_). Each chief had generally attached to him one of that order who acted as his mouthpiece; and in like manner each settlement retained the services of a member of the order, who was the leading orator of the district. Decisions were reached not by voting but by general consent, the discussion being prolonged until some conclusion, satisfactory to the greater part of the members, and particularly to the most influential, was arrived at. One of the principal prerogatives of the king seems to have been that of convoking a parliament; though, if he refused to do so, when circumstances seemed to require it, the assembly would undoubtedly have met without him. The functions of these assemblies were judicial as well as legislative and deliberative. Offenders were arraigned before them and, if found guilty, were condemned and punished.[66] [66] H. Hale, _Ethnography and Philology of the United States Exploring Expedition_, p. 29; Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, ii. 153 _sq._; Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) p. 119; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 177 _sqq._, 180 _sqq._; S. Ella, _op. cit._ pp. 632 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 84 _sqq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 286 _sq._, 288 _sqq._ It says much for the natural ability of the Samoans that they should have attained to a level of culture so comparatively high with material resources so scanty and defective. Nature, indeed, supplied them with abundance of food and timber, but she denied them the metals, which were unknown in the islands until they were introduced from Europe. In their native state, accordingly, the Samoans were still in the Stone Age, their principal tools being stone axes and adzes, made mainly from a close-grained basalt which is found in the island of Tutuila. Of these axes the rougher were chipped, but the finer were ground. Shells were used as cutting instruments and as punches to bore holes in planks; and combs, neatly carved out of bone, were employed as instruments in tattooing. A wooden dibble served them instead of a plough to turn up the earth. The only skins they prepared were those of sharks and some other fish, which they used as rasps for smoothing woodwork. The art of pottery was unknown.[67] Food was cooked in ovens of hot stones;[68] fire was kindled by the friction of wood, the method adopted being what is called the stick-and-groove process.[69] [67] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 319; G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 158; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 146, 149, 154, 159. As to the wooden dibbles, see Ella, _op. cit._ p. 635 (above, p. 166). [68] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 111 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 130. [69] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 129. We now pass to a consideration of the religion of these interesting people, especially in regard to the human soul and its destiny after death. § 6. _Religion: Gods of Families, Villages, and Districts_ The first missionary to Samoa, John Williams, was struck by the contrast between the religion of the Samoans and the religion of the other Polynesian peoples whom he had studied. "The religious system of the Samoans," he says, "differs essentially from that which obtained at the Tahitian, Society, and other islands with which we are acquainted. They have neither _maraes_, nor temples, nor altars, nor offerings; and, consequently, none of the barbarous and sanguinary rites observed at the other groups. In consequence of this, the Samoans were considered an impious race, and their impiety became proverbial with the people of Rarotonga; for, when upbraiding a person who neglected the worship of the gods, they would call him 'a godless Samoan.' But, although heathenism was presented to us by the Samoans in a dress different from that in which we had been accustomed to see it, having no altars stained with human blood, no _maraes_ strewed with the skulls and bones of its numerous victims, no sacred groves devoted to rites of which brutality and sensuality were the most obvious features, this people had 'lords many and gods many';--their religious system was as obviously marked as any other with absurdity, superstition, and vice."[70] [70] John Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, pp. 465 _sq._ This account of the Samoan religion, written at a time when the islands were not yet fully opened up to Europeans, must be modified by the testimony of later writers, in particular with regard to the alleged absence of temples and offerings; but in its broad outlines it holds good, in so far as the Samoan ritual was honourably distinguished from that of many other islands in the Pacific by its freedom from human sacrifice and from the gross and licentious practices which prevailed in other branches of the Polynesian race. The notion of the Rarotongans that the Samoans were a godless people has proved to be totally mistaken. On closer acquaintance it was found that they lived under the influence of a host of imaginary deities who exercised their faith and demanded their obedience. Among these deities the most numerous and perhaps the most influential were the _aitu_, which were the gods of individuals, of families, of towns or villages, and of districts.[71] These gods were supposed to appear in some visible embodiment or incarnation, and the particular thing, or class of things, in which his god was in the habit of appearing, was to the Samoan an object of veneration, and he took great care never to injure it or treat it with contempt. In the great majority of cases the thing in which the deity presented himself to his worshippers was a class of natural objects, most commonly a species of animal, bird, or fish, less frequently a tree or plant or an inanimate object, such as a stone, the rainbow, or a meteor. One man, for example, saw his god in the eel, another in the shark, another in the turtle, another in the owl, another in the lizard, and so on throughout all the fish of the sea, the birds, the four-footed beasts, and creeping things. In some of the shell-fish, such as the limpets on the rocks, gods were supposed to be present. It was not uncommon to see an intelligent chief muttering prayers to a fly, an ant, or a lizard, which chanced to alight or crawl in his presence. A man would eat freely of the incarnation of another man's god, but would most scrupulously refrain from eating of the incarnation of his own particular god, believing that death would be the consequence of such sacrilege. The offended god was supposed to take up his abode in the body of the impious eater and to generate there the very thing which he had eaten, till it caused his death. For example, if a man, whose family god was incarnate in the prickly sea-urchin (_Echinus_), were to eat of a sea-urchin, it was believed that a prickly sea-urchin would grow in his body and kill him. If his family god were incarnate in the turtle, and he was rash enough to eat a turtle, the god would enter into him, and his voice would be heard from within the sinner's body, saying, "I am killing this man; he ate my incarnation." Occasionally, however, the penalty exacted by the deity was less severe. If, for instance, a man's god was in cockles, and he ate one of these shell-fish, a cockle would grow on his nose; if he merely picked up a cockle on the shore and walked away with it, the shell-fish would appear on some part of his person. But in neither case, apparently, would the kindly cockle take the life of the offender. It was not a bloodthirsty deity. Again, a man whose god was in coco-nuts would never drink the refreshing beverage which other people were free to extract from the nuts. But the worshipper who shrank from eating or drinking his god in the shape, say, of an octopus or of coco-nut water, would often look on with indifference while other people partook of these his divinities. He might pity their ignorance or envy their liberty, but he would not seek to enlighten the one or to restrain the other.[72] Indeed this indifference was sometimes carried to great lengths. For example, a man whose god was incarnate in the turtle, though he would not himself dare to partake of turtle, would have no scruple in helping a neighbour to cut up and cook a turtle; but in doing so he took the precaution to tie a bandage over his mouth to prevent an embryo turtle from slipping down his throat and sealing his doom by growing up in his stomach.[73] Sometimes the incarnate deity, out of consideration perhaps for the weakness of the flesh, would limit his presence to a portion of an animal, it might be the left wing of a pigeon, or the tail of a dog, or the right leg of a pig.[74] The advantages of such a restriction to a worshipper are obvious. A man, for instance, to whom it would have been death to eat the right leg of a pig, might partake of a left leg of pork with safety and even with gusto. And so with the rest of the divine menagery. [71] W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_ (London, 1866), pp. 106 _sqq._; T. H. Hood, _Notes of a Cruise in H.M.S. "Fawn" in the Western Pacific_, p. 141; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 16 _sqq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 211, 215 _sqq._ [72] J. Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, p. 468; Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, ii. 131 _sq._; T. H. Hood, _Notes of a Cruise in H.M.S. "Fawn" in the Western Pacific_, p. 141; W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, pp. 106 _sqq._; Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) p. 111; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 16 _sqq._, 40, 50 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 211, 216 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 137, 218. The account of these deities given by Dr. G. Turner is by far the fullest and best. [73] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 67 _sq._ [74] W. T. Pritchard, _op. cit._ p. 107. Similarly some people had pig's heart for their god, or the embodiment of their god, and they scrupulously avoided eating pigs' hearts lest pigs' hearts should grow in their bodies and so cause their death. See G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 72. However, even if the worst had happened, that is to say, if the deity had been killed, cooked and eaten, the consequences were not necessarily fatal to his worshippers; there were modes of redeeming the lives of the sinners and of expiating their sin. Suppose, for example, that the god of a household was the cuttle-fish, and that some visitor to the house had, either in ignorance or in bravado, caught a cuttle-fish and cooked it, or that a member of the family had been present where a cuttle-fish was eaten, the family would meet in conclave to consult about the sacrilege, and they would select one of their number, whether a man or a woman, to go and lie down in a cold oven and be covered over with leaves, just as in the process of baking, all to pretend that the person was being offered up as a burnt sacrifice to avert the wrath of the deity. While this solemn pretence was being enacted, the whole family would engage in prayer, saying, "O bald-headed cuttle-fish, forgive what has been done. It was all the work of a stranger." If they did not thus abase themselves before the divine cuttle-fish, they believed that the god would visit them and cause a cuttle-fish to grow internally in their bodies and so be the death of some of them.[75] Similar modes of appeasing the wrath of divine eels, mullets, stinging ray fish, turtles, wild pigeons, and garden lizards were adopted with equal success.[76] [75] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 31 _sq._ [76] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 38, 58, 59, 69 _sq._, 72. Apparently the Samoans were even more concerned to defend their village gods or district gods against injury and insult than to guard the deities of simple individuals. We are told that all the inhabitants of a district would thus unite for the protection of the local divinity.[77] For example, it happened that in a village where the first native Christian teachers settled one of them caught a sea-eel (_Muraena_) and cooked it, and two of the village lads, who were their servants, ate some of the eel for their supper. But the eel was the village god, and when the villagers heard that the lads had eaten the god, they administered a sound thrashing to the culprits, and dragged them off to a cooking-house where they laid them down in the oven pit and covered them with leaves in the usual way, as if the lads had been killed and were now to be cooked as a peace-offering to avert the wrath of the deity.[78] When John Williams had caused some Christian natives to kill a large sea-snake and dry it on the rocks to be preserved as a specimen, the heathen fishermen of the island at sight of it raised a most terrific yell, and, seizing their clubs, rushed upon the Christian natives, saying, "You have killed our god! You have killed our god!" It was with difficulty that Mr. Williams restrained their violence on condition that the reptile should be immediately carried back to the boat from which the missionary had landed.[79] The island in which this happened belonged to the Tongan group, but precisely the same incident might have occurred in Samoa. In some parts of Upolu a goddess was believed to be incarnate in bats, and if a neighbour chanced to kill one of these creatures, the indignant worshippers of the bat might wage a war to avenge the insult to their deity.[80] If people who had the stinging ray fish for the incarnation of their god heard that their neighbours had caught a fish of that sort, they would go and beg them to give it up and not to cook it. A refusal to comply with the request would be followed by a fight.[81] [77] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 216 _sq._ [78] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 58. [79] J. Williams, _op. cit._ p. 469. [80] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 57. [81] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 75. Accordingly, when the Samoans were converted to Christianity, they gave the strongest proof of the genuineness of their conversion by killing and eating their animal gods. Thus when a chief named Malietoa renounced heathenism, he caused an eel to be publicly caught, cooked, and eaten by many persons who had hitherto regarded the eel as their god. His own sons had a different sort of fish, called _anae_, for their private deity, and to demonstrate their faith in the new religion they had a quantity of the fish caught, cooked, and served up in the presence of a large party of friends and relations. There, with trembling hearts, they partook of the once sacred morsel; but, their fears getting the better of them, they immediately retired from the feast and swallowed a powerful emetic, lest the divine fish should lie heavy on their stomachs and devour their vitals.[82] As nothing particular happened after these daring innovations, the people took heart of grace, and concerted further plans for the destruction of their ancient deities. Among these was a certain Papo, who was nothing more or less than a piece of old rotten matting, about three yards long and four inches wide; but being a god of war and, in that capacity, always attached to the canoe of the leader when they went forth to battle, he was regarded with great veneration by the people. At the assembly convoked to decide on his fate, the first proposal was to throw him into the fire. But the idea was too shocking to the general sense of the community, and by way of making death as little painful as possible to the deity, they decided to take him out to sea in a canoe and there consign him to a watery grave. Even from this mitigated doom Papo was rescued by the efforts of the missionaries, and he now adorns a museum.[83] [82] J. Williams, _op. cit._ pp. 373 _sq._ [83] J. Williams, _op. cit._ p. 375. But even when the career of one of these animal gods was not prematurely cut short by being killed, cooked, and eaten, he was still liable to die in the course of nature; and when his dead body was discovered, great was the sorrow of his worshippers. If, for example, the god of a village was an owl, and a dead owl was found lying beside a road or under a tree, it would be reverently covered up with a white cloth by the person who discovered it, and all the villagers would assemble round the dead god and burn their bodies with firebrands and beat their foreheads with stones till the blood flowed. Then the corpse of the feathered deity would be wrapped up and buried with as much care and ceremony as if it were a human body. However, that was not the death of the god. He was supposed to be yet alive and incarnate in all the owls in existence.[84] [84] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 21, 26, 60 _sq._ Compare W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, pp. 110 _sq._ The offerings to these deities consisted chiefly of cooked food,[85] which was apparently deemed as essential to the sustenance of gods as of men, and that even when the gods were not animals but stones. For example, two oblong smooth stones, which stood on a platform of loose stones near a village, were regarded as the parents of the rain-god, and when the people were making ready to go off to the woods for the favourite sport of pigeon-catching, they used to lay offerings of cooked taro and fish on the stones, accompanied by prayers for fine weather and no rain. These stone gods were also believed to cause yams to grow; hence in time of dearth a man would present them with a yam in hope of securing their favour.[86] [85] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 20. [86] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 24 _sq._ At the feasts the first cup of kava was dedicated to the god, the presiding chief either pouring it out on the ground or waving it towards the sky. Afterwards all the chiefs drank from the same cup according to their rank; then the food brought as an offering was divided and eaten there before the god.[87] Even within the circle of the family it was customary to pour out on the ground a little kava as an offering to the family god before any one else drank of it.[88] [87] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 20; W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, pp. 121 _sqq._ [88] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 229. Annual feasts were held in honour of the gods, and the season of the feast was often in May, but sometimes in April or June.[89] In some cases the feasts were regulated by the appearance of the bird which was believed to be the incarnation of the god. Whenever the bird was seen, the priest would say that the god had come, and he would fix upon a day for the entertainment of the deity.[90] At these festivals all the people met in the place of public assembly, where they had collected heaps of cooked food. First, they made their offerings to the god and prayed to him to avert calamity and grant prosperity; then they feasted with and before their god, and after that any strangers present might eat. Some of the festivals included games, such as wrestling, spear-throwing, club exercises, sham-fights, and nocturnal dances; and they lasted for days.[91] At one of these annual festivals held in the month of June, the exercise with clubs assumed a serious and indeed sanguinary form. All the people, old and young, men, women, and children, took part in it, and battered their scalps till the blood streamed down over their faces and bodies. This proof of their devotion was supposed to be acceptable to the deity, who, gratified by the sight of their flowing blood, would answer their prayers for health, good crops, and victory in war.[92] At the feast of the cockle god in May prayers were offered up to the divine shell-fish that he would be pleased to cure the coughs and other ailments usually prevalent at that season, which in Samoa forms the transition from the wet to the dry months.[93] At the festival of an owl god, which fell about the month of April, the offerings and prayers were particularly directed towards the removal of caterpillars from the plantations; for these insects were believed to be the servants of the owl god, who could send them as his ministers of vengeance to lay waste the fields and orchards of the impious.[94] Elsewhere the owl was a war god, and at the beginning of the annual fish festivals the chiefs and people of the village assembled round the opening of the first oven and gave the first fish to the god.[95] A family, who had the eel for their household god, showed their gratitude to him for his kindness by presenting him with the first fruits of their taro plantation.[96] Another family believed their deity to be incarnate in centipedes; and if a member of the family fell ill or was bitten by a centipede, they would offer the divine reptile a fine mat and a fan, with a prayer for the recovery of the patient.[97] The utility of a fine mat and a fan to a centipede is too obvious to be insisted on. Sometimes offerings were made to a god, not to persuade him to come, but to induce him to go away. For example, where gods or spirits were believed to voyage along the coast, offerings of food were often set down on the beach as an inducement to the spirits to take the victuals and pass on without calling at that particular place.[98] [89] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 20, 26, 29, 41, 44, 47, 53, 57. [90] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 20 _sq._ [91] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 20, 26, 29; W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, p. 123. [92] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 57. [93] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 41. [94] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 47. [95] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 25 _sq._ [96] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 70 _sq._ [97] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 47 _sq._ [98] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 229. Formal prayers were offered to the god by the head of a family, and public prayer was put up when the men were setting out for war. On such occasions they prayed that stones, stumps of trees, and other obstacles might be taken out of the way of the warriors, and that their path might be wet with the blood of their foes. All their prayers were for temporal benefits, such as protection against enemies, plenty of food, and other desirable objects. They attached great importance to confession of wrongdoing in times of danger, but, so far as appears, they expressed no repentance, promised no amendment, and offered no prayer for forgiveness. If, for example, a canoe, crossing the channel between Savaii and Upolu, were caught in a squall and seemed likely to be swamped, the steersman would head the canoe to the wind, and every man on board would make a clean breast of his sins. One would say, "I stole a fowl at such and such a village." Another would confess an intrigue with a married woman somewhere else; and so on. When all had either confessed their guilt or declared their innocence, the helmsman would put the helm about and scud before the wind, in perfect confidence of bringing the canoe and crew safe to land.[99] [99] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 229 _sq._ When a god was believed to be incarnate in a species of birds or animals or fish, omens were naturally drawn from the appearance and behaviour of the creatures. This happened particularly in time of war, when hopes and fears were rife among the people. Thus, if their war god was an owl, and the bird fluttered above the troops on the march, the omen was good; but if the owl flew away in the direction of the enemy, it was an evil omen, the god had deserted them and joined the foe;[100] if it crossed the path of the warriors or flew back on them, it was a warning to retreat.[101] So in places where the war-god was a rail-bird, if the bird screeched and flew before the army, the people marched confidently to battle; but if it turned and flew back, they hesitated. If the plumage of the rail showed glossy red, it was a sign to go to war; but if the feathers were dark and dingy, it was a warning to stay at home. And if the bird were heard chattering or scolding, as they called it, at midnight, it prognosticated an attack next day, and they would at once send off the women and children to a place of safety.[102] In like manner omens were drawn from the flight of herons, kingfishers, the _Porphyris Samoensis_, and flying-foxes, where these creatures were supposed to incarnate the war god.[103] People who saw their war god in the lizard used to take omens from a lizard before they went forth to fight. They watched the movements of a lizard in a bundle of spears. If the creature ran about the outside of the bundle and the points of the spears, the omen was favourable; but if it crept into the bundle for concealment, it was an evil sign.[104] The inhabitants of several villages looked upon dogs, especially white dogs, as the incarnation of their war god; accordingly if the dog wagged his tail, barked, and dashed ahead in sight of the enemy, it was a good omen; but if he retreated or howled, their hearts failed them.[105] Again, where the cuttle-fish was the war god, the movements of that fish at sea were anxiously observed in time of war. If the fish swam inshore while the people were mustering for battle, it augured victory; but if it swam far away, it portended defeat.[106] [100] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 25 _sq._ [101] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 60. [102] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 52, 61, 65. [103] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 35, 51, 54 _sq._, 64. [104] G. Turner, pp. 46 _sq._ [105] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 49. [106] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 29. When a god was supposed to dwell in some inanimate object, the art of divination was similarly employed to elicit a knowledge of the future from an observation of the object, whatever it might be. In several villages, for example, the people viewed a rainbow as the representative of their war god. If, when they were going to battle by land or sea, a rainbow appeared in the sky right in front of them, with the arch, as it were, straddling across the line of march or the course that the fleet was steering, it was a warning to turn back. But if the bow shone on the right or left of the army or of the fleet, it meant that the god was marching with them, and cheering on the advance.[107] Another village revered its god in the lightning. When lightning flashed frequently in time of war, it was believed that the god had come to help and direct his people. A constant play of lightning over a particular spot was a warning that the enemy was lurking there in ambush. A rapid succession of flashes in front meant that the foe was being driven back; but if the lightning flashed from front to rear, it was a signal to retreat.[108] In one large village the war god resided in two teeth of the sperm whale, which were kept in a cave and observed by a priest in time of war. If the teeth were found lying east and west, it was a good omen; but if they lay north and south, it prognosticated defeat.[109] In another place the war god was present in a bundle of shark's teeth, and the people consulted the bundle before they went out to fight. If the bundle felt heavy, it foreboded ill; but if it was light, it was an omen of victory, and the troops marched with hearts correspondingly light.[110] [107] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 35; compare p. 43. [108] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 59 _sq._ [109] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 35. [110] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 55. When the god was incarnate in a live creature, it was an obvious advantage to ensure his constant presence and blessing by owning a specimen of his incarnation and feeding it. Hence some folk kept a tame god on their premises. For instance, some people possessed a war god in the shape of a pet owl;[111] others had a divine pigeon, which was carefully kept and fed by the different members of the family in turn.[112] Yet others were so fortunate as to capture the thunder god and to keep him in durance, which effectually prevented him from doing mischief. Having caught him, they tied him up with pandanus leaves and frightened him by poking firebrands at him. And lest, as an old offender, he should attempt to break prison and relapse into his former career of crime, they filled a basket with pandanus leaves and charred firebrands and hung it up on a tree _in terrorem_, to signify what he might expect to get if he took it into his head to strike houses again.[113] [111] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 25 _sq._ [112] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 64. [113] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 34. Vegetable gods were much less plentiful than animal gods in Samoa. Still they occurred. Thus, the god of one family lived in a large tree (_Hernandia peltata_); hence no member of the family dared to pluck a leaf or break a branch of that tree.[114] The household deity of another family dwelt in a tree of a different sort (_Conanga odorata_), which has yellow and sweet-scented flowers.[115] In Savaii the special abode of a village god called Tuifiti or "King of Fiji" was a grove of large and durable trees (_Afzelia bijuga_). No one dared to cut that timber. It is said that a party of natives from another island once tried to fell one of these trees; but blood flowed from the trunk, and all the sacrilegious strangers fell ill and died.[116] One family saw their god in the moon. On the appearance of the new moon all the members of the family called out, "Child of the moon, you have come." They assembled also, presented offerings of food, feasted together, and joined in praying, "Oh, child of the moon! Keep far away disease and death." And they also prayed to the moon before they set out on the war path.[117] But in Samoa, as in Tonga, there seems to be no record of a worship of the sun, unless the stories of human sacrifices formerly offered to the great luminary be regarded as reminiscences of sun-worship.[118] [114] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 72. [115] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 71. [116] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 63. [117] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 67. [118] See above, p. 158. § 7. _Priests and Temples_ The father of a family acted as the priest of the household god. He usually offered a short prayer at the evening meal, begging the deity to guard them all from war, sickness, death, and the payment of fines. Sometimes he would direct the family to hold a feast in honour of their god, and on these occasions a cup of kava was poured out as a libation to the divinity. Such simple domestic rites were celebrated in the house, where the whole family assembled; for the gods were believed to be present with men in a spiritual and invisible form as well as in the material objects which were regarded as their visible embodiments. Often the deity spoke through the father or other members of the family, telling them what to do in order to remove a present evil or avert a threatened one.[119] [119] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 18. For the offering of kava to the household god, compare _id._ p. 51. But while every head of a family might thus act as a domestic priest and mouthpiece of the deity, there was also a professional class of priests set apart for the public worship of the gods, particularly of the war gods, who in their nature did not differ essentially from the gods of families, of villages, and of districts, being commonly embodied either in particular material objects or in classes of such objects, especially in various species of birds, animals, and fish, such as owls, rails, kingfishers, dogs, lizards, flying-foxes, and cuttle-fish. Sometimes the ruling chiefs acted as priests; but in general some one man in a particular family claimed the dignity of the priesthood and professed to declare the will of the god. His office was hereditary. He fixed the days for the annual feasts in honour of the deity, received the offerings, and thanked the people for them. He decided also whether the people might go to war.[120] The priests possessed great authority over the minds of the people, and they often availed themselves of their influence to amass wealth.[121] The gods were supposed from time to time to take possession of the priests and to speak through their mouths, answering enquiries and issuing commands. Thus consulted as an oracle the priest, or the god through him, might complain that the people had been slack in making offerings of food and property, and he would threaten them with vengeance if they did not speedily bring an ample supply to the human representative of the deity. At other times the god required a whole family to assemble and build him a large canoe or a house, and such a command was always obeyed with alacrity and a humble apology tendered for past neglect. The priests were also consulted oracularly for the healing of the sick, the recovery of stolen property, and the cursing of enemies. Thus they kept the people in constant fear by their threats and impoverished them by their exactions.[122] [120] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 20. For a full account of the priesthood, see J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 220 _sqq._ As to the Samoan war-gods, see G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 23, 25 _sq._, 27 _sq._, 28, 32, 33, 35, 42, 46 _sq._, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54 _sq._, 55, 57, 60, 61, 64, 65; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 215 _sq._ [121] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 70, 222 _sq._, 225; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 228, 246 _sq._ [122] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 223-225; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 246 _sq._ The outward signs of divine inspiration or possession were such as priests or prophets have manifested in many lands and ages as conclusive evidence of their being the vehicles of higher powers. The approach or presence of the god was indicated by the priest beginning to gape, yawn, and clear his throat; but soon his countenance changed, his body underwent violent contortions, and in loud, unearthly tones, which the trembling and awe-stricken hearers interpreted as the voice of an indwelling deity, he delivered his message of exhortation or warning, of menace, or comfort, or hope.[123] [123] J. B. Stair, p. 223; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 228, 246 _sq._ Spirit-houses (_fale-aitu_) or temples were erected for some, but not all, of the class of deities (_aitu_) which we are now considering. It was chiefly the war gods who were thus honoured. Such temples were built with the same materials and in the same style as the houses of men, with nothing to distinguish them from ordinary dwellings, except that they almost always stood on platforms of stones, which varied in height and size with the respect felt for the particular deity. They were usually situated on the principal public place or green (_malae_) of the village and surrounded by a low fence. Sometimes they were mere huts; yet being viewed as the abode of gods they were held sacred and regarded with great veneration by the Samoans in the olden time. Whatever emblems of deity were in possession of the village were always placed in these houses under the watchful care of keepers.[124] In one temple, for instance, might be seen a conch shell hung from the roof in a basket. This shell the god was supposed to blow when he wished the people to go to war. In another a cup made of the shell of a coco-nut was suspended from the roof, and before it prayers were uttered and offerings presented. The cup was also used in an ordeal for the detection of theft. In a trial before chiefs the cup would be sent for, and each of the suspected culprits would lay his hand on it and say, "With my hand on this cup, may the god look upon me, and send swift destruction, if I took the thing which has been stolen." They firmly believed that it would be death to touch the cup and tell a lie.[125] [124] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 226-228. [125] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 19. The temples were always built by the united exertions of a whole family, village, or district.[126] For example, when the inhabitants of a village whose god was the cuttle-fish erected a new temple to that deity, every man, woman, and child in the village contributed something to it, if it was only a stick or a reed of thatch. While some of the villagers were drafted off to put up the house, the rest engaged in a free fight, which appears to have been considered as a necessary part of the proceedings. On this occasion many old scores were settled, and he who got most wounds was believed to have earned the special favour of the deity. With the completion of the temple the fighting ended, and ought not to be renewed for a year, till the anniversary of the building of the temple came round, when the worshippers were again at liberty to break each other's heads in honour of the divine cuttle-fish.[127] [126] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 227 _sq._ [127] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 29 _sq._ At one place in Savaii there was a temple in which a priest constantly resided. The sick used to be carried to him in the temple and there laid down with offerings of fine mats. Thereupon the priest stroked the diseased part, and the patient was supposed to recover.[128] We hear of another temple in which fine mats were brought as offerings to the priests and stored up in large numbers among the temple treasures. Thus in time the temples might have amassed a considerable degree of wealth and might even, if economic progress had not been arrested by European intervention, have developed into banks. However, when the people were converted to Christianity, they destroyed this particular temple and dissipated the accumulated treasures in a single feast by way of celebrating their adhesion to the new faith.[129] Where the bat was the local deity, many bats used to flock about the temple in time of war.[130] Where the kingfisher received the homage of the people as the god of war, the old men of the village were wont to enter his temple in times of public emergency and address the kingfisher; and people outside could hear the bird replying, though, singularly enough, his voice was that of a man, and not that of a bird. But as usual the god was invisible.[131] In one place a temple of the great god Tangaloa was called "the House of the Gods," and it was carefully shut up all round, the people thinking that, if this precaution were not taken, the gods would get out and in too easily and be all the more destructive.[132] Such a temple might be considered rather as a prison than a house of the gods. [128] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 49. [129] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 55. [130] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 56 _sq._ [131] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 54 _sq._ [132] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 53. To the rule that Samoan temples were built of the same perishable materials as ordinary houses a single exception is known. About ten miles inland from the harbour of Apia, in the island of Upolu, are the ruins of a temple, of which the central and side posts and the rafters were all constructed of stone. The ground plan seems to have resembled that of an ordinary Samoan house of the best style, forming an ellipse which measured fifty feet in one direction by forty feet in the other. Two central pillars appear to have supported the roof, each fashioned of a single block of stone some thirteen feet high, twelve inches thick one way and nine inches the other. The rafters were in lengths of twelve feet and six feet, by four inches square. Of the outside pillars, which upheld the lower edge of the sloping roof, eighteen were seen standing by Pritchard, who has described the ruins. Each pillar stood three feet high and measured nine inches thick in one way by six inches in the other. Each had a notch or shoulder on the inner side for supporting the roof. Pillars and rafters were quarried from an adjoining bluff, distant only some fifty yards from the ruins. Some squared stones lying at the foot of the bluff seem to show that the temple was never completed. The site of the ruins is a flat about three acres in area. The natives call the ruins _Fale-o-le-Fe'e_, that is, the House of the Fe'e. This Fe'e was a famous war god of A'ana and Faleata, two native towns of Upolu; he was commonly incarnated in the cuttle-fish. As the Samoans were unacquainted with the art of cutting stones, and had no tools suitable for the work, they thought that this temple, with its columns and rafters of squared stone, must have been built by the gods, and they explained its unfinished state by alleging that the divine builders had quarrelled among themselves before they had brought the work to completion.[133] [133] W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, pp. 119-121; Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) p. 112; G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 31; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 228; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 220. For the sake of completeness I will mention another stone monument, of more imposing dimensions, which has been discovered in Samoa, though its origin and meaning are unknown. It stands on a tableland in the high mountainous interior of Upolu and appears to be not altogether easy of access. The discoverer, Mr. H. B. Sterndale, reached it by clambering up from what he describes as a broad and dangerous ravine. In making his way to the tableland he passed through a gap which from a distance he had supposed to be a natural fissure in the rocks; but on arriving at it he discovered, to his surprise, that the gap was in fact a great fosse formed by the hand of man, being excavated in some places and built up at others, while on one side, next to the rise of the hill, it was further heightened by a parapet wall. When, passing through the fosse, he issued upon the tableland, which is a level space of some twenty acres in extent, he perceived the monument, "a truncated conical structure or _Heidenmauer_ of such huge dimensions as must have required the labour of a great multitude to construct. So little did I expect," he says, "in this neighbourhood to meet with any example of human architecture, and so rudely monstrous was the appearance of this cyclopean building, that from its peculiar form, and from the vegetation with which it was overgrown, I might have passed it by, supposing it to have been a volcanic hillock, had not my attention been attracted by the stonework of the fosse. I hastened to ascend it. It was about twenty feet high by one hundred in diameter. It was circular with straight [perpendicular?] sides; the lower tiers of stone were very large, they were lava blocks, some of which would weigh at least a ton, which must have been rolled or moved on skids to their present places. They were laid in courses; and in two places near the top seemed to have been entrances to the inside, as in one appeared a low cave choked with rocks and tree roots. If there had been chambers within, they were probably narrow and still existing, as there was no sign of depression on the crown of the work, which was flat and covered with flat stones, among which grew both trees and shrubs. It is likely that it was not in itself intended as a place of defence, but rather as a base or platform upon which some building of importance, perhaps of timber, had been erected, no doubt in the centre of a village, as many foundations of a few feet high were near it. The fosse, when unbroken, and its inner wall entire, was probably crossed by a foot-bridge, to be withdrawn on the approach of an enemy; and the little gap, by which I had entered, closed, so that this must have been a place of great security. The Samoan natives, as far as I have been able to learn, have no tradition of what people inhabited this mountain fastness."[134] [134] H. B. Sterndale, quoted by R. A. Sterndale, "Asiatic Architecture in Polynesia," _The Asiatic Quarterly Review_, x. (July-October 1890) pp. 347-350. The writer of this article reports the discoveries of his brother, Mr. Handley Bathurst Sterndale. On an adjoining tableland, approached by a steep and narrow ridge, Mr. Sterndale saw a great number of cairns of stone, apparently graves, disposed in rows among huge trees, the roots of which had overturned and destroyed very many of the cairns. Here, within the numerous trunks of a great spreading banyan tree, Mr. Sterndale found what he calls an inner chamber, or cell, about ten feet square, the floor being paved with flat stones and the walls built of enormous blocks of the same material, while the roof was composed of the twisted trunks of the banyan tree, which had grown into a solid arch and, festooned by creepers, excluded even the faint glimmer of twilight that dimly illuminated the surrounding forest. Disturbed by a light which the traveller struck to explore the gloomy interior, bats fluttered about his head. In the centre of the chamber he discovered a cairn, or rather cromlech, about four feet high, which was formed of several stones arranged in a triangle, with a great flat slab on the top. On the flat slab lay a large conch shell, white with age, and encrusted with moss and dead animalculae. The chamber or cell, enclosed by the trunks of the banyan-tree, might have been inaccessible, if it were not that, under the pressure of the tree-trunks, several of the great slabs composing the wall had been displaced, leaving a passage.[135] [135] H. B. Sterndale, _op. cit._ pp. 351 _sq._ What were these remarkable monuments? Mr. Sterndale believed the stone chamber to be the tomb of some man of authority in ancient days, the antiquity of the structure being vouched for by the great banyan-tree which had so completely overgrown it. This view is likely enough, and is confirmed by the large number of cairns about it, which appear to be sepulchral. But what was the massive circular monument or platform, built of huge blocks of lava laid in tiers? From Mr. Sterndale's description it would seem that the structure closely resembled the tombs of the sacred kings of Tonga, though these tombs are oblong instead of circular. But they often supported a house or hut of wood and thatch; and Mr. Sterndale may well be right in supposing that the circular Samoan monument in like manner served as a platform to support a wooden building. In this connexion we must not forget that the typical Samoan house was circular or oval in contrast to the typical Tongan house, which was oblong. The openings, which seemed to lead into the interior of the monument, may have given access to the sepulchral chamber where the bodies of the dead were deposited. Slight as are these indications, they apparently point to the use of the monument as a tomb. There is nothing, except perhaps its circular shape, to suggest that it was a temple of the sun. As no such stone buildings have been erected by the Samoans during the time they have been under European observation, it may be, as Mr. Sterndale supposed, that all the ruins described by him were the work of a people who inhabited the islands before the arrival of the existing race.[136] [136] H. B. Sterndale, _op. cit._ p. 352. § 8. _Origin of the Samoan Gods of Families, Villages, and Districts: Relation to Totemism_ If we ask, What was the origin of the peculiar Samoan worship of animals and other natural objects? the most probable answer seems to be that it has been developed out of totemism. The system is not simple totemism, for in totemism the animals, plants, and other natural objects are not worshipped, that is, they do not receive offerings nor are approached with prayers; in short, they are not gods, but are regarded as the kinsfolk of the men and women who have them for totems. Further, the local distribution of the revered objects in Samoa, according to villages and districts, differs from the characteristic distribution of totems, which is not by place but by social groups or clans, the members of which are usually more or less intermixed with each other in every district. It is true that in Samoa we hear of family or household gods as well as of gods of villages and districts, and these family gods, in so far as they consist of species of animals and plants which the worshippers are forbidden to kill or eat, present a close analogy to totems. But it is to be observed that these family gods were, so to say, in a state of unstable equilibrium, it being always uncertain whether a man would inherit his father's or his mother's god or would be assigned a god differing from both of them. This uncertainty arose from the manner of determining a man's god at birth. When a woman was in travail, the help of several gods was invoked, one after the other, to assist the birth; and the god who happened to be invoked at the moment when the child saw the light, was his god for life. As a rule, the god of the father's family was prayed to first; so that generally, perhaps, a man inherited the god of his father. But if the birth was tedious and difficult, the god of the mother's family was next invoked. When the child was born, the mother would call out, "To whom were you praying?" and the god prayed to just before was carefully remembered, and his incarnation duly acknowledged throughout the future life of the child.[137] Such a mode of selecting a divine patron is totally different from the mode whereby, under pure totemism, a person obtains his totem; for his totem is automatically determined for him at birth, being, in the vast majority of cases, inherited either from his father or from his mother, without any possibility of variation or selection. Lastly, the Samoan system differs from most, though not all, systems of totemism, in that it is quite independent of exogamy; in other words, there is no rule forbidding people who revere the same god to marry each other. [137] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 17, 78 _sq._ Thus, while the Samoan worship of certain classes of natural objects, especially species of animals, is certainly not pure totemism, it presents points of analogy to that system, and might easily, we may suppose, have been developed out of it, the feeling of kinship for totemic animals and plants having been slowly transformed and sublimated into a religious reverence for the creatures and a belief in their divinity; while at the same time the clans, which were originally intermixed, gradually sorted out from each other and settled down in separate villages and districts. This gradual segregation of the clans may have been facilitated by a change from maternal to paternal descent of the totem; for when a man transmits his totem to his offspring, his descendants in the male line tend naturally to expand into a local group in which the totem remains constant from generation to generation instead of alternating with each successive generation, as necessarily happens when a man's children take their totem not from him but from their mother. That the Samoan worship of _aitu_ was developed in some such way out of simple totemism appears to have been the view of Dr. George Brown, one of our best authorities on Samoan society and religion; for he speaks without reserve of the revered objects as totems.[138] A similar derivation of the Samoan _aitu_ was favoured by Dr. Rivers, who, during a visit to Samoa, found some evidence confirmatory of this conclusion.[139] [138] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 137, 218, 334. [139] W. H. R. Rivers, "Totemism in Polynesia and Melanesia," _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_, xxxix. (1909) pp. 159 _sq._ § 9. _The High Gods of Samoa_ But besides these totemic gods of Samoa, as we may term them, which were restricted in the circle of their worshippers to particular families, villages, or districts, there were certain superior deities who were worshipped by all the people in common and might accordingly be called the national divinities of Samoa; indeed the worship of some of them was not confined to Samoa, but was shared by the inhabitants of other groups of islands in Polynesia. These high gods were considered the progenitors of the inferior deities, and were believed to have formed the earth and its inhabitants. They themselves dwelt in heaven, in the sea, on the earth, or under the earth; but they were invisible and did not appear to their worshippers in the form of animals or plants. They had no temples and no priests, and were not invoked like their descendants.[140] [140] W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, pp. 111 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 211 _sq._ Among these high gods the chief was Tangaloa, or, as he was sometimes called, Tangaloa-langi, that is, Tangaloa of the Skies. He was always spoken of as the principal god, the creator of the world and progenitor of the other gods and of mankind.[141] It is said that after existing somewhere in space he made the heavens as an abode for himself, and that wishing to have also a place under the heavens he created this lower world (_Lalolangi_, that is, "Under the heavens"). According to one account, he formed the islands of Savaii and Upolu by rolling down two stones from the sky; but according to another story he fished them up from the depths of the sea on a fishing-hook. Next he made the _Fee_ or cuttle-fish, and told it to go down under the earth; hence the lower regions of sea or land are called _Sa he fee_ or "sacred to the cuttle-fish." In its turn the cuttle-fish brought forth all kinds of rocks, including the great one on which we live.[142] Another myth relates how Tangaloa sent down his son or daughter in the likeness of a bird called _turi_, a species of plover or snipe (_Charadrius fulvus_). She flew about, but could find no resting-place, for as yet there was nothing but ocean; the earth had not been created or raised above the sea. So she returned to her father in heaven and reported her fruitless search; and at last he gave her some earth and a creeping plant. These she took down with her on her next visit to earth; and after a time the leaves of the plant withered and produced swarms of worms or maggots, which gradually developed into men and women. The plant which thus by its corruption gave birth to the human species was the convolvulus. According to another version of the myth, it was in reply to the complaint of his daughter or son that the sky-god Tangaloa fished up the first islands from the bottom of the sea.[143] [141] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 212. [142] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 7. [143] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 7 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 212-214. The bird _turi_ or _tuli_ is spoken of by Turner as the daughter, but by Stair as the son, of Tangaloa. According to Turner, the bird is a species of snipe; according to Stair, a species of plover. As to Tangaloa and the stories told about him, compare John Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, pp. 469 _sq._; H. Hale, _Ethnography and Philology of the United States Exploring Expedition_, p. 22; Violette, "Notes d'un Missionnaire sur l'archipel de Samoa," _Les Missions Catholiques_, iii. (1870) pp. 111 _sq._; E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 463, _s.v._ "Tangaroa." Another of the national gods of Samoa was Mafuie, who was supposed to dwell in the subterranean regions and to cause earthquakes by shaking the pillar on which the earth reposes. In a tussle with the hero Ti'iti'i, who descended to the lower world to rob Mafuie of his fire, the earthquake god lost one of his arms, and the Samoans considered this as a very fortunate circumstance; for otherwise they said that, if Mafuie had had two arms, he would have shaken the world to pieces.[144] It is said that during a shock of earthquake the natives used to rush from their houses, throw themselves upon the ground, gnaw the grass, and shriek in the most frantic manner to Mafuie to desist, lest he should shake the earth to bits.[145] [144] Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, ii. 131; W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, pp. 112, 114 _sqq._; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 209-211; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 238 _sq._ [145] J. Williams, _op. cit._ p. 379. It seems to be doubtful whether among the Samoan gods are to be numbered the souls of deceased ancestors. Certainly the evidence for the practice of a worship of the dead is far less full and clear in Samoa than in Tonga. On this subject Dr. George Brown writes as follows: "Traces of ancestor worship are few and indistinct. The word _tupua_ is supposed by some to mean the deified spirits of chiefs, and to mean that they constituted a separate order from the _atua_, who were the original gods. The word itself is the name of a stone, supposed to be a petrified man, and is also generally used as the name of any image having some sacred significance, and as representing the body into which the deified spirit was changed. What appears certain is that ancestor worship had amongst the Samoans gradually given place to the worship of a superior order of supernatural beings not immediately connected with men, but having many human passions and modes of action and life. There are, however, some cases which seem to point to ancestor worship in olden days, as in the case of the town of Matautu, which is said to have been settled by a colony from Fiji. Their principal deity was called Tuifiti, the King of Fiji. He was considered to be the head of that family, and a grove of trees, _ifilele_ (the green-heart of India), was sacred to him and could not be cut or injured in any way."[146] This god was supposed to be incarnate in a man who walked about, but he was never visible to the people of the place, though curiously enough he could be seen by strangers.[147] [146] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 223. See also above, p. 192. [147] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 62 _sq._ The town or village of Matautu is in the island of Savaii. According to G. Turner, the sacred tree of Tuifiti was the _Afzelia bijuga_. However, another experienced missionary, J. B. Stair, who knew Samoa a good many years before Dr. Brown arrived in it, speaks apparently without hesitation of the _tupua_ as being "the deified spirits of chiefs, who were also supposed to dwell in Pulotu," where they became posts in the house or temple of the gods. Many beautiful emblems, he says, were chosen to represent the immortality of these deified spirits; among them were some of the heavenly bodies, including the Pleiades and the planet Jupiter, also the rainbow, the marine rainbow, and many more. He adds that the embalmed bodies of some chiefs were worshipped under the significant title of "sun-dried gods"; and that people prayed and poured libations of kava at the graves of deceased relatives.[148] [148] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 210 _sq._, 215. § 10. _The Samoan Belief concerning the Human Soul: Funeral Customs_ Whether the Samoans practised the worship of the dead in a developed form or not, they certainly possessed the elements out of which the worship might under favourable circumstances be evolved. These elements are a belief in the survival of the human soul after death, and a fear of disembodied spirits or ghosts. The Samoans believed that every man is animated by a soul, which departs from the body temporarily in faints and dreams and permanently at death. The soul of the dreamer, they thought, really visited the places which he saw in his dream. At death it departed to the subterranean world of the dead which the Samoans called Pulotu, a name which clearly differs only dialectically from the Tongan Bolotoo or Bulotu. Some people professed to see the parting soul when it had quitted its mortal body and was about to take flight to the nether region. It was always of the same shape as the body. Such apparitions at the moment of death were much dreaded, and people tried to drive them away by shouting and firing guns. The word for soul is _anganga_, which is a reduplicated form of _anga_, a verb meaning "to go" or "to come." Thus apparently the Samoans did not, like many people, identify the soul with the shadow; for in Samoan the word for shadow is _ata_.[149] [149] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 8, 16; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 220; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 218 _sq._; E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 26, _s.v._ "Ata." However, they seem to have in a dim way associated a man's soul with his shadow. This appears from a remarkable custom which they observed in the case of the unburied dead. The Samoans were much concerned for the lot of these unfortunates and stood in great dread of their ghosts. They believed that the spirits of those who had not received the rites of burial wandered about wretched and forlorn and haunted their relatives everywhere by day and night, crying in doleful tones, "Oh, how cold! oh, how cold!" Hence when the body of a dead kinsman was lost because he had been drowned at sea or slain on a battlefield, some of his relatives would go down to the seashore or away to the battlefield where their friend had perished; and there spreading out a cloth on the ground they would pray to some god of the family, saying, "Oh, be kind to us; let us obtain without difficulty the spirit of the young man!" After that the first thing that lighted on the cloth was supposed to be the spirit of the dead. It might be a butterfly, a grasshopper, an ant, a spider, or a lizard; whatever it might be, it was carefully wrapt up and taken to the family, who buried the bundle with all due ceremony, as if it contained the body of their departed friend. Thus the unquiet spirit was believed to find rest. Now the insect, or whatever it happened to be, which thus acted as proxy at the burial was supposed to be the _ata_ or shadow of the deceased. The same word _ata_ served to express likeness; a photographer, for example, is called _pue-ata_, "shadow-catcher." The Samoans do not appear to have associated the soul with the breath.[150] [150] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 170 _sq._, 218 sq.; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 150 _sq._; S. Ella, "Samoa," _Report of the Fourth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Hobart, Tasmania, in January 1892_, pp. 641 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 184. According to Brown and Stair the ceremony described in the text was observed when a man had died a violent death, even when the relatives were in possession of the body, and in that case the insect, or whatever it might be, was buried with the corpse. I have followed Turner and Ella in supposing that the ceremony was only observed when the corpse could not be found. As to the fear of the spirits of the unburied dead, see also W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, pp. 58 _sq._, 151. They attributed disease and death to the anger of a god, to the agency of an evil spirit, or to the ghost of a dead relative who had entered into the body of the sufferer. Epilepsy, delirium, and mania were always thus explained by the entrance into the patient of a god or demon. The Samoan remedy for all such ailments was not medicine but exorcism. Sometimes a near relative of the sick person would go round the house brandishing a spear and striking the walls to drive away the spirit that was causing the sickness.[151] Hence when a member of a family fell seriously ill, his friends did not send for a doctor, but repaired to the high priest of the village to enquire of him the cause of the sickness, to learn why the family god (_aitu_) was angry with them, and to implore his mercy and forgiveness. Often the priest took advantage of their anxiety to demand a valuable piece of property, such as a canoe or a parcel of ground, as the best means of propitiating the angry deity and so ensuring the recovery of the patient. With all these demands the anxious and unsuspecting relatives readily complied. But if the priest happened not to want anything in particular at the time, he would probably tell the messengers to gather the family about the bed of the sufferer and there confess their sins. The command was implicitly obeyed, and every member of the family assembled and made a clean breast of his or her misdeeds, especially of any curse which he or she might have called down either on the family generally or on the invalid in particular. Curiously enough, the curse of a sister was peculiarly dreaded; hence in such cases the sister of the sick man was closely questioned as to whether she had cursed him and thus caused his illness; if so, she was entreated to remove the curse, that he might recover. Moved by these pleadings, she might take some coco-nut water in her mouth and spurt it out towards or upon the body of the sufferer. By this action she either removed the curse or declared her innocence; a similar ceremony might be performed by any other member of the family who was suspected of having cursed the sick man.[152] [151] S. Ella, _op. cit._ pp. 639, 643; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 223 _sq._, 402. [152] W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, pp. 146 _sq._; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 140 _sq._; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 639; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 180 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 223 _sq._, 401. When an illness seemed likely to prove fatal, messengers were despatched to friends at a distance that they might come and bid farewell to the dying man. Every one who came to visit the sufferer in his last moments brought a present of a fine mat or other valuable piece of property as a token of regard, and to defray the cost of the illness and funeral. The best of the mats would be laid on the body of the dying man that he might have the comfort of seeing them before he closed his eyes for ever. Dr. George Brown thought that the spirits of the mats thus laid on the body of the dying chief were supposed to accompany his soul to the other world. It is possible that their spirits did so, but it is certain that their material substance did not; for after the funeral all the mats and other valuables so presented were distributed among the mourners and friends assembled on the occasion, so that every one who had brought a gift took away something in return on his departure.[153] [153] W. T. Pritchard, _op. cit._ pp. 147, 150 _sq._; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 141 _sq._, 146; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 639; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 180; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 220, 401, 405 _sq._ If the dying man happened to be a chief, numbers crowded round him to receive a parting look or word, while in front of the house might be seen men and women wildly beating their heads and bodies with great stones, thus inflicting on themselves ghastly wounds, from which the blood poured as an offering of affection and sympathy to their departing friend or lord. It was hoped that, pleased and propitiated by the sight of their devotion, the angry god might yet stay his hand and spare the chief to his people. Above all the tumult and uproar would rise the voice of one who prayed aloud for the life then trembling in the balance. But if the prayer seemed likely to prove ineffectual, it was exchanged for threats and upbraiding. "O thou shameless spirit," the voice would now be heard exclaiming, "could I but grasp you, I would smash your skull to pieces! Come here and let us fight together. Don't conceal yourself, but show yourself like a man, and let us fight, if you are angry."[154] [154] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 181 _sq._ Immediately after death, all the mats on the floor of the house were thrown outside, and the thatched sides of the house were either torn down or knocked in with clubs; while the relatives and assembled crowds wrought themselves up to frenzy, uttering loud shrieks, rending their garments, tearing out their hair by handfuls, burning their bodies with firebrands, beating their faces and heads with clubs and stones, or gashing themselves with shells and shark's teeth, till the blood ran freely down. This they called an offering of blood for the dead. In their fury some of the mourners fell on the canoes and houses, breaking them up and tearing them down, felling the bread-fruit trees, and devastating the plantations of yams and taro.[155] [155] W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, p. 148; G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 144; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 640; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 182; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 401 _sq._ As decomposition is rapid in the hot moist climate of Samoa, it was customary to bury commoners a few hours after death. The body was laid out on a mat, anointed with scented oil, and the face tinged with turmeric, to soften the cadaverous look. It was then wound up in several folds of native cloth and the chin propped up, the head and face being left uncovered, while for some hours longer the body was surrounded by weeping relatives, who kept constant watch over it, so long as it remained in the house. These watchers were always women, and none of them might quit her post under any pretext till she was relieved by another. A fire was kept burning brightly in the house all the time. If the deceased had died of a complaint which had previously carried off other members of the family, they would probably open the body to "search for the disease." Any inflamed substance which they happened to find they would take away and burn, thinking thus to prevent any other member of the family from being similarly afflicted. Such a custom betrays an incipient sense of death from natural, instead of supernatural, causes, and must have contributed to diffuse a knowledge of human anatomy.[156] [156] W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, pp. 148 _sq._; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 144 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, 182; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 402. So long as a corpse remained in the house no food might be eaten under the roof; the family had their meals outside or in another house. Those who had attended to the deceased or handled the corpse were taboo: they might not feed themselves or touch food with their hands. For days they were fed by others as if they were helpless infants. Baldness and the loss of teeth were supposed to be the punishment inflicted by the household god for a breach of the rule. Many people fasted at such times, eating nothing during the day, but taking a meal in the evening. The fifth day was a day of purification. The tabooed persons then washed their faces and hands with hot water and were clean; after that they were free to eat at the usual time and in the usual manner.[157] [157] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 145; W. T. Pritchard, _op. cit._ p. 149; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 640; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 182; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 402. The ordinary mode of disposing of the dead was by interment either in a stone vault or in a shallow grave. But occasionally other modes were adopted, such as embalming, putting the corpse in a canoe and setting it adrift on the sea, or exposing it on a stage erected in the forest, where it was left to decay, the bones being afterwards collected and buried. Upon the death of a chief his body was generally deposited in a family vault, the sides and bottom of which were lined with large slabs of sandstone or basalt, while another large slab of the same material formed the roof. Such vaults were sometimes large and massive. The stones used in their construction were found in various parts of the islands. Commoners were buried in shallow graves.[158] [158] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 178 _sq._ Ordinary people were usually buried the day after they died. As many friends as could be present attended the funeral. Every one brought a present, but on the day after the funeral all these presents, like those which had previously been made to the dying man, were distributed again, so that none went empty-handed away. The corpse was generally buried without a coffin; but chiefs were laid in hollow logs or canoes. However, even the bodies of common people were sometimes interred in rude coffins similarly constructed. There were no common burying-grounds; all preferred to bury their dead on their own land. Often the grave was dug close to the house. The body was laid in it with the head to the east and the feet to the west. When it had been thus committed to its last resting-place, a near relative of the deceased, a sister, if one survived, seated herself at the grave, and waving a white cloth over the corpse, began an address to the dead. "Compassion to you," she said, "go with goodwill, and without bearing malice towards us. Take with you all our diseases, and leave us life." Then pointing to the west, she exclaimed, "Misery there!" Next pointing to the east, she cried, "Prosperity there!" Lastly, pointing to the grave, she said, "Misery there; but leave happiness with us!" With the body they deposited in the grave several things which had been used by the deceased during his illness, such as his clothing, his drinking-cup, and his bamboo pillow. The wooden pickaxes and coco-nut shells employed as shovels in digging the grave were also carefully buried with the corpse. It was not, we are told, because the people believed these things to be of use to the dead; but because it was supposed that, if they were left and handled by others, further disease and death would be the consequence. Valuable mats and other articles of property were sometimes buried with the corpse, and the grave of a warrior was surrounded with spears stuck upright in the ground. Graves were sometimes enclosed with stones and strewn with sand or crumbled coral.[159] [159] W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, pp. 150 _sq._; G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 146 _sq._; S. Ella, _op. cit._ pp. 640 _sq._; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 179 _sq._, 182 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 403. The obsequies of a chief of high rank were more elaborate. The body was kept unburied for days until his clansfolk had assembled from various parts of the islands and paraded the body, shoulder high, through the village, chanting a melancholy dirge.[160] The mourning and ceremonies lasted from ten to fifteen days. All that time the house of death was watched night and day by men appointed for the purpose. After the burial, and until the days of mourning were ended, the daytime was generally spent in boxing and wrestling matches, and sham-fights, while the nights were occupied with dancing and practising a kind of buffoonery, which was customary at these seasons of mourning for the dead. The performance was called _O le tau-pinga_. The performers amused themselves by making a variety of ludicrous faces and grimaces at each other, to see who could excite the other to laugh first. Thus they whiled away the hours of night till the days of mourning were expired.[161] So long as the funeral ceremonies and feasts lasted no work might be done in the village, and no strangers might approach it. The neighbouring lagoon and reefs were taboo: no canoe might pass over the lagoon anywhere near the village, and no man might fish in it or on the reef.[162] For a chief or man of distinction fires were kept burning day and night in a line from the house to the grave; these fires were maintained for ten days after the funeral. The reason assigned for this custom, according to Ella, was to keep away evil spirits. Even common people observed a similar custom. After burial they kept a fire blazing in the house all night, and they were careful to clear the intervening ground so that a stream of light went forth from the house to the grave. The account which the Samoans gave of the custom, according to Turner, was that it was merely a light burning in honour of the departed, and a mark of their tender regard for him. Dr. George Brown believed that the original motive for the custom was to warm the ghost, and probably at the same time to protect the mourners against dangerous spirits.[163] [160] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 146 [161] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 183 _sq._ [162] W. T. Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, pp. 149 _sq._; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 642; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 403 _sq._ [163] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 149; S. Ella, _op. cit._ pp. 640 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 402. The head was deemed a very sacred part, and in olden days the bodies of chiefs were often buried near their houses until decomposition had set in, when the head was cut off and interred in some family burying-place inland, to save it from insult in time of war. This interment of the head was accompanied with feasts, dances, and sham-fights. The skull was borne to the appointed place on a kind of stage, attended by a troop of armed men. With these sham-fights Dr. George Brown, who records the custom, compares the sham-fights which used to take place among the Melanesians of the Duke of York Island when the body of a chief was laid on a high platform in front of his house, one company of warriors striving to deposit the corpse on the platform, while their adversaries attempted to prevent them from doing so.[164] The meaning of these curious sham-fights is obscure. Perhaps the attacking party represented a band of evil spirits, who endeavoured to snatch away the chief's body, but were defeated in the nefarious attempt. [164] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 388 _sq._, 404 _sq._ One or two families of chiefs in the island of Upolu used to practise a rude kind of embalming. The work was done exclusively by women. The viscera having been removed and buried, the women anointed the body daily with a mixture of oil and aromatic juices. To let the fluids escape, they punctured the body all over with fine needles. Finally, wads of native cloth, saturated with oil or resinous gums, were inserted in the abdomen, the apertures were closed up, and the body wrapt in native cloth. The face, hands, and feet were left exposed, and were repeatedly anointed with oil, mixed with turmeric powder, to give a fresh and life-like appearance to the mummy. The whole process lasted about two months. On its completion the mummy was placed in a house built specially for the purpose, where, loosely covered with a sheet of native cloth, it rested on a raised platform. Strangers were freely admitted to see it. Four of these mummies, laid out in a house, were to be seen down to about the year 1864. They were the bodies of a chief, his wife, and two sons. Dr. George Turner judged that they must have been embalmed upwards of thirty years, and although they had been exposed all that time, they were in a remarkably good state of preservation. The people assigned no particular reason for the practice, further than that it sprang from an affectionate desire to keep the bodies of their departed friends with them, as if they were still alive.[165] [165] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 148 _sq._; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 641; J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 184 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 405. § 11. _The Fate of the Human Soul after Death_ With regard to the fate of human souls after death the Samoans appear to have believed in their immortality, or at all events in their indefinite survival. On this subject Dr. Brown observes: "All souls survived after death, and so far as I know they had no idea of their dying a second death or being destroyed. I do not think that a Samoan could give any reason for his belief that the soul does not perish with the body, but he certainly does believe this, and I never heard any one question the fact."[166] Thus, according to Dr. Brown the Samoans, unlike the Tongans, drew no invidious distinction between the souls of noblemen and the souls of commoners, but liberally opened the doors of immortality to gentle and simple alike. So far, they carried their republican or democratic spirit into the world beyond the grave. [166] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 220 _sq._ However, according to the American ethnologist, Horatio Hale, some of the Samoans agreed with the Tongans in taking an aristocratic view of the destiny of souls after death; and as he had good opportunities for acquainting himself with the Samoan religion during the prolonged stay of the American Exploring Expedition at Samoa in 1839, when the islands were as yet but little affected by European influence, I will quote his account. He says: "All believe in the existence of a large island, situated far to the north-west called _Pulótu_, which is the residence of the gods. Some suppose that while the souls of the common people perish with their bodies, those of the chiefs are received into this island, which is described as a terrestrial elysium, and become there inferior divinities. Others hold (according to Mr. Heath) that the spirits of the departed live and work in a dark subterraneous abode, and are eaten by the gods. A third, and very common opinion is, that the souls of all who die on an island, make their way to the western extremity, where they plunge into the sea; but what then becomes of them is not stated. The rock from which they leap, in the island of Upolu, was pointed out to us; the natives term it '_Fatu-asofia_,' which was rendered the 'jumping-off stone.'"[167] [167] H. Hale, _Ethnography and Philology of the United States Exploring Expedition_, p. 27. Of these various opinions described by Hale the third would seem to have been by far the most prevalent. It was commonly believed that the disembodied spirit retained the exact resemblance of its former self, by which we are probably to understand the exact resemblance of its former body. Immediately on quitting its earthly tabernacle it began its solitary journey to Fafa, which was the subterranean abode of the dead, lying somewhere to the west of Savaii, the most westerly island of the group. Thus, if a man died in Manua, the most easterly of the islands, his soul would journey to the western end of that island, then dive into the sea and swim across to Tutuila. There it would walk along the beach to the extreme westerly point of the island, when it would again plunge into the sea and swim across to the next island, and so on to the most westerly cape of Savaii, where it finally dived into the ocean and pursued its way to the mysterious Fafa.[168] [168] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 218 _sq._ Compare G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 257; S. Ella, _op. cit._ pp. 643 _sq._ At the western end of Savaii, near the village of Falealupo, there are two circular openings among the rocks, not far from the beach. Down these two openings the souls of the dead were supposed to go on their passage to the spirit-world. The souls of chiefs went down the larger of the openings, and the souls of common people went down the smaller. Near the spot stood a coco-nut tree, and if a passing soul chanced to collide with it, the soul could not proceed farther, but returned to its body. When a man recovered from a deep swoon, his friends supposed that his soul had been arrested in its progress to the other world by knocking against the coco-nut tree, and they rejoiced, saying, "He has come back from the tree of the Watcher," for that was the name by which the coco-nut tree was known. So firmly did the people of the neighbourhood believe in the passage of the souls near their houses, that at night they kept down the blinds to exclude the ghosts.[169] The "jumping-off stone" at the west end of Upolu was also dreaded on account of the passing ghosts. The place is a narrow rocky cape. The Samoans were much astonished when a Christian native boldly built himself a house on the haunted spot.[170] According to one account, the souls of the dead had not to make their way through the chain of islands by the slow process of walking and swimming, but were at once transported to the western end of Savaii by a band of spirits, who hovered over the house of the dying man, and catching up his parting spirit conveyed it in a straight course westward.[171] [169] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 257 _sq._; S. Ella, _op. cit._ pp. 643 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 221. [170] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, p. 219. [171] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 257; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 643. The place down which the spirits of the dead were supposed to descend to the nether world was called by a native name (_Lua[=o]_), which means "hollow pit." "May you go rumbling down the hollow pit" was a common form of cursing. At the bottom of the pit was a running stream which floated the spirits away to Pulotu. All alike, the handsome and the ugly, old and young, chiefs and commoners, drifted pell-mell on the current in a dazed, semi-conscious state, till they came to Pulotu. There they bathed in "the Water of Life" and recovered all their old life and vigour. Infirmity of every kind fled away; even the aged became young again. The underworld of Pulotu was conceived on the model of our upper world. There, as here, were heavens and earth and sea, fruits and flowers; there the souls of the dead planted and fished and cooked; there they married and were given in marriage, all after the manner of life on earth.[172] [172] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 258 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 222. However, it appears that according to a widespread belief the world of the dead was sharply discriminated into two regions, to wit, an Elysium or place of bliss called Pulotu, and a Tartarus or place of woe named S[=a]-le-Fe'e. The title for admission to one or other of these places was not moral worth but social rank, chiefs going to Elysium and commoners to Tartarus. The idea of the superiority of the chiefs to the common people was thus perpetuated in the land of the dead.[173] The king of the lower regions was a certain Saveasiuleo, that is, Savea of the Echo. He reclined in a house in the company of the chiefs who gathered round him: the upper part of his body was human, the lower part was like that of a fish and stretched away into the sea. This royal house of assembly was supported by the erect bodies of chiefs, who had been of high rank on earth, and who, before they died, anticipated with pride the honour they were to enjoy by serving as pillars in the temple of the King of Pulotu.[174] [173] J. B. Stair, _Old Samoa_, pp. 217 _sq._; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 221. On the question whether the Samoans held a doctrine of moral retribution after death, Dr. Brown observes: "I do not remember any statement to the effect that the conduct of a man in this life affected his state after death. They certainly believe this now, but whether they did so prior to the introduction of Christianity I cannot definitely say. I am inclined, however, to believe that they did not believe that conduct in this life affected them in the future" (_Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 261 _sq._). Elsewhere, however, Dr. Brown seems to express a contrary opinion. He says: "It was generally understood that the conditions of men in this life, even amongst the common people, had an effect on their future conditions. A good man in Samoa generally meant a liberal man, one who was generous and hospitable; whilst a bad man was one who was mean, selfish, and greedy about food" (_op. cit._ p. 222). [174] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 259 _sq._; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 644. But the souls of the dead were not permanently confined to the lower world. They could return to the land of the living by night to hold converse with members of their families, to warn and instruct them in dreams, and to foretell the future. They could cause disease and death by entering into the bodies of their enemies and even of their friends, and they produced nightmare by sitting on the chests of sleepers. They haunted some houses and especially burying-grounds. Their apparitions were visible to the living and were greatly dreaded; people tried to drive them away by shouts, noises, and the firing of guns. But the ghosts had to return to the nether world at daybreak. It was because they feared the spirits of the dead that the Samoans took such great pains to propitiate dying people with presents; this they did above all to persons whom they had injured, because they had most reason to dread the anger of their ghosts.[175] However, the souls of the departed were also thought of in a more amiable light; they could help as well as harm mankind. Hence prayers were commonly offered at the grave of a parent, a brother, or a chief. The suppliant, for example, might pray for health in sickness; or, if he were of a malignant turn, he might implore the ghost to compass the death of some person at whom he bore a grudge. Thus we are told that a woman prayed for the death of her brother, and he died accordingly.[176] In such beliefs and practices we have, as I have already observed, the essential elements of a regular worship of the dead. Whether the Samoans were on the way to evolve such a religion or, as Dr. George Brown preferred to suppose,[177] had left it behind them and made some progress towards a higher faith, we hardly possess the means of determining. [175] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 259; S. Ella, _op. cit._ p. 644; G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 219, 221, 222. [176] G. Turner, _Samoa_, p. 151. [177] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, pp. 245, 282. But while the Samoans thought that the dead return to earth to make or mar the living, they did not believe that the spirits come back to be born again in the form of men or animals or to occupy inanimate bodies; in other words they had no belief in the transmigration of souls.[178] The absence of such a belief is significant in view of Dr. Rivers's suggestion that Melanesian totemism may have been evolved out of a doctrine of metempsychosis, human souls being supposed to pass at death into their totem animals or plants.[179] We have seen that the Samoan system of family, village, and district gods bears strong marks of having been developed out of totemism; and if their totemism had in turn been developed out of a doctrine of transmigration, we should expect to find among them a belief that the souls of the dead appeared in the shape of the animals, plants, or other natural objects which were regarded as the embodiments of their family, village, or district gods. But of such a belief there is seemingly no trace. It appears, therefore, unlikely that Samoan totemism was based on a doctrine of transmigration. Similarly we have seen reason to think that the Tongan worship of animals may have sprung from totemism, though according to the best authorities that worship was not connected with a theory of metempsychosis.[180] Taken together, the Samoan and the Tongan systems seem to show that, if totemism ever flourished among the Polynesians, it had not its roots in a worship of the dead. [178] G. Brown, _Melanesians and Polynesians_, p. 221, "They had no belief in the transmigration of souls either into animals, inert bodies, or into different human bodies." [179] W. H. R. Rivers, _The History of Melanesian Society_, ii. 358 _sqq._ [180] See above, pp. 92 _sqq._ CHAPTER IV THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE HERVEY ISLANDERS § 1. _The Hervey or Cook Islands_ The Hervey or Cook Archipelago is a scattered group of nine small islands situated in the South Pacific about seven hundred miles south-east of Samoa. The islands are either volcanic or coralline, and approach to them is impeded by dangerous reefs and the absence of harbours.[1] The two principal islands are Rarotonga and Mangaia, the most southerly of the group. Of these the larger, Rarotonga, has a circumference of about thirty miles. It is a vast mass of volcanic mountains, rising peak above peak, to a height of between four and five thousand feet above the sea; but from the foot of the mountains a stretch of flat land, covered with rich alluvial soil, extends for one or two miles to the coast, which is formed by a fringing reef of live coral. The whole island is mantled in luxuriant tropical verdure. It is difficult, we are told, to exaggerate the strange forms of beauty which everywhere meet the eye in this lovely island: gigantic and fantastic columns of rock draped with vines; deep valleys lying in the shadow of overhanging mountains; primaeval forest with its many shades of green; immense chestnut trees, laden with fragrant blossoms; miles of bread-fruit groves, intermingled with coco-nut palms; and nearer the beach plantains, bananas, sweet potatoes, and lastly, growing to the water's edge, graceful iron-wood trees with hair-like leaves drooping like tresses, all contribute to the variety and charm of the scenery.[2] [1] F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. (London, 1894) p. 509. [2] W. W. Gill, _Life in the Southern Isles_ (London, N.D.), p. 11. Compare John Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_ (London, 1838), pp. 16, 174-176. According to Dr. Guillemard (_loc. cit._), the height of Rarotonga is 2900 feet; according to W. W. Gill, our principal authority on the island, it is 4500 feet. Very different is the aspect of Mangaia. It is a complete coral island rising from deep water as a ring of live coral; there is no lagoon. A few hundred yards inland from the rugged beach there rises gradually a second or inner ring of dead coral, which towards the interior falls away perpendicularly, thus surrounding the island like a cyclopean wall. This belt or bulwark of dead coral is from one to two miles wide. To cross it is like walking on spear-points: to slip and fall on it may entail ghastly wounds. The streams of water from the interior find their way through it to the sea by subterranean channels. Imbedded in the highest parts of this inland reef of coral are many sea-shells of existing species, and it is honeycombed with many extensive caves, which were formerly used as dwellings, cemeteries, places of refuge, or storehouses. Scores of them are filled with desiccated human bodies. So vast are they that it is dangerous to venture alone into their recesses; the forlorn wanderer might never emerge from them again. Some of them are said to penetrate far under the bed of the ocean. In these caverns stalactite and stalagmite abound, forming thick and fast-growing layers of limestone rock. The largest and most famous of the caves is known as the Labyrinth (_Tuatini_). The interior of the island is formed of dark volcanic rock and red clay, descending in low hills from a flat-topped centre, called the Crown of Mangaia. The summit is not more than six hundred and fifty feet above the level of the sea.[3] [3] W. W. Gill, _Life in the Southern Isles_. pp. 7 _sq._; _id._, _From Darkness to Light in Polynesia_ (London, 1894), pp. 6 _sq._; A. Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_ (Berlin, 1900), pp. 271 _sqq._, 274 _sqq._ (as to the caverns). § 2. _The Islanders and their Mode of Life_ Though the natives speak a Polynesian language closely akin to the Samoan and have legends of their migration from Samoa, they appear not to be pure Polynesians. They say that they found black people on Rarotonga; and their more pronounced features, more wavy hair, darker complexion, and more energetic character seem to indicate an admixture of Melanesian blood. In Mangaia, indeed, this type is said to predominate, the natives of that island being characterised by dusky brown skin, wavy or frizzly hair, and ample beards: their features, too, are more prominent than those of the Rarotongans, and their manners are wilder.[4] Cannibalism prevailed in most of the islands of the group down to the conversion of the natives to Christianity, which took place between 1823 and 1834, when, with the exception of a few pagans in Mangaia, there did not remain a single idolater, or vestige of idolatry, in any one of the islands. However, many years afterwards old men, who had partaken of cannibal feasts, assured a missionary that human flesh was far superior to pork.[5] [4] F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. 509. Compare A. Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_, pp. 257 _sq._, 269. The latter writer remarks on the great variety of types among the natives of these islands. In Mangaia he found the people darker than in Rarotonga, undersized, sturdy, with thick lips, noses broad and sunken at the bridge, which gave them a somewhat wild appearance. As to the tradition of an emigration of the Hervey Islanders from Samoa, see W. W. Gill, _Life in the Southern Isles_, pp. 23 _sqq._ "The Mangaians themselves trace their origin to Avaiki, or nether world; but Avaiki, Hawai'i, and Savai'i, are but slightly different forms of one word. The _s_ of the Samoan dialect is invariably dropped in the Hervey Group dialects, whilst a _k_ is substituted for the break at the end. No native of these days doubts that by Avaiki his ancestors really intended Savai'i, the largest island of the Samoan Group. In Polynesia, to sail _west_ is to go _down_; to sail _east_ is to go _up_. To sail from Samoa to Mangaia would be 'to come up,' or, to translate their vernacular closely, 'to climb up.' In their songs and myths are many references to 'the hosts of _Uk_upolu,' undoubtedly the Upolu of Samoa" (W. W. Gill, _op. cit._ p. 25). Compare _id._, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_ (London, 1876), pp. 166 _sq._ [5] W. W. Gill, _Life in the Southern Isles_, pp. 13 _sq._; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _Report of the Second Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science held at Melbourne, 1890_, p. 324. As to the date of the introduction of Christianity into the Hervey Islands, see John Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, pp. 491 _sq._ In the larger islands the natives cultivated the soil diligently even before their contact with Europeans. The missionary John Williams, who discovered Rarotonga in 1823, found the island in a high state of cultivation. Rows of superb chestnut trees (_inocarpus_), planted at equal distances, stretched from the base of the mountains to the sea, while the spaces between the rows, some half a mile wide, were divided into taro patches, each about half an acre in extent, carefully banked up and capable of being irrigated at pleasure. On the tops of the banks grew fine bread-fruit trees placed at equal intervals, their stately foliage presenting a pleasing contrast to the pea-green leaves of the ordinary taro and the dark colour of the giant taro (_kape_) in the beds and on the sloping banks beneath.[6] In Rarotonga bread-fruit and plantains are the staple food; in Mangaia it is taro. On the atolls the coco-nut palm flourishes, but no planting can be done, as the soil consists of sand and gravel thrown up by the sea on the ever-growing coral. The inhabitants of the atolls live contentedly on coco-nuts and fish; they are expert fishermen, having little else to do. But fresh fish are also eaten in large quantities on most of the islands.[7] In some of the islands the planting was done by the women, but in others, including Rarotonga, the taro was both planted and brought home by the men. Women cooked the food in ovens of hot stones sunk in holes, and they made cloth from the bark of the paper-mulberry, which they stripped from the tree, steeped in water, and beat out with square mallets of iron-wood. But garments were made also from the inner bark of the banyan and bread-fruit trees.[8] In the old days the native houses were flimsy quadrangular huts constructed of reeds and thatched with plaited leaflets of the coco-nut palm, which were very pervious to rain; but the temples and large houses of chiefs were thatched with pandanus leaves. The doors were always sliding; the threshold was made of a single block of timber, tastefully carved. There was a sacred and a common entrance.[9] Like all the Polynesians, the Hervey Islanders before their discovery were ignorant of the metals. When in a wrecked vessel they found a bag of Californian gold, they thought it was something good to eat and proceeded to cook the nuggets in order to make them juicy and tender.[10] [6] John Williams, _op. cit._ pp. 175 _sq._ [7] W. W. Gill, _Life in the Southern Isles_, pp. 12, 15; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _Report of the Second Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science held at Melbourne, 1890_, p. 336. [8] W. W. Gill, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ pp. 332 _sq._, 338. [9] W. W. Gill, _Life in the Southern Isles_, p. 16; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ pp. 335 _sq._ [10] W. W. Gill, _Life in the Southern Isles_, p. 16. § 3. _Social Life: the Sacred Kings_ The people were divided into tribes or clans, each tracing descent in the male line from a common ancestor, and each possessing its own lands, which were inalienable. Exogamy, we are told, was the universal rule in the olden time; but when a tribe was split up in war, the defeated portion was treated as an alien tribe. Polygamy was very common, and was not restricted to chiefs. A man often had two or three sisters to wife at the same time. Distant cousins sometimes, though rarely, married each other; but in such cases they had to belong to the same generation; that is, they must be descended in the same degree, fourth, fifth, or even more remote, from the common ancestor. If misfortune or disease overtook couples linked even by so distant a relationship, the elders would declare that it was brought upon them by the anger of the clan-god. It was the duty of parents to teach their growing children whom they might lawfully marry, but their choice was extremely limited. Children as a rule belonged to the tribe or clan of their father, unless they were adopted into another. However, parents had it at their option to assign a child at birth either to the tribe of its father or to the tribe of its mother; this they did by pronouncing over the infant the name either of the father's or of the mother's god. Commonly the father had the preference; but occasionally, when the father's tribe was one from which human victims for sacrifice were regularly drawn, the mother would seek to save the child's life by having the name of her tribal god pronounced over it and so adopting it into her own tribe.[11] Circumcision in an imperfect form was practised in the Hervey Islands from time immemorial. It was usually performed on a youth about the age of sixteen. The operation was indispensable to marriage. No woman would knowingly marry an uncircumcised husband. The greatest insult that could be offered to a man was to accuse him of being uncircumcised. The rite is said to have been invented by the god Rongo in order to seduce the beautiful wife of his brother Tangaroa, and he enjoined the observance of circumcision upon his worshippers.[12] In Rarotonga it was customary to mould a child's head into a high shape by pressing the forehead and the back of the head between slabs of soft wood. This practice did not obtain on Mangaia nor, apparently, on any other island of the Hervey Group.[13] [11] W. W. Gill, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ pp. 323, 330, 331, 333. [12] W. W. Gill, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ pp. 327-329. In the operation the prepuce was slit longitudinally, and the divided pieces were drawn underneath and twisted, so as in time to form a small knot under the urethra. As to the ceremony of assigning a child either to its father's or to its mother's tribe, see W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_ (London, 1876), pp. 36 _sq._ [13] W. W. Gill, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 326. In Rarotonga four ranks of society were recognised. These were the _ariki_, or king; the _mataiapo_, or governors of districts; the _rangatira_, or landowners; and the _unga_, or tenants. A man was accounted great according to the number of his _kaingas_ or farms, which contained from one to five acres. These were let to tenants, who, like vassals under the feudal system, obeyed the orders of their superior, assisted him in erecting his house, in building his canoe, in making fishing-nets, and in other occupations, besides bringing him a certain portion of the produce of his lands.[14] [14] John Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, pp. 183 _sq._ The kings were sacred men, being regarded as priests and mouthpieces of the great tutelary divinities.[15] In Mangaia they were the priests or mouthpieces of the great god Rongo. So sacred were their royal persons that no part of their body might be tattooed: they might not take part in dances or in actual warfare. Peace could not be proclaimed nor blood spilt lawfully without the consent of the king speaking in the name of the god Rongo. Quite distinct from, and subordinate to, the sacred king was the "lord of Mangaia," a warrior chief who gained his lordship by a decisive victory. He represented the civil power, while the king represented the spiritual power; but while the office of the king was hereditary, the office of the civil lord was not. It sometimes happened that the civil lord was at enmity with the king of his day. In that case the king would refuse to complete the ceremonies necessary for his formal investiture; life would remain unsafe; the soil could not be cultivated, and famine soon ensued. This state of turbulence and misery might last for years, till the obnoxious chief had been in his turn despatched, and a more agreeable successor appointed.[16] Thus the sacred king and the civil lord corresponded to the Tooitonga or sacred chief and the civil king of Tonga.[17] [15] W. W. Gill, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 335. [16] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 293. [17] See above, pp. 62 _sq._ § 4. _Religion, the Gods, Traces of Totemism_ Yet though the king of Mangaia ranked above the civil or temporal lord, it devolved on that lord to install a new king in office by formally seating him on "the sacred sandstone" (_te kea inamoa_) in the sanctuary or sacred grove (_marae_)[18] of Rongo on the sea-shore facing the setting sun. The ceremony took place in presence of the leading under-chiefs. The special duty of the king was by offering rhythmical and very ancient prayers to Great Rongo to keep away evil-minded spirits who might otherwise injure the island. For this end the principal king (_te ariki pa uta_) lived in the interior of the island in the sacred and fertile district of Keia. His prayers were thought to avert evil spirits coming from the east. On the barren sea-shore at O-rongo (the seat of the temple or grove of Rongo) lived the secondary king (_te ariki pa tai_), who warded off bad spirits coming from the west. Besides this primary ghostly function, many other important duties devolved upon these royal personages. The secondary or shore king was not infrequently a natural son of the great inland king. By virtue of their office all kings were high priests of Rongo, the tutelary god of Mangaia.[19] [18] In the Hervey Islands a _marae_ seems to have been a sacred grove. So it is described by W. W. Gill (_Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 14), who adds in a note: "These _maraes_ were planted with _callophylla inophylla_, etc., etc., which, untouched by the hand of man from generation to generation, threw a sacred gloom over the mysteries of idol-worship. The trees were accounted sacred, not for their own sake, but on account of the place where they grew." [19] W. W. Gill, _From Darkness to Light in Polynesia_, pp. 314 _sq._ As to the installation of the priestly king by the temporal lord, see also _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ pp. 339 _sq._ But Rongo was not peculiar to the Hervey Islands. He was a great Polynesian deity worshipped in almost every part of the Pacific, and though his attributes differed greatly in different places, a universal reverence was paid to him. In the Hervey Islands, he and his twin brother Tangaroa were deemed the children of Vatea, the eldest of the primary gods, a being half man and half fish, whose eyes are the sun and the moon. The wife of this monstrous deity and mother of the divine twins was Papa, whose name signifies Foundation and who was supposed to be a daughter of Timatekore or "Nothing-more." The twin Tangaroa, another great Polynesian deity, was specially honoured in Rarotonga and Aitutaki, another of the Hervey Islands.[20] The famous Polynesian hero Maui was also well known in the Hervey Islands, where people told how he had brought up the first fire to men from the under world, having there wrested it from the fire-god Mauike;[21] how he raised the sky--a solid vault of blue stone--to its present height, for of old the sky almost touched the earth, so that people could not walk upright;[22] and finally how he caught the great sun-god Ra himself in six nooses made of strong coco-nut fibre, so that the motions of the orb of day, which before had been extremely irregular, have been most orderly ever since.[23] [20] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 3 _sqq._; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ pp. 348 _sq._ As to Rongo and Tangaroa, see E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_ (Wellington, N.Z., 1891), pp. 424 _sq._, 463 _sq._, _svv._ "Rongo" and "Tangaroa." [21] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 51-58. [22] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 58-60. [23] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 61-63. But besides the divine or heroic figures of more or less anthropomorphic type, which the Hervey Islanders recognised in common with the rest of the Polynesians, we may distinguish in their mythology traces of that other and probably older stage of thought in which the objects of religious reverence are rather animals than men or beings modelled in the image of man. We have seen that this early stage of religion was well preserved in Samoa down to the time when the islands fell under the observation of Europeans, and that it was probably a relic of totemism,[24] which at an earlier period may perhaps have prevailed generally among the ancestors of the Polynesians. In the Hervey Islands there was a god called Tonga-iti, who appeared visibly in the form of black and white spotted lizards.[25] Another deity named Tiaio took possession of the body of the large white shark, the terror of these islanders, and he had a small sacred grove (_marae_) set apart for his worship. It is said that this shark-god was a former king of Mangaia, who in the pride of his heart had defiled the sacred district of Keia, the favourite haunt of the gods, by wearing some beautiful scarlet hibiscus flowers in his ears. Now anything red was forbidden in that part of the island as being offensive to the gods; and even the beating of bark-cloth was prohibited there, lest the repose of the gods should be disturbed by the noise. Hence an angry priest knocked the proud and impious king on the head, and the blood of the slain monarch flowed into a neighbouring stream, where it was drunk by a great fresh-water eel. So the spirit of the dead king entered into the eel, but subsequently, pursuing its way to the sea, the spirit forsook the eel and took possession of the shark.[26] Nevertheless he continued occasionally to appear to his worshippers in the form of an eel; for we are told that in the old heathen days, if a huge eel were caught in a net, it would have been regarded as the god Tiaio himself come on a visit, and that it would accordingly have been allowed to return to the water unmolested.[27] It is quite possible that this derivation of the eel-god or shark-god from a former king of Mangaia may be historically correct; for we are told that "many of the deities worshipped in the Hervey Group and other islands of the eastern Pacific were canonised priests, kings, and warriors, whose spirits were supposed to enter into various birds, fish, reptiles, insects, etc., etc. Strangely enough, they were regarded as being, in no respect, inferior to the original deities."[28] Among the creatures in which gods, and especially the spirits of deified men, were believed permanently to reside or to be incarnate were reckoned sharks, sword-fish, eels, the octopus, yellow and black spotted lizards, as well as several kinds of birds and insects.[29] In Rarotonga the cuttle-fish was the special deity of the reigning family down to the subversion of paganism.[30] In Mangaia the tribe of Teipe, whose members were liable to serve as victims in human sacrifices, worshipped the centipede: there was a shrine of the centipede god at Vaiau on the eastern side of Mangaia.[31] Again, two gods, Tekuraaki and Utakea, were supposed to be incarnate in the woodpecker.[32] A comprehensive designation for divinities of all kinds was "the heavenly family" (_te anau tuarangi_); and this celestial race included rats, lizards, beetles, eels, sharks, and several kinds of birds. It was supposed that "the heavenly family" had taken up their abode in these creatures.[33] Nay, even inanimate objects, such as the triton-shell, sandstone, bits of basalt, cinnet, and trees were believed to be thus tenanted by gods.[34] The god Tane-kio, for example, was thought to be enshrined in the planets Venus and Jupiter, and also, curiously enough, in cinnet work.[35] Again, each tribe had its own sacred bird, which was supposed to be sent by a god to warn the people of impending danger.[36] In these superstitions it is possible that we have relics of totemism. [24] See above, pp. 182 _sqq._, 200 _sqq._ [25] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 10 _sq._ 19. Another god called Turanga, who was worshipped at Aumoana, was also supposed to be incarnate in white and black spotted lizards. See _id._, _Life in the Southern Isles_, p. 96. [26] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 29 _sq._ [27] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 79 _sq._ [28] W. W. Gill, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 349. [29] W. W. Gill, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 347. Yet in the same passage the writer affirms that "there is no trace in the Eastern Pacific of the doctrine of transmigration of human souls, although the spirits of the dead are fabled to have assumed, temporarily, and for a specific purpose, the form of an insect, bird, fish, or cloud." [30] _Id._, _Life in the Southern Isles_, p. 289. [31] _Id._, _Life in the Southern Isles_, pp. 96, 308, 309. [32] _Id._, _Life in the Southern Isles_, p. 96. [33] _Id._, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 34 _sq._ [34] _Id._, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 32. [35] _Id._, _Life in the Southern Isles_, p. 96. [36] _Id._, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 35; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 349. Originally, it is said, the gods spoke to men through the small land birds, but the utterances of these creatures proved too indistinct to guide the actions of mankind. Hence to meet this emergency an order of priests was set apart, the gods actually taking up their abode, for the time being, in their sacred persons. Hence priests were significantly named "god-boxes" (_pia-atua_) a title which was generally abbreviated to "gods," because they were believed to be living embodiments of the divinities. When a priest was consulted, he drank a bowl of kava (_Piper methysticum_), and falling into convulsions gave the oracular response in language intelligible only to the initiated. The oracle so delivered, from which there was no appeal, was thought to have been inspired by the god, who had entered into the priest for the purpose.[37] [37] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 35; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 349. § 5. _The Doctrine of the Human Soul_ Like other Polynesians, the Hervey Islanders believed that human beings are animated by a vital principle or soul, which survives the death of the body for a longer or shorter time. Indeed, they held that nobody dies a strictly natural death except as an effect of extreme old age. Nineteen out of twenty deaths were believed to be caused either by the anger of the gods or by the incantations of "the praying people" or sorcerers.[38] Hence, when a person fell ill, it was customary to consult a priest in order to discover the nature of the sin which had drawn down on the sufferer the wrath of the deity or the enmity of the sorcerer.[39] But besides its final departure at death, the soul was thought to quit the body temporarily on other occasions. In sleep it was supposed to leave the sleeper and travel over the island, holding converse with the dead, and even visiting the spirit-world. It was thus that the islanders, like so many other savages, explained the phenomena of dreams. We are told that some of the most important events in their national history were determined by dreams.[40] Again, they explained sneezing as the return of the soul to the body after a temporary absence. Hence in Rarotonga, when a person sneezes, the bystanders exclaim, as though addressing his spirit, "Ha! you have come back!"[41] [38] W. W. Gill, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 342. Compare _id._, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 35. [39] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 35; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 339; _id._, _Life in the Southern Isles_, p. 70. [40] W. W. Gill, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 347. [41] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 177. How exactly the Hervey Islanders pictured to themselves the nature of the human soul, appears not to be recorded. Probably their notions on this obscure subject did not differ greatly from those of the natives of Pukapuka or Danger Island, a lonely island situated some hundreds of miles to the north-west of the Hervey Group. These savages apparently conceived the soul as a small material substance that varied in size with the dimensions of the body which it inhabited. For the sacred men or sorcerers of that island used to set traps to catch the souls of people, and the traps consisted of loops of coco-nut fibre, which differed in size according as the soul to be caught in one of them was fat or thin, or perhaps according as it was the soul of a child or that of an adult. Two of these soul-traps were presented to Mr. W. W. Gill, the first white missionary to land in Danger Island. The loops or rings were arranged in pairs on each side of two cords, one of which was twenty-eight feet long and the other fourteen. The mode of setting the traps was this. If a person was very sick or had given offence to a sorcerer, the offended wizard or priest would hang a soul-trap by night from a branch of a tree overhanging the house of the sufferer or of the person against whom he bore a grudge; then sitting down beside the snare he would pretend to watch for the flight of the victim's spirit. If the family enquired the sin for which the soul-trap had been set, the holy man would probably allege some ceremonial fault committed by the sick man against the gods. If an insect or small bird chanced to fly through one of the loops, the priest would allege that the man's soul was caught in the mesh, and that there was no hope for it but that the wretch must die. In that case the demon Vaerua, who presided over the spirit-world, was believed to hurry off the poor soul to the nether world, there to feast upon it. The news that So-and-so had lost his soul would then spread through the island, and great would be the lamentation. The friends of the unhappy man would seek to propitiate the sorcerer by large presents of food, begging him to intercede with the dread Vaerua for the restoration of the lost soul. Sometimes the intercessions were successful, and the patient recovered; but at other times the priest reported that his prayers were of no avail, and that Vaerua could not be induced to send back the soul to re-inhabit the body. The melancholy tidings acted like a sentence of death. The patient gave up all hope and soon pined away through sheer distress at the thought of his soul caught in the trap.[42] [42] W. W. Gill, _Life in the Southern Isles_, pp. 180-183; _id._, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 171. § 6. _Death and Funeral Rites_ The moment a sick person expired, his near relatives cut off their hair, blackened their faces, and slashed their bodies with shark's teeth, so that the blood might stream down; in Rarotonga it was customary also to knock out some of the front teeth in token of sorrow. During the days of mourning people wore only native cloth, dyed red in the sap of the candle-nut tree and then dipped in the black mud of a taro-patch. The very foul smell of these garments is said to have been symbolical of the putrescent state of the corpse;[43] perhaps at the same time, though we are not told so, it helped to keep the ghost at arm's length. [43] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 181; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 344. That the mourners were not anxious to detain the departed spirit appears from a custom observed by the Rarotongans and described by the discoverer of the island, John Williams. He tells us that in order to secure the admission of a departed spirit to future joys, the corpse was dressed in the best attire the relatives could provide, the head was wreathed with flowers, and other decorations were added. A pig was then baked whole and placed on the body of the deceased, surrounded by a pile of vegetable food. After that, supposing the departed to have been a son, the father would thus address the corpse: "My son, when you were alive I treated you with kindness, and when you were taken ill I did my best to restore you to health; and now you are dead, there is your _momoe o_, or property of admission. Go, my son, and with that gain an entrance into the palace of Tiki,[44] and do not come to this world again to disturb and alarm us." The whole would then be buried; and, if they received no intimation to the contrary within a few days of the interment, the relatives believed that the pig and the rest of the victuals had obtained for the deceased an entrance to the abode of bliss. If, however, a cricket was heard to chirp in the house, it was deemed an ill omen, and they would immediately break into loud laments, saying, for example, "Oh, our brother! his spirit has not entered the paradise; he is suffering from hunger; he is shivering with cold!" Forthwith the grave would be opened and the offering repeated. This usually effected the purpose.[45] [44] The name of the god of the Rarotongan paradise. [45] John Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, pp. 477 _sq._ In Rarotonga the provisions which were buried with the dead person as an offering to Tiki sometimes consisted of the head and kidneys of a hog, a split coco-nut, and a root of kava; in the island of Aitutaki it was usual to place at the pit of the stomach of the corpse the kernel of a coco-nut, and a piece of sugar-cane; in Mangaia the extremity of a coco-nut frond served the same purpose of propitiating Tiki and ensuring the entrance of the ghost into paradise.[46] [46] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 170 _sq._ The bodies of the dead were anointed with scented oil, carefully wrapt up in a number of cloths, and so committed to their last resting-place. They were never disembowelled for the purpose of embalming, but some were desiccated by being kept for about a month and daily anointed with coco-nut oil. A few were buried in the earth within the precincts of a sacred grove (_marae_); but by far the greater number were hidden in caves which were regarded as the private property of certain families. The bodies of warriors were in general carefully concealed by their friends, lest foes should find and burn them in revenge. If a body were buried in the earth, it was always laid face downwards, with chin and knees meeting, and the limbs well secured with coco-nut fibre. A thin covering of earth was spread over the corpse, and large heavy stones were piled on the grave. "The intention," we are informed, "was to render it impossible for the dead to rise up and injure the living." The head of the corpse was always turned to the rising sun. It was customary to bury with the dead some article of value: a woman would have her cloth-mallet laid by her side, while a man would enjoin his friends to bury with him a favourite stone adze or a beautiful white shell (_Ovula ovum_, Linn.) which he had worn in the dance. Such articles were never afterwards touched by the living. Many people were buried in easily accessible caves, that their relatives might visit the mouldering remains from time to time. On such visits the corpse might be again exposed to the sun, anointed afresh with oil, and wrapt in new cloth. But as the sorrow of the survivors abated, these visits became less and less frequent, and finally ceased.[47] [47] W. W. Gill, _Life in the Southern Isles_, pp. 72-76; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 343. A death in a family was the signal for a change of names among the near relatives of the deceased. The greatest ingenuity was exercised in devising new appellations. Sometimes these names were most offensive to good taste. This custom of changing names after the death of a relative has survived the conversion of the natives to Christianity;[48] probably it originated in a desire to avoid the unwelcome attentions of the ghost, who might be thought to be attracted by the sound of the familiar names.[49] [48] W. W. Gill, _Life in the Southern Isles_, pp. 78 _sq._; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 344. [49] See _The Golden Bough_, Part II., _Taboo and the Perils of the Soul_, pp. 356 _sqq._ As soon as the corpse was committed to its last resting-place, the mourners selected five old coco-nuts, opened them one after the other, and poured the water on the ground. These nuts were then wrapt up in leaves and native cloth and thrown towards the grave; or, if the corpse had been let down by cords into the deep chasm called Auraka, the nuts and other food would be cast down successively upon it. Calling loudly each time the name of the departed, they said, "Here is thy food; eat it." When the fifth nut and the accompanying pudding were thrown down, the mourners cried, "Farewell! we come back no more to thee."[50] [50] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 187; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 344. Immediately after a decease a remarkable custom was observed in Mangaia. A messenger was despatched to bear the tidings round the island. On reaching the boundary of each district, he paused to give the war-shout peculiar to the people of the district, adding, "So-and-so is dead." Thereupon near relatives would start off at once for the house of the deceased, each carrying a present of native cloth. Most of the athletic young men of the entire island on the day following united in a series of sham-fights called _ta i te mauri_ or "slaying the ghosts." The district where the corpse lay represented the _mauri_ or ghosts. The young men belonging to it early in the morning arrayed themselves as if for battle, and, well armed, started off for the adjoining district, where the young men were drawn up in battle array under the name of _aka-oa_ or "friends." Having performed the war-dance, the two parties rushed together, clashing their spears and wooden swords, as though fighting in good earnest. The sufferers in this bloodless conflict were supposed to be malignant spirits, who would thus be deterred from doing further mischief to mortals. After the mock battle the combatants united, and, being collectively called _mauri_ or "ghosts," passed on to the third district. Throughout the day their leader carried the sacred _iku kikau_, or coco-nut leaf, at the pit of his stomach, like a dead man. Arrived at the third village, they found the younger men ready for the friendly conflict and bearing the name of _aka-oa_ or "friends." The battle of the ghosts was fought over again, and then with swelling numbers they passed on to the fourth, fifth, and sixth districts, in every one of them fighting and thrashing the ghosts afresh. Repairing at last with united forces to the place where the corpse was laid out in state, the brave ghost-killers were there entertained at a feast, after which all, except the near relatives, returned to their various homes at nightfall. So similar to actual warfare was this custom of fighting the ghosts that it went by the name of "a younger brother of war."[51] Apparently every death was attributed to the action of ghosts who had carried off the soul of the departed brother or sister; and in order to prevent a repetition of the catastrophe it was deemed necessary to repel or even to slay the ghostly assailants by force of arms. [51] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 268 _sq._ The mourning ceremonies lasted from ten to fifteen days according to the rank and age of the deceased. During the whole period no beating of bark for the manufacture of the native cloth was permitted in the district where the death had occurred. A woman who wished to beat out her bark-cloth must go to another part of the island. This rule is said to have been dictated by a fear of offending the female demon Mueu, who introduced the beating of bark-cloth into the world, but who herself beats out cloth of a very different texture; for her cloth-flail is the stroke of death.[52] [52] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 182. Some months after the decease of a person of note funeral games called _eva_ were performed in honour of the departed. These ceremonies invariably took place by day. They were of four sorts. First, there was the _eva tapara_, or "funeral dirge." In this the mourners appeared with blackened faces, shaved heads, streaming blood, and stinking garments. This, we are told, was a most repulsive exhibition.[53] [53] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 271. Second, there was the _eva puruki_ or "war dirge." In this the people arrayed themselves in two columns facing each other, both sides armed with spears made of a brittle kind of wood instead of the fatal iron-wood (_Casuarina equasitifolia_), out of which the spears used in real warfare were made. The performance began with an animated conversation between the leaders of the two squadrons of supposed enemies as to the grounds for war. When this was concluded, the person most nearly related to the deceased began the history of the heroic deeds of the clan by slowly chanting the introductory words. At the appointed pause both companies took up the strain and chanted it vigorously together, the mighty chorus being accompanied by the clash of spears and all the evolutions of war. Then followed a momentary pause, after which a new story would be introduced by the musical voice of the chief mourner, to be caught up and recited in full chorus by both companies as before. These war-dirges were most carefully elaborated, and they embodied the only histories of the past known to these islanders.[54] [54] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 272. Third, there was the _eva toki_ or "axe dirge." In this ceremony the performers, armed with mimic axes of iron-wood instead of stone, used to cleave the cruel earth which had swallowed up the dead; and as they smote the ground, with tears streaming down their cheeks, they expressed a vain wish that so they might open up a passage through which the spirit of the departed might return. This axe-dirge was appropriate to artisans only, who enjoyed great consideration because their skill was believed to be a gift of the gods.[55] [55] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 272 _sq._ Fourth, there was the _eva ta_ or "crashing dirge." In this ceremony two supposed armies were arrayed against each other as in the "war dirge," but differed from it both in the style of composition and in the weapons employed, the combatants being armed with flat spears or wooden swords. In the dialogue or songs the death of their friends was explained by the anger of the gods, for which reasons were assigned. These performances generally concluded with a sort of comedy, the nature of which has not been described.[56] [56] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 273. Sometimes, instead of these funeral games or ceremonies, a grand tribal gathering was held for the sake of reciting songs in honour of the illustrious dead. Such an assembly met in a large house built for the purpose and well lighted with torches, for the doleful concert always took place at night. As many as sixty songs might be prepared for the occasion and mournfully chanted to the accompanying drone of the great wooden drum. Every adult male relative was bound to recite a song; if he could not compose one himself, he had to pay a more gifted person to furnish him with the appropriate words. Some of the songs or ballads of a touching nature were much admired and long remembered. Several months were needed for the preparation of such a performance or "death-talk," as it was called. Not only had the songs to be composed and the dresses made, but a liberal supply of food had to be provided for the guests.[57] [57] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 269-271; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 345. In general all mourning ceremonies were over within a year of the death. But we hear of a chief of the island of Atiu who mourned for seven years for an only child, living all that time in a hut near the grave, and allowing his hair and nails to grow, and his body to remain unwashed. He was the wonder of all the islanders.[58] [58] W. W. Gill, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 345. Among the caverns in which, in the island of Mangaia, the dead used to be deposited, two are particularly famous. One of them, at Tamarua, is the chasm called Raupa or "leafy entrance" on account of the dense growth of hibiscus which formerly surrounded this supposed entrance to the shades. It was the ancient burial-place of the Tongan tribe, the descendants of a band of Tongans, who had landed in Mangaia and settled there. The chasm is a hundred and fifty feet deep and has two openings, the smaller of which was used only for chiefs and priests. The other famous sepulchral cavern, called Auraka, is situated on the western side of the island. It was the grand depository of the dead of the ruling families, who claimed to be descended from the great god Rongo. This chasm is not nearly so deep as Raupa, but, like it, has two entrances; the one sacred and the other profane; the former was reserved for the bodies of the nobility, the latter for the bodies of commoners. Besides these ceremonial entrances there are many natural openings into the vast subterranean cave, for the rock is everywhere perforated. It is possible by torchlight to explore the gloomy recesses of the cavern, which in some places contracts to the narrowest dimensions, while in others it expands till the roof is almost lost to sight. Hundreds of well-preserved mummies may be seen lying in rows, some on ledges of stalactite, others on wooden platforms. Mr. Gill, who thrice visited the cave, judged that some of the bodies were over fifty years old. The whole neighbourhood of the great cavern was deemed sacred to wandering disembodied spirits, who were believed to come up at midnight and exhibit the ghastly wounds by which they had met their fate.[59] [59] W. W. Gill, _Life in the Southern Isles_, pp. 71 _sq._ As to the settlement of a Tongan colony in Mangaia, see _id._, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 287 _sq._ In native tradition the colonists were spoken of as "Tongans sailing through the skies" (_Tongaiti-akareva-moana_). Their leader was the first high-priest of the god Turanga. § 7. _The Fate of the Human Soul after Death_ The home of the departed spirits was believed to be a vast subterranean region called Avaiki. The natives of Mangaia believed that this mysterious region was situated directly under their island. "As the dead were usually thrown down the deepest chasms, it was not unnatural for their friends to imagine the earth to be hollow, and the entrance to this vast nether world to be down one of these pits. No one can wonder at this who knows that the outer portion of Mangaia is a honeycomb, the rock being pierced in every direction with winding caves and frightful chasms. It is asserted that the Mission premises at Oneroa are built over one of these great caverns, which extends so far towards the sea that the beating of the surf can be distinctly heard, whilst the water, purified from its saline particles, continually drips from the stony roof." The inland opening into the infernal regions was believed to be the great cavern of Auraka, in which, as we have just seen, so many of the dead were deposited.[60] [60] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 152-154. However, Avaiki was not the home of the ghosts alone; it was tenanted also by the gods, both the greater and the lesser, with their dependants. There they married, and multiplied, and quarrelled, just like mortals. There they planted, cooked, fished, and inhabited dwellings of exactly the same sort as exist on earth. Their food was no better than that of mortals. There might be seen birds, fish, and rats, likewise the mantis, centipedes, and beetles. There the coco-nut palm, the pandanus, and the myrtle flourished, and yams grew in abundance. The gods committed murder and adultery; they got drunk; they lied; they stole. The arts and crafts were also practised by the deities, who indeed taught them to mankind. The visible world, in short, was but a gross copy of the spiritual and invisible world. If fire burns, it is because latent flame was hidden in wood by the god Mauike in Hades. If the axe cleaves, it is because the fairy of the axe is present unseen in the blade. If the ironwood club kills its man, it is because a fierce demon from Tonga lives in the weapon.[61] [61] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 154. The old high-road to the spirit-land used to start from a place called Aremauku, on a cliff overhanging the western ocean. By this road a regular communication was formerly kept up with the infernal regions. It was by this route, for example, that the hero Maui descended in ancient days to the home of the fire-god Mauike and brought up fire for the use of men. However, the denizens of spirit-land in time grew very troublesome by constantly coming up and afflicting mankind with disease and death; they also created a dearth by stealing people's food, and they even ravished their wives. To put an end to these perpetual annoyances a brave and beautiful woman, Tiki by name, rolled herself alive down into the gloomy chasm which led to the infernal world. The yawning abyss closed on her, and there has been no thoroughfare ever since. The spirits have not been able to come up from Avaiki by that road, and the souls of the dead have been equally unable to go down by it; they are now obliged to descend by a different route.[62] [62] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 154 _sq._ After their departure from the body the spirits of the dead wandered disconsolately along the seashore, picking their steps painfully among the sharp spikes of the coral and stumbling over the bindweed and thick vines which caught their feet. The fragrant smell of the heliotrope, which grows luxuriantly among these barren and rugged rocks, afforded them a little relief, and they wore a red creeper, like a turban, round their heads; the rest of their costume was a miscellaneous collection of weeds which they had picked up in the course of their wanderings. Twice a year, at the summer and winter solstices, they mustered to follow the setting sun down into the under world. They gathered at the two points of the island which face towards the rising of the sun at these two seasons of the year. At the summer solstice, in January, he seems to rise out of the sea opposite to Ana-Kura, that is, the Red Cave, so called because it receives the red rays of the morning. It was there that by far the greater number of the ghosts gathered for their last sad journey with the sun: they all belonged to the southern half of the island. The other point of ghostly muster was called Karanga-iti or "the Little Welcome"; it faced towards the rising of the sun at the winter solstice in June, and it was there that the ghosts born in the northern half of the island assembled. Thus many months might elapse between a death and the final departure of the soul from the land of the living. The weary interval was spent by the spirits in dancing and revisiting their old homes. As a rule they were well disposed to their living relatives, but the ghost of a mother would often grow vindictive when she saw her pet child ill-treated by its stepmother. Sometimes, weary of wandering, the poor ghosts huddled together in the Red Cave, waiting for the midsummer sun and listening to the monotonous moan of the great rollers, which break there eternally.[63] [63] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 155-157. The exact moment of departure was fixed by the leader of the band. As the time drew near, messengers were despatched to call in the stray ghosts who might be lingering near their ancient haunts. Tearfully they gathered at the Red Cave or on a grassy lawn above it, out of reach of the foam and the billows. All kept their eyes on the spot of the horizon where the sun was expected to appear. At the first streak of dawn the whole band took their departure to meet the rising orb of day. That done, they followed in his train as nearly as might be, flitting behind or beneath him across the rolling waters or the rocks and stones of the coast, till towards the close of day they all mustered at Vairo-rongo, "the Sacred Stream of Rongo," facing towards the setting sun. The spot is so named from a little rivulet which there rushes out of the stones at the sacred grove (_marae_) of Rongo: none but priests and kings might bathe there in days of old. At the moment when the sun sank beneath the horizon, the entire band of ghosts followed him along the golden track of light across the shimmering sea and descended in his train to the nether world, but not like him to reappear on the morrow.[64] [64] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 157 _sq._ There were three such points of departure for the spirit-land in Mangaia, all facing the setting sun. Each of them was known as a _Reinga vaerua_ or "leaping-place of souls." One of them was at Oneroa, where a rocky bluff stands out by itself like a giant looking towards the west. To it a band of souls from the great cavern of Auraka used to go in mournful procession, and from it they leaped one by one to a second and much smaller block of stone resting on the inner edge of the reef; thence they passed to the outer brink of the reef, on which the surf beats ceaselessly, and from which at sunset they flitted over the ocean to sink with the great luminary into the land of the dead. Such appears to have been the general notion of the people concerning the departure of human souls at death in Mangaia. Similar ideas prevailed in the other islands of the group, in all of which the "leaping-place of souls" was regularly situated on the western coast of the island.[65] [65] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 159 _sq._ The teaching of the priests added many particulars to this general account of the journey of the soul to the nether world. According to them the souls of the dying, before life was quite extinct, left their bodies and travelled towards the edge of the cliff at Araia, near the sacred grove (_marae_) of Rongo, which faced westward. But if on its way to this fatal bourne the soul of the dying chanced to meet a friendly spirit who cried to it, "Go back and live," the departing soul would joyfully return to its forsaken body, and the sick man or woman would revive. This was the native explanation of fainting. But if no friendly spirit intervened to save the passing soul, it pursued its way to the edge of the cliff. On its arrival a great wave of the sea washed the base of the crag, and a gigantic _bua_ tree (_Beslaria laurifolia_), covered with fragrant blossoms, sprang up from Avaiki to receive the ghost. The tree had as many branches as there were principal gods in Mangaia, and every ghost had to perch on the particular branch allotted to members of his or her tribe; the worshippers of the great gods, such as Motoro and Tane, had separate boughs provided for their accommodation; while the worshippers of the lesser deities huddled together on a single big branch.[66] [66] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 160 _sq._; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 346. No sooner had the ghost perched on the place appointed for him than down plumped the tree with him into the nether world. Looking down to see where he was going, what was the horror of the ghost to perceive a great net spread by Akaanga and his assistants to catch him at the foot of the tree! Into this fatal net the doomed spirit inevitably fell to sink in a lake of fresh water and there to wriggle like a fish for a time. At last the net was pulled up with the ghost in it, who, half-drowned, was now ushered trembling into the presence of the grim hag Miru, generally known as "the Ruddy," because her face reflected the glowing heat of the ever-burning oven in which she cooked her ghostly victims. At first, however, she fed, and perhaps fattened, them on a diet of black beetles, red earth-worms, crabs, and small blackbirds. Thus refreshed, they had next to drain bowls of strong kava brewed by the fair hands of the hag's four lovely daughters. Reduced to a state of insensibility by the intoxicating beverage, the ghosts were then borne off without a struggle to the oven and cooked. On the substance of these hapless victims Miru and her son and her peerless daughters regularly subsisted. The leavings of the meal were thrown to the servants. Such was the fate of all who died what we should call a natural death, and therefore of all cowards, women, and children. They were annihilated.[67] [67] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 161 _sq._; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ pp. 346 _sq._ Not so with warriors who fell fighting on the field of battle. For a time, indeed, their souls wandered about among the rocks and trees where their bodies were thrown, the ghastly wounds by which they met their fate being still visible. The plaintive chirping of a certain cricket, rarely seen but heard continually at night, was believed to be the voice of the slain warriors sorrowfully calling to their friends. At last the first who fell would gather his brother ghosts at a place a little beyond Araia, on the edge of the cliff and facing the sunset. There they would linger for a time. But suddenly a mountain sprang up at their feet, and they ascended it over the spears and clubs which had given them their mortal wounds. Arrived at the summit they leaped up into the blue expanse, thus becoming the peculiar clouds of the winter or dry season. During the rainy season they could mount up to the warriors' paradise in the sky. In June, the first month of winter, the atmosphere was pervaded by these ghosts, to whom the chilliness of death still clung. For days together their thronging shapes hid the sun, dimming the sky and spreading among men the heaviness and oppression of spirits which are characteristic of the season. But with the early days of August, when the coral-tree puts forth its blood-red blossoms and the sky grows mottled with light fleecy clouds, the ghosts of the brave prepare to take flight for heaven. Soon the sky is cloudless, the weather bright and warm. The ghosts have fled away, and the living resume their wonted avocations in quiet and comfort.[68] [68] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 162 _sq._ In their celestial home the spirits of the slain are immortal. There, in memory of their deeds on earth, they dance their old war dances over again, decked with gay flowers--the white gardenia, the yellow _bua_, the golden fruit of the pandanus, and the dark crimson, bell-like blossom of the native laurel, intertwined with myrtle; and from their blissful heights they look down with pity and disgust on the wretched souls in Avaiki entangled in the fatal net and besmeared with filth. For the spirits of the slain in battle are strong and vigorous, their bodies never having been wasted by disease; whereas the spirits of those who die a natural death are excessively feeble and weak, like their bodies at the moment of dissolution. The natural result of such beliefs was to breed an utter contempt for a violent death, nay even a desire to seek it. Many stories are told of aged warriors, scarcely able to hold a spear, who have insisted on being led to the battlefield in the hope of finding a soldier's death and gaining a soldier's paradise.[69] [69] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 163 _sq._ Beliefs of the same general character concerning the fate of the dead prevailed in other islands of the Hervey Group. Thus in Rarotonga the great meeting-place of the ghosts was at Tuoro, facing the sunset. There at a stately tree, called "the Weeping Laurel," the disembodied spirits used to bewail their hard fate. If no pitying spirit sent him back to life, the ghost had to scramble up a branch of an ancient _bua_ tree which grew on the spot. Should the bough break under his weight, the ghost was precipitated into the net which Muru had spread out for him in a natural circular hollow of the rock. A lively ghost might break the meshes of the net and escape for a while, but passing on to the outer edge of the reef, in the hope of traversing the ocean, he inevitably fell into another net artfully concealed by Akaanga. From this second net escape was impossible. The demons drew the captive ghosts out of the nets, and ruthlessly dashing out their brains on the sharp coral they carried off the shattered victims in triumph to devour them in the lower world. Ghosts from Ngatangiia ascended the noble mountain range which stretches across the island, dipping into the sea at Tuoro. Inexpressibly weary and sad was this journey over a road which foot of living wight had never trod. The departed spirits of this tribe met at a great iron-wood tree, of which some branches were green and others dead. The souls that trod on the green branches came back to life; but the souls that crawled on to the dead boughs were at once caught in the net either of Muru or of Akaanga.[70] [70] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, pp. 169 _sq._; _id._, "Mangaia (Hervey Islands)," _op. cit._ p. 346. In Rarotonga, as in Mangaia, the lot of warriors who died in battle was much happier than that of the poor wretches who had the misfortune to die quietly in bed or to be otherwise ignominiously snuffed out. The gallant ghosts were said to join Tiki, who in Rarotonga appears to have been a dead warrior, whereas in Mangaia, as we saw, Tiki was a dead woman. In the Rarotongan Hades, which also went by the name of Avaiki, this Tiki sat at the threshold of a very long house built with walls of reeds, and surrounded by shrubs and flowers of fadeless bloom and never-failing perfume. Each ghost on his arrival had to make an offering to the warder Tiki, who, thus propitiated, admitted him to the house. There, sitting at their ease, eating, drinking, dancing, or sleeping, the brave of past ages dwelt in unwithering beauty and perpetual youth; there they welcomed newcomers, and there they told the story of their heroic exploits on earth and fought their old battles over again. But ghosts who had nothing to give to Tiki were compelled to stay outside in rain and darkness for ever, shivering with cold and hunger, watching with envious eyes the joyous revels of the inmates, and racked with the vain desire of being admitted to share them.[71] [71] W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, p. 170; John Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, pp. 476 _sq._ Such beliefs in the survival of the soul after death may have nerved the warrior with fresh courage in battle; but they can have contributed but little to the happiness and consolation of ordinary people, who could apparently look forward to nothing better in the life hereafter than being cooked and eaten by a hideous hag. CHAPTER V THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE SOCIETY ISLANDERS § 1. _The Society Islands_ The Society Islands are a large and scattered archipelago in the South Pacific, situated within 16° and 18° of South latitude, and between 148° and 155° of West longitude. They lie some three hundred miles from the Hervey or Cook Islands, from which they are separated by the open sea. The islands form a chain nearly two hundred miles in length, extending from north-west to south-east, and fall into two groups, an eastern and a western, which, on account of the prevailing wind, are known respectively as the Windward and Leeward Islands. The Windward or eastern group includes Eimeo or Moörea in the west, Maitea in the east, and Tahiti, the principal island of the whole archipelago, in the centre. In the Leeward or western group the chief islands are Huahine, Raiatea, Tahaa, and Borabora. The islands appear to have been first discovered by the Spanish navigator Fernandez de Quiros in 1606 or 1607, but after him they were lost sight of till 1767, when they were rediscovered by Wallis. A few years later they were repeatedly visited by Captain Cook, who gave the first full and accurate description of the islands and their inhabitants.[1] [1] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 6 _sq._; A. v. H[ügel], "Tahiti," _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, Ninth Edition, xxiii. 22, 24; C. E. Meinicke, _Die Inseln des Stillen Oceans_, ii. 151 _sqq._; F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. 510. As to Wallis's discovery of the islands see J. Hawkesworth, _Voyages_, i. (London, 1773) pp. 433 _sqq._; R. Kerr, _General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels_, xii. (Edinburgh, 1814) pp. 164 _sqq._ The islands, with the exception of a few flat lagoon islands, are of volcanic formation, high and mountainous, consisting for the most part of a central peak or peaks of bold and striking outline, which descend in steep ridges towards the sea, sometimes reaching the coast, but oftener leaving a broad stretch of flat and very fertile land between their last slopes and the beach. Between the ridges lie deep and beautiful valleys, watered by winding streams and teeming with luxuriant vegetation. The rocks of which the islands consist are all igneous, chiefly trachyte, dolerite, basalt, and lava. They are considered by geologists to present perhaps the most wonderful and instructive example of volcanic rocks to be seen on the globe. Yet, though the islands are judged to be of comparatively recent formation, there are no traces of volcanic action in them at the present time. The craters have disappeared: hot springs do not exist; and earthquakes are rare.[2] [2] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 11 _sqq._; C. E. Meinicke, _op. cit._ ii. 152 _sq._; A. v. H[ügel], _op. cit._ p. 22; F. H. H. Guillemard, _op. cit._ p. 513. The Society Islands, and Tahiti in particular, are famous for the beauty of their natural scenery; indeed, by general consent they appear to rank as the fairest islands in the Pacific. Travellers vie with each other in praise of their enchanting loveliness. Tahiti, the largest island of the group, may be taken as typical of them all. It consists of two almost circular islands united by a very low and narrow neck of land: the northern and larger island is known as Tahiti the Great (Tahiti nui), the southern and smaller island is known as Tahiti the Little (Tahiti iti). In the centre of each island the mountains rise in craggy peaks, sometimes in the shape of pyramids or sugar-loaves, their rocky sides clothed with every variety of verdure, and enlivened here and there by cataracts falling from lofty cliffs, while the shore is washed by the white-crested waves of the Pacific breaking in foam on the coral reefs or dashing in spray on the beach. The scene is especially striking when beheld for the first time from the sea at sunrise on a fine morning. Then the happy combination of land and water, of precipices and plains, of umbrageous trees drooping their pendent boughs over the sea, and distant mountains shown in sublime outline and richest hues, all blended in the harmony of nature, produces in the beholder sensations of admiration and delight. The inland scenery is of a different character, but not less impressive. There the prospect is occasionally extensive, but more frequently circumscribed. There is, however, a startling boldness in the towering piles of basalt, often heaped in picturesque confusion near the source or margin of some crystal stream that flows in silence at their base, or plashes purling over the rocks that obstruct its bed; and there is the wildness of romance about the deep and lonely glens, from which the mountains rise like the steep sides of a natural amphitheatre till they seem to support the clouds that rest upon their summits. In the character of the teeming vegetation, too, from the verdant moss that drapes the rocks to the rich foliage of the bread-fruit tree, the luxuriance of the pandanus, and the waving plumes of the coconut palm, all nurtured by a prolific soil and matured by the genial heat of a tropical climate, there is enough to arrest the attention and to strike the imagination of the wanderer, who, in the unbroken silence that reigns in these pleasing solitudes, may easily fancy himself astray in fairyland and treading enchanted ground.[3] [3] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 14-18. Compare J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 172 _sqq._; G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_ (London, 1777), i. 253 _sq._; J. Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 321 _sqq._; D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _Journal of Voyages and Travels_ (London, 1831), i. 58 _sq._, 108 _sqq._, 136 _sqq._, 206 _sq._, 234 _sq._, 316 _sq._, 555 _sq._, ii. 51-53, 59-61; F. H. H. Guillemard, _op. cit._ pp. 511 _sqq._ C. E. Meinicke, _op. cit._ ii. 152 _sq._; A. Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_ (Berlin, 1900), pp. 29 _sqq._ § 2. _The Islanders and their Mode of Life_ The islanders are, or were at the date of their discovery by Europeans, fine specimens of the Polynesian race, being tall, well-proportioned, and robust. Captain Cook described them as of the largest size of Europeans. Their complexion varies from olive to bronze and reddish-brown, frequently presenting a hue intermediate between the yellow of the Malay and the copper-colour of the American Indians. The hair is shining black or dark brown, usually straight, but often soft and curly; never lank and wiry like that of the American Indians, and only in rare cases woolly or frizzly like that of the Papuans. The men have beards, which they used to wear in a variety of fashions, always, however, plucking out the greater part. The shape of the face is comely, and the facial angle is often as perpendicular as in Europeans. The cheek-bones are not high; the nose is either straight or aquiline, often accompanied by a fulness about the nostrils; it is seldom flat, though it was formerly the practice of mothers and nurses to press the nostrils of the female children, a broad flat nose being by many regarded as a beauty. The mouth in general is well formed, though the lips are sometimes large and protuberant, yet never so much as to resemble the lips of negroes; the chin is usually prominent. The general aspect of the face very seldom presents any likeness to the Tartar or Mongolian cast of countenance; while the profile frequently bears a most striking resemblance to that of Europeans. A roundness and fulness of figure, not usually extending to corpulency, is characteristic of the race, especially of the women. In general physique they resemble the Sandwich Islanders and Tonga Islanders; according to Ellis, they are more robust than the Marquesans, but inferior in size and strength to the Maoris.[4] [4] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 175 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 79 _sqq._; C. E. Meinicke, _op. cit._ ii. 171; F. H. H. Guillemard, _op. cit._ pp. 513 _sq._ Their diet is chiefly vegetable; when Captain Cook visited the islands, the only tame animals were hogs, dogs, and poultry. Bread-fruit, taro, yams, bananas, and coconuts are their staple food; the bread-fruit in particular has been called their staff of life. Taro and yams are carefully cultivated by the natives, and they also grow the sweet potato as an article of food, though to a less extent than the other two roots; in quality the sweet potato of Tahiti is far inferior to that of the Sandwich Islands. The sea affords a great variety of fish and shell-fish, which the natives catch and eat; nothing that the sea produces is said to come amiss to them. Hogs and dogs were in olden times the only quadrupeds whose flesh was eaten by the Tahitians; but for the most part they rarely tasted meat, subsisting almost exclusively on a diet of fruit, vegetables, and fish.[5] [5] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 185 _sq._ vi. 139 _sqq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 36 _sqq._, 70 _sqq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _Voyages aux Îles du Grand Ocean_ (Paris, 1837), ii. 93 _sqq._; C. E. Meinicke, _op. cit._ ii. 171 _sq._ The common houses were of an oblong shape, usually from eighteen to twenty-four feet in length, by eleven feet in width, the long sides being parallel to each other, but the two ends commonly rounded, especially in the houses of chiefs. The thatched roofs were supported on three parallel rows of wooden posts, and there being no outer walls and no partitions, the wind blew freely through them. The floor was covered with mats, forming a single cushion, on which the people sat by day and slept at night. In some houses there was a single stool appropriated to the use of the master of the family; otherwise an ordinary dwelling contained little or no furniture except a few small blocks of wood, hollowed out on the upper surface so as to form head-rests or pillows. The houses served chiefly as dormitories and as shelters in rain: the people took their meals in the open air. Chiefs, however, often owned houses of much larger dimensions, which were built and maintained for them at the common expense of the district. Some of these chiefly dwellings were two hundred feet long, thirty feet broad, and twenty feet high under the ridge; one of them, belonging to the king, measured three hundred and seventy feet in length. We read of houses which could contain two or three thousand people;[6] and of one particular house in Tahiti we are informed that it was no less than three hundred and ninety-seven feet long by forty-eight feet broad, and that the roof was supported in the middle by twenty wooden pillars, each twenty-one feet high, while the sides or eaves of the roof rested on one hundred and twenty-four pillars, each ten feet high. A wooden wall or fence enclosed the whole. This great house was used for the celebration of feasts, which sometimes lasted for days together, and at which nearly all the hogs in the island were consumed.[7] [6] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 181 _sqq._; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 341 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 170 _sqq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ ii. 84 _sqq._ As to the wooden head-rests see W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 188 _sq._ [7] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 213 _sq._ Like all the Polynesians down to the date of their discovery by Europeans, the inhabitants of the Society Islands were totally ignorant of the use and even of the existence of the metals, and they had to employ substitutes, chiefly stone and bone, for the manufacture of their tools and weapons. Of their tools Captain Cook gives the following account: "They have an adze of stone; a chisel, or gouge, of bone, generally that of a man's arm between the wrist and elbow; a rasp of coral; and the skin of a sting-ray, with coral sand, as a filer or polisher. This is a complete catalogue of their tools, and with these they build houses, construct canoes, hew stone, and fell, cleave, carve, and polish timber. The stone which makes the blade of their adzes is a kind of basaltes, of a blackish or grey colour, not very hard, but of considerable toughness: they are of different sizes; some, that are intended for felling, weigh from six to eight pounds; others, that are used for carving, not more than so many ounces; but it is necessary to sharpen both almost every minute; for which purpose, a stone and a cocoa-nut shell full of water are always at hand. Their greatest exploit, to which these tools are less equal than to any other, is felling a tree; this requires many hands, and the constant labour of several days."[8] The earliest missionaries expressed their astonishment that with such simple tools the natives could carve so neatly and finish so smoothly; our most ingenious workmen, they declared, could not excel them.[9] [8] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 204 _sq._ [9] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 400. The principal manufacture of the Society Islanders was the making of the cloth which they used for their garments. The material for the cloth was furnished by the bark of several trees, including the paper-mulberry, the bread-fruit tree, and a species of wild fig-tree. Having been stripped from the tree and soaked in water, the bark was spread out on a beam and beaten with heavy wooden mallets, till it was reduced to the proper degree of thinness and flexibility. The finest and most valuable kind of cloth was made chiefly, and sometimes entirely, from the bark of the paper-mulberry and was bleached pure white. But vegetable dyes were also commonly employed to stain the cloth with a variety of hues arranged in patterns. The favourite colours were a brilliant scarlet and a bright yellow; Captain Cook described the scarlet as exceedingly beautiful, brighter and more delicate than any we have in Europe; it was produced by a mixture of the juices of two vegetables, the fruit of a species of fig and the leaves of the _Cordia sebastina_ or _etou_ tree. The patterns were in this bright scarlet on a yellow ground; formerly they were altogether devoid of uniformity or regularity, yet exhibited a considerable degree of taste. The bales of bark-cloth were sometimes as much as two hundred yards long by four yards wide; the whole bale was in a single piece, being composed of narrow strips joined together by being beaten with grooved mallets. A chief's wealth was sometimes estimated by the number of bales which he possessed; the more valuable sort, covered with matting or cloth of an inferior sort, were generally hung from the roof of his house. The manufacture of cloth was chiefly in the hands of women; indeed it was one of their most usual employments. Even women of high rank did not disdain this form of industry; the wives and daughters of chiefs took a pride in manufacturing cloth of a superior quality, excelling that produced by common women in the elegance of the patterns or the brilliance of the dyes. Every family had a little house where the females laboured at the making of cloth; but in addition every district had a sort of public factory, consisting of a spacious house where immense quantities of cloth were produced on the occasion of festivals, the visits of great chiefs, or other solemnities. In such a factory the women would often assemble to the number of two or three hundred, and the monotonous din of their hammers falling on the bark was almost deafening; it began early in the morning, only to cease at night. Yet heard at a distance in some lonely valley the sound was not disagreeable, telling as it did of industry and peace.[10] [10] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 196 _sqq._; G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_ (London, 1777), i. 276 _sq._; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 389-392; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 179 _sqq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ ii. 112 _sqq._ Among the other articles manufactured by the Society Islanders before the advent of Europeans were fine mats, baskets of many different patterns, ropes, lines, and fishing-tackle, including nets, hooks, and harpoons made of cane and pointed with hard wood. In every expedient for taking fish they are said to have been exceedingly ingenious.[11] They made bows and arrows, with which, as an amusement, they shot against each other, not at a mark, but to see who could shoot farthest. Like the rest of the Polynesians, they never used these weapons in war.[12] [11] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 202 _sq._ [12] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 368; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 217-220; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ ii. 148-150. Society among these islanders was divided into three ranks; first the royal family and nobility (_hui arii_); second, the landed proprietors, or gentry and farmers (_bue raatira_); and third, the common people (_manahune_). Of these, the landed gentry and farmers were the most numerous and influential class, constituting at all times the great body of the people and the strength of the nation, as well as of the army. The petty farmers owned from twenty to a hundred acres. Some of the great landowners possessed many hundreds of acres, and being surrounded by retainers they constituted the aristocracy of the country and imposed a restraint upon the king, who, without their co-operation, could carry but few of his measures. They also frequently acted as priests in their family temples. The common people comprised slaves and servants. The slaves were captives taken in war. Their treatment was in general mild, and if peace continued, they often regained their freedom and were allowed to return to their own country.[13] [13] W. Ellis, _op. cit._. iii. 94-98. Compare J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 225 _sq._ The government of the Society Islands, like that of Hawaii, was at least in form an arbitrary monarchy. The supreme authority was vested in the king and was hereditary in his family. It partook of a sacred character, for in these islands government was closely interwoven with religion; the king sometimes personated the god and received the homage and prayers of the worshippers; at other times he officiated as high-priest and transmitted the vows and petitions of the people to the superior deities. The genealogy of the reigning family was usually traced back to the first ages of the world: in some of the islands the kings were believed to be descended from the gods: their persons were always sacred, and their families constituted the highest rank recognised by the people.[14] [14] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iii. 93 _sq._ Indeed, everything in the least degree connected with the king or queen--the cloth they wore, the houses in which they dwelt, the canoes in which they voyaged, the men who carried them when they journeyed by land--became sacred and could not be converted to common use. The very sounds in the language which composed their names could no longer be appropriated to ordinary significations. If on the accession of a king any words in the language were found to resemble his name, they were abolished and changed for others; and if any man were bold enough to continue to use them, not only he but all his relations were immediately put to death; and the same severity was exercised on any who should dare to apply the sacred name to an animal. Thus in process of time the original names of most common objects in the language underwent considerable alterations. No one might touch the body of the king or queen; nay, any person who should so much as stand over them, or pass his hand over their heads, was liable to pay for the sacrilege with the forfeiture of his life. The very ground on which the king or queen even accidentally trod became sacred; and any house belonging to a private person which they entered must for ever be vacated by the owner and either set apart for the use of the royal personages or burnt down with every part of its furniture. Hence it was a general rule that the king and queen never entered any dwellings except such as were specially dedicated to their use, and never trod on the ground in any part of the island but their own hereditary districts. In journeying they were always carried on men's shoulders.[15] [15] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 155 _sq._; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 329; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iii. 101 _sq._ The inauguration of a king consisted in girding him with a sacred girdle (_maro ura_) of red, or red and yellow, feathers, which not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but identified him with the gods. The red feathers were taken from the images of the gods and interwoven with feathers of other colours. A human victim was sacrificed when they began to make the girdle, and another was sacrificed when it was finished; sometimes others were slaughtered at intermediate stages, one for each fresh piece added to the girdle. The blood of the victims was supposed to consecrate the belt.[16] [16] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iii. 108 _sqq._ Compare J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 327 _sq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ ii. 22 _sq._; D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _Journal of Voyages and Travels_, i. 526 _sq._, ii. 56. Another singular ceremony observed at the installation of a king was this. The king advanced into the sea and bathed there. Thither he was followed by the priest of Oro bearing a branch plucked from a sacred tree that grew within the precincts of the temple. While the king was bathing, the priest struck him on the back with the holy bough, at the same time invoking the great god Taaoroa. This ceremony was designed to purify the monarch from any defilement or guilt he might previously have contracted. See W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iii. 110. The deification of kings in their lifetime would seem not to have been confined to Tahiti, but to have prevailed in the other islands of the Society Archipelago. We hear particularly of the divinity of the kings of Raiatea. In that island a place called Opoa is said to have been the metropolis of idolatry for all the South Pacific Islands within a compass of five hundred miles. Hither, from every shore, human victims, already slain, were sent to be offered on the altar of the war-god Oro, whose principal image was there worshipped. There, too, was the residence of the kings of the island, "who, beside the prerogatives of royalty, enjoyed divine honours, and were in fact living idols among the dead ones, being deified at the time of their accession to political supremacy here. In the latter character, we presume, it was, that these sovereigns (who always took the name of Tamatoa) were wont to receive presents from the kings and chiefs of adjacent and distant islands, whose gods were all considered tributary to the Oro of Raiatea, and their princes owing homage to its monarch, who was Oro's hereditary high-priest, as well as an independent divinity himself."[17] Of one particular monarch of this line, Tamatoa by name, we read that he "had been enrolled among the gods," and that "as one of the divinities of his subjects, therefore, the king was worshipped, consulted as an oracle, and had sacrifices and prayers offered to him."[18] [17] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _Journal of Voyages and Travels_, i. 529 _sq._ [18] Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 524. In the succession to the throne the law of primogeniture prevailed, and in accordance with a singular usage, which was invariably observed, the king regularly abdicated on the birth of his first son and became a subject of his infant offspring. The child was at once proclaimed the sovereign of the people: the royal title was conferred on him; and his own father was the first to do him homage by saluting his feet and declaring him king. The public herald was despatched round the island with the flag of the infant monarch: in every district he unfurled the banner and proclaimed the accession of the youthful sovereign. The insignia of royalty and the homage of the people were at once transferred from the father to the child: the royal domains and other sources of revenue were appropriated to the maintenance of the household of the infant ruler; and the father paid him all the marks of reverence and submission which he had hitherto exacted from the people. However, during the minority of his son the former king appears to have filled the office of regent. This remarkable rule of succession was not limited to the royal house, but prevailed also in noble families: no sooner did a baron's wife give birth to a child than the baron was reduced to the rank of a private man, though he continued to administer the estate for the benefit of the infant, to whom all the outward marks of honour were now transferred.[19] [19] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 225 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iii. 99 _sq._ Compare J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 180 _sq._, 327, 330, 333; J. Turnbull, _Voyage round the World_ (London, 1813), pp. 134, 137, 188 _sq._, 344; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ ii. 13 _sq._ § 3. _The Religion of the Society Islanders_ If religion consists essentially in a fear of gods, the natives of the Society Islands were a very religious people, for they believed in a multitude of gods and stood in constant dread of them. "Whatever attention," says Ellis, "the Tahitians paid to their occupations or amusements, and whatever energies have been devoted to the prosecution of their barbarous wars, the claims of all were regarded as inferior to those of their religion. On this every other was dependent, while each was alike made subservient to its support."[20] "No people in the world, in ancient or modern times, appear to have been more superstitious than the South Sea Islanders, or to have been more entirely under the influence of dread from imaginary demons, or supernatural beings. They had not only their major, but their minor demons, or spirits, and all the minute ramifications of idolatry."[21] "Religious rites were connected with almost every act of their lives. An _ubu_ or prayer was offered before they ate their food, when they tilled their ground, planted their gardens, built their houses, launched their canoes, cast their nets, and commenced or concluded a journey. The first fish taken periodically on their shores, together with a number of kinds regarded as sacred, were conveyed to the altar. The first-fruits of their orchards and gardens were also _taumaha_, or offered, with a portion of their live-stock, which consisted of pigs, dogs, and fowls, as it was supposed death would be inflicted on the owner or the occupant of the land, from which the god should not receive such acknowledgment."[22] [20] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 321; compare J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 417. [21] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 361. [22] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 350. Different gods were worshipped in different islands, and even in different parts of the same island,[23] and if a deity failed to answer the expectations of his worshippers, they did not scruple to change him for another. In Captain Cook's time the people of Tiaraboo (Tairaboo), the southern peninsula of Tahiti, discarded their two old divinities and adopted in their place Oraa, the god of the island of Bolabola (Borabora), apparently because the people of Bolabola had lately been victorious in war; and as, after this change of deity, they themselves proved very successful in their operations against their enemies, they imputed the success entirely to their new god, who, they literally said, fought their battles.[24] Again, when the prayers and offerings for the recovery of a sick chief were unavailing, the god was regarded as inexorable, and was usually banished from the temple, and his image destroyed.[25] [23] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 148, 160; J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_ (London, 1778), p. 539. [24] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 148 _sq._ [25] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 350. The pantheon and mythology of the Society Islands were of the usual Polynesian type; some of their chief gods were recognised and worshipped under the same names, with dialectical differences, in other islands of the Pacific. In the beginning they say that all things were in a state of chaos or darkness, from which the principal deities, including Taaroa, Oro, and Tane, at last emerged. Hence these high gods were said to be born of Night or the primaeval darkness (_Po_). Among them all the first place in time and dignity was generally assigned to Taaroa, who appears in other parts of Polynesia as Tanaroa, Tangaroa, Tagaloa, and so on. By some he was spoken of as the progenitor of the other gods and as the creator of the heavens, the earth, and sea, as well as of men, beasts, birds, and fishes; but others were of opinion that the land or the world had existed before the gods. Oro, the great national god of Tahiti, Raiatea, and other islands, was believed to be a son of Taaroa.[26] To these three great gods, Oro, Tane, and Taaroa, the people sacrificed in great emergencies, when the deities were thought to be angry. At such times the wrath of the god was revealed to a priest, who, wrapt up like a ball in a bundle of cloth, spoke in a sharp, shrill, squeaky voice, saying, "I am angry; bring me hogs, kill a man, and my anger will be appeased."[27] [26] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 322 _sqq._ Compare J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, pp. 539 _sqq._; G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_, ii. 149 _sqq._; J. Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 343 _sqq._; D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _Journal of Voyages and Travels_, i. 523 (as to Taaroa); J. A. Moerenhout, _Voyages aux Îles du Grand Ocean_, i. 416 _sqq._, 436 _sqq._, 442 _sq._ As to Taaoroa and his counterparts in Polynesian mythology, see H. Hale, _United States Exploring Expedition, Ethnography and Philology_, p. 22; E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, pp. 463 _sq._, _s.v._ "Tangaroa." [27] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 167 _sq._ Oro is sometimes described as the war-god.[28] The great seat of his worship was at Opoa in the island of Raiatea: his principal image was worshipped there "with the most bloody and detestable rites"; and thither human victims, ready slain, were sent from every shore to be offered on his altar.[29] Sometimes, instead of the bodies of the slain, only their jaw-bones were sent to decorate the temple of Oro at Opoa; long strings of these relics might be seen hanging about the sacred edifice.[30] In the small island of Tahaa, off Raiatea, there was a temple (_marae_) dedicated to Oro and his two daughters. It belonged to the king and "was upheld for the convenience of finding a pretext to get rid, from time to time, of obnoxious persons, of both sexes; the men slain by assassination, or in war, being presented to the male idol, and the women to his female progeny, who were held to be as cruelly delighted with blood as their parent. But the human sacrifices brought hither were not allowed to remain and infect the atmosphere. When they had lain upon the altar till they became offensive, the carcases were transported to Oro's metropolitan temple at Opoa, in Raiatea, which was the common Golgotha of his victims."[31] [28] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 114, 529. [29] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 529. [30] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ ii. 14. In a long house in the southern part of Tahiti, Captain Cook saw, at one end of it, a semicircular board, from which hung fifteen human jaw-bones, apparently fresh; not one of them wanted a tooth. He was told that they "had been carried away as trophies, the people here carrying away the jaw-bones of their enemies, as the Indians of North America do the scalps." See J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 152, 160. [31] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 549. Oro was said to have instituted the notorious Society of the Areois, a licentious fraternity of strolling players and mountebanks, who roamed about in troupes from island to island, everywhere entertaining the populace by their shows, which comprised recitations, songs, dramatic performances, wrestling matches, and especially dances, which were often of a lascivious character.[32] These exhibitions, which were witnessed by crowds and appear to have been the most popular amusement of the islanders, were given in large, substantial, sometimes highly ornamented, houses, which were erected chiefly for the purpose of lodging these itinerant performers, and providing them with suitable places for their performances.[33] The first missionaries describe how, in a long native house where they lodged for the night, they saw the Areois men and women dancing and singing till near midnight: so great were their numbers that they made the house appear like a village.[34] Sometimes, apparently, the performances took place in front of the house, the musicians, singers, and reciters occupying a sort of stage, while the actors or dancers performed on a place marked out for them on the ground or on the floor.[35] The subject of their songs or recitations was often a legend of the gods, or of some distinguished member of the Society, which was chanted or recited by the performers in chorus seated in a circle on the ground, while the leader stood in the centre and introduced the recitation with a sort of prologue, accompanied by antic gestures and attitudes.[36] In these recitals the tales often turned on romantic and diverting episodes in the lives of ancestors or of deities. "Many of these were very long, and regularly composed, so as to be repeated verbatim, or with such illustrations only as the wit or fancy of the narrator might have the skill to introduce. Their captain on public occasions, was placed cross-legged on a stool seven feet high, with a fan in his hand, in the midst of the circle of laughing or admiring auditors, whom he delighted with his drollery, or transported with his grimaces, being, in fact, the merry-andrew of the corps, who, like a wise fool, well knew how to turn his folly to the best account."[37] [32] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 193-195; J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, pp. 411-414; G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_, ii. 128-135; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 56, 57, 59, 65 _sq._, 153, 154, 174, 194 _sq._, 209, 331, 335; J. Turnbull, _Voyage round the World_ (London, 1813), p. 364; D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 326-328; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 229-247; Waitz-Gerland, _Anthropologie_, vi. 363-369. [33] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 236 _sq._ [34] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 209. [35] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ ii. 133 _sq._ [36] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 235. [37] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 327 _sq._ The Society of the Areois was wealthy and highly esteemed; members were drawn from all social ranks and greatly prided themselves on belonging to it.[38] Indeed, they were regarded as a sort of superhuman beings, closely allied to the gods, and were treated with a corresponding degree of veneration by many of the vulgar and ignorant.[39] They were divided into seven ranks or classes, the members of which were distinguished from each other by their tattoo marks; the greater the amount of the tattooing, the higher the rank of the person.[40] Admission to the Society was attended by a variety of ceremonies; a protracted noviciate followed, and it was only by progressive advancement that any were promoted to the higher dignities. It was imagined that those who became Areois were prompted or inspired by the gods to take this step. A candidate for admission, therefore, repaired to one of the public exhibitions in that apparent state of frenzy which is commonly supposed to indicate divine inspiration. His face was dyed scarlet; his hair was perfumed and adorned with flowers, and he wore a girdle of yellow plantain leaves. Thus arrayed, he rushed through the crowd assembled round the house in which the actors or dancers were performing, and, leaping into the circle, joined with seeming frantic wildness in the dance or pantomime. If the Society approved of him, they appointed him to wait as a servant on the principal Areois, and after a period of probation he might be inducted into the Society as a full-fledged member. At his induction, which took place in a great assembly of the body, the candidate received a new name, by which he was thenceforth known in the Society.[41] When a member was advanced from a lower to a higher grade, the ceremony was performed at a public festival which all the members of the Society in the island were expected to attend. The candidate was then taken to a temple, where he was solemnly anointed with fragrant oil on the forehead, and offered a pig to the god.[42] [38] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 239, 245; G. Forster, _op. cit._ ii. 130; J. R. Forster, _op. cit._ pp. 411 _sq._ [39] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 239, 244; J. Turnbull, _op. cit._ p. 364; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 492. [40] G. Forster, _op. cit._ ii. 128 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 238; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 491. [41] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 239 _sq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 491 _sqq._ [42] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 241 _sq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 493 _sq._ When a member of the Society died his body was conveyed by the Areois to the grand temple, where the bones of the kings were deposited. There the priest of Oro, standing over the corpse, offered a long prayer to his god. This prayer, and the ceremonies accompanying it, were designed to divest the body of all the sacred and mysterious influence which the deceased was thought to have received from the god at the moment when, in the presence of the idol, the perfumed oil had been sprinkled on him, and he had been raised to the order or rank in which he died. By this act they supposed that the sacred influence was restored to Oro, by whom it had been imparted. The body was then buried, like that of a common man, within the precincts of the temple, in which the mortal remains of chiefs were interred.[43] But if for any reason the corpse were buried in unconsecrated ground, the ghost would appear to a survivor next day and remonstrate with him, saying, "You have buried me in common earth, and so long as I lie there, I cannot go to heaven. You must bury me with ceremonies, and in holy ground." After that the corpse was disinterred, and having been doubled up by tying the arms to the shoulders and the knees to the trunk, it was buried in a sitting posture in a hole so shallow that the earth barely covered the head. This was esteemed the most honourable form of sepulture, and was principally confined to personages of high rank.[44] [43] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 244 _sq._ [44] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 273 _sq._ The Areoi Society comprised women as well as men,[45] but the accounts given of the proportion of the sexes and their relations to each other are conflicting. According to one account, the male members outnumbered the women as five to one.[46] The first missionaries reported that the Areois were said to have each two or three wives, whom they exchanged with each other.[47] According to Cook, every woman was common to every man[48]; and Turnbull affirmed that the community of women was the very principle of their union.[49] On the other hand, the naturalist George Forster, who accompanied Captain Cook, observes: "We have been told a wanton tale of promiscuous embraces, where every woman is common to every man: but when we enquired for a confirmation of this story from the natives, we were soon convinced that it must, like many others, be considered as the groundless invention of a traveller's gay fancy."[50] Again, Ellis observes that, "although addicted to every kind of licentiousness themselves, each Areoi had his own wife, who was also a member of the Society; and so jealous were they in this respect, that improper conduct towards the wife of one of their own number, was sometimes punished with death."[51] Yet the same writer speaks of "the mysteries of iniquity, and acts of more than bestial degradation" to which the Areois were at times addicted; and he says that "in some of their meetings, they appear to have placed their invention on the rack, to discover the worst pollutions of which it was possible for man to be guilty, and to have striven to outdo each other in the most revolting practices."[52] [45] G. Forster, _op. cit._ ii. 128. [46] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 326. [47] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 174. [48] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 193 _sq._ [49] J. Turnbull, _Voyage round the World_, p. 364. [50] G. Forster, _op. cit._ ii. 132. [51] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 239. [52] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 243. It was a rule of the Society that no member should have any children; hence the first injunction given to a new member was to murder his offspring. Any infant that might afterwards be born to him was strangled at birth.[53] If a woman spared her child and could induce a man to father it, "both the man and the woman, being deemed by this act to have appropriated each other, are ejected from the community, and forfeit all claim to the privileges and pleasures of Arreoy for the future; the woman from that time being distinguished by the term _whannow-now_, 'bearer of children,' which is here a term of reproach."[54] The pretext alleged by the Areois for this cruel practice was that, on the institution of the Society by the god Oro, the first two members, Orotetefa and Urutetefa, brothers of the god, had been celibate and childless, and that therefore the members of the Society were bound to imitate them by being also without offspring.[55] [53] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 194; J. R. Forster, _Observations_, pp. 413 _sq._; G. Forster, _Voyage_, ii. 129 _sq._; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 154 _sq._, 174, 194 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 230 _sq._, 233, 240. Moerenhout says that when a chief was an Areoi, his first-born son was spared, but all the rest were sacrificed; but immediately afterwards he adds, with apparent inconsistency, that "the first (by which he seems to mean the principal) Areois only killed their first sons and all their daughters; the other male infants were spared." See Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 495, 496. These statements, so far as I have observed, are not confirmed by other writers. [54] J. Cook, i. 194. [55] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 230 _sq._, 232 _sq._ In the constant repetition of their often obscene exhibitions the Areois passed their lives, sailing from island to island or strolling from one chief's house to that of another, where they renewed the same round of dances, wrestlings, and pantomimic performances.[56] But the labour and drudgery of dancing and performing for the amusement of the spectators devolved chiefly on the lowest members of the Society, who were the principal actors in all their shows, while the higher orders, though they plastered themselves with charcoal and stained themselves scarlet like their humbler brethren, were generally careful not to contribute to the public hilarity by any exhausting efforts of their own. Thus they led a life of dissipation and luxurious indolence.[57] [56] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 236, 237. [57] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 238, 241. They seem to have moved about in great troupes. As many as seventy canoes, with more than seven hundred of these vagabonds on board, have been seen steering from island to island.[58] The approach of such a fleet to the shore with drums beating, flutes playing, and streamers floating on the wind, was a picturesque sight, and as the canoes neared the land the dancers might be seen jigging it on stages erected on board, while the voices of the singers mingled with the roll of the drums, the shrill music of the flutes, and the roar of the surf on the beach in a confused but not unmelodious babel of sound.[59] [58] J. R. Forster, _Observations_, p. 412; G. Forster, _Voyage_, ii. 128. [59] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 236 _sq._ Compare J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ ii. 132 _sq._ According to the latter writer there were traditions of as many as a hundred and fifty canoes sailing at once, each one seldom containing less than thirty or forty, and sometimes a hundred persons. On landing in an island their first business was to take a small sucking-pig to the temple and present it to the god as a thank-offering to him for having brought them safe to shore. This, we are told, was the only sacrifice ever offered in token of gratitude by any of the South Sea Islanders to their imaginary divinities.[60] While they were everywhere welcomed by the vulgar for the merriment they carried with them, and were everywhere countenanced and liberally entertained by the kings and chiefs, who found them convenient tools of fraud and oppression, they were not received with equal enthusiasm by the farmers, who had to furnish them with provisions, and who durst not refuse them anything, however unreasonable and extortionate their demands. For the Areois lived on the fat of the land. When they alighted, like a swarm of locusts, on a rich district, they would send out their henchmen to scour the neighbourhood and plunder the miserable inhabitants; and when they moved on to their next halting-place, the gardens which they left behind them often presented a scene of desolation and ruin.[61] Such havoc, indeed, did they spread by their feastings and carousings on even a short visit of a few days, that in some parts of Tahiti the natives were compelled to abandon the fertile lowlands and retreat up the mountains, submitting to the trouble of clambering up almost inaccessible slopes and cultivating a less fruitful soil rather than expose much of the produce of their labour to the ravages of these privileged robbers.[62] [60] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 326 _sq._ [61] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 237 _sq._; D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 326-328. Compare J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 174, "Wherever they go they exercise power to seize what they want from the inhabitants. They smite their hand on their breast and say '_Harre_, give,' whenever they covet any thing, and none dares deny them. They never work; live by plunder; yet are highly respected, as none but persons of rank are admitted among them." This last statement, however, is contradicted by Ellis, who says (_op. cit._ i. 239) that "the fraternity was not confined to any particular rank or grade in society, but was composed of individuals from every class." [62] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 197. Not the least of the privileges, real or imaginary, enjoyed by the Areois was that after death their spirits were believed to pass without difficulty to that paradise of delights to which otherwise none but the noble and wealthy could hope to attain.[63] [63] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 245 _sq._, 397; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 434 _sq._ In spite of the profligate life which the Areoi led and their addiction to a round of frivolous amusements and entertainments, it seems likely that the Society was originally founded for some serious purpose, though the accounts which have come down to us hardly enable us to determine, or even to conjecture with a fair degree of probability, what that purpose was. That its aim was religious might be inferred on general grounds, and is confirmed by the close relation in which the Society stood to the national god Oro. Not only is Oro said to have founded the Society, but before a troop of Areois set out on their peregrinations they were obliged to kill many pigs in sacrifice to him and to offer large quantities of plantains, bananas, and other fruits on his altars. Moreover, temporary shrines were erected in their canoes for the worship of Oro's two divine brothers, Orotetefa and Urutetefa, who were traditionally said to have been the first members of the Society and were regarded as its tutelary deities. In these shrines the principal symbols were a stone for each of the brothers taken from Oro's temple, and a few red feathers from the inside of his sacred image. Into these symbols the gods were supposed to enter when the priest pronounced a short prayer immediately before the sailing of the fleet.[64] [64] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 234. We might be better able to understand the purpose and the functions of the Areoi Society if we were acquainted with the nature and meaning which the natives ascribed to the god Oro, the reputed founder of the Society; but on this subject our authorities shed little light. He is described as the war-god[65] and as "the great national idol of Raiatea, Tahiti, Eimeo, and some of the other islands," and he was said to be a son of the creator Taaroa, who at first dwelt alone up aloft, but who afterwards, with the help of his daughter Hina, created the heavens, the earth, and the sea.[66] By European writers Oro has been variously interpreted as a god of the dead or of the sun; and accordingly the Society of the Areois has been variously explained as devoted either to a cult of the Lord of the Dead for the sake of securing eternal happiness in a world beyond the grave, or to a worship of the sun-god; but the grounds alleged for either interpretation appear to be extremely slight.[67] [65] Above, p. 258. [66] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 324, 325. [67] Gerland takes the former view, Moerenhout the latter. See Waitz-Gerland, _Anthropologie_, vi. 368 _sq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 484. The only evidence adduced by Moerenhout for his interpretation of Oro as a sun-god is a statement that in the Marquesas Islands the Areois suspended their performances and went into retreat from April or May till the vernal equinox (which in the southern hemisphere falls in September), and that during their retreat they assumed the style of mourners and bewailed the absence or death of their god, whom they called Mahoui. This Mahoui is accordingly taken by Moerenhout to be the sun and equated to Oro, the god of the Areois in the Society Islands. But Mahoui seems to be no other than the well-known Polynesian hero Maui, who can hardly have been the sun (see below, p. 286 note^5); and Moerenhout's statement as to the annual period of mourning observed by the Areois in the Marquesas Islands is not, so far as I know, confirmed by any other writer, and must, therefore, be regarded as open to doubt. His statement and his interpretation of Oro and Mahoui were accepted by Dr. Rivers, who made them the basis of his far-reaching theory of a secret worship of the sun introduced into the Pacific by immigrants from a far northern country, who also built the megalithic monuments of Polynesia and Micronesia. See W. H. R. Rivers, "Sun-cult and Megaliths in Polynesia," _American Anthropologist_, xvii. July-September 1915, pp. 431 _sqq._ In proof of the supposed connexion between these megalithic monuments and a worship of the sun, Dr. Rivers says (p. 440) that the Areois "held their celebrations in an enclosure called _marae_ or _marai_, at one end of which was situated a pyramidical structure with steps leading to a platform on which were placed the images of the gods during the religious celebrations of the people." But if by "their celebrations" Dr. Rivers means the ordinary dramatic, musical, and athletic performances of the Areois, he seems to be in error; for it appears to be certain that these exhibitions were regularly given, not at the _maraes_, but in or before large houses built or specially set apart for the purpose. See above, pp. 259 _sq._ Perhaps a faint gleam of light may fall on the mystery of the Areois from an examination of their traditionary first members and guardian deities, the two divine brothers, Orotetefai and Urutetefai. The similarity of the names of the brothers suggests that they may have been twins; for it is a common custom to bestow either the same or a similar name on each of a pair of twins in order to indicate their close relationship to each other.[68] If they were twins, there are some grounds for thinking that they were Heavenly Twins; for their father or creator, Taaroa, seems certainly to have been a sky-god, and their mother, Hina, is by some authorities regarded as the moon; moreover, the two brothers are said to have first descended from the sky to the earth on a rainbow.[69] If the twinship of the divine brothers could be made out, it might perhaps explain some of the peculiar features of the Areoi Society. For example, their remarkable custom of not allowing any of their offspring to live; for it has been a common custom in many parts of the world to put twins to death.[70] Further, the superhuman rank accorded to the Areois becomes more intelligible on this hypothesis. For among many savage peoples twins are credited with the possession of powers superior to those of ordinary humanity; in particular, they are thought to be able to influence the weather for good or evil, as by causing rain or drought and the wind to blow or be still.[71] Among the Baronga of South-Eastern Africa the supposed relation of twins to the sky is very clearly marked. They call the mother of twins by a name which means "Heaven" (_Tilo_), and consistently they style the twins themselves "Children of Heaven" (_Bana ba Tilo_).[72] The mother is even said to have "made Heaven," to have "carried Heaven," and to have "ascended to Heaven."[73] The connexion which is believed to exist between her and the twins on the one side and the sky on the other is brought out plainly in the customs which the Baronga observe for the purpose of procuring rain in time of drought. Thus they will take a mother of twins, put her in a hole, and pour on her water which they have drawn from all the wells, till the hole is half full, and the water comes up to her breast. This is thought to make the rain fall.[74] Or again, in order to get rain, the women will strip themselves naked except for a girdle and head-dress of grass, and thus attired will go in procession, headed by a mother of twins, and pour water on the graves of twins. And if the body of a twin has been buried in dry ground, they will dig it up and bury it again near a river; for the grave of a twin, in their opinion, should always be wet. Thus they hope to draw down rain on the thirsty ground.[75] Again, when a thunderstorm is raging and lightning threatens to strike a village, the Baronga will say to a twin, "Help us! you are a Child of Heaven! You can therefore cope with Heaven; it will hear you when you speak." So the child goes out of the hut and prays to Heaven as follows: "Go away! Do not annoy us! We are afraid. Go and roar far away." When the thunderstorm is over, the child is thanked for its services. The mother of twins is also supposed to be able to help in the same way, for has she not, as the natives express it, ascended to Heaven? They say that she can speak with Heaven, and that she is at it or in it.[76] Among the Kpelle, a negro tribe of Liberia, twins are regarded as born magicians, and as such are treated with respect, and people sometimes make them presents in order to ensure their goodwill; in doing so they are careful never to make a present to the one twin without the other, and the twin who was born last gets his present first, for he is regarded as the first-born. Twins are thought by the Kpelle to do wonders; they even say that "a twin surpasses every medicine-man."[77] Among the Fan or Fang, a tribe of the Cameroons in West Africa, there is a curious superstition that a twin ought not to see a rainbow. Should he by accident have caught sight of one, he must shave his eyebrows and dye the place of the one black and the place of the other red.[78] This superstition seems to imply a special relation between twins and the sky, and it reminds us of the Tahitian tradition that the two divine brothers, the first members of the Areoi Society, descended to earth on a rainbow.[79] [68] J. Rendel Harris, _The Dioscuri in the Christian Legends_ (London, 1903), pp. 1 _sqq._ _id._, _The Cult of the Heavenly Twins_ (Cambridge, 1906), pp. 58 _sqq._; _id._, _Boanerges_ (Cambridge, 1913), pp. 291 _sqq._ [69] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 230, 232. Ellis does not admit that Orotetefa and Urutetefa were, strictly speaking, the sons of Oro. He writes: "According to the traditions of the people, Taaroa created, and, by means of Hina, brought forth when full grown Orotetefa and Urutetefa. They were not his sons; _oriori_ is the term employed by the people, which seems to mean _create_" (_op. cit._ i. 230). With regard to Hina (Heena), interpreted as the moon, or the goddess of the moon, see J. R. Forster, _Observations_, p. 549; G. Forster, _Voyage_, ii. 152; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._. i. 428 _sq._, 458, 472; E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 69. _s.v._ "Hina," "Hina is by far the best known of all Polynesian legendary personages. In the more easterly islands she is a goddess, and is almost certainly the Moon-goddess." Similarly Mr. E. E. V. Collocot observes that Hina "is generally regarded as the Moon-goddess, and this view was spontaneously put forward by a Tongan; in conversation with me" (_Journal of the Polynesian Society_, xxx. (1921) p. 238). [70] Abundant evidence of the custom is produced by Dr. Rendel Harris in his learned works, _The Cult of the Heavenly Twins_ and _Boanerges_. [71] _The Golden Bough_, Part I., _The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings_, i. 262 _sqq._ [72] H. A. Junod, _Les Ba-ronga_ (Neuchâtel, 1898), p. 412; _id._, _Life of a South African Tribe_ (Neuchâtel, 1912-1913), ii. 394. [73] H. A. Junod, _Life of a South African Tribe_, ii. 398. [74] H. A. Junod, _Life of a South African Tribe_, ii. 399. [75] H. A. Junod, _Les Ba-ronga_, pp. 417 _sq._; _id._, _Life of a South African Tribe_, ii. 296. [76] H. A. Junod, _Life of a South African Tribe_, ii. 399 _sq._ [77] D. Westermann, _Die Kpelle, ein Negerstamm in Liberia_ (Göttingen, 1921), pp. 68, 212, 355. The Bambara, another tribe of West Africa, similarly regard the last-born of twins as the elder of the two. See Jos. Henry, _Les Bambara_ (Münster i. W., 1910), p. 98. So, too, with the Mossi of the Sudan. See E. Mangin, "Les Mossi," _Anthropos_, x.-xi. (1915-1916) p. 192. [78] L. Martrou, "Les 'Eki' des Fang," _Anthropos_, i. (1906) p. 751; H. Trilles, _Le Totémisme chez les Fân_ (Münster i. W., 1912), p. 593. Compare H. A. Junod, _Life of a South African Tribe_, ii. 400, note^1, who reports the same superstition among the Fan on the testimony of his wife, who was for years a missionary in the tribe. [79] Above, p. 267. Another notion about twins which may possibly help to throw light on some of the practices of the Areoi Society, is that they or their parents or both are endowed with a fertilising or prolific virtue, which enables them to multiply animals or plants and thereby to increase the food supply. Thus, for example, some tribes of Northern Rhodesia keep pigeons in their villages, and in erecting a pigeon-cote they take care that the first stakes "are driven in by a woman who has borne twins, in order, they say, that the pigeons may multiply."[80] Some Bantu tribes of this region ascribe a similar virtue to both the father and the mother of twins. They think that such parents exert a beneficial or prolific influence at laying the foundations of pigeon-cotes, chicken-houses, goat-pens, or any other building used for the purposes of breeding; a certain woman who had borne twins thrice was lately in great request at these functions.[81] The Zulus think that all goats belonging to a twin bring forth young in couples.[82] [80] C. Gouldsbury and H. Sheane, _The Great Plateau of Northern Nigeria_ (London, 1911), pp. 307 _sq._ [81] D. Campbell, _In the Heart of Bantuland_ (London, 1922), p. 155. [82] Dudley Kidd, _Savage Childhood_ (London, 1906), p. 49. In the Central District of Busoga, Central Africa, when a woman has given birth to twins, the people of her clan do not sow any seed until the twins have been brought to the field. A pot of cooked grain is set before the children with a cake of sesame and all the seed that is to be sown. The food is eaten by the assembled people, and afterwards the field is sown in presence of the twins; the plot is then said to be the field of the twins. The mother of twins must sow her seed before any person of the clan will sow his or hers.[83] These customs seem clearly to imply a belief that twins and their mother possess a special power of fertilising the seed. Among the Baganda of Central Africa twins were supposed to be sent by Mukasa, the great god whose blessing on the crops and on the people was ensured at an annual festival. The twins were thought to be under the protection of the god, and they bore his name, the boys being called Mukasa and the girls Namukasa. And a series of customs observed by the parents of twins among the Baganda indicates in the plainest manner a belief that they were endowed with a fertilising virtue which extended, not only to the crops and the cattle, but also to human beings. Thus the parents of twins were supposed to make people fruitful by sprinkling them with a mixture of water and clay from pots, of which each of the parents had one. Again, some time after the birth the parents used to make a round of visits to relations and friends, taking the twins with them. At every house they danced, the father wearing a crown made from a certain creeper, and the mother wearing a girdle of the same material. At these dances offerings were made to the twins. These dances were most popular "because the people believed that thereby they obtained a special blessing from the god Mukasa, who favoured the parents of twins, and through them dispensed blessing wherever they went." The persons whom the twins and their parents honoured with a visit "thought that, not only they themselves would be blessed and given children, but that their herds and crops also would be multiplied." A ceremony performed by the father and mother of twins over a flower of the plantain indicated in the plainest, if the grossest, fashion the belief of the Baganda that parents of twins could magically fertilise the plantains which form the staple food of the people. No wonder, then, that among them a mother of twins is deemed a source of blessing to the whole community, and that for some time after the birth both she and the father were sacred and wore a distinctive dress to prevent any one from touching them. The father, in particular, "could do what he liked, because he was under the protection of the god"; for example, he was free to enter anybody's garden and to take the produce at will. Special drums, too, were made for the parents, one for the father and one for the mother; and for some time after the birth these were beaten continually both by day and by night.[84] [83] J. Roscoe, _The Northern Bantu_ (Cambridge, 1915), p. 235. [84] J. Roscoe, "Further Notes on the Manners and Customs of the Baganda," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxii. (1902) pp. 32-34, 80; _id._, _The Baganda_ (London, 1911), pp. 64-72. These two accounts to some extent supplement each other. I have drawn on both. As to the annual festival of the god Mukasa, see _id._, _The Baganda_, pp. 298 _sq._ Among the Hos of Togo, in West Africa, in like manner, special drums are beaten for the parents of twins, and the parents dance publicly to the music in the main street of the village, after going nine times round it. Some days later the parents go the round of all the Ho towns, everywhere executing the same dance to the same music at noon; but should one of the twins have died in the meantime, the parents dance at night. It is believed that, if the customary rites were not performed at the birth of twins, the parents of the twins would be crippled. Curiously enough, the drums, to the music of which the parents dance, may not be beaten by any one without special reason; and no one else may dance to their music except such as have slain either a man or a leopard. Among these people the birth of twins is the occasion of very great rejoicing. They say that "the road which the mother of twins goes is better than the road which the rich man goes."[85] The saying suggests that the Hos, like the Baganda, regard a mother of twins as diffusing fertility wherever she goes; and, on the analogy of the dances of parents of twins among the Baganda, we may conjecture that in like manner among the Hos the parents of twins are supposed to confer the blessing of fruitfulness on all the towns where they dance. [85] J. Spieth, _Die Ewe-Stämme_ (Berlin, 1906), pp. 202-206. Among the Barundi of East Africa the birth of twins is celebrated with rites, songs, and ritual dances, which last for days and even for weeks. As soon as the news spreads, the neighbours, friends, and relations flock to the house to sing, bringing with them presents for the parents or offerings to the spirits. The amount of provisions thus accumulated is enormous, but the parents of the twins benefit little by it; the great bulk disappears as by magic among the self-invited guests. Festivity, dancing, and singing are now the order of the day. Dancers, male and female, their faces painted red and white or yellow, dance like furies in a circle for hours together, singing ritual hymns at the top of their voices, while an old sorceress besprinkles the troop with lustral water. It is commonly believed that if these rites were omitted, the twins and their parents would die. At the birth of twins it is customary to buy two black sheep or lambs and to dedicate them to the twins, one to each. These sheep are then left at liberty to run about as they like by day and night, and to enter the fields and browse at will. If one of them dies it is replaced by another. The animals are described as the guardians of the children, the receptacle or symbol of their spirits, in short, as their fetish.[86] To some extent, they are analogous to the pig which an Areoi used to offer to the god at the ceremony of his consecration; for, though sometimes the animal was killed, at other times it was liberated, and, being regarded as sacred or belonging to the god to whom it had been offered, was allowed to range the district uncontrolled till it died.[87] Among the Baluba, a tribe of the Belgian Congo, there is great joy at the birth of twins, and special ceremonies are observed on the occasion. The twins are invariably named Kyunga and Kahya, after the spirits of two ancient kings, and to these spirits the twins are consecrated. After being washed and decorated they are placed side by side in a winnowing-basket and carried by the women of the family in procession through the village, headed by the proud father. Dancing and singing they go to the ash-heap of the village. There they all rub themselves with ashes and perform another dance. After that, still led by the father of the twins, they go to the houses of the chief people, and in front of each house the father dances, while the women beat time with their hands. Wherever the procession halts, the householder is expected to come and admire the twins, to compliment the father, and to deposit a small present in the winnowing-basket.[88] Among the Herero of South-West Africa the parents of twins are looked on as sacred, and for a time they may not speak to any one, and no one may speak to them. But after the lapse of some days the family goes the round of the village, visiting three or four huts every day. The father of the twins sits down on the right side of the hut, and the inmates make him offerings of beads, oxen, and so forth. When he has thus gone the round of the village, he repairs to the neighbouring villages, where the same ceremonies are repeated. It is often a year before he returns to his own village, and when he does so he brings back with him a great quantity of offerings. Henceforth the father of the twins enjoys all the privileges of a priestly chief; he may sacrifice at the holy fire, and he may represent and even succeed the chief in the office of priest for the village. The twins themselves are eligible for the same office. If a chief dies a natural death, he is succeeded in his priestly function by his twin son; whereas the chieftainship passes to the chief's legal heir, who is properly the son of his eldest sister, and who thenceforth assumes the name of the twin. A twin is bound by no taboo; he may eat of all flesh offered in sacrifice; he may drink of the milk of every holy cow, just like the chief and the priest themselves.[89] [86] J. M. M. van der Burgt, _Dictionnaire Français-Kirundi_ (Bois-le-Duc, 1903), pp. 324 _sq._; H. Meyer, _Die Barundi_ (Leipzig, 1916), pp. 110 _sq._ [87] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 242. [88] Colle, _Les Baluba_ (Brussels, 1913), i. 253-255. [89] J. Irle, _Die Herero_ (Gütersloh, 1906), pp. 96-99. In these cases we are not told that twins and their parents are supposed to be endowed with a power of multiplying the herds and generally of increasing the supply of food by the prolific influence which they diffuse about them; but the analogy of the customs and beliefs of the Baganda concerning the birth of twins renders the supposition probable. At least on this hypothesis we can readily understand the round of visits which the parents, or one of them, pay to the surrounding towns or villages, and the presents which are made to them. If they indeed possess a power of imparting fertility and abundance wherever they go, it is obviously in everybody's interest to be visited by them, and clearly, on the same supposition, it is everybody's duty to make some return to them for the wonderful benefits which they have conferred. Similarly we may perhaps suppose that the rounds which the Areois went from island to island, dancing, singing, and playing their tricks wherever they stopped, were believed to quicken the fruits of the earth, and possibly also to multiply the pigs and the fish. On that assumption, the unlimited right which these vagabonds enjoyed of appropriating and consuming the produce of the gardens was probably accorded to them as a natural and proper remuneration for the inestimable services which their mere presence was believed to render to the crops. The sexual excesses, in which they appear to have indulged, would also be intelligible, if it was imagined that, on the principle of sympathetic magic, such indulgences actually promoted the multiplication and growth of plants and animals. But this explanation of the extravagant rites observed by the Areois, and of the quaint beliefs entertained concerning them, is offered only as an hypothesis for what it is worth. It may be worth while noting that among the Kpelle, a tribe of Liberia in West Africa, there is reported to exist a Secret Society of Twins,[90] but whether it bears any resemblance to the Society of the Areois I do not know. [90] D. Westermann, _Die Kpelle, ein Negerstamm in Liberia_ (Göttingen, 1921), p. 228. A familiar figure of the Polynesian pantheon, who meets us in the mythology of the Society Islanders, was the famous god or hero Maui. Many stories of his exploits were told in the islands. It is said that originally the sky lay flat upon the face of the earth and ocean, being held down by the legs of a huge cuttle-fish. But Maui dived into the sea, and, grappling with the monster, utterly dismembered him; whereupon the sky flew up and expanded into the beautiful blue vault which we now see above us, with the noonday sun for the keystone of the arch.[91] Again, the natives told how, one day, sitting in his canoe, Maui let down his line with a hook at the end of it and fished up the earth, which had hitherto lain at the bottom of the sea.[92] Also he is said to have held the sun with ropes to prevent him from going too fast.[93] For it happened that Maui was hard at work, building a temple, when he perceived that the day was declining and that the night would overtake him before he had accomplished his task; so hastily twining some ropes of coco-nut fibre, he laid hold of the sun's rays and tethered them by the ropes to a tree, so that the sun could not stir till Maui had finished the task he was at.[94] Further, Maui is said to have invented the mode of kindling fire by rubbing the point of one stick in the groove of another,[95] which was the way in which the Society Islanders regularly made fire.[96] Maui was also supposed to be the cause of earthquakes.[97] In Tahiti a curious image of Maui was seen and described by Captain Cook. "It was the figure of a man, constructed of basket-work, rudely made, but not ill-designed; it was something more than seven feet high, and rather too bulky in proportion to its height. The wicker skeleton was completely covered with feathers, which were white where the skin was to appear, and black in the parts which it is their custom to paint or stain, and upon the head, where there was to be a representation of hair: upon the head also were four protuberances, three in front and one behind, which we should have called horns, but which the Indians dignified with the name of _Tate Ete_, little men. The image was called Manioe, and was said to be the only one in Otaheite. They attempted to give us an explanation of its use and design, but we had not then acquired enough of their language to understand them. We learnt, however, afterwards that it was a representation of Mauwe, one of their _Eatuas_, or gods of the second class."[98] [91] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 526. [92] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 449 _sq._ [93] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 167. [94] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ ii. 40 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ ii. 170 _sq._ [95] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 526. [96] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 141; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 357; J. Turnbull, _Voyage round the World_, p. 349; Wallis, in R. Kerr's _General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels_, xii. 212; _id._, in J. Hawkesworth's _Voyages_, i. (London, 1773) p. 483. [97] J. R. Forster, _Observations_, p. 540; G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_, ii. 151. These writers spell his name O-Maouwe and O-mauwee. [98] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 156 _sq._ Besides the high primaeval deities, born of the Night, the Society Islanders believed in a host of inferior divinities, many of whom were said to have been created by Taaroa, the supreme god. Thus, between the high gods and the deities of particular places or of particular professions, there was a class of intermediate deities, who were not supposed to have existed from the beginning or to have been born of Night. Their origin was veiled in obscurity, but they were often described as having been renowned men, who, after death, were deified by their descendants. They all received the homage of the people, and on all public occasions were acknowledged among the gods.[99] Again, there were many gods of the sea, among whom the principal seem to have been Tuaraatai and Ruahatu. These were generally called shark gods (_atua mao_), not that the shark was itself deemed a god, but that it was supposed to be employed by the marine gods as their minister of vengeance. It was only the large blue shark which was believed to act in this capacity; and it is said that these voracious creatures always spared a shipwrecked priest, even when they devoured his companions; nay, they would recognise a priest on board any canoe, come at his call, and retire at his bidding. A priest of one of these shark gods told Mr. Ellis that he or his father had been carried on the back of a shark from Raiatea to Huahine, a distance of twenty miles. Other gods were thought to preside over the fisheries, and to direct the shoals of fish to the coasts. Their aid was invoked by fishermen before they launched their canoes and while they were busy at sea. But these marine deities were not supposed by the people to be of equal antiquity with the great primordial gods, born of the Night (_atua fauau po_).[100] Again, there were gods of the air, who were sometimes worshipped under the figure of birds. The chief of these aerial deities were thought to be a brother and sister, who dwelt near the great rock, which is the foundation of the world. There they imprisoned the stormy winds, but sent them forth from time to time to punish such as neglected the worship of the gods. In tempests their compassion was besought by mariners tossed on the sea or by their friends on shore.[101] To the minds of the islanders there were also gods of hill and dale, of precipice and ravine. "By their rude mythology each lovely island was made a sort of fairy-land, and the spells of enchantment were thrown over its varied scenes.... The mountain's summit, and the fleecy mists that hang upon its brows--the rocky defile--the foaming cataract--and the lonely dell--were all regarded as the abode or resort of these invisible beings."[102] [99] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 326 _sq._ As to the inferior gods, see also J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 451 _sqq._ [100] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 327-329. [101] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 329 _sq._ As to the worship of birds, Captain Cook says: "This island [Tahiti indeed, and the rest that lie near it, have a particular bird, some a heron and others a king's fisher, to which they pay a peculiar regard, and concerning which they have some superstitious notions with respect to good and bad fortune, as we have of the swallow and robin-redbreast, giving them the name of _eatua_, and by no means killing or molesting them; yet they never address a petition to them, or approach them with any act of adoration." See J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 224. [102] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 329 _sq._, 331. The general name for "god" in the Society Islands, as throughout Polynesia, was _atua_.[103] The word was also applied, in the expression _oramatuas_ or _oromatuas_, to the spirits of departed relatives, who were also worshipped and ranked among the deities.[104] To these we shall return presently; meantime it may not be out of place to give some notice of the worship of the other gods, since in the religion of the Society Islanders, as of other branches of the Polynesian race, it was closely interwoven with the worship of the dead. [103] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 333 _sq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 440 _sqq._; E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, pp. 30 _sq._, _s.v._ "atua." Captain Cook and the first missionaries spelled the word _eatua_ or _eatooa_. See J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 221, vi. 149; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 343. [104] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 324 _sq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 454 _sq._ § 4. _The Temples and Images of the Gods_ The sacred place dedicated to religious worship was called a _morai_, or, as it is also spelled, a _marai_ or _marae_, which may be translated "temple," though all such places were uncovered and open to the sky. The national temples, where the principal idols were deposited, consisted of large walled enclosures, some of which contained smaller inner courts. The form was frequently that of a square or a parallelogram, with sides forty or fifty feet long. The area was paved with flat stones, and two sides of it were enclosed by a high stone wall, while the front was protected by a low fence, and within rose in steps or terraces a solid pyramidical structure built of stone, which usually formed one of the narrow sides of the area, either at the western or at the eastern end. These pyramids, which were always truncated so as to form a narrow platform or ridge on their upper surface, were the most striking and characteristic feature of the _morais_; indeed the name _morai_ or _marae_ appears to have been sometimes confined, at least by European observers, to the pyramid. In front of the pyramid the images were kept and the altars fixed. The houses of the priests and of the keepers of the idols were erected within the enclosure.[105] Of these interesting monuments, which seemed destined to last for ages, only a few insignificant ruins survive; the rest have been destroyed, chiefly at the instigation of the missionaries.[106] [105] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 339 _sqq._ Compare J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 157 _sqq._, 217, 219, 220, 222, vi. 37, _sq._, 41; J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, pp. 543 _sqq._; G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_, i. 267, ii. 138 _sq._; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 207 _sq._, 211 _sq._; D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 267 _sq._, 271, 280 _sqq._, 549, ii. 13 _sq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 466-470; A. Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_, pp. 111 _sqq._; S. and K. Routledge, "Notes on some Archaeological Remains in the Society and Austral Islands," _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_, li. (1921) 438 _sqq._ According to J. R. Forster (_l.c._), the _marais_ (_morais, maraes_) "consist of a very large pile of stones, generally in the shape of an Egyptian pyramid, with large steps; sometimes this pyramid makes one of the sides of an area, walled in with square stones and paved with flat stones: the pyramid is not solid, but the inside is filled with smaller fragments of coral stones." [106] A. Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_, p. 135. This writer has given us a survey and description of some of the principal remains which existed at the end of the nineteenth century (pp. 111-148). The ruins of two _maraes_ in the island of Moorea are described by Mr. and Mrs. Routledge (_l.c._). In one of them the pyramid stood at the western end of the enclosure, and in the other at the eastern end. Some of the pyramids erected within these sacred enclosures were of great size. In Tahiti an enormous one was seen and described by Captain Cook as well as by later observers. It was of oblong shape and measured two hundred and sixty-seven feet in length by eighty-seven feet in width. It rose in a series of eleven steps or terraces, each four feet high, so that the total height of the structure was forty-four feet. Each step was formed of a single course of white coral stone, neatly squared and polished. The steps on the long sides were broader than those at the ends, so that at the top it terminated, not in an oblong of the same figure as the base, but in a ridge like the roof of a house. The interior of the pyramid was solid, being filled up with round pebbles which, from the regularity of their figure, seemed to have been wrought. Some of the coral stones were very large; one of them was three and a half feet long by two and a half feet wide. The foundation of the pyramid was built not of coral, but of what Captain Cook called rock, by which he probably meant a volcanic stone. These foundation stones were also squared; one of them measured four feet seven inches by two feet four inches. "Such a structure," says Captain Cook, "raised without the assistance of iron tools to shape the stones, or mortar to join them, struck us with astonishment: it seemed to be as compact and firm as it could have been made by any workman in Europe, except that the steps which range along its greatest length are not perfectly strait, but sink in a kind of hollow in the middle, so that the whole surface, from end to end, is not a right line, but a curve." All the stones, both rock and coral, must have been brought from a distance, for there was no quarry in the neighbourhood. The squaring of these blocks with stone tools must, as Captain Cook observes, have been a work of incredible labour; but the polishing of them could have been effected more easily by means of the sharp coral sand, which is found everywhere on the seashore in great abundance. On the top of the pyramid, and about the middle, stood the wooden image of a bird; and near it lay the image of a fish carved in stone. This great pyramid formed part of one side of a spacious area, nearly square, which measured three hundred and sixty feet by three hundred and fifty-four, and was walled in with stone as well as paved with flat stones in its whole extent. Notwithstanding the pavement, several trees were growing within the sacred enclosure. About a hundred yards to the west was another paved area or court, in which were several small stages raised on wooden pillars about seven feet high. These stages the natives called _ewattas_. Captain Cook judged them rightly to be altars, observing that they supported what appeared to be offerings in the shape of provisions of all sorts, as well as whole hogs and many skulls of hogs and dogs.[107] [107] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 157-159. The great pyramid was afterwards visited and described by the first missionaries. Their measurements confirm, while slightly exceeding, those of Captain Cook. They speak, however, of ten steps instead of eleven, and say that the lowest step was six feet high and the rest about five. See J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 207 _sq._, with the plate. The pyramids within the sacred enclosure were not usually so large or so lofty. In the island of Huahine the pyramid of the chief god Tani or Tane was a hundred and twenty-four feet long by sixteen feet broad, and it had only two steps or stories. The lower step or story was about ten feet high and faced with blocks of coral, set on their edges: some of these blocks were as high as the step itself. The upper step or story was similarly faced with coral, but was not more than three feet high. The interior of both stories was filled with earth. In the centre of the principal front stood the god's bed, a stone platform twenty-four feet long by thirteen feet wide, but only eighteen inches high. The style and masonry of this pyramid, as well as its dimensions, appear to have been very inferior to those of the great one in Tahiti. The blocks were apparently unhewn and unpolished, the angles ill formed, and the walls not straight. Venerable and magnificent trees overshadowed the sanctuary. One of them measured fifteen yards in girth above the roots. It is said that the god often wished to fly away, but that his long tail always caught in the boughs of this giant tree and dragged him down to earth again.[108] [108] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 265 _sq._ These sacred pyramids "were erected in any place, and at any time, when the priests required, by the slavish people. On such occasions the former overlooked the latter at their work, and denounced the most terrible judgments upon those who were remiss at it. The poor wretches were thus compelled to finish their tasks (burthensome as they often were, in heaving blocks from the sea, dragging them ashore, and heaping them one upon another) without eating, which would have desecrated the intended sanctuary. To restrain the gnawings of hunger they bound girdles of bark round their bodies, tightening the ligatures from time to time, as their stomachs shrank with emptiness. And, when the drudgery was done, it was not uncommon for the remorseless priests to seize one of the miserable builders and sacrifice him to the idol of the place."[109] [109] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 13 _sq._ Temples of this sort were found scattered over the islands in every situation--on hill-tops, on jutting headlands, and in the recesses of groves.[110] They varied greatly in size: some were small and built in the rudest manner, mere squares of ill-shapen and ill-piled stones. In the island of Borabora the missionaries found not less than two hundred and twenty of these structures crowded within an area only ten miles in circumference.[111] The trees that grew within the sacred enclosure were sacred. They comprised particularly the tall cypress-like casuarina and the broader-leaved and more exuberant callophyllum, thespesia, and cardia. Their interlacing boughs formed a thick umbrageous covert, which often excluded the rays of the sun; and the contrast between the bright glare of a tropical day outside and the sombre gloom in the depths of the grove, combined with the sight of the gnarled trunks and twisted boughs of the aged trees, and the sighing of the wind in the branches, to strike a religious horror into the mind of the beholder.[112] The ground which surrounded the temples (_morais_) was sacred and afforded a sanctuary for criminals. Thither they fled on any apprehension of danger, especially when many human sacrifices were expected, and thence they might not be torn by violence, though they were sometimes seduced from their asylum by guile.[113] [110] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 341. [111] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ ii. 13. [112] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 341 _sq._ [113] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 351. These remarkable sanctuaries were at once temples for the worship of the gods and burial-places for the human dead. On this combination of functions I have already adduced some evidence;[114] but as the point is important, I will cite further testimonies as to the custom of burying the dead in these enclosures. [114] Above, pp. 116 _sqq._ Thus Captain Cook writes: "I must more explicitly observe that there are two places in which the dead are deposited: one a kind of shed, where the flesh is suffered to putrefy; the other an enclosure, with erections of stones, where the bones are afterwards buried. The sheds are called _tupapow_, and the enclosures _morai_. The _morais_ are also places of worship".[115] Again, after describing how a dead body used to be placed in the temporary house or shed (_tupapow_) and left there to decay for five moons, Captain Cook tells us that "what remains of the body is taken down from the bier, and the bones, having been scraped and washed very clean, are buried, according to the rank of the person, either within or without a _morai_: if the deceased was an _earee_ or chief, his skull is not buried with the rest of the bones, but is wrapped up in fine cloth, and put in a kind of box made for that purpose, which is also placed in the _morai_. This coffer is called _ewharre no te orometua_, the house of a teacher or master".[116] [115] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 217. [116] J. Cook, _op. cit._ i. 219. Again, after describing the human sacrifice which he witnessed at the great _morai_ at Attahooroo, in Tahiti, Captain Cook proceeds as follows: "The _morai_ (which, undoubtedly, is a place of worship, sacrifice, and burial at the same time), where the sacrifice was now offered, is that where the supreme chief of the whole island is always buried, and is appropriated to his family, and some of the principal people. It differs little from the common ones, except in extent. Its principal part is a large oblong pile of stones, lying loosely upon each other, about twelve or fourteen feet high, contracted toward the top, with a square area on each side, loosely paved with pebble stones, under which the bones of the chiefs are buried.... The human sacrifices are buried under different parts of the pavement."[117] [117] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 37. Again, Captain Cook tells us that after a battle the victors used to collect all the dead that had fallen into their hands and bring them to the _morai_, where, with much ceremony, they dug a hole and buried all the bodies in it as so many offerings to the gods; but the skulls of the slain were never afterwards taken up. Their own great chiefs who fell in battle were treated in a different manner. Captain Cook was informed that the bodies of the late king and two chiefs, who were slain in battle, were brought to the _morai_ at Attahooroo. There the priests cut out the bowels of the corpses before the great altar, and the bodies were afterwards buried at three different spots in the great pile of stones which formed the most conspicuous feature of the _morai_. Common men who perished in the same battle were all buried in a single hole at the foot of the pile. The spots where the bodies of the king and chiefs reposed were pointed out to Captain Cook and his companions.[118] [118] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 40 _sq._ Again, in the island of Tahiti, the naturalist George Forster, who accompanied Captain Cook, saw a stone building, "in form of the frustum of a pyramid," constructed in terraces or steps, and measuring about twenty yards in length at the base. "This the native said was a burying-place and place of worship, _marài_, and distinguished it by the name of _marai no-Aheatua_, the burying-place of Aheatua, the present king of Tiarroboo."[119] [119] G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_, i. 267. Again, in the island of Huahine, the missionaries Tyerman and Bennet saw "a pagan _marae_ hard by, where the sovereigns of Huahine were buried--and where, indeed, they lay in more than oriental state, each one resting in his bed, at the foot of the Sacred Mountain, beneath the umbrage of the magnificent _aoa_ [tree], and near the beach for ever washed by waters that roll round the world.... The great _marae_ itself was dedicated to Tani, the father of the gods here; but the whole ground adjacent was marked with the vestiges of smaller _maraes_--private places for worship and family interment--while this was the capital of the island and the headquarters of royalty and idolatry."[120] A little later, speaking of the same sacred place, the missionaries observe, "The first _marae_ that we visited was the sepulchral one of the kings of Huahine, for many generations. It was an oblong inclosure, forty-five feet long by twenty broad, fenced with a strong stone wall. Here the bodies of the deceased, according to the manner of the country, being bound up, with the arms doubled to their shoulders, the legs bent under their thighs and both forced upwards against the abdomen, were let down, without coffins, into a hole prepared for their reception, and just deep enough to allow the earth to cover their heads."[121] [120] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 271. [121] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 280. One of our best authorities on these islands, William Ellis, speaks of the _maraes_ (_morais_), whether they belonged to private families, to districts, or to the kings, as being "the general depositories of the bones of the departed, whose bodies had been embalmed"; and as a motive for the practice he alleges the sanctity which attached to these places, and which might naturally be supposed to guard the graves against impious and malicious violation.[122] However, the first missionaries say of the islanders that "they bury none in the _morai_, but those offered in sacrifice, or slain in battle, or the children of chiefs which have been strangled at the birth--an act of atrocious inhumanity too common."[123] According to Moerenhout, the _marais_ (_morais_) belonging to private families were often used as cemeteries; but in the public _marais_ none but the human victims, and sometimes the priests, were interred.[124] Thus there is to some extent a conflict of testimony between our authorities on the subject of burial in the temples. But the evidence which I have adduced seems to render it probable that many at least of the _morais_ served as burial-grounds for kings and chiefs of high degree, and even for common men who had fallen fighting in the service of their country. [122] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 405. See above, pp. 117 _sq._ [123] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 364. [124] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 470. In more recent years the German traveller, Arthur Baessler, who examined and described the existing ruins of these sacred edifices, denied that the _maraes_ (_morais_) were places of burial, while he allowed that they were places of worship.[125] He distinguished a _marae_ from an _ahu_, admitting at the same time that they closely resembled each other, both in their structure and in the ritual celebrated at them.[126] According to him, a _marae_ was a sort of domestic chapel, the possession of which constituted the most distinctive mark of a noble family. Every chief, high or low, had one of them and took rank according to its antiquity.[127] It was an oblong area, open to the sky and enclosed by walls on three sides and by a pyramid on the fourth: walls and pyramid alike were built of blocks of stone or coral.[128] The _ahu_, on the other hand, was a monument erected to the memory of a distinguished chief, whose mortal remains were deposited in it. But apart from the grave which it contained, the _ahu_, according to Baessler, hardly differed from a _marae_, though it was mostly larger: it was a great walled enclosure with a pyramid, altars, and houses of the priests. And the ritual celebrated in the _ahu_ resembled the ritual performed in the _marae_: there, too, the faithful assembled to pray, and there the priests recited the same liturgy.[129] Thus both the form and, to some extent at least, the function of the two types of sanctuary presented a close similarity. The islanders themselves, it appears, do not always clearly distinguish them at the present day.[130] And the single distinction on which Baessler insisted, that the dead were buried in the _ahu_ but not in the _marae_, seems not to hold good universally, even on Baessler's own showing. For he admits that, "if ever a chief was buried in his own _marae_, it must have been in most exceptional cases, but probably statements to that effect rest only on a confusion of the _marae_ with the _ahu_; such a practice would also run counter to the habits of the natives, who sought the most secret places for their dead, and certainly concealed the heads in caves difficult of access and unknown to others. On the other hand, the _maraes_ of humbler families may more frequently, if not as a rule, have served as places of burial."[131] And even in regard to the holiest _marae_, dedicated to the great god Oro, in the island of Raiatea,[132] Baessler himself cites a tradition, apparently well authenticated, that a great number of warriors slain in battle were buried in it.[133] The argument that the people buried their dead, or at all events their skulls, only in remote caves among the mountains seems untenable; for according to the evidence of earlier writers the practice of concealing the bones or the skulls of the dead in caves was generally, if not always, a precaution adopted in time of war, to prevent these sacred relics from falling into the hands of invaders; the regular custom seems to have been to bury the bones in or near the _marae_ and to keep the skulls either there or in the house.[134] On the whole, then, it is perhaps safer to follow earlier and, from the nature of the case, better-informed writers in neglecting the distinction which Baessler drew between a _marae_ (_morai_) and an _ahu_. In any case we have Baessler's testimony that an _ahu_ was at once a place of burial and a place of worship. There seems to be no evidence that any of these sacred edifices, whether _maraes_ or _ahus_, were associated with a worship of the sun. On the other hand, it is certain that some at least of them were dedicated, partly or chiefly, to a cult of the dead, which formed a very important element in the religion of the Society Islanders, whereas there is little or nothing to show that they adored either the sun, or any other of the heavenly bodies, with the possible exception of the moon.[135] This did not, however, prevent them from entertaining absurd notions concerning these great luminaries. At an eclipse they imagined that the moon or the sun was being swallowed by some god whom they had offended; and on such occasions they repaired to the temple and offered prayers and liberal presents to the deity for the purpose of inducing him to disgorge the luminary.[136] [125] A. Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_, pp. 116 _sq._, 127 _sq._, 144 _sq._ [126] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 130, 131. [127] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ p. 119. [128] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 117 _sq._ [129] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 130 _sq._ [130] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ p. 140. [131] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ p. 127. [132] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 124, 141. [133] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 127 _sq._, 144 _sq._ [134] See below, p. 311. [135] Ellis says, "I am not aware that they rendered divine homage either to the sun or moon" (_Polynesian Researches_, iii. 171). Speaking of the Areois, Moerenhout says that "it seems to me clear that though they did not adore directly the sun and the other stars, nevertheless their worship was little else than sabeism or the adoration of the visible and animated universe" (_op. cit._ i. 503). He interpreted both Oro and Maui or Mahoui (as he spells the name) as the sun-god (_op. cit._ i. 484, 502, 503, 560 _sq._); but these interpretations appear to be his own guesses, unsupported by any statement of the natives. Maui was the great Polynesian hero, one of whose most famous exploits was catching the sun in a snare and compelling him to move more slowly (E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, pp. 234 _sqq._, _s.v._ "Maui"; see above, p. 275); but this story, far from favouring the identification of Maui with the sun, seems fatal to it. According to J. R. Forster, the great god Taroa (Taaroa) was thought to have created the sun and to dwell in it (_Observations_, p. 540); but even if this statement is correct, it hardly implies a worship of the sun. With regard to the moon, the same writer tells us (_l.c._) that it was supposed to be procreated by a goddess named O-Heena, "who presides in the black cloud which appears in this luminary"; and the statement is repeated by his son, George Forster, who adds: "The women sing a short couplet, which seems to be an act of adoration paid to that divinity [O-Heena], perhaps because they suppose her to have some influence upon their physical [oe]conomy.... 'The cloud within the moon, that cloud I love'" (_Voyage round the World_, ii. 152). This so far seems to imply a reverence for the moon; and there are some grounds for thinking that O-Heena or Hina (as the name is usually spelt) was in Eastern Polynesia a moon-goddess. See above, p. 267, note^2. [136] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 331 _sq._, iii. 171. According to another account, the sun and moon in eclipse were supposed to be in the act of copulation. See J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 346. Temples such as have been described were erected on all important occasions, such as a war, a decisive victory, or the installation of a great chief or king of a whole island. In these latter cases the natives boasted that the number of persons present was so great that, if each of them only brought a single stone, the amount of stones thus collected would have sufficed to build their largest temples and pyramids.[137] One of the occasions when it became necessary to build new temples was when the old ones had been overthrown by enemies in war. After such a desecration it was customary to perform a ceremony for the purpose of purifying the land from the defilement which it had incurred through the devastations of the foe, who had, perhaps, demolished the temples, destroyed or mutilated the idols, and burned with fire the curiously carved pieces of wood which marked the sacred places of interment and represented the spirits of the dead (_tiis_). Before the rite of purification was performed the temples were rebuilt, new altars reared, new images placed within the sacred precincts, and new wooden effigies set up near the graves. At the close of the rites in the new temples, the worshippers repaired to the seashore, where the chief priest offered a short prayer and the people dragged a net of coco-nut leaves through a shallow part of the sea, usually detaching small pieces of coral, which they brought ashore. These were called fish and were delivered to the priest, who conveyed them to the temple and deposited them on the altar, offering at the same time a prayer to induce the gods to cleanse the land from pollution, that it might be as pure as the coral fresh from the sea. It was now thought safe to abide on the soil and to eat of its produce, whereas if the ceremony had not been performed, death would have been, in the opinion of the people, the consequence of partaking of fruits grown on the defiled land.[138] [137] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 468. [138] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 348 _sq._ The temples were sacred. When a man approached one of them to worship or to bring his offering to the altar, he bared his body to the waist in sign of reverence and humility.[139] Women in general might not enter a temple, but when their presence was indispensable for certain ceremonies, the ground was covered with cloth, on which they walked, lest they should defile the holy place with their feet.[140] For example, some six weeks or two months after the birth of a child the father and mother took the child to a temple, where they both offered their blood to the gods by cutting their heads with shark's teeth and allowing the blood to drip on leaves, which they laid on the altar. On this occasion the husband spread a cloth on the floor of the temple for his wife to tread upon, for she might not step on the ground or the pavement.[141] Similarly at marriage bride and bridegroom visited the family temple (_marae_, _morai_), where the skulls of their ancestors were brought out and placed before them; but a large white cloth had to be spread out on the pavement for the bride to walk upon. Sometimes at these marriage rites the female relatives cut their faces and brows with shark's teeth, caught the flowing blood on cloth, and deposited the cloth, sprinkled with the mingled blood of the mothers of the married pair, at the feet of the bride.[142] At other times the mother of the bride gashed her own person cruelly with a shark's tooth, and having filled a coco-nut basin with the blood which flowed from her wounds, she presented it to the bridegroom, who immediately threw it from him.[143] While certain festivals were being celebrated at the temples the exclusion of women from them was still more rigid. Thus in the island of Huahine, during the celebration of the great annual festival, at which all the idols of the island were brought from their various shrines to the principal temple to be clothed with new dresses and ornaments, no woman was allowed to approach any of the sacred edifices under pain of death, which was instantly inflicted by whoever witnessed the sacrilege. Even if the wives and children of the priests themselves came within a certain distance, while some particular services were going on, they were murdered on the spot by their husbands and fathers with the utmost ferocity.[144] [139] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 224; J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, p. 547; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 469. Elsewhere (vi. 149) Captain Cook mentions that the baring of the body on the approach to a temple was especially incumbent on women, who otherwise had to make a considerable circuit to avoid the sacred edifice. [140] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 469 _sq._; A. Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_, pp. 126 _sq._ [141] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 536 _sq._ [142] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 271 _sq._ [143] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 558. [144] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 267 _sq._ Some of these sacred edifices are still impressive in their ruins and deserve the name of megalithic monuments. Thus the temple (_marae_, _morai_) of Oro at Opoa, which was the holiest temple in the island of Raiatea and perhaps in the Society Islands generally,[145] is about a hundred and thirty-eight feet long by twenty-six feet broad. It is enclosed by a wall of gigantic coral blocks standing side by side to a height of about six feet seven inches. The blocks have been hewn from the inner reef; the outer surfaces were smoothed, the inner left rough. One of the blocks stands over eleven feet high, without reckoning the part concealed by the soil; it is twelve feet wide, by two and a half feet thick. Another block is about ten feet long by eight feet broad and one foot thick.[146] In the ruined temple of Tainuu, situated in the district of Tevaitoa, one block is about eleven and a half feet high by eleven feet wide, with a thickness varying from twenty inches to two and a half feet.[147] [145] A. Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_, pp. 124, 141; D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 529 _sq._ [146] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ p. 142. [147] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ p. 146. The idols or images of the gods were usually made of wood, but sometimes of stone. Some were rudely carved in human shape; others were rough unpolished logs, wrapped in many folds of cloth or covered with a matting of coco-nut fibre.[148] The image of the god Oro was a straight log of casuarina wood, six feet long, uncarved, but decorated with feathers. On the other hand Taaroa, the supreme deity of Polynesia, was represented by a rudely carved human figure about four feet high, with a number of little images studding his body to indicate the multitude of gods that had proceeded from him as creator. The body of the god was hollow, and when it was taken from the temple, where it had been worshipped for many generations, it was found to contain a number of small idols in the cavity. It is supposed that these petty gods had been placed there by their worshippers and owners that they might absorb some of the supernatural powers of the greater divinity before being removed to the places where they were to commence deities on their own account.[149] With a similar intention it was customary to fill the inside of the hollow images with red feathers in order that the plumes might be impregnated with the divine influence and might afterwards diffuse it for the benefit of the owner of the feathers, who had placed them in the image for that purpose. The red feathers, plucked from a small bird which is found in many of the islands, thus became an ordinary medium for communicating and extending supernatural powers, not only in the Society Islands, but throughout Polynesia. The beautiful long tail-feathers of the tropic or man-of-war bird were used for the same purpose. The gods were supposed to be very fond of these feathers and ready to impart their blessed essence to them. Hence people brought the feathers to the priest and received from him in exchange two or three which had been sanctified in the stomach of the deity; on extracting them from that receptacle, the priest prayed to the god that he would continue to inhabit the red feathers even when they were detached from his divine person.[150] The feathers thus consecrated were themselves regarded as in some sense divine and were called gods (_atuas_, _oromatuas_); the people had great confidence in their sovereign virtue, and on occasions of danger they sought them out, believing that the mere presence of the feathers would afford them adequate protection. For example, when they were threatened by a storm at sea, they would hold out the feathers to the menacing clouds and command them to depart.[151] [148] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 337 _sq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 471. According to Ellis, the wooden images were made from the durable timber of the _aito_ or casuarina tree, and the stone images were mostly rude uncarved angular columns of basalt, of various sizes, though some were of calcareous or siliceous stone. Some stone images, however, were rudely carved in human form. See A. Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_, pp. 128 _sq._ [149] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 354. [150] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 338 _sq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 471 _sqq._ [151] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 473 _sq._ § 5. _The Sacrifices, Priests, and Sacred Recorders_ The offerings presented to the gods included every kind of valuable property, such as birds, fish, beasts, the fruits of the earth and the choicest native manufactures. The fruits and other eatables were generally, but not always, dressed. Portions of the fowls, pigs, or fish, cooked with sacred fire in the temple, were presented to the deity; the remainder furnished a banquet for the priests and other sacred persons, who were privileged to eat of the sacrifices. The portions appropriated to the gods were placed on the altar and left there till they decayed. In the public temples the great altars were wooden stages, some eight or ten feet high, supported on a number of wooden posts, which were sometimes curiously carved and polished. But there were also smaller altars in the temples; some of them were like round tables, resting on a single post. Domestic altars and such as were erected near the bodies of dead friends were small square structures of wicker-work. In sacrificing pigs they were very anxious not to break a bone or disfigure the animal. Hence they used to strangle the animal or bleed it to death.[152] [152] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 344 _sq._ Human victims were sacrificed on many occasions, as in time of war, at great national festivals, during the illness of their rulers, and at the building of a temple. William Ellis was told that the foundations of some of their sacred edifices were laid in human sacrifices, and that at least the central pillar, which supported the roof of one of the sacred houses at Maeva, had been planted on the body of a man. The victims were either captives taken in war or persons who had rendered themselves obnoxious to the chiefs or the priests. In the technical language of the priests they were called "fish." When once a man had been chosen for sacrifice, the family to which he belonged was regarded as taboo or devoted to the altar, and when another victim was wanted, he was more frequently taken from that family than from any other. Similarly, a district which had once furnished victims was thenceforth devoted. Hence, at the approach of ceremonies which were usually accompanied by human sacrifices, the members of certain families and the inhabitants of certain districts used to flee to the mountains and hide in caves till the ceremony was over. But the doomed man was seldom apprised of his fate beforehand. A sudden blow with a club or a stone on the nape of the neck was the usual way of despatching him, lest the body should be mangled or a bone broken. If the blow had only stunned him, he was soon killed, and the corpse, placed in a long basket of coco-nut leaves, was carried to the temple and offered to the god by being set before the idol. In dedicating it the priest took out one of the eyes and handed it on a leaf to the king, who made as if he would swallow it, but passed it on to a priest or attendant. After the ceremony the body, still wrapt in coco-nut leaves, was often deposited on the branches of a neighbouring tree, where it remained some time. Finally, the bones were taken down and buried under the pavement of the temple (_marae_).[153] [153] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 345-348. Compare J. Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 168 _sqq._ vi. 28-41; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 350 _sq._; D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 549, ii. 38 _sq._ In the family, according to patriarchal usage, the father was the priest, but the priests of the national temples formed a distinct class; their office was hereditary. The high priesthood was often held by a member of the royal family, and sometimes the king himself acted as the national priest. The duties of the priests were to recite prayers, to present offerings, and to sacrifice victims. Their prayers, usually uttered in shrill, chanting tones, were often exceedingly long and full of repetitions.[154] They had plenty of employment, being called in to officiate on all occasions, whether at birth or at death, at feasts or in sickness; for they were the physicians as well as the clergy of the country. They professed to possess extraordinary powers, such as to promote conception or to effect abortion, to cause or to heal disease, to pray the evil spirit into food, and even to kill men outright. Hence they were greatly feared.[155] Of the little knowledge that existed in the islands the priests are reported to have possessed the largest share, but it consisted chiefly in an acquaintance with the names and ranks of the various subordinate deities (_atuas_); however, according to Captain Cook, they excelled the rest of the people in their knowledge of navigation and astronomy: indeed, the very name for priest (_tahowa_) signified nothing more than a man of knowledge.[156] In the island of Huahine the priest whose duty it was to carry the image of the god Tani (Tane) "was a personage of such superhuman sanctity that everything which he touched became sacred; he was, therefore, not suffered to marry, as the honour of being his wife was too much for any mortal woman. But this was not all; he would himself be so defiled by such a connection that he would be disqualified for his office, and must immediately resign it; nay, if he did not repent, and return with a great peace-offering to Tani's house, he might expect to be first struck blind, and afterwards strangled in his sleep. He was not allowed to climb a cocoa tree, because, if he did, it would be so hallowed that nobody else durst afterwards ascend it."[157] [154] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 342 _sq._ Compare J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, pp. 545 _sqq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 474 _sqq._ [155] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 348. [156] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 223. [157] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 279. One of the most important functions of the priests was to act as mouthpieces of the gods. In the discharge of this duty they were believed to be inspired and possessed by the deity, who spoke through them to the people. When the time came for them to consult the god, they assumed an odd fantastic dress, enriched with red and black feathers, to which the deity was so partial, that when the priests approached him in this array, he descended to earth at their call in one of the sacred birds that frequented the temples (_morais_) and fed on the sacrifices. As soon as the bird lighted on the sacred edifice, the god left the fowl and entered into the priest. The holy man, thus inspired, now stretched himself, yawned, and rubbed his arms, legs, and body, which began to be inflated, as if the skin of the abdomen would burst; the eyes of the seer were thrown into various contortions, now staring wide, now half-shut and sinking into stupor, while at other times the whole frame was convulsed and appeared to have undergone a sudden and surprising change. The voice sank to a low pitch, and grew squeaky and broken; but at times it would suddenly rise to an astonishing height. The words uttered by the possessed man were regarded as oracular, and nothing that he asked for the god or for himself in this state was ever refused him. Of all this the priest himself affected to be entirely unaware, but a colleague was regularly at hand to record the divine message and the divine requirements, which were often very large. When the deity took his departure from the priest, he did so with such convulsions and violence as to leave the man lying motionless and exhausted on the ground, and the oracle was so timed that this happened at the very moment when the sacred bird, the vehicle of the god, flew away from the temple. On coming to himself the priest uttered a loud shriek and seemed to wake as from a profound sleep, unconscious of everything that had passed.[158] Sometimes, however, the priest continued to be possessed by the deity for two or three days; at such times he wore a piece of native cloth, of a peculiar sort, round one arm as a sign of his inspiration. His acts during this period were deemed to be those of the god; hence the greatest attention was paid to his expressions and to the whole of his deportment. Indeed, so long as the fit of inspiration lasted he was called a god (_atua_); but when it was over, he resumed his ordinary title of priest.[159] [158] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 349 _sq._ [159] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 373-375. We are told that in his fine frenzy the priest "often rolled on the earth, foaming at the mouth, as if labouring under the influence of the divinity, by whom he was possessed, and, in shrill cries, and violent and often indistinct sounds, revealed the will of the god."[160] It would probably be a mistake to assume that on such occasions the frantic behaviour was deliberately assumed and the wild whirling words were consciously uttered for the purpose of deceiving the people; in short, that the whole performance was a mere piece of acting, a bare-faced imposture. It is far more likely that, bred from childhood to believe in the reality of divine inspiration, the priest often sincerely imagined himself to be possessed by a deity, and that, under the excitement which such an imagination was calculated to produce, he honestly mistook his own thick-coming fancies for a revelation from the gods. A chief, who had formerly been a prophet of the god Oro, assured the missionaries "that although he sometimes feigned his fits of inspiration, to deceive the credulous multitude, yet, at other times, they came upon him involuntarily and irresistibly. Something seemed to rush through his whole frame, and overpower his spirit, in a manner which he could not describe. Then he frothed at the mouth, gnashed his teeth, and distorted his limbs with such violence that it required five or six strong men to hold him. At these times his words were deemed oracles, and whatever he advised respecting state affairs, or other matters, was implicitly observed by king and chiefs."[161] Thus on the ravings of these crazy fanatics or deliberate impostors often hung the issues of life or death, of war or peace.[162] It appears to have been especially the priests of Oro who laid claim to inspiration and contrived to shape the destinies of their country through the powerful sway which they exercised over the mind of the king. In their fits of fanatical frenzy, while they delivered their oracles, they insisted on the sovereign's implicit compliance with their mandates, denouncing the most dreadful judgments on him if he should prove refractory.[163] [160] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 373 _sq._ [161] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 124. [162] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 114 _sq._ [163] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 121. Apart from the priests there was a class of men whose business it was to preserve and hand down to their successors the lists of the gods, the liturgical prayers, and the sacred traditions. As these liturgies and legends were often very lengthy and couched in a metaphorical and obscure language, a prodigious memory and long practice were indispensable for their preservation and transmission among a people to whom the art of writing was unknown. Since the slightest mistake in the recitation of a liturgy was deemed the worst of omens and necessitated the suspension of the religious service, however costly and important the service might be, the sacred recorders, as we may call them, were obliged, for the sake of their credit, to practise continually the recitation of the prayers, legends, and traditions of which they were the depositories. To aid them in their task they made use of bundles of little sticks of different sizes, one of which they drew from a bundle at the conclusion of each prayer. It was their duty on solemn occasions to recite these liturgies or sacred poems while they paced slowly by night round the temples (_morais_) and other holy places; hence they went by the name of _harepo_, which means "Walkers by night." We are told that if at these times they made a mistake in a single word or hesitated for a moment, they stopped and returned home; and if the subject of their prayers chanced to be some enterprise in which they desired to enlist the favour of the gods, such a mistake or hesitation was enough to cause the undertaking to be abandoned irretrievably, since success in it was believed to be impossible. Nothing, it is said, could be more astonishing than the memory displayed by these men, while they recited, word for word, and for nights together, the ancient traditions of which the mutilated and mangled remains would demand the assiduous study of several years. The office of sacred recorder (_harepo_) was hereditary in the male line; the sons were trained in the duties from their earliest years, but only such as were endowed with an excellent memory could satisfy the requirements of the profession. They believed that a good memory was a gift of the gods.[164] [164] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 504-507. § 6. _The Doctrine of the Human Soul_ Of the Society Islanders we are informed that "they believe every man to have a separate being within him, named _tee_, which acts in consequence of the impression of the senses, and combines ideas into thoughts. This being, which we would call the soul, exists after death, and lodges in the wooden images which are placed round the burying-places, and which are called by the same name, _tee_."[165] When they were asked in what part of the body the soul resides, they always answered that it was seated in the belly or in the bowels (_I roto té obou_). They would not admit that the brain could be the seat of thought or the heart of the affections; and in support of their opinion they alleged the agitation of the bowels in strong emotion, such as fear and desire.[166] Hence, too, they called thoughts by a phrase which signifies "words in the belly" (_parou no te oboo_).[167] [165] G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_, ii. 151 _sq._ Compare J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, pp. 534 _sq._, 542 _sq._, where the word for soul is given as _E-teehee_ or _Teehee_. [166] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 431. [167] G. Forster, _op. cit._ ii. 151 note *. But the Society Islanders did not regard the possession of a soul as a privilege peculiar to humanity. According to Captain Cook, "they maintain that not only all other animals, but trees, fruit, and even stones, have souls, which at death, or upon being consumed or broken, ascend to the divinity, with whom they first mix, and afterwards pass into the mansion allotted to each."[168] Their word for soul was _varoua_, according to Moerenhout, who adds that, "It appears that they accorded this _varoua_ (spirit, soul) not only to man, but even in addition to the animals, to plants, to everything that vegetates, grows or moves on the earth."[169] [168] J. Cook, _op. cit._ vi. 151. [169] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 430. They thought that the soul of man could be separated for a time from the body during life without causing immediate death. Thus, like many other peoples, they explained dreams by the supposed absence of the soul during slumber. We are told that "they put great confidence in dreams, and suppose in sleep the soul leaves the body under the care of the guardian angel, and moves at large through the regions of spirits. Thus they say, My soul was such a night in such a place, and saw such a spirit. When a person dies, they say his soul is fled away, _h[=a]rre p[=o]_, gone to night."[170] But they also believed that a man's soul or spirit could be conjured out of his body by magic art or demoniacal agency. Thus, when people had been robbed, they would sometimes call in the help of a priest to ascertain the thief. In such a case the priest, after offering prayers to his demon, would direct them to dig a hole in the floor of the house and to fill it with water; then, taking a young plantain in his hand, he would stand over the hole and pray to the god, whom he invoked, and who, if he were propitious, was supposed to conduct the spirit of the thief to the house and to place it over the water. The image of the spirit, which they believed to resemble the person of the man, was, according to their account, reflected in the water and perceived by the priest, who was thus able to identify the thief, alleging that the god had shown him the reflection of the culprit in the water.[171] From this it appears that in the opinion of the Society Islanders, as of many other peoples, a man's soul or spirit is a faithful image of his body.[172] [170] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 346. In the Polynesian languages _po_ is the word both for "night" and for "the shades," the primaeval darkness from which all forms of life were evolved, and to which the souls of the dead return. See E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 342, _s.v._ "po." [171] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 378 _sq._ [172] Compare W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 396, "What their precise ideas of a spirit were, it is not easy to ascertain. They appear, however, to have imagined the shape or form resembled that of the human body, in which they sometimes appeared in dreams to the survivors." They believed that in the pangs of death the soul keeps fluttering about the lips, and that, when all is over, it ascends and mixes with or, as they expressed it, is eaten by the deity.[173] When one of their sacred recorders (_harepo_), who had been famous in his life for his knowledge of the ancient traditions, was at the point of death, it was customary for his son and successor to place his mouth over the mouth of the dying man, as if to inhale the parting soul at the moment of quitting the body; for in this way he was supposed to inherit the lore of his father. The natives, it is said, were convinced that these sages owed their learning to this expedient, though none the less they studied day and night to perfect themselves in their profession.[174] [173] J. Cook, _op. cit._ vi. 150. [174] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 507. § 7. _Disease, Death, and Mourning_ Every disease was supposed to be the result of direct supernatural agency, and to be inflicted by the gods for some crime committed against the law of taboo of which the sufferer had been guilty; or it might have been brought upon him by an enemy, who had compassed his destruction by means of an offering. They explained death in like manner: according to them, it was invariably caused by the direct influence of the gods.[175] They acknowledged, indeed, that they possessed poisons which, taken with food, produced convulsions and death, but these effects they traced to the anger of the gods, who employed the drugs as their material agents or secondary causes. Even when a man was killed in battle, they still saw in his death the hand of a god, who had actually entered into the weapon that inflicted the fatal blow.[176] [175] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 395; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 433, 538 _sqq._ [176] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 395 _sq._ The gods who were thus supposed to afflict human life with sickness and disease and to bring it to an untimely termination in death were not always nor perhaps usually the high primaeval deities; often they were the souls of the dead, who ranked among the domestic divinities (_oromatuas_). And, like the Maoris,[177] the natives of the Society Islands are said to have stood in particular fear of the souls of dead infants, who, angered at their mother for their too early death, took their revenge by sending sickness on the surviving members of the family. Hence when a woman was ill-treated by her husband, she would often threaten to insult the ghost of a dead baby; and this threat, with the deplorable consequences which it was calculated to entail, seldom failed to bring the husband to a better frame of mind; or if he happened to prove recalcitrant, the other members of the family, who might be involved in the calamity, would intercede and restore peace in the household. Thus we are told that among these islanders the fear of the dead supplied in some measure the place of natural affection and tenderness in softening and humanising the general manners.[178] [177] See above, p. 49. [178] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 538 _sq._ Disease and death were also attributed to the malignant charms of sorcerers, who, hired by an enemy of the sufferer, procured for the purpose the clipped hair or the spittle of their intended victim, the flowers or garment he had worn, or any object which had touched his person. But the real agents who were thought to give effect to the charms were the minor deities, whom the sorcerer employed to accomplish his nefarious ends. For this purpose he put the hair or other personal refuse of the victim in a bag along with the images and symbols of the petty divinities, and buried the bag and its contents in a hole which he had dug in the ground. There he left it until, applying his ear to the hole, he could hear the soul of the sufferer whimpering down below, which proved that the charm was taking effect. If the intended victim got wind of these machinations, it was always in his power to render them abortive, either by sacrificing to the gods or by sending a present to the sorcerer, who thus was feed by both sides at the same time.[179] [179] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 539-541. Compare W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 363 _sqq._ However, most cases of sickness apparently were set down not to the wiles of sorcerers, but to the displeasure of the deified spirits of the dead.[180] On this point the evidence of the early missionaries is explicit. Speaking of the Society Islanders, they say that "they regard the spirits of their ancestors, male and female, as exalted into _eatooas_ [_atuas_, deities], and their favour to be secured by prayers and offerings. Every sickness and untoward accident they esteem as the hand of judgment for some offence committed; and therefore, if they have injured any person, they send their peace-offering, and make the matter up: and if sick, send for the priest to offer up prayers and sacrifices to pacify the offended _eatooa_; giving anything the priests ask, as being very reluctant to die."[181] "As it is their fixed opinion, that no disease affects them but as a punishment inflicted by their _eatooa_ [_atua_] for some offence, and never brought on themselves by intemperance or imprudence, they trust more to the prayers of their priests than to any medicine."[182] [180] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 543. [181] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 345. [182] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 404. They imagined that at death the soul (_varua_) was drawn out of the head by a god or spirit (_atua_) as a sword is drawn out of its scabbard, and that the spirits of the dead often waited to catch it at the moment when it issued from the body. Sometimes the dying man would fancy that he saw the spirits lurking for him at the foot of the bed, and would cry out in terror, "They are waiting for my spirit. Guard it! Preserve it from them!"[183] [183] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 396. When the last struggle was over, a priest or diviner (_tahua tutera_) was called in to ascertain the cause of death. For this purpose he entered his canoe and paddled slowly along on the sea, near the house in which the dead body was lying, in order to watch the passage of the departing spirit; for they thought that it would fly towards him with the emblem of the cause through which the person had died. If he had been cursed by the gods, the spirit would appear with a flame, fire being the agent employed in the incantations of the sorcerers, who had presumably drawn down the curse upon the deceased. If some enemy had bribed the gods to kill him, the spirit would come with a red feather, as a sign that evil spirits had entered into his food. After a short time the diviner returned to the house, announced the cause of death to the survivors, and received his fee, the amount of which was regulated by the circumstances of the family. After that a priest was employed to perform ceremonies and recite prayers for the purpose of averting destruction from the surviving members of the family; but the nature of the ceremonies has not been recorded.[184] [184] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 398 _sq._ When it was manifest that death was approaching, the relatives and friends, who had gathered round the sufferer, broke into loud lamentations and other demonstrations of sorrow, which redoubled in violence as soon as the spirit had departed. Then they not only wailed in the loudest and most affecting tone, but tore out their hair, rent their garments, and cut themselves with shark's teeth or knives in a shocking manner. The instrument usually employed was a small cane, about four inches long, with five or six teeth fixed into it on opposite sides. Struck forcibly into the head, these instruments wounded it like a lancet, so that the blood poured down in copious streams. Every woman at marriage provided herself with one of these implements and used it unsparingly on herself on the occasion of a death in the family. Some people, not content with this instrument of torture, provided themselves with a sort of mallet armed with two or three rows of shark's teeth; and with this formidable weapon, on the demise of a relative or friend, they hammered themselves unmercifully, striking their skulls, temples, cheeks, and breast, till the blood flowed profusely from the wounds. At the same time they uttered the most deafening and agonising cries; and what with their frantic gestures, the distortion of their countenances, their torn and dishevelled hair, and the mingled tears and blood that trickled down their bodies, they presented altogether a horrible spectacle. This self-inflicted cruelty was practised chiefly by women, but not by them alone; for the men on these occasions committed the like enormities, and not only cut themselves, but came armed with clubs and other deadly weapons, which they sometimes plied freely on the bodies of other people. These dismal scenes began with the nearest relatives of the deceased, but they were not confined to them. No sooner did the tidings spread, and the sound of wailing was heard throughout the neighbourhood, than friends and kinsfolk flocked to the spot and joined in the demonstrations of real or affected sorrow. The pageant of woe reached its climax when the deceased was a king or a principal chief. It was then, above all, that the tenants and retainers came armed with bludgeons and stones, with which they fought each other till some of them were wounded or slain; while others operated on themselves by tearing their hair and lacerating their bodies in the usual manner till their bodies were bedabbled with blood. After the introduction of firearms into the islands, these lethal weapons lent variety and noise to the combats, as well as adding to the number of the slain. At the death of a person of distinction these exhibitions of frenzied sorrow sometimes lasted two or three days in succession, or even longer.[185] On such occasions a body of armed men, composed of friends and allies, used to arrive from a neighbouring district and request to be allowed access to the body of the chief, in order that they might mourn for him in due form. The request was always refused by the bodyguards, who kept the last vigil over their departed lord; and in consequence a fight ensued in which several warriors were generally wounded or killed. Yet it was only a sham fight, which seems to have always ended in a victory for the mourners who had come from a distance; and when it was over, victors and vanquished regularly united in performing the usual sanguinary rites of mourning. In all the islands wrestling matches, combats, and assaults-at-arms were ordinary features of the obsequies of chiefs.[186] [185] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 407-409; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 352; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 546 _sq._ [186] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 551 _sq._ The blood which women in the paroxysms of grief drew from their bodies, and the tears which flowed from their eyes, were received on pieces of cloth, which were then thrown upon or under the bier as oblations to the dead.[187] Sometimes for this purpose a woman would wear a short apron, which she held up with one hand, while she cut herself with the other, till the apron was soaked in blood. Afterwards she would dry it in the sun and present it to the bereaved family, who kept it as a token of the estimation in which the departed had been held.[188] Some of the younger mourners used also to cut off their hair and throw it under the bier with the other offerings.[189] When the deceased was a child, the parents, in addition to other tokens of grief, used to cut their hair short on one part of their heads, leaving the rest long; sometimes they shaved a square patch on the forehead; sometimes they left the hair on the forehead and cut off all the rest; at other times they removed all the hair but a lock over one or both ears; or again they would clip close one half of the head, while on the other half the tresses were suffered to grow long; and these signs of mourning might be continued for two or three years.[190] [187] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 135, 218; J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, p. 560. [188] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 410. [189] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 218; J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, p. 560. [190] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 352 _sq._ Captain Cook tells us that the custom observed by mourners of offering their own blood, tears, and hair to their departed relative or friend "is founded upon a notion that the soul of the deceased, which they believe to exist in a separate state, is hovering about the place where the body is deposited: that it observes the actions of the survivors, and is gratified by such testimonies of their affection and grief."[191] This explanation, in perfect harmony with the vigilance, vanity, and jealousy commonly ascribed to ghosts, is in all probability correct. Yet it deserves to be noticed that the custom of voluntarily hacking the body with shark's teeth to the effusion of blood was singularly enough practised by the Society Islanders on occasions of joy as well as of sorrow. When a husband or a son returned to his family after a season of absence or exposure to danger, his arrival was greeted, not only with the cordial welcome and the warm embrace, but with loud wailing, while the happy wife or mother cut her body with shark's teeth, and the gladder she was the more she gashed herself.[192] Similarly many savage peoples weep over long-absent friends, or even over strangers, as a polite form of greeting in which genuine sorrow can hardly be supposed to play a part.[193] It is difficult to see how such observances can be based on superstition; apparently the emotion of joy may express itself in very different ways in different races. [191] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 218 _sq._ [192] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 410; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 196, 362. [193] See _Folk-lore in the Old Testament_, ii. 82 _sqq._ The natives stood in great fear of the spirits of the dead, which were supposed to haunt the places of their former abode and to visit the habitations of men, but seldom on errands of mercy or benevolence. They woke the survivors from their slumbers by squeaking noises to upbraid them with their past wickedness or to reproach them with the neglect of some ceremony, for which the ghosts were compelled to suffer. Thus the people imagined that they lived in a world of spirits, which surrounded them night and day, watching every action of their lives and ready to revenge the smallest slight or the least disobedience to their injunctions, as these were proclaimed to the living by the priests. Convulsions and hysterics, for example, were ascribed to the action of spirits, which seized the sufferer, scratched his face, tore his hair, or otherwise maltreated him.[194] [194] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 406. This fear of the spirits of the dead induced the Society Islanders to resort to some peculiar ceremonies for the protection of the living against the ghosts of persons who had recently died. One of these quaint rites was performed by a priest, who went by the name of the "corpse-praying priest" (_tahua bure tiapa-pau_). When the corpse had been placed on a platform or bier in a temporary house, this priest ordered a hole to be dug in the earth or floor, near the foot of the platform, and over this hole he prayed to the god by whom the spirit of the deceased had been summoned to its long home. The purport of the prayer was that all the dead man's sins, and especially that for which his soul had been called to the region of Night (_po_), should be deposited in that hole, that they should not attach in any degree to the survivors, and that the anger of the god might be appeased. The priest next addressed the corpse, usually saying, "With you let the guilt now remain." The pillar or post of the corpse, as it was called, was then planted in the hole, earth was thrown over the guilt of the departed, and the hole filled up. After that, the priest proceeded to the side of the corpse, and taking some small slips of plantain leaf-stalk he fixed two or three of them under each arm, placed a few on the breast, and then, addressing the dead body, said, "There are your family, there is your child, there is your wife, there is your father, and there is your mother. Be satisfied yonder (that is, in the world of spirits). Look not towards those who are left in this world." The concluding parts of the ceremony were designed to impart contentment to the deceased, and to prevent his spirit from repairing to the places of his former resort, and so distressing the survivors. This was considered a most important ceremony, being a kind of mass for the dead and necessary as well for the peace of the living as for the quiet of the departed. It was seldom omitted by any who could pay the priest his usual fees, which for this service generally took the form of pigs and cloth, in proportion to the rank or possessions of the family.[195] [195] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 401-403. Compare J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 552. Soon after the decease of a chief or person of distinction, another singular ceremony, called a _heva_, was performed by the relatives or dependants, who personated the ghost of the departed. The principal actor in the procession was a priest or kinsman who wore a curious dress and an imposing head-ornament called a _parae_. A cap or turban of thick native cloth was fitted close to the head; in front were two broad mother-of-pearl shells that covered the face like a mask, with only a small aperture through which the wearer could look in order to find his way. Above the mask were fixed a number of long, white, red-tipped feathers of the tropic bird, diverging like rays and forming a radiant circle; while beneath the mask was a thin yet strong board curved like a crescent, from which hung a sort of network of small pieces of brilliant mother-of-pearl, finely polished and strung together on threads. The depth of this network varied according to the taste or means of the family, but it was generally nine inches or a foot, and might consist of ten to fifteen or twenty perfectly straight and parallel rows. The labour of making this mother-of-pearl pendant must have been immense; for many hundred pieces of the shell had to be cut, ground down to the requisite thinness, polished and perforated, without the use of iron tools, before a single line could be fixed upon the head-dress. Fringed with feathers, the pendant formed a kind of ornamental breastplate or stomacher. Attached to it was a garment composed of alternate stripes of black and yellow cloth, which enveloped the body and reached sometimes to the loins, to the knees, or even to the ankles.[196] On his back the masker wore an ample cloak or mantle of network covered with glossy pigeon's feathers of a bluish colour. The costume appears to have been intended as a disguise to prevent the spectators from recognising the wearer; for George Forster, who has given us an elaborate description of it, observes that "an ample hood of alternate parallel stripes of brown, yellow, and white cloth descends from the turban to cover the neck and shoulders, in order that as little as possible of the human figure may appear."[197] [196] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 412 _sq._ Compare J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 135 _sq._, 138, 219; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 547-549. [197] G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_, ii. 74. For the full description of the garb, see _id._, ii. 71-75; J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, pp. 450-453. In this strange garb the chief mummer, who was usually the nearest relation of the deceased, carried in one hand a formidable weapon, consisting of a staff about five feet long, one end of which was rounded to serve as a handle, while the other end broadened out into a sort of scythe, of which the inner or concave side was armed with a row of large strong shark's teeth fixed in the wood. In the other hand he bore a kind of clapper formed of two pearl-oyster shells, beautifully polished. Thus attired and equipped, he led a procession either from the house of the deceased, or, according to another account, from a valley to which, as if under a paroxysm of grief, the party had retired at the death of the person for whom the ceremony was performed; and as he walked along he continued to rattle or jingle the shells against each other to give notice of his approach. With him walked a number of men and boys, naked except for a girdle, armed with cudgels, their faces and bodies painted black, red, and white with charcoal and coloured earths. In this impressive style the mummers marched through the district, the people everywhere fleeing in terror at the sight of them, and even deserting the houses at their approach. For whenever the leader caught sight of any one, he ran at him, and if he overtook the fugitive, belaboured him with his sharp-toothed club, to the grievous mauling of the unfortunate wretch; while, not to be behind their leader, the assistants plied their bludgeons on the bodies of all and sundry who chanced to fall into their hands. At such times safety was only to be found in the king's temple, which served on this as on other occasions as a sort of sanctuary or place of refuge. Having thus scoured the country, the mummers marched several times round the platform where the body was exposed, after which they bathed in a river and resumed their customary apparel. This performance was repeated at intervals for five moons, but less and less frequently as the end of the time approached. The longer it lasted, the greater was the honour supposed to be done to the dead. The relatives took it in turn to assume the fantastic dress and discharge the office of leader. Throughout the ceremonies the performers appeared and acted as if they were deranged. They were supposed to be inspired by, or at all events to represent, the spirit of the deceased, to revenge any injury he might have received, or to punish those who had not shown due respect to his remains.[198] Hence we may infer that the whole of this quaint masquerade was designed to appease the anger of the ghost, and so to protect the survivors by preventing him from returning to take vengeance on them for any wrongs or slights he might have suffered at their hands. [198] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 138 _sq._, 219; J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, pp. 560 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 413 _sq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 549 _sq._ According to Ellis, the mummers were supposed to be inspired by the spirit of the deceased; according to Moerenhout, they were not inspired by, but merely represented, the ghost. The difference between spiritual representation and inspiration is somewhat fine; too fine perhaps to be apprehended by Tahitian intelligence. Forster says that the procession started from the house of the deceased, Ellis that it started from a valley. The same fear of the returning ghost is clearly expressed in a prayer which the natives used to address to a dead relative at burial. They put blossoms of bread-fruit and leaves of the edible fern under the arms of the corpse, and as they did so, they prayed, saying, "You go to the Po [Night, the World of Shades], plant bread-fruit there, and be food for the gods; but do not come and strangle us, and we will feed your swine and cultivate your lands."[199] [199] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _Journal of Voyages and Travels_, i. 322. § 8. _The Disposal of the Dead_ The heat of the climate, by hastening the decomposition of dead bodies, rendered it necessary that corpses should be speedily removed or treated so as to preserve them for a time from decay. As such treatment was generally too costly for the poor and even the middle ranks of society, families belonging to these classes were usually obliged to inter their dead on the first or second day after the decease. During the short intervening period the body, resting on a bed of fragrant green leaves, was placed on a sort of bier covered with white cloth and decorated with wreaths and garlands of sweet-smelling flowers. Round it sat the relatives, giving vent to their grief in loud and continued lamentations, and often cutting their temples, faces, and breasts with shark's teeth, till they were covered with blood from their self-inflicted wounds. The bodies were frequently committed to the grave in deep silence; but sometimes a father would deliver a pathetic oration at the funeral of his son.[200] The grave was generally shallow and the corpse was deposited in a bent posture, with the hands tied to the knees or to the legs.[201] [200] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 399 _sq._ [201] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 553 _sq._ But in the families of chiefs the custom was to submit the bodies of the dead to a sort of embalming and to preserve them above ground for a time.[202] The Tahitians had a tradition of a rude or unpolished period in their history, when the bodies of the dead were allowed to remain in the houses in which they lived, and which were still occupied by the survivors. A kind of stage or altar was erected in the dwelling, and on it the corpse was deposited. But in a later and more polished age, which lasted till the advent of Europeans, the practice was introduced of building separate houses or sheds for the lodgment of corpses.[203] [202] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 400. [203] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 404. These houses or sheds (_tupapows_) were small temporary buildings, often neatly constructed. The thatched roof rested on wooden pillars, which were seldom more than six feet high. The body was laid on a bier or platform raised on posts about three feet from the ground. This bier was movable, for the purpose of being drawn out, and of exposing the body to the rays of the sun. The body was usually clothed or covered with cloth, and for a long time it was carefully rubbed with aromatic oils once a day. The size of these charnel-houses varied with the rank of the persons whose bodies they contained; the better sort were enclosed by railings. Those which were allotted to people of the lower class just sufficed to cover the bier, and were not railed in. The largest seen by Captain Cook was eleven yards long. Such houses were ornamented according to the taste and abilities of the surviving kindred, who never failed to lay a profusion of good cloth about the body, and sometimes almost covered the outside of the house.[204] [204] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 93 _sq._, 135, 217, 218; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 84, 212 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 404; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 547. But before the corpse was deposited in one of these temporary structures, it was shrouded in cloth and carried on a bier to the sea-shore, where it was set down on the beach at the water's edge. There a priest, who accompanied the procession, renewed the prayers which he had offered over the body both at the house and on its passage to the shore. Further, he took up water in his hands and sprinkled it towards the corpse, but not upon it. These prayers and sprinklings he repeated several times, and between the repetitions the body was carried back some forty or fifty yards from the sea, only to be brought back again to the water's edge. While these ceremonies were being performed, the temporary house or shed was being prepared, in which the corpse was to remain until the flesh had wholly wasted from the bones. Thither it was then carried from the beach and laid upon the bier.[205] [205] J. Cook, _op. cit._ i. 217 _sq._ Compare J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, p. 559. The practice of embalming appears to have been long familiar to the natives of the Society Islands. The methods employed by them were simple. Sometimes the juices were merely squeezed out of the corpse, which was then exposed to the sun and anointed with fragrant oils. At other times, and apparently more usually, the bowels, entrails, and brains were extracted, and the cavities filled with cloth soaked in perfumed oils, which were also injected into other parts of the body. Scented oils were also rubbed over the outside daily: every day the corpse was exposed to the sun in a sitting posture: every night it was laid out horizontally and often turned over, that it might not remain long on the same side. By these means, combined with the heat of the sun and the dryness of the atmosphere, the process of desiccation was effected in the course of a few weeks: the muscular parts and the eyes shrivelled up; and the wizened body resembled a skeleton covered with parchment or oilcloth. Thus reduced to a mummy, it was clothed and fixed in a sitting attitude: a small altar was erected before it; and offerings of fruit, food, and flowers were daily presented by the relatives or by the priest who was appointed to attend to it. For if the deceased was a chief of high rank or great renown, a priest or other person was set apart to wait upon the corpse and to present food to its mouth at different hours of the day. They supposed that the soul still hovered over the mouldering remains and was pleased by such marks of attention. Hence during the exposure of the body in the temporary house the mourners would sometimes renew their lamentations there, and, wounding themselves with shark's teeth, wipe off the blood on a cloth, and deposit the bloody rag beside the mummy as a proof of their affection. In this state the desiccated body was preserved for many months till the flesh had completely decayed; Ellis was of opinion that the best-preserved of these mummies could not be kept for more than twelve months. The bones were then scraped, washed, and buried within the precincts of the family temple (_morai_), if the deceased was a chief; but if he was a commoner, they were interred outside of the holy ground. However, the skull was not buried with the bones; it was carefully wrapt in fine cloth and kept in a box by the family, it might be for several generations. Sometimes the box containing the skull was deposited at the temple, but often it was hung from the roof of the house.[206] At marriage the skulls of ancestors were sometimes brought out and set before the bride and bridegroom in order, apparently, to place the newly wedded pair under the guardianship of the ancestral spirits who had once animated these relics of mortality.[207] In time of war victorious enemies would sometimes despoil the temples of the vanquished and carry off the bones of famous men interred in them; these they would then subject to the utmost indignity by converting them into chisels, borers, or fish-hooks. To prevent this sacrilege the relations of the dead conveyed the bones of their chiefs, and even the bodies of persons who had lately died, to the mountains and hid them in caverns among the most inaccessible rocks and lofty precipices of these wild solitudes.[208] Where the mountains advance to the coast, many of these caves exist in the face of cliffs overhanging the sea; for the most part they are situated in places which Europeans can reach only with the help of ropes and ladders, though the natives, it is said, can clamber up the steepest crags with ease. Few even of the islanders know the situation of the caverns, and fewer still will consent to act as guides to the curious stranger who may wish to explore their recesses; for the fear of the ghosts, who are supposed to haunt these ancient depositories of the dead, is yet deeply rooted in the native mind. Moreover, the mouths of the caves are generally so low and overgrown with shrubs and creepers that they may easily be overlooked by an observer standing in front of them. Some of the grottos are said to be still full of skulls, or were so down to the end of the nineteenth century.[209] The mummies as well as the bones were liable to be captured by an invader, and were esteemed trophies not less glorious than foemen slain in battle. Hence during an invasion the mummies were generally the first things to be carried off for safety to the mountains.[210] [206] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 93 _sq._, 135 _sq._, 218, 219, vi. 47 _sq._; J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, pp. 561 _sq._; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 212 _sq._, 363 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 400 _sq._, 404 _sq._, 405 _sq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 554. [207] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 272, who observes that the survivors "considered the spirits of the proprietors of these skulls as the guardian spirits of the family." [208] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 405. [209] A. Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_ (Berlin, 1900), pp. 37 _sq._, 81 _sq._, 83. [210] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 364. A dangerous pollution was supposed to be contracted by all who had handled a corpse. Hence the persons employed in embalming a body were carefully shunned by every one else so long as the process lasted, because the guilt of the crime for which the deceased had died was supposed to attach in some degree to such as touched his mortal remains. The embalmers did not feed themselves, lest the food, defiled by the touch of their polluted hands, should cause their death; so they were fed by others.[211] This state of uncleanness lasted for a month, during which the tabooed persons were forbidden to handle food as well as to put it into their own mouths.[212] [211] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 403. [212] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 363. Again, when the ceremony of depositing the sins of the deceased in a hole[213] was over, all who had touched the body or the garments of the deceased, which were buried or destroyed, fled precipitately into the sea to cleanse themselves from the pollution which they had incurred by contact with the corpse; and they cast into the sea the garments they had worn while they were engaged in the work. Having bathed, they gathered a few pieces of coral from the bottom of the sea, and returning with them to the house, addressed the dead body, saying, "With you may the pollution be." With these words they threw down the pieces of coral on the top of the hole that had been dug to receive all the objects defiled by their connexion with the deceased.[214] [213] See above, p. 305. [214] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 403. When a person had died of an infectious disorder, the priests entreated him to bury the disease with him in the grave and not to inflict it upon other people, when he revisited them as a ghost. They also threw a plantain into the grave, and either buried with him or burned all his utensils, that nobody might be infected by them.[215] [215] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 364. § 9. _The Fate of the Soul after Death_ The natives of the Society Islands believed in the immortality of the human soul, or at all events in its separate existence after death[216]; they thought that no person perishes or becomes extinct.[217] On its departure from the body the spirit, now called a _tee_, _teehee_, or _tii_, was supposed to linger near its old habitation, whether the mouldering remains exposed on the bier, or the bones buried in the earth, or the skull kept in its box. In this state the spirits were believed to lodge in small wooden images, seldom more than eighteen inches high, which were placed round about the burial-ground.[218] These images are variously said to have borne the same name (_tee_, _teehee_) as the spirits which inhabited them,[219] or to have been called by a different name (_unus_)[220]. Specimens of these images were seen by George Forster in Tahiti. He says that round about the _marai_ (_morai_) of Aheatua, at that time King of Tiarroboo, "were placed perpendicularly, or nearly so, fifteen slender pieces of wood, some about eighteen feet long, in which six or eight diminutive human figures of a rude unnatural shape were carved, standing above each other, male or female promiscuously, yet so that the uppermost was always a male. All these figures faced the sea, and perfectly resembled some which are carved on the sterns of their canoes, and which they call _e-tee_."[221] To the same effect George Forster's father, J. R. Forster, observes that "near the _marais_ are twenty or thirty single pieces of wood fixed into the ground, carved all over on one side with figures about eighteen inches long, rudely representing a man and a woman alternately, so that often more than fifteen or twenty figures may be counted on one piece of wood, called by them _Teehee_."[222] But the souls of the dead, though they inhabited chiefly the wooden figures erected at the temples or burial-grounds (_marais_, _morais_), were by no means confined to them, and were dreaded by the natives, who believed that during the night these unquiet spirits crept into people's houses and ate the heart and entrails of the sleepers, thus causing their death.[223] [216] J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 222, vi. 150. [217] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 345. [218] J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, pp. 552, 553; G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_, ii. 151 _sq._ [219] J. R. Forster and G. Forster, _ll.cc._ [220] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 348, "the _unus_, or curiously carved pieces of wood marking the sacred places of interment, and emblematical of _tiis_ or spirits." [221] G. Forster, _op. cit._ i. 267. Compare J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 461, "_Les images des Tiis étaient placées aux extrémités des marais et gardaient l'enceinte des terres sacrées_." [222] J. R. Forster, _op. cit._ pp. 544 _sq._ In the southern peninsula of Tahiti, both on the coast and inland, Captain Cook saw many sepulchral buildings, and he described them as "decorated with many carved boards, which were set upright, and on the top of which were various figures of birds and men: on one in particular there was the representation of a cock, which was painted red and yellow, to imitate the feathers of that animal, and rude images of men were, in some of them, placed one upon the head of another." See J. Cook, _Voyages_, i. 150 _sq._ These "carved boards" were no doubt of the same sort as the _tees_ or _teehees_ described by the two Forsters. No other writer seems to mention the figures of birds carved on them. [223] J. R. Forster, _op. cit._ p. 543. However, the Society Islanders appear to have been by no means consistent in the views which they held concerning the fate of the soul after death. Like many other people, they seem to have wavered between a belief that the souls of the dead lingered invisible near their old homes and the belief that the disembodied spirits went away to a distant land, where all human souls, which have departed this life, met and dwelt together. Or perhaps it might be more correct to say, that instead of wavering between these two inconsistent beliefs, they held them both firmly without perceiving their inconsistency. At all events these islanders believed that either at death or at some time after it their souls departed to a distant place called _po_ or Night, the common abode of gods and of departed spirits.[224] Thither the soul was conducted by other spirits, and on its arrival it was eaten by the gods, not all at once, but by degrees. They imagined that the souls of ancestors or relatives, who ranked among the gods, scraped the different parts of the newly arrived spirit with a kind of serrated shell at different times, after which they ate and digested it. If the soul underwent this process of being eaten and digested three separate times, it became a deified or imperishable spirit and might visit the world and inspire living folk.[225] According to one account, the soul was cooked whole in an earth-oven, as pigs are baked on earth, and was then placed in a basket of coco-nut leaves before being served up to the god whom the deceased had worshipped in life. "By this cannibal divinity he was now eaten up; after which, through some inexplicable process, the dead and devoured man emanated from the body of the god, and became immortal."[226] In the island of Raiatea the great god Oro was supposed to use a scallop-shell "to scrape the flesh from the bones of newly deceased bodies, previous to their being converted into pure spirits by being devoured by him, and afterwards transformed by passing through the laboratory of his cannibal stomach."[227] This process of being devoured by a god was not conceived of as a punishment inflicted on wicked people after death; for good and bad souls had alike to submit to it. Rather, Captain Cook tells us, the natives considered "this coalition with the deity as a kind of purification necessary to be undergone before they enter a state of bliss. For, according to their doctrine, if a man refrain from all connexion with women some months before death, he passes immediately into his eternal mansion, without such a previous union; as if already, by this abstinence, he were pure enough to be exempted from the general lot."[228] A slightly different account of this process of spiritual purification is given by the first missionaries to Tahiti. They say that "when the spirit departs from the body, they have a notion it is swallowed by the _eat[=o]oa_ (_atua_) bird, who frequents their burying-places and _morais_, and passes through him in order to be purified, and be united to the deity. And such are afterwards employed by him to attend other human beings and to inflict punishment, or remove sickness, as shall be deemed requisite."[229] [224] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 396. Compare J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 346; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 431; D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 330. [225] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 396 _sq._; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 433. [226] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _Journal of Voyages and Travels_, i. 273; compare _ib._ pp. 330 _sq._ [227] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 521 _sq._ [228] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 150. [229] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 345 _sq._ In spite of the purification which the souls of the dead underwent by passing through the body of a god or of a divine bird, they were believed to be not wholly divested of the passions which had actuated them in life on earth. If the souls of former enemies met in the world beyond the grave, they renewed their battles, but apparently to no purpose, since they were accounted invulnerable in this invisible state. Again, when the soul of a dead wife arrived in the spirit land, it was known to the soul of her dead husband, if he had gone before, and the two renewed their acquaintance in a spacious house, called _tourooa_, where the souls of the deceased assembled to recreate themselves with the gods. After that the pair retired to the separate abode of the husband, where they remained for ever and had offspring, which, however, was entirely spiritual; for they were neither married nor were their embraces supposed to be like those of corporeal beings.[230] [230] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 150 _sq._ In general the situation of _po_ or the land of the dead seems to have been left vague and indefinite by the Society Islanders; apparently they did not, like the Western Polynesians, imagine it to be in some far western isle, to reach which the souls of the departed had to cross a wide expanse of sea.[231] However, the natives of Raiatea had very definite ideas on this mysterious subject. They thought that _po_ was situated in a mysterious and unexplored cavern at the top of the highest mountain in the island. This cavern, perhaps the crater of a volcano, was said to communicate, by subterranean passages, with a cave on the coast, the opening of which is so small that a child of two years could hardly creep into it. Here an evil spirit (_varu iino_) was said to lurk and, pouncing out on careless passers-by, to drag them into the darkest recesses of his den and devour them. After the conversion of the natives to Christianity the missionaries were shown the spot. Near it were the ruins of a temple of the war god, where multitudes of the corpses of warriors slain in battle had been either buried or left to rot on the ground. The missionaries saw many mouldering fragments of skeletons. Not far off a cape jutted into the sea, up the lofty and precipitous face of which the souls of the dead were said to climb on their way to their long home in the cavern at the top of the mountain. A native informant assured the missionaries that he had often seen them scaling the dizzy crag, both men and women.[232] [231] See above, pp. 87 _sq._, 214 _sqq._, 238 _sqq._ [232] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 537 _sq._ In the island of Borabora the fate even of kings after death was believed to be a melancholy one. Their souls were converted into a piece of furniture resembling an English hat-stand; only in Borabora the corresponding utensil was the branch of a tree with the lateral forks cut short, on which bonnets, garments, baskets, and so forth were suspended. The natives very naturally concluded that in the other world a similar stand was wanted for the convenience of the ghosts, to hang their hats and coats on. Kings who shrank from the prospect of being converted into a hat-stand after death made interest with the priest to save them from such a degradation. So when a king who had been great and powerful in life saw his end approaching, he would send to the priests the most costly presents, such as four or five of the largest and fattest hogs, as many of the best canoes, and any rare and valuable European article which he happened to possess. In return the priests prayed for him daily at the temples till he died; and afterwards his dead body was brought to one of these sacred edifices and kept upright there for several days and nights, during which yet larger gifts were sent by his relatives, and the most expensive sacrifices offered to the idols. The decaying corpse was then removed, placed on a canoe, and rowed out on the lagoon as far as an opening in the reef, only to be brought back again in like manner; while all the time the priests recited their prayers and performed their lugubrious ceremonies over it on the water as well as on the land. Finally, the mouldering remains were laid out to rot on a platform in one of the usual charnel-houses.[233] [233] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 331 _sq._ Conversion into a hat-stand was not, perhaps, the worst that could happen to the soul of a Society Islander after death. In the island of Raiatea there is a lake surrounded by trees, the tops of which appear curiously flat. On this verdant platform the spirits of the newly departed were said to dance and feast together until, at a subsequent stage of their existence, they were converted into cockroaches.[234] The souls of infants killed at birth were supposed to return in the bodies of grasshoppers.[235] [234] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 522. [235] J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 455. But the Society Islanders were far from thinking that the souls of the dead herded together indiscriminately in the other world. They imagined that the spirits were discriminated and assigned to abodes of different degrees of happiness or misery, not according to their virtues or vices in this life, but according to the rank which they had occupied in society, one receptacle of superior attractions being occupied by the souls of chiefs and other principal people, while another of an inferior sort sufficed to lodge the souls of the lower orders. For they did not suppose that their good or bad actions in this life affected in the least their lot in the life hereafter, or that the deities took account of any such distinction. Thus their religion exerted no influence on their morality.[236] Happiness and misery in the world beyond the grave, we are told, "were the destiny of individuals, altogether irrespective of their moral character and virtuous conduct. The only crimes that were visited by the displeasure of their deities were the neglect of some rite or ceremony, or the failing to furnish required offerings."[237] [236] J. Cook, i. 222. Compare _id._, vi. 150; J. R. Forster, _Observations made on a Voyage round the World_, pp. 553 _sqq._ [237] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 397. Compare J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 433. The Society Islanders, especially the natives of the Leeward Islands, believed that some of the souls of the dead were destined to enjoy a kind of heaven or paradise, which they called _Rohutu noanoa_, "sweet-scented Rohutu." This blissful region was supposed to be near a lofty and stupendous mountain in the island of Raiatea, not far from the harbour Hamaniino. The mountain went by the name of _Temehani unauna_, "splendid or glorious Temehani." It was probably the same with the lofty mountain on whose summit popular fancy placed the _po_ or common abode of the dead.[238] But the paradise was invisible to mortal eyes, being situated in the regions of the air (_reva_). The country was described as most lovely and enchanting in appearance, adorned with flowers of every shape and hue, and perfumed with odours of every fragrance. The air was pure and salubrious. Every sort of delight was to be enjoyed there; while rich viands and delicious fruits were supplied in abundance for the celebration of sumptuous festivals. Handsome youths and women thronged the place. But these honours and pleasures were only for the privileged orders--the chiefs and the members of the society of the Areois--for only they could afford to pay the heavy charges which the priests exacted for a passport to paradise; common folk seldom or never dreamed of attempting to procure for their relatives admission to the abode of bliss. Even apart from the expense of getting to heaven, it is probable that the sharp distinction kept up between chiefs and commoners here on earth would be expected to be maintained hereafter, and to exclude every person of the humbler sort from the society of his betters in the future life.[239] The other less exclusive, and no doubt less expensive, place for departed spirits, in contrast to "sweet-scented Rohutu," went by the significant name of "foul-scented Rohutu"; but over the nature of the substances which earned for it this unsavoury appellation our missionary authority preferred to draw a veil.[240] [238] See above, p. 317. [239] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 245 _sq._, 397; J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 434 _sq._ [240] J. Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, p. 476. According to one account, the souls of the dead were supposed to gather in the sun, where they feasted with the god Maouwe or O-Mauwee (Maui) on bread-fruit and the flesh of pigs or dogs, and drank never-ending draughts of kava.[241] [241] J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, p. 553; G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_, ii. 151. But wherever the souls of the dead were imagined to dwell, we may infer that they were credited with the power of returning to earth for a longer or shorter time to benefit or injure the living. For we have seen that sickness and death were commonly ascribed to the action of these spirits,[242] which seems to imply that they revisited this sublunary world on their errands of mischief. Accordingly, whenever the natives approached by night one of the charnel-houses in which dead bodies were exposed, they were startled "in the same manner that many of our ignorant and superstitious people are with the apprehension of ghosts, and at the sight of a churchyard." Again, the souls of the departed were sometimes thought to communicate with their friends in dreams and to announce to them things that should afterwards come to pass, thus enabling the dreamer to foretell the future. Foreknowledge thus acquired, however, was confined to particular persons, and such favoured dreamers enjoyed a reputation little inferior to that of the inspired priests. One of them prophesied to Captain Cook on the strength of a communication vouchsafed to him by the soul of his deceased father in a dream; but the event proved that the ghost was out in his reckoning by five days.[243] [242] See above, pp. 299 _sqq._ [243] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 152. The fear of ghosts in the minds of the Society Islanders has long survived their conversion to Christianity; indeed, we are informed that it is as rampant as ever. No ordinary native would dare to visit one of the lonely caves where the mouldering bones or skulls of his forefathers were deposited for safety in days of old.[244] At one point on the western coast of Tahiti, where the mountains advance in precipices close to the sea, the road which skirts their base is a place of fear to the natives. For in these precipices are caves full of skulls, and the ghosts who reside in the caverns are reported sometimes to weary of their own society and to come down to the road for company, where in a sportive vein they play all sorts of tricks on passers-by. Not so long ago three Tahitians were riding home at dusk from Papeete, where they had been drinking rum. Just at the pass under the cliff they were surprised by ghosts, who threw them into the ditch at the side of the road. So great is the dread which the natives entertain of apparitions at this spot that the Government has been compelled to divert the road, so that it no longer skirts the foot of the haunted mountain, but gives it a wide berth, and runs in a long sweep by the edge of the sea.[245] [244] A. Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_, p. 37. [245] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 83 _sq._ Again, at another point on the west coast of Tahiti, where mighty mountains, a glorious sea, and little coral islands with their groves of palms, offer a view of enchanting beauty, there is said to be a cave containing the skulls of chiefs in a jutting cliff half-way up the mountain. The cave was in charge of an old man in whose family the office of guardian was hereditary. It had been entrusted to him by his father on his deathbed, and the son had kept the secret faithfully ever since. In vain did a traveller seek to persuade the old man to guide him to the cave; in vain did the chief himself beg of him to reveal the grotto which concealed the mouldering relics of his forefathers. The guardian was obdurate; he believed that the world was not wide enough to hold two men who knew the holy place. He assured the traveller that nobody could reach the cave without the help of the ghosts, so perpendicular and so smooth was the face of the cliff that led up to it. When he himself wished to make his way to it, his custom was to go to the foot of the crag and pray, till the spirits came and wafted him lightly up and down again; otherwise it would have been a sheer impossibility for him to ascend and descend.[246] [246] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 81 _sq._ § 10. _The Worship of the Dead_ The belief in the existence of the spirits of the dead, and in their power to help or harm the living, naturally led the Society Islanders, like so many other peoples of the world, to propitiate these powerful beings, to sue their favour, or to appease their anger by prayer and sacrifice, in short, to worship them. On this subject the first missionaries to these islanders tell us that, in addition to the greater gods, "for general worship they have an inferior race, a kind of _dii penates_. Each family has its _tee_ or guardian spirit: he is supposed to be one of their departed relatives, who, for his superior excellences, has been exalted into an _eatooa_ (_atua_). They suppose this spirit can inflict sickness or remove it, and preserve them from a malignant deity who also bears the name _tee_, and is always employed in mischief."[247] "Every family has its _tee_, or guardian spirit, whom they set up, and worship at the _morai_."[248] "They regard the spirits of their ancestors, male and female, as exalted into _eatooas_ (_atuas_) and their favour to be secured by prayers and offerings. Every sickness and untoward accident they esteem as the hand of judgment for some offence committed."[249] As for the mischievous spirit who bore the same name as the worshipful spirit of a dead ancestor, the missionaries say that "the evil demon named _Tee_ has no power but upon earth; and this he exercises by getting into them with their food, and causing madness or other diseases; but these they imagine their tutelar saints, if propitious, can prevent or remove."[250] [247] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 344. [248] T. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 343. [249] J. Wilson, _op. cit._ p. 345. "The general name for deity, in all its ramifications, is _eatooa_" (_id._ p. 343). [250] J. Wilson, p. 346. We may suspect that the missionaries were mistaken in thus sharply distinguishing between an "evil demon" and a "tutelar saint," both of whom went by the same name (_tee_). Probably the "evil demon" and the "tutelar saint" were alike supposed to be souls of dead persons, with this difference between them, that whereas the one had been good and beneficent in his life, the other had been bad and maleficent; for it is a common belief that the dead retain in the other world the character and disposition which they manifested on earth, and that accordingly as disembodied spirits they may benefit or injure their surviving relatives.[251] Thus according to his character and behaviour in this present state of existence a person's ghost may naturally develop either into a god or into a devil. [251] In confirmation of my conjecture that the missionaries mistook a general name (_tee_, otherwise spelled _tii_) for the name of a particular demon, I may point out that the naturalist J. R. Forster before them seems to have fallen into precisely the same mistake with regard to another general name for departed spirits (_oramatuas_ or _oromatuas_). Thus he writes: "Besides these divinities of the second class, there are others of a still inferior rank, and though called _Eatooas_, are no more than what the Greek or Roman mythologists would have called _Genii_, or _Dii minorum gentium_: one of them, called _Orometooa_, is of a malignant disposition, resides chiefly near the _Marais_ and _Toopapous_ (places of burial) and in or near the boxes, or little chests, including the heads of their deceased friends, each of which, on that account, is called _Te-wharre no te Orometooa_, the house of the evil genius _Orometooa_, The people at Taheitee are of opinion, that if their priests invoke this evil genius, he will kill, by a sudden death, the person on whom they intend to bring down the vengeance of this divinity." See J. R. Forster, _Observations made during a Voyage round the World_, pp. 541 _sq._ In this passage we can hardly doubt that "this evil genius," Orometooa, is simply the _oramatuas_ or _oromatuas_, the spirits of the dead, by means of whom sorcerers were supposed to injure or destroy any one at whom they or their employers had a grudge. See above, p. 299, and below, pp. 323 _sqq._ It is to be feared that in the case of Tahitian ghosts the course of spiritual evolution was rather in the direction of devilry than of deity. At least this conclusion seems forced on us by the account which William Ellis, perhaps our best authority on Tahitian religion, gives of the character of these worshipful beings. I will reproduce it in his own words. "The objects of worship among the Tahitians, next to the _atua_ or gods, were the _oramatuas tiis_ or spirits. These were supposed to reside in the _po_, or world of night, and were never invoked but by wizards or sorcerers, who implored their aid for the destruction of an enemy, or the injury of some person whom they were hired to destroy. They were considered a different order of beings from the gods, a kind of intermediate class between them and the human race, though in their prayers all the attributes of the gods were ascribed to them. The _oramatuas_ were the spirits of departed fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, etc. The natives were greatly afraid of them, and presented offerings to avoid being cursed or destroyed, when they were employed by the sorcerers. "They seem to have been regarded as a sort of demons. In the Leeward Islands, the chief _oramatuas_ were spirits of departed warriors, who had distinguished themselves by ferocity and murder, attributes of character usually supposed to belong to these evil genii. Each celebrated _tii_ was honoured with an image, through which it was supposed his influence was exerted. The spirits of the reigning chiefs were united to this class, and the skulls of deceased rulers, kept with the images, were honoured with the same worship. Some idea of what was regarded as their ruling passion, may be inferred from the fearful apprehensions constantly entertained by all classes. They were supposed to be exceedingly irritable and cruel, avenging with death the slightest insult or neglect, and were kept within the precincts of the temple. In the _marae_ of Tane at Maeva, the ruins of their abode were still standing when I last visited the place. It was a house built upon a number of large strong poles, which raised the floor ten or twelve feet from the ground. They were thus elevated, to keep them out of the way of men, as it was imagined they were constantly strangling, or otherwise destroying, the chiefs and people. To prevent this, they were also treated with great respect; men were appointed constantly to attend them, and to keep them wrapped in the choicest kinds of cloth, to take them out whenever there was a _pae atua_, or general exhibition of the gods; to anoint them frequently with fragrant oil; and to sleep in the house with them at night. All this was done, to keep them pacified. And though the office of calming the angry spirits was honourable, it was regarded as dangerous, for if, during the night or at any other time, these keepers were guilty of the least impropriety, it was supposed the spirits of the images, or the skulls, would hurl them headlong from their high abodes, and break their necks in the fall."[252] [252] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_. i. 334-336. The difference in power and dignity between the great national gods (_atuas_) and the spirits of deceased relations (_oramatuas tiis_) might be measured by the size of their images; for whereas the images of the gods were six or eight feet long, those of the spirits were not more than so many inches.[253] But while these malignant and irritable spirits--the souls of dead fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and children--resided generally either in their little images or in their skulls, they were not strictly confined to these material vehicles; they resorted occasionally to the shells from the seashore, especially to a beautiful kind of murex, the _Murex ramoces_. These shells were kept by the sorcerers, and the peculiar singing or humming sound that may be heard when the valve is applied to the ear was imagined to proceed from the demon in the shell.[254] [253] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 337. [254] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 363. It was these malignant and dangerous demons whom the sorcerer employed as his agents to execute his fell purposes. But to effect them he had to secure something connected with the body of his intended victim, it might be the parings of his nails, a lock of his hair, his spittle or other bodily secretions, or else a portion of the food which he was about to eat. Over this material substance, whatever it was, the sorcerer recited his incantations and performed his magical rites either in his own house or in his private temple (_marae_). The result was believed to be that the demon entered into the substance, and through it passed into the body of the man at whom the enchanter aimed his elfish darts. The wretched sufferer experienced the acutest agonies; his distortions were frightful to witness; his eyes seemed starting from his head; he foamed at the mouth; he lay writhing in anguish on the ground; in short, to adopt the native expression, he was torn by the evil spirit. Yet his case was not hopeless; the demon could be mollified by a bribe, or defeated by the intervention of a more powerful demon. Hence, when any one was believed to be suffering from the incantations of a sorcerer, if he or his friends were rich enough they engaged another sorcerer for a fee to counteract the spells of the first and so to restore the health of the invalid. It was generally supposed that the efforts of the second sorcerer would be crowned with success if only the demon whom he employed were equally powerful with that at the command of his rival, and if the presents which he received for his professional services were more valuable. In order to avoid the danger of being thus bewitched through the refuse of their persons, the Tahitians used scrupulously to burn or bury their shorn hair, lest it should fall into the hands of enchanters.[255] [255] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 363-370. It is possible that some even of the great national gods were no more than ghosts of dead men, whose human origin was forgotten. There is some reason for supposing that this was true of Hiro, the god of thieves. On the one hand, this deity was reputed to be the son of the great god Oro;[256] and when a mother desired her child to grow up a clever thief, she repaired to a temple, where the priest, on receipt of the requisite offerings, caught the spirit of the god in a snare and infused it into the infant, thus ensuring the future proficiency of the infant in the arts of theft and robbery.[257] Yet, in spite of these claims to divinity, there are some grounds for thinking that Hiro was himself originally no better than a thief and a robber. He is said to have been a native of Raiatea, from whose sacrilegious fingers not even the temples and altars of the gods were safe. His skull was shown in a large temple of his own construction in that island down to the early years of the nineteenth century. His hair, too, was stuffed into the image of his reputed father, the god Oro, and perished when that image was committed to the flames by the early converts to Christianity.[258] [256] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iii. 112, 125. [257] J. Williams, _Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands_, pp. 466 _sq._ [258] D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 254 _sq._ As to Hiro, the god of thieves, see also J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 447-449. Once a year the Society Islanders celebrated a festival accompanied by rites, of which one has been compared to the Roman Catholic custom of performing a mass for the benefit of souls in purgatory. The festival was called "the ripening of the year," and the time for its observance was determined by the blossoming of reeds. It was regularly observed in the island of Huahine, and vast multitudes assembled to take part in it. As a rule, only men engaged in the pagan festivals, but at this particular one women and children were also present, though they were not allowed to enter the sacred enclosure. The celebration was regarded as a kind of annual acknowledgment made to the gods. Prayers were offered at the temple, and a sumptuous banquet formed part of the festival. At the close of the festival every one returned to his home, or to his family temple (_marae_), there to offer special prayers for the spirits of departed relatives, that they might be liberated from the _po_, or state of Night, and might either ascend to paradise ("sweet-scented Rohutu") or return to this world by entering into the body of one of its inhabitants. But "they did not suppose, according to the generally received doctrine of transmigration, that the spirits who entered the body of some dweller upon earth, would permanently remain there, but only come and inspire the person to declare future events, or execute any other commission from the supernatural beings on whom they imagined they were constantly dependent."[259] [259] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 351 _sq._ Compare J. A. Moerenhout, _op. cit._ i. 502 note^1, 523. Hence we learn that the spirits of the dead as well as the gods were believed to be capable of inspiring men and revealing to them the future. In this, as in other respects, the dead were assimilated to deities. CHAPTER VI THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE MARQUESANS § 1. _The Marquesas Islands_ The Marquesas are an archipelago of eleven or twelve chief islands in the South Pacific, situated about nine hundred miles to the north-east of Tahiti. They fall into two groups, which together stretch in a direction from north-west to south-east, from 8° to 11° of South latitude. The south-eastern group, of which Hivaoa (Dominica) is the largest island, was discovered by the Spanish Admiral Alvaro Mendana de Neyra in 1595, but, so far as appears, it was not again visited by Europeans until 1774, when Captain Cook touched at the islands on his second voyage. Curiously enough, the north-westerly group, of which Nukahiva is the largest and most important island, remained unknown until 1791, when it was discovered by the American Captain Ingraham, who named the group the Washington Islands. About a month later, in June 1791, the French navigator Marchand visited the same islands, and in 1797 the first missionary, William Crook, was landed from the missionary ship _Duff_. The whole archipelago is now known as the Marquesas, a name which the Spanish Admiral Mendana bestowed on the islands discovered by him in honour of the Marquess de Canete, Viceroy of Peru, by whose order the voyage had been undertaken.[1] [1] Captain J. Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 274 _sqq._; G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_, ii. 5 _sqq._; C. P. Claret Fleurieu, _Voyage round the World performed by E. Marchand_ (London, 1801), i. 27 _sqq._, 55 _sqq._; J. Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. lxxiii. _sqq._, 127 _sqq._; A. J. von Krusenstern, _Voyage round the World_ (London, 1813), i. 136; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _Îles Marquises ou Nouka-hiva_ (Paris, 1843), pp. 1 _sqq._, 12 _sq._; Le P. Mathias G----, _Lettres sur les Îles Marquises_ (Paris, 1843), pp. 7 _sqq._; P. E. Eyriaud des Vergnes, _L'Archipel des Iles Marquises_ (Paris, 1877), pp. 1 _sqq._; C. E. Meinicke, _Die Inseln des Stillen Oceans_, ii. 235 _sq._; F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. 522. The islands are of volcanic formation, lofty and mountainous. The interior consists generally of a range of mountains some three thousand feet high, from which a series of spurs descend steeply to the coast, terminating for the most part in tremendous cliffs, at the foot of which the great rollers break in foam; for with a single exception there are no coral reefs, and a ship can sail in deep water within a cable's length of the rocks. Viewed at a distance from the sea, the aspect of the islands is somewhat stern and forbidding. Bare mountains, jagged peaks, sometimes lost in the clouds, and an iron-bound coast of black and beetling crags, buffeted eternally by the surf, make up a gloomy picture; but a nearer view discloses verdant valleys nestling between the ridges which radiate from the central mountains. These valleys are watered by mountain streams and clothed with dense tropical vegetation, their luxuriant green offering an agreeable contrast to the bareness and aridity of the frowning precipices and sharp peaks which soar above them. Cascades tumbling from high cliffs into the depths of the glens add to the beauty and charm of the scenery. So steep and precipitous are the ridges which divide these smiling vales from each other that the ascent and descent are in many places both difficult and dangerous even for the natives; European mountaineers need to have stout limbs and steady heads to accomplish them in safety. Hence in former days each valley contained a separate tribe, which was commonly in a state of permanent hostility towards its neighbours across the mountain barriers.[2] Of these tribes the most famous were the warlike and dreaded Taipiis or Typees, who occupied a beautiful valley at the eastern end of Nukahiva, and in their mountain fastness deemed themselves inaccessible to their enemies. However, in the early part of the nineteenth century an American naval officer, Captain David Porter, succeeded, not without great difficulty, in carrying havoc and devastation into these sylvan scenes.[3] Later in the century a runaway American sailor, Hermann Melville, spent more than four months as a captive in the tribe, and published an agreeable narrative of his captivity; but never having mastered the language, he was not able to give much exact information concerning the customs and beliefs of the natives.[4] As there is no maritime plain interposed between the mountains and the shore, the only way of passing from one valley to another is either to go by sea or to clamber over the intervening ridges. It would be materially impossible, we are told, unless at enormous and ruinous cost, to make a road or even a mule-path round any of the Marquesas Islands, as has been done in Tahiti.[5] [2] As to the formation and scenery of the islands, see Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 110; C. S. Stewart, _Visit to the South Seas_ (London, 1832), i. 193 _sqq._; F. D. Bennett, _Narrative of a Whaling Voyage round the Globe_ (London, 1840), i. 299 _sqq._; H. Melville, _Typee_, pp. 8 _sq._, 17 _sq._, and _passim_ (_Everyman's Library_); Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 138 _sq._; P. E. Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ pp. 84 _sq._; Clavel, _Les Marquisiens_ (Paris, 1885) pp. 1 _sq._; C. E. Meinicke, _op. cit._ ii. 236 _sq._; F. H. H. Guillemard, _op. cit._ pp. 522 _sq._; A. Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_ (Berlin, 1900), pp. 192 _sq._, 220 _sqq._ As to the extreme difficulty of scaling the mountains and precipices to pass from one valley to another, see particularly M. Radiguet, _Les Derniers Sauvages_ (Paris, 1882), pp. 101 _sq._, note. [3] Captain David Porter, _Journal of a Cruise made to the Pacific Ocean_, Second Edition (New York, 1822), ii. 86 _sqq._ [4] H. Melville, _Typee_ (London, _Everyman's Library_, no date). The first edition of this book was published in 1846. Melville's residence among the Taipiis (Typees) fell in the year 1841. [5] P. E. Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ p. 85. Despite their situation in the heart of the tropics, the Marquesas enjoy an extremely healthy climate subject to none of the inconveniences usually incidental to countries in the same latitude; endemic and epidemic diseases are alike unknown. European soldiers can work in the sun without accident and without exhaustion.[6] The climate has been described as an eternal spring, without winter or even autumn; though a perpetual succession of ripe fruits may seem to lend an autumnal air to the landscape, which yet is never chilled by hoar frosts or saddened by the sight of bare boughs and fallen leaves.[7] Even in the hottest days a cool wind blows from the sea, and at night there is a breeze from the land. Rain falls during some months of the year, especially from May or June to August or September; but on the whole there is little variation in the seasons;[8] the Marquesan year has been described as one long tropical month of June just melting into July.[9] Yet we are told that the northern islands sometimes suffer from droughts which may last for years; at such times vegetation languishes, till a fresh cloud-burst restores the verdure of the trees and grass as by magic.[10] It is then, too, that the cascades everywhere enliven the landscape by the glitter and roar of their tumbling waters, which, after dropping from the height, flow rapidly down their steep beds into the sea.[11] [6] M. Radiguet, _Les Derniers Sauvages_ (Paris, 1882), pp. 304 _sq._; P. E. Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ p. 57. [7] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 94. [8] P. E. Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ p. 57. Compare M. Radiguet, _Les Derniers Sauvages_, pp. 304 _sq._ [9] H. Melville, _Typee_, p. 220. [10] A. Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 222 _sq._ [11] M. Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 304. § 2. _Physical Appearance of the Natives_ Observers are generally agreed that from the purely physical point of view the Marquesan islanders are, or used to be, the noblest specimens of the Polynesian race. Captain Cook remarked that "the inhabitants of these islands collectively are, without exception, the finest race of people in this sea. For fine shape and regular features, they perhaps surpass all other nations."[12] To the same effect the naturalist George Forster, who accompanied Captain Cook, gives his impression of a crowd of Marquesan men, among whom were no women. He says: "They were tall, and extremely well limbed; not one of them unwieldy or corpulent like a Taheitian, nor meagre and shrivelled like a native of Easter Island. The punctuation" (by which he meant the tattooing) "which almost entirely covered the men of a middle age, made it difficult to distinguish their elegance of form; but among the youths, who were not yet marked or tattooed, it was easy to discover beauties singularly striking, and often without a blemish, such as demanded the admiration of all beholders. Many of them might be placed near the famous models of antiquity, and would not suffer in the comparison: "_Qualis aut Nireus fuit, aut aquosa Raptus ab Ida."_ HOR. "The natural colour of these youths was not quite so dark as that of the common people in the Society Isles; but the men appeared to be infinitely blacker, on account of the punctures which covered their whole body, from head to foot. These punctures were disposed with the utmost regularity; so that the marks on each leg, arm, and cheek, and on the corresponding muscles, were exactly similar. They never assumed the determinate form of an animal or plant, but consisted of a variety of blotches, spirals, bars, chequers, and lines, which had a most motley appearance."[13] [12] J. Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 284. [13] G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_, ii. 14 _sq._ Compare Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 152 _sq._; U. Lisiansky, _Voyage round the World_ (London, 1814), p. 85; G. H. von Langsdorff, _Reise um die Welt_ (Frankfurt am Mayn, 1812), i. 92 _sqq._; Fleurieu, _op. cit._ i. 96 _sqq._; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 216 _sqq._; Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ p. 39. Similarly, speaking of the Taipiis or Typees, Melville observes, "In beauty of form they surpassed anything I had ever seen. Not a single instance of natural deformity was observable in all the throng attending the revels. Occasionally I noticed among the men the scars of wounds they had received in battle; and sometimes, though very seldom, the loss of a finger, an eye, or an arm, attributable to the same cause. With these exceptions, every individual appeared free from those blemishes which sometimes mar the effect of an otherwise perfect form. But their physical excellence did not merely consist in an exemption from these evils; nearly every individual of their number might have been taken for a sculptor's model."[14] As to their stature, the same writer affirms that "the men, in almost every instance, are of lofty stature, scarcely ever less than six feet."[15] Similarly Captain Porter tell us that "they are far above the common stature of the human race, seldom less than five feet eleven inches, but most commonly six feet two or three inches, and every way proportioned. Their faces are remarkably handsome, with keen, piercing eyes; teeth white, and more beautiful than ivory; countenances open and expressive, which reflect every emotion of their souls; limbs which might serve as models for a statuary, and strength and activity proportioned to their appearance."[16] Another observer remarks of them that "the natives bear the palm for personal beauty from most other of the Polynesian tribes. The men are tall and muscular, though rather slightly framed; their deportment is graceful and independent; their features are handsome, and partake more of the European regularity of profile than is usual with Polynesian islanders."[17] The nose is straight or aquiline, sometimes short or slightly flattened, but never ill-shaped: the mouth is never large nor the lips thick: the forehead is rather low and somewhat retreating.[18] The hair is almost always straight or wavy; men or women with frizzly hair are very seldom seen, especially in the north-western group. The colour of the skin, where it is not darkened by tattooing, is a clear brown, resembling the bronzed appearance acquired by Europeans through exposure to a tropical sun.[19] The women are both absolutely and relatively shorter than the men; indeed Melville describes them as "uncommonly diminutive." Their complexion is lighter; in the parts of the body which are seldom exposed to the sun they are even said to appear as white as European women. Their features are good, but rather pretty than beautiful; their hands and feet are very shapely. Unlike the men, who are, or used to be, tattooed from head to foot, the women were tattooed very little, and that chiefly on the lips.[20] They took pains to whiten their skin by avoiding exposure to the sun and by washing themselves with the juice of a small native vine,[21] or by smearing themselves with a cosmetic in which the yellow of the turmeric root predominated.[22] [14] H. Melville, _Typee_, p. 194. [15] H. Melville, _Typee_, p. 195. [16] David Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 58 _sq._ [17] F. D. Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 304. [18] M. Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 169. [19] Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ p. 39. [20] Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ pp. 39 _sq._; H. Melville, _Typee_, p. 195. [21] C. S. Stewart, _Visit to the South Seas_, i. 231 _sq._, who speaks highly of the beauty of the women. But the general opinion appears to be that the Marquesan women are much less handsome than the men. See Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 94-96; Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 59. [22] F. D. Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 308 _sq._ § 3. _Food, Weapons, Tools, Houses, Canoes, Fishing_ The Marquesans subsist chiefly on a vegetable diet. Their staple food is the bread-fruit, and their national dish is a paste called _popoi_, which is prepared from bread-fruit after it has been subjected to a process of fermentation. Fish is also a common article of diet; the natives usually eat it raw, even when it is rotten and stinking. They keep pigs, but seldom kill them except for a festival or at the reception of a stranger. Hence pork is not a regular or common article of diet with them; and apart from it they hardly taste flesh. Other sorts of food, such as bananas, taro, and sugar-cane, are entirely subsidiary to the great staples, bread-fruit and fish. The natives do not readily accustom themselves to a European diet; indeed when the experiment has been made of feeding them exclusively in our manner, they have wasted away and only recovered their health when they were allowed to return to their usual nourishment. Their ordinary beverage was water, but they were also addicted to the drinking of kava, which was extracted from the root of the _Piper methysticum_ in the usual fashion.[23] Drawing their sustenance chiefly from the bread-fruit tree, the Marquesans paid little attention to the cultivation of the soil; however, they grew a certain amount of taro, sweet potatoes, and sugar-cane; and they had plantations of the paper-mulberry,[24] the bark of which was manufactured by the women into cloth in the ordinary way. But the bark of other trees was also employed for the same purpose. Since the natives were able to procure European stuffs, the indigenous manufacture of bark-cloth has much declined.[25] Hence agriculture engaged the men very little; fishing, though it was part of their business, they are said to have neglected; the only work of consequence they did was to build their houses and manufacture their arms, but these employments occupied them only occasionally.[26] [23] Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ pp. 42-44; Clavel, _Les Marquisiens_, pp. 3 _sqq._ Compare G. Forster, _op. cit._ ii. 27 _sq._; Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 106-108; Fleurieu, _op. cit._ i. 115 _sq._; Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 50-55; F. D. Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 316 _sq._; H. Melville, _Typee_, pp. 120-124, 179; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 277 _sq._; Mathias G----, _op. cit._ pp. 138 _sq._, 144 _sq._; A. Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 208-211. As to the preparation and drinking of kava among the Marquesans, see also M. Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 64-66. [24] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 164; Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 53; C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 213 _sq._; F. D. Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 345 (who says that the only root the natives cultivate for food is the sweet potato); Mathias G----, _op. cit._ pp. 148, 149; Clavel, _op. cit._ p. 18. [25] Fleurieu, _op. cit._ i. 122 _sq._; Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 116; Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 337 _sq._; Melville, _Typee_, pp. 158-160, 210; Mathias G----, _op. cit._ pp. 137 _sq._; Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 53 _sq._; Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ 55 _sq._; Clavel, _op. cit._ 19. [26] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 164. The weapons of the warriors were clubs, spears, and slings. The slings were made of coco-nut fibre, and the natives were very expert in the use of them. Bows and arrows were unknown.[27] Like the rest of the Polynesians, the Marquesans were totally ignorant of the metals until they acquired them from Europeans. Their tools were made of stone, bone, and shell. Thus they employed a pointed stone to bore holes with, and an axe of black, hard stone for cutting. The axe-head was shaped like an elongated wedge or mortise-chisel, and was fastened to the haft by coco-nut fibre. Some of these axes weighed as much as twenty-five pounds. The natives also used sharp-edged or toothed shells as cutting implements, and borers made of pointed bones; while rough fish-skins served them as polishers.[28] Like the rest of the Polynesians, they kindled fire by the method known as the stick-and-groove, that is, by rubbing the sharp point of one stick against the flat surface of another, so as to form a groove in it and, by continued friction, to elicit smoke and a glow, which, with the help of dry leaves, is nursed into a flame. Contrary to the usage of some peoples, the Marquesans employed the same kind of wood for both the fire-sticks, either a species of hibiscus (_Hibiscus tiliaceus_) or a species of poplar (_Thespesia populnea_); for this purpose they split a branch in two, lengthwise, and used the two pieces as the fire-sticks. In former days these fire-sticks were regularly kept in every native house.[29] [27] Fleurieu, _op. cit._ i. 118 _sq._; Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 162; Lisiansky, _op. cit._ p. 88; Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 152 (bows and arrows unknown); Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 282 _sq._ [28] Fleurieu, _op. cit._ i. 121; Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 162. [29] H. Melville, _Typee_, pp. 118 _sq._; Clavel, _Les Marquisiens_, pp. 11 _sq._ Compare G. Forster, _op. cit._ ii. 20; D. Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 116; Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 143. The Marquesan houses are regularly built on stone platforms, oblong or square in shape, and raised above the ground to heights varying from one to four, eight, or even ten feet. The higher platforms are approached from the ground by ladders or notched poles. The houses, constructed of timber and bamboo, are oblong in shape, and comprise a high back wall, generally inclined forward at an angle, from which the thatched roof slopes down steeply to a low front wall, while two short walls close the house at either end. The door is in the middle of the front wall, and is so low that it is necessary to stoop in entering. Sometimes the fronts of the houses are entirely open except for the low pillars which support the roof. The interior of the house forms a single chamber undivided by partitions. Two trunks of coco-nut palms extend parallel to each other along the whole length of the floor at an interval of four or five feet; the innermost log, a foot or two distant from the back wall, forms a pillow on which the heads of the sleepers rest, while the other supports their feet or legs. The space between the two logs is paved with stone, and spread with mats. In the single apartment the whole family live and sleep. Such at least were the domestic arrangements in the old days. The size of the houses naturally varies. Some of them measure eighty feet by forty, others only twenty-five feet by ten, or even less.[30] [30] J. Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 285 _sq._; G. Forster, _op. cit._ pp. 21, 24; J. Wilson, _op. cit._ pp. 131, 134 _sq._; Lisiansky, _op. cit._ p. 84; Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 159; Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 109-111; Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 39 _sq._; C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 209-211, 212, 267 _sq._; Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 302 _sq._; Melville, _Typee_, pp. 81-83; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 274-276; Mathias G----, _op. cit._ pp. 122-129; Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 36-38; Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ pp. 44 _sq._; Clavel, _op. cit._ pp. 15 _sq._; Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 200-208. The platforms on which the houses are built consist often of large blocks of stone neatly and regularly laid without mortar or cement, in a style which would do no discredit to European masons.[31] Sometimes the stones are described as enormous blocks of rock,[32] some of which would require ten or twelve men to carry or roll them.[33] Water-worn boulders, washed down from the mountains in the bed of torrents, were especially chosen for the purpose.[34] [31] Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 109 _sq._ [32] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 129. [33] Langsdorff, _l.c._ [34] Clavel, _op. cit._ p. 15. Sometimes, though far less commonly, Marquesan houses were raised above the ground on posts from eight or ten to sixteen feet high. Such houses were lightly built of wood and thatched; the floor was an open work of split bamboos. Sometimes these raised dwellings resembled the ordinary Marquesan house in structure; at other times they were quadrangular, with perpendicular walls and an ordinary roof. They were approached by ladders and resembled the habitations in use among the Malay tribes of the Indian Archipelago. No dwellings of this type have been noticed in Nukahiva, the principal island of the archipelago; but they have been seen and described in Tauata (Santa Christina) and Hivaoa (Dominica).[35] [35] F. D. Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 303 _sq._; Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 207 _sq._ The Marquesans built canoes of various sizes, the smaller for fishing, the larger for war. These latter might be from forty to fifty feet long. They were fitted with outriggers. The prow had an ornamental projection rudely carved to represent the head of an animal. Sometimes the prows of war canoes were decorated with the skulls of slaughtered enemies. But in general the Marquesans appear to have been inferior to the other South Sea islanders in the arts of canoe-building and navigation.[36] This inferiority may perhaps have been partly due to the absence of those lagoons which, formed by coral reefs, elsewhere enabled the natives to acquire confidence and skill in sailing on smooth and sheltered waters. The same cause may also, perhaps, explain why fishing was comparatively little practised by the Marquesans. We are told that as an occupation it was despised by such as owned a piece of land of any extent, and that only the poorer class of people, who depended on the sea for a livelihood, addicted themselves to it. They caught fish by means both of nets and of lines with hooks neatly made of mother-of-pearl; also they stupefied the fish by a certain mashed root, which the fisherman distributed in the water by diving, and then caught the fish as they rose to the surface.[37] [36] J. Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 287; Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 163 _sq._; Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 150; Porter, _op. cit._, ii. 12-14; Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 338; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 280-282. [37] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 163. § 4. _Polyandry, Adoption, Exchange of Names_ The social life of the Marquesan islanders presented some peculiar features. Thus they are said to have practised the rare custom of polyandry. On this subject Stewart observes: "We have yet met with no instance, in any rank of society, of a male with two wives, but are informed that for one woman to have two husbands is a universal habit. Some favourite in the father's household or retinue at an early period becomes the husband of the daughter, who still remains under the paternal roof till contracted in marriage to a second individual, on which she removes with her first husband to his habitation, and both herself and original companion are supported by him."[38] Melville describes the custom in substantially the same way, and adds, "No man has more than one wife, and no wife of mature years has less than two husbands,--sometimes she has three, but such instances are not frequent." He seems to have attributed the practice to a scarcity of women; for he tells us that "the males considerably outnumber the females."[39] The same view was taken at a later date by Dr. Clavel, who observes: "In the islands where the women are in a minority we may to this day observe tolerably numerous cases of polyandry. Thus at Ua-Una I met some women who had each two husbands, almost always one of them young and the other old. Such households of three are not worse than the rest and never give rise to intestine dissensions."[40] According to Radiguet, the right of having more husbands than one was not general and hardly belonged to any but chieftainesses,[41] but this limitation is denied by a good authority.[42] The Russian navigator Lisiansky, who visited the Marquesas in 1804, seems to have supposed that the custom was restricted to wealthy families. He says: "In rich families, every woman has two husbands; of whom one may be called the assistant husband. This last, when the other is at home, is nothing more than the head servant of the house; but, in case of absence, exercises all the rights of matrimony, and is also obliged to attend his lady wherever she goes. It happens sometimes, that the subordinate partner is chosen after marriage; but in general two men present themselves to the same woman, who, if she approves their addresses, appoints one for the real husband, and the other as his auxiliary: the auxiliary is generally poor, but handsome and well-made."[43] [38] C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 317. [39] Melville, _Typee_, pp. 203 _sq._ [40] Clavel, _op. cit._ p. 60. [41] Radiguet, _op. cit._ 173. [42] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 111. [43] Lisiansky, _op. cit._ p. 83. As to polyandry in the Marquesas, see further E. Westermarck, _History of Human Marriage_, Fifth Edition (London, 1921), iii. 146 _sqq._ Another peculiar habit of the Marquesans was to give away their children to be adopted by other people soon after their birth. When a woman was pregnant, she and her husband would discuss to whom they should give the child that was about to be born. They received offers from neighbours, and often knocked down the infant to the highest bidder; for the adopting parents regularly made presents to the child's family, consisting of cloth, tools, and pigs, according to the fortune of the contracting parties. After birth the child remained with its mother for some months till it was weaned, upon which it was sent away to its parents by adoption, who might inhabit a different district and even a different island. It is said to have been exceptional for parents to bring up their own offspring.[44] [44] Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ pp. 19 _sq._; Clavel, _op. cit._ pp. 56, 61 _sq._ Another mode by which the Marquesans created artificial relationships was the exchange of names. Such an exchange was equivalent to a ratification of amity and good-will between the persons, who thereby acquired a claim to mutual protection and the enjoyment of each other's property and even of their wives, if they happened to be married men. The custom was not limited to the natives; they readily exchanged names with Europeans and granted them the privileges which flowed from the pact. It is even said that some natives gave their own names to animals, which thenceforth became sacred for them and for the rest of the tribe. This led to so many inconveniences that the priests had to forbid the practice of exchanging names with animals.[45] [45] Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 16 _sq._, 158 _sq._; Clavel, _op. cit._ pp. 61 _sq._ § 5. _Amusements, Dancing-places, Banqueting-halls_ A favourite amusement of the islanders was racing or combating on stilts. A stilt was composed of two pieces, a pole of light wood which the runner held in his hand, and a step or foot-rest of hard wood, on which he planted one of his feet. The step or foot-rest was often adorned with human figures curiously carved, which are said to have represented gods. The races or combats took place on the paved areas which were to be seen in most villages, and which formed the scene of public entertainments. In these contests each runner or combatant tried to get in the way of his adversary, and, balancing himself on one stilt, to strike his rival with the other, so as to bring him to the ground amid the laughter and jeers of the spectators. It has sometimes been supposed that the use of stilts in the Marquesas originated in the practical purpose of enabling people to cross a stream without wetting their feet. But the supposition is highly improbable. For, on the one hand, the streams in the islands are mere rivulets, which dry up for the greater part of the year; and, on the other hand, the natives are almost amphibious, often spending whole days in the water, and swimming for hours without fatigue. Hence it is absurd to imagine that they invented stilts simply to keep their feet dry at crossing a shallow stream.[46] [46] Fleurieu, _op. cit._ i. 119 _sq._, 124; Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 146; Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 124-126; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 284; Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 96. As for the ability of the natives to swim in the sea for hours without fatigue, compare J. Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, p. 129. But perhaps the most popular recreation of the Marquesans was dancing and singing, which formed a leading feature of their festivals. Every inhabited district had its dancing-place, a sort of public square, where places were set apart for the use of the performers, the musicians, and the spectators. These have been described by the missionary, C. S. Stewart, from personal observation. He says, "Our walk terminated at what may be called the _theatre_ or _opera house_ of the settlement, a large rectangular platform of stone pavement, surrounded by low terraces also laid with stone; the first designed for the public exhibitions of the song and the dance, and the last for the accommodation of the spectators who assemble to witness the performance. Entertainments of this kind are the most fashionable and favourite amusements at the Washington and the Marquesan groups. Every inhabited district has its _Tahua_, or public square of this kind; some of them so extensive, it is said, as to be capable of accommodating ten thousand people."[47] Again, speaking of another of these dancing-places, the same writer observes, "This _Tahua_, or theatre, is a structure altogether superior to that visited by us yesterday, and so massive and well built as to be capable of enduring for ages. It is a regular oblong square, about sixty feet in length and forty broad. The outer wall consists of immense stones, or slabs of rock, three feet high, and many of them four or six feet long, joined closely together and hewn with a regularity and neatness truly astonishing, in view of the rude implements by which it must have been accomplished. On a level with the top of this outer wall, a pavement of large flat stones, several feet in width, extends entirely round, forming seats for the chiefs, warriors, and other persons of distinction, and singers performing the recitatives and choruses accompanying the dance. Within this, and some inches lower, is another pavement still wider, having large flat-topped stones fixed in it at regular intervals of six or eight feet, used as seats by the beaters on the drums, and other rude instruments of music, and immediately within this again, an unpaved area, some twenty feet long by twelve broad, constituting the stage on which the dancers exhibit their skill."[48] [47] C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 214 _sq._ [48] C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 233 _sq._ Compare Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 265 _sq._ Some of these dancing-places appear to have been much larger than those seen by Stewart. According to Langsdorff they were sometimes not less than a hundred fathoms in length, and the great smooth pavement consisted of blocks of stone, several feet broad, laid so neatly and so close together that you might have imagined it to be the work of European master-masons.[49] Radiguet describes one such dancing-place as a rectangular area eighty metres (about two hundred and sixty feet) long by thirty metres (about one hundred feet) broad, and surrounded by a terrace paved with stone, on which the spectators were seated.[50] [49] Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 138. [50] Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 195. The festivals (_koikas_) celebrated at these places were either periodical or occasional. Among the periodical perhaps the most important was that held at the ingathering of the bread-fruit harvest in February and March. Among the occasional were those held after a successful fishing, at the ratification of peace, and after the death of a priest or chief, who had been raised to the rank of a deity. A messenger decked in all the native finery repaired to the surrounding villages inviting the inhabitants to attend the festival. Immense numbers of hogs were killed and huge troughs filled with bread-fruit were provided by the hosts for the banquet. The festivals were attended not only by the people of the particular valley in which they were held, but by the inhabitants of other valleys and even of other islands; for so long as a festival lasted, a special taboo forbade the natives to harm the strangers in their midst. A general truce was observed; members of hostile tribes came to share the pleasures of the festival with the foes whom they had recently fought, and whom they would fight again in a few days.[51] Yet such visitors were careful to observe certain precautions: they never came unarmed, and they always kept together on one side of the festival ground, in order that they might rally the more easily for mutual defence, if they should be suddenly attacked.[52] [51] C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 236 _sq._; F. D. Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 318; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 264 _sq._; Mathias G----, _op. cit._ pp. 69 _sqq._; Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 192 _sq._ [52] Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 138. The performers who sang and danced at these festivals for the entertainment of the public were called _Hokis_ or _Kaioas_: they are described as a sort of wandering troubadours or minstrels, who went from tribe to tribe, seeking their fortune. They took great care of their persons, which they artificially whitened. At once poets, musicians, and dancers, they nevertheless did not enjoy the public esteem; on the contrary, their effeminate habits incurred the contempt of a people who had small taste for the fine arts.[53] Thus these wandering minstrels and mountebanks would seem to have corresponded to the Areois of the Society Islands.[54] The dances were accompanied by the beating of drums and the songs of a chorus, it might be of a hundred and fifty singers, who sat on the upper platform along with the chiefs and warriors. Sometimes in the intervals between the dances a choir of women, seated on an adjoining and elevated platform, would chant in dull monotonous tones, clapping their hands loudly in unison with their song. The subjects of the songs were various and were often furnished by some passing event, such as the arrival of a ship or any less novel incident. Not unfrequently, like ballads in our own country, the songs caught the popular fancy and became fashionable, being sung in private by all classes of society. So passionately addicted were the Marquesans to these entertainments that they undertook the longest and most fatiguing journeys from all parts of the island in order to be present at them, carrying their food and suffering great hardships by the way; they even came in their crazy canoes, at the hazard of their lives, from other islands, and accepted the risk of being knocked on the head at one of the brawls with which such gatherings usually ended.[55] [53] Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 231. Compare C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 237, who calls the performers _Kaioi_. [54] See above, pp. 259 _sqq._ [55] C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 234, 236, 237. Closely connected with the festivals were the banqueting-halls, as they may be called. These were houses, or rather sheds, thatched with leaves and open in front, where the lower end of the sloping roof was supported on short wooden pillars, of which the upper parts were rudely carved in the likeness of the god Tiki, thus forming a sort of Caryatids. These sheds varied in length from thirty to sixty and even two hundred feet in length. They stood on quadrangular stone platforms of the usual type, ranging from three or four to six, eight, twelve, and even fifteen feet in height. The blocks of stone put together to form the platforms were sometimes enormous, many of them measuring eight feet long by four feet thick and wide; and they were hewn and polished into such perfect form as to excite the wonder of the European beholder, who reflected with astonishment on the vast labour requisite to bring these huge rocks from the sea and to chisel them into shape without the help of iron tools. Access to the platforms was afforded by sloping trunks of trees notched into steps. In these open sheds the men feasted and prayed. Before each repast it was customary to offer to the deity a small portion of food wrapt in leaves. Sometimes the priests would thrust the morsels into the mouths of Tiki's grotesque images. No woman might enter these banqueting-halls or mount the platforms on which they stood. The place was strictly tabooed to them, and the taboo was signified in the usual way by long pennants of white cloth attached to the posts of the house.[56] [56] Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 38 _sq._; F. D. Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 317 _sq._; Mathias G----, _op. cit._ pp. 54-56; Melville, _Typee_ pp. 93-95. Of these writers it is Porter who gives the dimensions of some of the blocks of stone composing the platforms and expresses his amazement at the labour involved in their construction. He concludes his description as follows (ii. 39): "When we count the immense numbers of such places, which are everywhere to be met with, our astonishment is raised to the highest, that a people in a state of nature, unassisted by any of those artificial means, which so much assist and facilitate the labour of the civilized man, could have conceived and executed a work, which, to every beholder, must appear stupendous. These piles are raised with views to magnificence alone; there does not appear to be the slightest utility attending them: the houses situated on them are unoccupied, except during the period of feasting, and they appear to belong to a public, without the whole efforts of which they could not have been raised, and with every exertion that could possibly have been made, years must have been requisite for the completion of them." Of one of these structures seen by him in the anterior of Nukahiva, Stewart observes, "The stones, bearing marks of antiquity that threw the air of an old family mansion around the whole, were regularly hewn and joined with the greatest nicety, many which I measured being from four to six feet in length, nearly as wide, and two or more deep" (_Visit to the South Seas_, i. 267 _sq._). § 6. _Social Ranks, Taboo_ Socially the Marquesans were divided into chiefs or nobles and commoners; but the chiefs seem to have possessed very little authority, and to have received few outward marks of deference and respect. A monarchical government in any proper sense of the word was unknown.[57] The power of the chiefs, such as it was, rested mainly on their superior wealth, particularly on their landed property; for the larger their estates, the greater the number of the tenants whose services they could command. Hence the government has been called aristocratic and compared to the feudal system.[58] In a fruitful season the chiefs had a right to a fourth part of the produce, and in other seasons a share according to circumstances. Their dignity was hereditary.[59] There was no general government of the archipelago as a whole. Each island was quite independent of all the rest; and in every island there were several independent tribes, which were generally at war with each other.[60] [57] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 165; Langsdorff, i. 112 _sq._; Fleurieu, _op. cit._ i. 132-134; Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 64; Melville, _Typee_, p. 199; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 225; Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ pp. 24 _sq._ [58] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ 101 _sq._ [59] Lisiansky, _op. cit._ p. 80. [60] Lisiansky, _op. cit._ pp. 79 _sq._; Clavel, _op. cit._ p. 62. A powerful instrument in the hands of the nobles was the taboo or _tapu_, which, though it seems to have been originally a religious institution,[61] was turned to political and economic account by the chiefs and priests acting in conjunction. One of our best authorities on the Marquesans describes the institution as a tool of despotism for the gratification of the passions and caprices of such as could wield it.[62] But this is a somewhat one-sided and imperfect view to take of its scope. There is no doubt, as other good authorities on the Marquesans have pointed out, that in the absence of a strong government which could maintain order and protect life and property, the taboo to a great extent served the purposes which in more civilised society are fulfilled by laws.[63] The taboo was a sacred interdiction, a breach of which was believed of itself to entail disastrous consequences on the transgressor. The interdiction might be either public or private. To give examples of public interdictions, when the quantity of breadfruit, on which the people depended for their subsistence, was from any cause seriously diminished in a district, the chief had the right to impose a taboo on bread-fruit trees for twenty months, during which no one might gather the fruit. This close time allowed the trees to recover their strength and fertility. Similarly, if fish were scarce, the chief might pronounce a taboo on the neighbouring bay, or a part of it, in order to allow the fish to multiply undisturbed and replenish the sea in the neighbourhood of human habitations. Again, in the prospect of a great festival, a chief might lay an interdict on pigs for two or three years in advance, in order that, when the time came, there might be plenty of pork for the multitude at the banquet. Similarly, when the paper-mulberry, from which the Marquesans made their bark-cloth, threatened to give out, the chief might lay the trees under an interdict for five years, at the end of which the crop was sure to be magnificent.[64] In these and similar cases the taboo was of public utility by ensuring a proper supply of the necessaries of life. However, its imposition was not always guided by rational considerations, and hence it sometimes failed of its purpose. For example, so long as the bread-fruit was unripe, almost all kinds of fish were taboo and therefore might not be eaten, and this interdiction, instead of alleviating, tended naturally to aggravate the scarcity of food. The reason for the taboo was a curious superstition that if any one were to eat fish while the bread-fruit was unripe, the fruit would fall from the trees.[65] [61] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ pp. 47 _sq._; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 259. [62] Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 153. [63] Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 258 _sq._; Clavel, _op. cit._ pp. 65 _sq._ [64] Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ pp. 35 _sq._ Compare Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 155. [65] Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 118. But the taboo also served a useful purpose by ensuring respect for private property, which is a fundamental condition of social prosperity. "The priests only," we are told, "can impose a general taboo, but every individual has a right to pronounce one upon his own property: this is done by declaring, if his wish be to preserve a breadfruit, or a cocoa tree, a house or a plantation, from robbery and destruction, that the spirit of his father or of some king, or indeed of any other person, reposes in this tree, or house, which then bears the name of the person, and nobody ventures to attack it. If any one is so irreligious as to break through a taboo, and should be convicted of it, he is called _kikino_; and the _kikinos_ are always the first to be devoured by the enemy, at least they believe it to be so, nor is it impossible that the priests should so arrange matters as that this really happens."[66] Again, if a man's pig had been stolen, and he suspected who had done the deed, he would lay a taboo on the swine or other property of the thief by giving his own name, or the name of somebody else, to the animals or the trees or whatever it might be. After that, in the opinion of the people, the property so named was bewitched or haunted by the spirit of the person, whether alive or dead, whose name it bore; and this belief sometimes sufficed to compel the thief to abandon his possessions and to settle elsewhere.[67] A wreath of leaves or a strip of white cloth attached to a house, a canoe, a fruit-tree, or other piece of property, was the symbol of taboo, and in ordinary circumstances was enough to protect it.[68] [66] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 172. In this quotation I have altered the spelling _tahbu_ into _taboo_. [67] Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 116. [68] Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 157; Melville, _Typee_, p. 230; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 264. But the taboo was an instrument which could be used capriciously to thwart, as well as to further, the course of justice. Thus we read how, under the French government of the islands, a wife set out for the police-office to complain of the ill-treatment to which she had been subjected by her husband. But scarcely had she put her foot outside the door, when her husband, aware of her intention and determined to frustrate it, called out after her, "The road from here to the police-office is your father." On hearing that, the woman at once stopped short, for under no circumstances would she dare to trample on the author of her being. On the contrary, she immediately roasted two little pigs and carried them to the tomb of her father as an offering to appease his ghost, which might reasonably be supposed to fret at the mere thought of being trodden under foot by his own daughter.[69] This instructive example shows how closely the taboo was associated with the fear and worship of the dead; by bestowing the name of a dead person on a thing you rendered the thing inviolate, since thereby you placed it under the immediate protection of the ghost. [69] Clavel, _op. cit._ p. 68. Among the multitude of taboos which were religiously observed by the Marquesans it is perhaps possible to detect a trace of totemism. Thus the sting ray fish was taboo to the tribe of Houmis. Not only would they not eat the fish, but they fled in horror if it were even shown to them. Their horror was explained by a tradition that once on a time a great chief of the tribe had been out fishing with his people, when a gigantic sting ray upset their canoes and gobbled them all up.[70] This aversion to eating and even looking at a certain species of animal, together with a traditionary explanation based on an incident in the past history of the tribe, is very characteristic of totemism. [70] Clavel, _op. cit._ pp. 67 _sq._ § 7. _Religion and Mythology_ The consideration of taboo introduces us to the subject of religion; for, on the one hand, the foregoing evidence tends to establish a connexion between the institution of taboo and the doctrine of the human soul, and on the other hand some of our best authorities on the Marquesans have stated that the taboo was believed to be an expression of the will of the gods conveyed to the people through the mouth of a priest.[71] The definition may be accepted, if under gods we include the spirits of the dead, who were worshipped by the Marquesans and lent their sanction, as we have just seen, to the taboo. [71] Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 258; Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 48; Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 153; Clavel, _op. cit._ p. 65. The Marquesan term for a god was the usual Polynesian word _atua_ or, as it is sometimes spelled, _etua_. But their notion of divinity, as commonly happens, was vague. One of the earliest writers on their religion, the Russian navigator Krusenstern, informs us that "a confused notion of a higher being, whom they call _Etua_, does indeed exist among them, but of these there are several kinds; the spirit of a priest, of a king, or of any of his relations, being an _etua_. They likewise consider all Europeans as such; for as their ideas do not extend beyond their own horizon, they are firmly convinced that their ships come from the clouds; and they imagine that thunder is occasioned by the cannonading of vessels which float in the atmosphere, on which account they entertain a great dread of artillery."[72] The _atuas_ or deities of the Marquesans, we are told by another writer, "are numerous and vary in their character and powers. Besides those having dominion respectively, as is supposed, over the different elements and their most striking phenomena, there are _atuas_ of the mountain and of the forest, of the sea-side and of the interior, _atuas_ of peace and of war, of the song and of the dance, and of all the occupations and amusements of life. It is supposed by them that many of the departed spirits of men also become _atuas_: and thus the multiplicity of their gods is such, that almost every sound in nature, from the roaring of the tempest in the mountains and the bursting of a thunderbolt in the clouds, to the sighing of a breeze through the cocoa-nut tops and the chirping of an insect in the grass or in the thatch of their huts, is interpreted into the movements of a god."[73] [72] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 171. [73] C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 243 _sq._ Compare Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 240; Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 218 _sq._ But the Marquesans, not content with deifying some men after death, deified others in their lifetime. Amongst them there is, or rather used to be, a class of living men "who claim the title and attributes of the Deity; not through a professed inspiration or possession by a supernatural influence or power, but in their own right of godship as those who control the elements, impart fruitfulness to the productions of the earth or smite them with blasting and sterility, and who exercise the prerogatives of the Deity in scattering disease and wielding the shafts of death. They are few in number, not more than one or two at farthest on an island, and live in a seclusion and mysticism somewhat in unison with their blasphemous pretensions. There is none at present in the near vicinity of Taiohae,[74] though the former abode of such an individual is pointed out at the foot of a bold cliff, high in the mountains. The Rev. Mr. Crook gives the following account of an Atua, at the island of Tahuata, in the Windward or Marquesan group, while he resided there temporarily in 1797, as a missionary from the London Missionary Society: 'He is now of great age, and has lived from early life at Hanateiteina, in a large house surrounded by an enclosure called the A. In the house is an altar, and from the beams within and upon the trees around it are human carcasses, suspended with their heads downward and scalped. No one enters the premises but his servant, except when human sacrifices are offered. Of these, more are offered to him than to any other of their gods, and he frequently seats himself on an elevated scaffold in front of his house and calls for two or three at a time. He is invoked in all parts of the island, and offerings everywhere are made to him and sent to Hanateiteina.'"[75] Similarly a Catholic missionary tells us that in the island of Nukahiva he was personally acquainted with two living human deities, a priest and a priestess, both of whom, it was said, had the right to demand the sacrifice of human victims to themselves. He adds, however, that they did not abuse the right, and that nobody in the world appeared more affable and polite than these divinities; he even entertained hopes of one day baptizing the priest.[76] Of the reverence in which the priestly class in general was held by the people, Captain Porter remarks that "their priests are their oracles; they are considered but little inferior to their gods; to some they are greatly superior, and after their death they rank with the chief divinity."[77] [74] The principal harbour of Nukahiva. [75] C. S. Stewart, _op cit._ i. 244 _sq._ Compare Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 226, 240 _sq._ The missionary William Crook was landed in the Marquesas from the missionary ship _Duff_ in 1797. See J. Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, pp. 131 _sqq._ [76] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 45. [77] Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 114. Little seems to be recorded of the theology and mythology of the Marquesans; but among their myths was the widespread Polynesian story of the origin of fire. Of old, it was said, fire used to be jealously guarded by Mahoike in the infernal regions. Hearing of its utility, Maui descended into the nether world to steal some of the element; but he failed to elude the vigilance of its guardian and was obliged to resort to force to extort the boon from him. In the struggle which ensued Mahoike lost an arm and a leg, and to save his remaining limbs he consented to give fire to the victorious Maui. At the same time he offered to rub it on Maui's leg; but Maui was too cunning to agree to that, for he knew that in that case the fire which he took to earth would not be sacred. Finally, Mahoike rubbed the fire on Maui's head, and said to him, "Go back to the place you came from and touch with your forehead all the trees except the _keïka_: all the trees will yield you fire."[78] [78] Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 223 _sq._ For the names of the Marquesan deities, among whom Tiki appears to have been the most famous, and for some myths concerning them, see Mathias G----, _op. cit._ pp. 40 _sqq._; Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 221 _sqq._; Amable, in _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xix. (1847) pp. 23 _sq._; Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ pp. 27 _sqq._ In the Marquesas there was a class of men called _tauas_, who were supposed to possess an hereditary gift of inspiration and to become deities after their death. They could cause a god to dwell within them. Often at night they might be heard conversing with the divinity in their bodies, the deity crying out in a shrill voice, while the man answered him in his own ordinary voice. Sometimes they would make a rustling noise with their fingers in the leaves, and say that they had been miraculously taken through the thatch of the house and brought back again by the door. In their fits of inspiration they became convulsed and glared fiercely with their eyes; then, with their hands quivering violently, they would run about, while they prophesied death to their enemies in squeaky tones, or demanded human victims for the god by whom they were possessed. With the function of prophecy they combined the office of physician or rather of exorciser. For every internal disorder was believed to be inflicted by some god, who had taken possession of the sufferer's person; and the _tauas_, or high priests, as we may call them, were called in to heal the patient by ridding him of the divinity who had entered into him. This they commonly did by feeling for the mischievous deity till they found him, when they smothered him between the palms of their hands.[79] Sometimes the good physician would converse with the spirit whom he had thus caught between his hands, and would elicit from him in conversation the cause of the sickness, which usually consisted in some breach of taboo, such as a theft of bread-fruit or coco-nuts from a sacred tree. At the same time the affable spirit would reveal to the physician the penalty which the sick man must pay in order to expiate his crime and thereby ensure his recovery. A sacrifice of pigs would appear to have been usually deemed indispensable for the patient's complete convalescence; the animals were conveyed to a temple and there consumed by the priests for the benefit of the sufferer.[80] The _tauas_ or high priests were supposed to become gods after death; when one of them departed this life, it was essential for his deification that human victims should be sacrificed. The number of victims varied with the rank of the new deity; it was never less than seven, but oftener ten. Each victim was sacrificed for the sake of a particular part of the deity's body, as for his head, or his eyes, or his hair. To procure the necessary tale of victims, predatory expeditions were undertaken against the tribes in neighbouring valleys.[81] [79] C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 245 _sq._; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 227 _sq._ [80] Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 136. The writer's language seems to imply that the spirit whom the priestly physician caught in his hands and interrogated was the patient's own soul. [81] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 45; C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 247; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 228 _sq._ § 8. _The Soul, Death, and Funeral Customs_ Like most savages, the Marquesans thought that they possessed souls which could quit their bodies and wander far away in dreams. Thus a young girl once related how, the night before, she had sailed in a splendid canoe to Tiburones, a mythical paradise to the west of Nukahiva; there she had seen beautiful things such as do not exist here on earth. "There," said she, "the trees are very tall, and the people very handsome; there they sing songs to music sweeter than ours. Ah! when shall I be able to return to Tiburones?" On another occasion a woman's soul appeared to a priest to inform him that she had committed the heinous crime of eating a fowl, but that she would expiate the sacrilege by an early death. The French authorities summoned both the priest and the woman to the bar of justice. There the priest stuck to it that he had received the revelation, and the woman expressed her regret for the escapade of which her soul had been guilty without her knowledge. It was necessary to reassure her on the subject of her soul's rash act and melancholy prediction, otherwise she might have fulfilled the prophecy by refusing food and dying outright.[82] [82] Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 238 _sq._ At death the soul was supposed to depart from the body by the mouth or the nose; hence in order to delay its departure and so to prolong the life of its owner, affectionate relatives used to stop his mouth and nostrils, thus accelerating the event which they wished to retard.[83] [83] Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 245; Clavel, _op. cit._ p. 44, note^1. Compare Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 115. The Marquesans have, or used to have, a sovereign contempt for death, and do not fear its approach. When a native felt that he must die, he took it calmly and ordered his coffin, which he caused to be brought to the house while he was still in life. The coffin is hollowed out of a single log and resembles a canoe. If the sick man after all recovered, the coffin was kept in a corner of the house till it was wanted. No attempt was made to hide it or to disguise its purpose. Should a stranger ask, "What is that?" he would be told, "It is So-and-so's coffin"; though So-and-so might be present and within hearing.[84] Nevertheless, when it was clear that a serious illness was about to terminate fatally, and that all the efforts of the priestly physician or sorcerer to avert the inevitable end were fruitless, the house would be filled by wailing women, who danced naked round the mat of the dying man, cutting themselves with sharp stones or shark's teeth as in a frenzy, and uttering the most piercing lamentations. This lasted till the moment of death, when all united in a terrific and prolonged howl.[85] Similar demonstrations of sorrow were continued or renewed after the decease. If the departed was a married man and his widow survived him, she would bruise her flesh with a stone, scratch it with her nails, and cut her forehead, cheeks, and breast with shark's teeth or splinters of bamboo till the blood trickled down.[86] Captain Porter saw a woman with deep wounds still unhealed, which she had inflicted on her neck, breast, and arms for the loss of her husband, who had been devoured by a shark.[87] After the death, too, the widow would place herself in front of the corpse, and three or four girls would surround her; whereupon they would all engage in a lascivious dance, with outstretched arms, tripping in cadence to the accompaniment of a funeral hymn or lamentation, which was chanted by a choir in honour of the dead. After executing the dance, which would seem to have been intended to attract the attention of the deceased and recall his wandering spirit, they would stoop over the corpse, and cry, "He has not stirred! He stirs not. Alas! alas! he is no more." It was only after they had thus practised their seductions in vain on the dead man that the widow gave way to her frantic outburst of sorrow by mauling herself with a sort of saw.[88] This funeral dance a widow was apparently expected to renew in public at every festival for months after the death. At a festival, which he called the Feast of Calabashes, Melville saw four or five old women, stark naked, holding themselves erect and leaping stiffly into the air, with their arms pressed close to their sides, like sticks bobbing up and down in water. They preserved the utmost gravity of countenance, and continued their strange movements without a single moment's cessation, though they did not appear to attract the observation of the crowd around them. The American was told that these dancing or leaping figures "were bereaved widows, whose partners had been slain in battle many moons previously; and who, at every festival, gave public evidence in this manner of their calamities."[89] When the deceased was a chief, the lamentations and the dances went on day and night for some time. A priestess or sorceress, in festal costume, led the choir of female mourners and vaunted the exploits of the dead warrior, recalling his mighty deeds and the incidents of his life. The dances were accompanied by the music of drums. The crowd of spectators, in their best array, ate and drank to repletion, and, flushed with liquor, abandoned themselves to excesses which transformed the mortuary chamber, lit up at night by smoky torches, into a scene of low debauchery. From time to time remarks of a gross nature were addressed to the dead man on the helpless condition to which he was reduced; and now and then the women would slash their faces and breasts with splinters of bamboo in the usual fashion. The orgy went on till the provisions were completely exhausted, which might not be for a considerable time, since hecatombs of pigs were sometimes slaughtered for the purpose of celebrating the obsequies of a chief in a manner worthy of his rank.[90] [84] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ pp. 114. _sq._; Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ p. 58. Compare Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 260 _sqq._ [85] C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 263; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 249 _sq._ [86] Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 284; Clavel, _op. cit._ p. 39. [87] Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 121. [88] Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 283 _sq._ Another writer mentions that at the moment of death it was customary for a number of matrons to strip themselves naked and execute obscene dances at the door of the house, crying out at the pitch of their voices, "Father! father!" See Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 116. [89] Melville, _Typee_, pp. 180, 201. [90] Clavel, _op. cit._ pp. 43 _sq._ The soul of the dead was believed not to abandon the corpse definitely for two days after the death. In the interval it was thought to haunt the house, watching the conduct of the survivors, and ready to act as a friend or a foe according as the mourners behaved towards the deceased and his remains. Hence, to keep the ghost in good humour it was customary to offer him food, in the shape of breadfruit paste and other dainties, which were wrapped up in leaves, hung on the edge of the coffin, and frequently renewed.[91] On the third night after the death a priest, stepping out on the terrace in front of the house, implored the wandering soul of the deceased to depart; and by way of enforcing the request a band of men, armed with spears and other lethal weapons, went about in the outer darkness, beating the bushes and stabbing the thatched roofs of the houses in order to drive the lingering ghost away. If, roused by the clamour, the dogs began to bark, the priest would say, "The soul is departing."[92] [91] Clavel, _op. cit._ p. 46. [92] Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 284 _sq._ From the moment of death till the priests had completed the litany or songs chanted on such occasions, all the assembled people fasted, no one touched the provisions collected for the funeral feast, and no fire might be kindled within sight of the house.[93] The litany consisted in the mumbling of a long speech in an unintelligible language accompanied by the constant beating of drums.[94] Among the victuals provided for the funeral feast special importance appears to have been attached to the head of a pig, which was cut off and attached to the bier.[95] We are told that the professed intention was thereby "to propitiate the gods, and obtain for the deceased a safe and peaceable passage through the lower regions." But, in point of fact the priest took possession of the pig's head and devoured it secretly, leaving only a small piece of it under a stone.[96] [93] C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 265; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 251. [94] Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 133. [95] Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 285. [96] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 173. Compare Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 133; C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 265; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 251. When death had taken place, the body was washed, neatly dressed in garments of new cloth, and laid on a bier constructed of bamboos or of spears and other warlike weapons, fastened together with wicker-work and spread with mats.[97] If the deceased was a chief and a warrior, his body would be arrayed in his finest ornaments, and his club, plumed helmet, necklaces of whale's teeth, and skulls of the enemies he had killed, would be laid beside him. Thus exposed, the corpse might be kept for weeks in the house, where, in spite of the stench, the family continued to eat, drink, and sleep beside it. Sometimes, however, and perhaps more usually, the body was transferred to a small house or shed adjoining the dwelling of the deceased, where it received the necessary attentions. Finally, it was removed to a little hut or shed, where the bier was supported on posts under a thatched roof. To be buried in the earth was a mark of ignominy reserved at most for a young girl of the lowest rank who had died childless. Beside the corpse food was hung for the use of the ghost, it might be fish, roast pork, or coco-nuts, and there it was allowed to remain till it rotted and fell to the ground; none but children would be greedy or impious enough to partake of the sacred victuals, and that only in the greatest secrecy. Often the house in which the death had taken place was tabooed and abandoned after the remains had been deposited in their last home.[98] [97] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 172 _sq._; Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 133; Lisiansky, _op. cit._ p. 81; C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 264. [98] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ pp. 116 _sq._ As to the decoration of the corpse, see Clavel, _op. cit._ pp. 43 _sq._ As to the temporary house or shed in which the body was kept for some time after death, compare C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 264, 266; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 250. As for the custom of keeping the body for months in the ordinary house, surrounded by the family, see Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 286. As to the practice of hanging food beside the body, even after its removal to its last place of rest, see J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage au Pole Sud et dans l'Océanie, Histoire du Voyage_, iv. (Paris, 1842), p. 33; Clavel, _op. cit._ p. 46. The bodies of the dead were regularly subjected to a kind of embalmment, which had the effect of preserving them for a longer or shorter time. As soon as decomposition appeared imminent, the corpse was stripped of its ornaments and placed in the usual canoe-shaped coffin, the trunk being propped up so as to facilitate the work of the embalmers. The task of embalming was entrusted to women, relations of the deceased, who rubbed the body daily with coco-nut oil and perfumes. They had no intercourse with the rest of the family, and took their meals apart without ever washing their hands. According to one account, the anointment was performed by night, while during the day the body was exposed to the sun on the stone platform of the house. The products of decomposition were carefully received in vessels and carried away to the place of sepulture; and the corpse was gradually eviscerated through the rectum. The friction was continued until the desiccated body was reduced to the state of a mummy, though sometimes, in spite of all precautions, it crumbled into dust. If the operation was successful, the mummy, wrapt in many bandages, was covered by a second canoe attached to the first, and was then placed on a scaffold in a _morai_ or sanctuary specially consecrated to it. But sometimes the mummy was fastened up to the roof or wall of the house wherein the person had died; and it might be kept there even for years. When it was deposited in a _morai_, no woman was allowed to approach it under pain of death.[99] Sometimes the head was detached from the body and kept in the house, where it was treated with respect. Sometimes it was carried away and hidden in some almost inaccessible cave in the mountains or beside the sea. This was done as a precaution to save the skulls from falling into the hands of enemies, who were eager to bear them off as trophies.[100] [99] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 173; Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 133 _sq._; Melville, _Typee_, p. 206; Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 286 _sq._; Clavel, _op. cit._ pp. 44 _sq._ In a house in Nukahiva the missionary Stewart saw a canoe-shaped coffin containing the remains of a man who had died many years before. It was raised on a bier of framework, at a height of two or three feet above the ground. Stewart adds, "The dead bodies of all persons of high distinction are preserved in their houses for a long period in this way." See C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 259. [100] Clavel, _op. cit._ pp. 45 _sq._; Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 233 _sq._ Each family had its own _morai_ or burial-place, where the mouldering bones or mummies were finally deposited and left to decay.[101] Such family cemeteries were scattered about the valleys; the choice of a site seems to have been determined by no special rule.[102] The _morai_ or burial-place of ordinary people was near their houses, and not far from it was a taboo-house, where the men feasted on the flesh of pigs.[103] But the cemeteries of chiefs were situated in the interior of the valleys, often so deeply imbedded in dense foliage that it was not easy to find them without the guidance of a native.[104] Similarly we are told that the cemeteries (_morais_) of priests lay quite apart from all dwellings.[105] [101] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 127, 173; Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 115, 134. Other writers on the Marquesas in like manner speak of a _morai_ simply as a place of burial. See Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 114 ("the gods at the burying-place, or morai, for so it is called by them"); Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 52 ("un _morai_ (sépulchre) en ruine"); Melville, _Typee_, p. 168 ("the 'morais' or burying-grounds"). So, too, the term was understood by the French navigator, J. Dumont d'Urville. See his _Voyage au Pole Sud, Histoire du Voyage_, iv. (Paris, 1842), pp. 27, 33. [102] Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 253. [103] Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 115. According to Krusenstern (_op. cit._ i. 127), the _morais_ in general "lie a good way inland upon hills." [104] F. D. Bennett, _Narrative of a Whaling Voyage_, i. 329. [105] Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 115. The ordinary form of a Marquesan _morai_ or burial-place seems to have been a thatched shed erected on a square or oblong platform of stones, exactly resembling the stone platforms on which the Marquesan houses were regularly built. Thus Vincendon-Dumoulin and Desgraz say that "the _morais_, funeral monuments where the bodies are deposited, are erected on a stone platform, the base of all Nukahivan edifices."[106] Again, describing what he calls "a picturesque _morai_," Radiguet observes, "Four posts, erected on a platform, supported a small plank covered with a roof of leaves. Under this roof could be seen the remains of a skeleton, perhaps that of the daughter-in-law of the neighbouring house.... At the two ends of the platform two upright stones, about ten feet high, and resembling the Breton _menhirs_, formed an exceptional ornament to this _morai_, which the bushes were in course of invading and the storms of demolishing."[107] Again, Stewart describes as follows what he calls "a depository of the dead": "It stands in the midst of a beautiful clump of trees, and consists of a platform of heavy stone work, twenty feet or more square and four or five high, surmounted in the centre by eight or ten posts arranged in the shape of a grave, and supporting at a height of six or seven feet a long and narrow roof of thatch. Close beneath this was the body enclosed in a coffin."[108] Again, in the island of Tahuata (Santa Christina), Bennett describes a chief's burial-place as follows: "A low but extensive stone platform, beneath the shade of a venerable _fau_-tree, marks the more consecrated ground; and on this is erected a wooden hut, containing an elevated trough, shaped as a canoe, and holding the perfect skeleton of the late chief. In front of the sepulchre are two hideous wooden idols, and several bundles of coco-nut leaves."[109] The shed, which was erected on the stone platform, and under which the body rested on a bier, seems to have consisted for the most part simply of a thatched roof supported on wooden posts.[110] Sometimes, however, instead of a simple shed, open on all sides, a small house resembling the ordinary houses of the natives appears to have been erected for the reception of the corpse or mummy. Thus in the island of Tahuata (Santa Christina) Bennett describes a burial-place as follows: "The most picturesque mausoleum we noticed was that which contained the corpse of one of Eutiti's children. It was placed on the summit of an isolated hill, rising from the bosom of a well-wooded savannah, and was covered entirely with the leaves of the fan-palm. The posterior, or tallest wall, was twelve feet high, the anterior was low, closed by a mat, and decorated with six wooden pillars, covered with stained cinnet and white cloth. Strips of tapa [bark-cloth], fixed to a wand, fluttered on the roof, to denote that the spot was tabooed; and for the same purpose, a row of globular stones, each the size of a football, and whitened with coral lime, occupied the top of a low but broad stone wall which encircled the building. The interior contained nothing but the bier on which the corpse was laid."[111] From the sketch which Bennett gives of this particular mausoleum, as he calls it, we gather that the sepulchral hut containing the body was not raised on a stone platform, but built on the flat. [106] Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 253. [107] Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 92. One of these stones was said to have been erected by the French navigator, Captain Marchand, and to have formerly borne an inscription recording his taking possession of the island. Hence it would be unsafe to draw any conclusion from the supposed antiquity of these two tall upright stones. [108] C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ i. 260. [109] F. D. Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 329. [110] Compare J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage au Pole Sud, Histoire du Voyage_, iv. 33, "Sous un hangar se trouvent quelques supports formant, à 2 mètres au-dessus du sol, une estrade sur laquelle est déposé le _toui-papao_. C'est le nom que les naturels donnent au cadavre enveloppé d'herbes et de _tapa_ (étoffes de papyrus faites dans le pays). On n'aperçoit du corps ainsi habillé que les extremités des doigts des pièds et des mains." [111] F. D. Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 331. There seems to be no evidence that the stone platforms on which the sepulchral sheds or huts of the Marquesans were erected ever took the shape of stepped or terraced pyramids like the massive stone pyramids of Tahiti and Tonga. So far as the mortuary platforms of the Marquesans are described, they appear to have been quadrangular piles of stone, with upright sides, not stepped or terraced. Megalithic monuments in the form of stepped or terraced pyramids seem to have been very rare in the Marquesas Islands; indeed, it is doubtful whether they existed at all. With regard to the island of Tahuata (Santa Christina), it is positively affirmed by Bennett that none of the valleys contain "any _morais_ or other buildings devoted to religious purposes, nor any public idols";[112] and by _morais_ he probably means stepped pyramids like those of Tahiti and Tonga. However, in the valley of Taipii (Typee), in Nukahiva, a megalithic monument, built in terraces, was seen by Melville in 1842. He describes it as follows: [112] F. D. Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 322. "One day in returning from this spring by a circuitous path, I came upon a scene which reminded me of Stonehenge and the architectural labours of the Druids. At the base of one of the mountains, and surrounded on all sides by dense groves, a series of vast terraces of stone rises, step by step, for a considerable distance up the hillside. These terraces cannot be less than one hundred yards in length and twenty in width. Their magnitude, however, is less striking than the immense size of the blocks composing them. Some of the stones, of an oblong shape, are from ten to fifteen feet in length, and five or six feet thick. Their sides are quite smooth, but though square, and of pretty regular formation, they bear no mark of the chisel. They are laid together without cement, and here and there show gaps between. The topmost terrace and the lower one are somewhat peculiar in their construction. They have both a quadrangular depression in the centre, leaving the rest of the terrace elevated several feet above it. In the intervals of the stones immense trees have taken root, and their broad boughs, stretching far over and interlacing together, support a canopy almost impenetrable to the sun. Overgrowing the greater part of them, and climbing from one to another, is a wilderness of vines, in whose sinewy embrace many of the stones lie half-hidden, while in some places a thick growth of bushes entirely covers them. There is a wild pathway which obliquely crosses two of these terraces, and so profound is the shade, so dense the vegetation, that a stranger to the place might pass along it without being aware of their existence. "These structures bear every indication of a very high antiquity, and Kory-Kory, who was my authority in all matters of scientific research, gave me to understand that they were coeval with the creation of the world; that the great gods themselves were the builders; and that they would endure until time shall be no more. Kory-Kory's prompt explanation, and his attributing the work to a divine origin, at once convinced me that neither he nor the rest of his countrymen knew anything about them."[113] Melville was accordingly disposed to attribute the erection of these remarkable terraces to an extinct and forgotten race.[114] The hypothesis is all the more probable because the monument appears to have been entirely abandoned and unused by the natives during the time when they have been known to Europeans. But it is doubtful whether the edifice was a pyramid; all that Melville's somewhat vague description implies is that it consisted of a series of terraces built one above the other on the hillside. [113] Melville, _Typee_, pp. 166 _sq._ [114] Melville, _Typee_, p. 167. According to some accounts the remains of the dead, instead of being deposited in sheds or huts erected on stone platforms, were buried in the platforms themselves. Thus, according to William Crook, the first missionary to the Marquesans, "they have a _morai_ in each district, where the dead are buried beneath a pavement of large stones."[115] Similarly, in Nukahiva two or three large quadrangular platforms (_pi-pis_), heavily flagged, enclosed with regular stone walls and almost hidden by the interlacing branches of enormous trees, were pointed out as burial-places to Melville, and he was told that the bodies "were deposited in rude vaults beneath the flagging, and were suffered to remain there without being disinterred. Although nothing could be more strange and gloomy than the aspect of these places, where the lofty trees threw their dark shadows over rude blocks of stone, a stranger looking at them would have discerned none of the ordinary evidences of a place of sepulture."[116] To the same effect, perhaps, Porter observes that, "when the flesh is mouldered from the bones, they are, as I have been informed, carefully cleansed: some are kept for relics, and some are deposited in the _morais_."[117] Again, Krusenstern says that twelve months after the death "the corpse is broken into pieces, and the bones are packed in a small box made of the wood of the bread-fruit tree, and carried to the _morai_ or burial place, where no woman is allowed to approach under pain of death."[118] However, these statements do not necessarily imply that the bones were buried under the stones of the platform at the _morai_. [115] Quoted by J. Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_, p. 144. [116] Melville, _Typee_, p. 205. [117] Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 123. [118] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 173. But whether deposited on biers or buried under the pavement, the remains of the dead were liable to be carried off in time of war by foes, who regarded such an exploit as a great deed of heroism. Hence when an invasion of the enemy in force was expected, the custom was to remove the bodies from the _morai_ and bury them elsewhere.[119] The heads of enemies killed in battle were invariably kept and hung up as trophies of victory in the house of the conqueror. They seem to have been smoked in order to preserve them better.[120] It is said that they were used as cups to drink kava out of.[121] [119] Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 134. [120] Melville, _Typee_, p. 206. [121] Clavel, _op. cit._ p. 47. After ten months or a year the obsequies were concluded by another funeral feast, which might last from eight to thirty days according to the rank of the deceased and the opulence of his family. At the same time offerings of food were presented afresh at the tomb, and the decorations were renewed, consisting of branches and leaves and strips of white bark-cloth, which waved like flags at the end of little white wands. At these anniversary feasts, to which, if the deceased was a man of quality, only chiefs were in many cases admitted, great quantities of pigs were consumed.[122] The intention of the feast is said to have been to thank the gods for having permitted the dead person to arrive safely in the other world.[123] [122] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ pp. 117 _sq._ [123] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 173. § 9. _Fate of the Soul after Death_ The souls of the dead were supposed to depart either to an upper or to a lower world, either to heaven or to a subterranean region called Havaiki. The particular destination of a soul after death was determined, not by moral considerations, not by the virtue or vice of the deceased, but by the rank he had occupied in this life: people of quality went to the upper world, and common people went to the lower, to Havaiki.[124] According to a more precise account, heaven was inhabited by deities of the highest order, by women who had died in childbed, by warriors who had fallen on the field of battle, by suicides, and especially by the aristocratic class of the chiefs. This celestial region was supposed to be a happy land, abounding in bread-fruit paste (_popoi_), pork, and fish, and offering the companionship of the most beautiful women imaginable. There the bread-fruit trees dropped their ripe fruit every moment to the ground, and the supply of coco-nuts and bananas never failed. There the souls reposed on mats much finer than those of Nukahiva; and every day they bathed in rivers of coco-nut oil. In that happy land there were plenty of plumes and feathers, and boars'-tusks, and sperm-whale teeth far better than even white men can boast of. The nether world, on the other hand, was peopled with deities of the second class and by ordinary human beings, who had no pretensions to gentility. But it was not a place of misery much less of punishment or torture; on the contrary, we are told that both the upper and the lower regions were happier than the earth which the living inhabit.[125] The approach to the lower world, curiously enough, was by sea. The soul sailed away in a coffin shaped like a canoe (_pahaa_). When it came near the channel which divides the island Tahuata from the island Hivaoa, it was met by two deities or two opposing influences, one of which tried to push the soul into a narrow strait between Tahuata and a certain rock in the sea, while the other deity or influence endeavoured to contrive that the soul should keep the broad channel between the rock and Hivaoa. The souls that were thrust into the narrow strait were killed; whereas such as kept the open channel were conducted safe by a merciful god to their destination.[126] [124] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 44. [125] Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 220; Melville, _Typee_, p. 185. Compare Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 40. [126] Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 220 _sq._ Sometimes the land of the dead was identified with a happy island or islands called Tiburones lying somewhere in the ocean to the west of Nukahiva. Not uncommonly natives of the Marquesas sailed away in great double canoes to seek and find these happy isles, but were never heard of again. On one occasion, for example, forty men in the island of Ua-pu, who had revolted against their chief and been defeated, embarked secretly by night and put to sea, hoping to discover the Fortunate Islands, where they would be beyond the reach of their offended lord, and where they might pass the remainder of their days in liberty and bliss. What became of them is unknown, for they were seen and heard of no more in their native island.[127] [127] Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 51 _sq._; Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 238 note, 239, 269, 270; Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 238 _sq._; Mathias G----, _op. cit._ pp. 234 _sq._ But even the souls that went to heaven were supposed to stand in need of a canoe in order to reach the place of bliss. On this point Porter writes: "I endeavoured to ascertain whether they had an idea of a future state of rewards and punishments, and the nature of their heaven. As respects the latter article, they believed it to be an island, somewhere in the sky, abounding with everything desirable; that those killed in war and carried off by their friends, go there, provided they are furnished with a canoe and provisions; but that those who are carried off by the enemy, never reach it, unless a sufficient number of the enemy can be obtained to paddle his canoe there. For this reason they were so anxious to procure a crew for their priest, who was killed and carried off by the Happahs. They have neither rewards nor punishments in this world, and I could not learn that they expected any in the next."[128] [128] Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 113. In the valley of Taipii (Typee), in the island of Nukahiva, Captain Porter visited "the chief place of religious ceremony." It was a platform of the usual sort situated in a fine grove at the foot of a steep mountain. On the platform was an idol of hard stone, rudely representing a deity in human shape of about life size and in a squatting posture. Arranged on either side of this idol, as well as in front and rear, were several other images of about the same size and of the same model, but better carved out of bread-fruit wood. The place was decorated with streamers of white cloth. A few paces from the grave were four fine war canoes, furnished with outriggers, and decorated with human hair, coral shells, and many white streamers. In the stern of each canoe was the effigy of a man with a paddle, steering, in full dress, decked with plumes, ear-rings, and all the usual ornaments. On enquiring of the natives, Captain Porter was informed that the dignified effigy seated in the stern of the most splendid canoe represented a priest who had been killed not long before by their enemies the Happahs. In the bottom of the priest's canoe Captain Porter found the putrefying bodies of two Taipiis (Typees) whom he and his men had recently killed in battle; and lying about the canoe he saw many other human carcasses, with the flesh still on them. The other canoes, he was told, belonged to different warriors who had been killed or had died not long since. "I asked them," continues Captain Porter, "why they had placed their effigies in the canoes, and also why they put the bodies of the dead Typees in that of the priest? They told me (as Wilson interpreted) that they were going to heaven, and that it was impossible to get there without canoes. The canoe of the priest being large, he was unable to manage it himself, nor was it right that he should, he being now a god. They had, therefore, placed in it the bodies of the Happas and Typees, which had been killed since his death, to paddle him to the place of his destination; but he had not been able yet to start, for the want of a full crew, as it would require ten to paddle her, and as yet they had only procured eight. They told me also that the taboo, laid in consequence of his death, would continue until he had started on his voyage, which he would not be able to do until they had killed two more of their enemies, and by this means completed the crew. I inquired if he took any sea stock with him. They told me he did, and pointing to some red hogs in an enclosure, said that they were intended for him, as well as a quantity of bread-fruit, coco-nuts, etc., which would be collected from the trees in the grove. I inquired if he had far to go; they replied, no: and pointing to a small square stone enclosure, informed me that was their heaven, that he was to go there. This place was tabooed, they told me, for every one except their priests."[129] [129] Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 109-111. A similar, or the same, effigy of a dead chief seated in his canoe was seen by Melville in the same valley (_Typee_, pp. 183 _sq._). He says that "the canoe was about seven feet in length; of a rich, dark-coloured wood, handsomely carved, and adorned in many places with variegated bindings of stained sinnate [cinnet], into which were ingeniously wrought a number of sparkling sea-shells, and a belt of the same shells ran all round it. The body of the figure--of whatever material it might have been made--was effectually concealed in a heavy robe of brown tappa [bark-cloth], revealing only the hands and head; the latter skilfully carved in wood, and surmounted by a superb arch of plumes." But it was deemed necessary to provide a dead priest or chief with human victims for other purposes than to paddle his canoe to heaven. When a great chief died, two commoners were sometimes sacrificed for the purpose of escorting him to the abode of bliss; one of them carried the chief's girdle, and the other bore the head of the pig that had been slaughtered for the funeral feast. The head was intended as a present to the warden of the infernal regions, who, if he did not get this perquisite, would revile and stone the ghost, and shut the door in his face.[130] The number of human victims sacrificed at the death of a priest varied with the respect and fear which he had inspired in his lifetime;[131] a common number seems to have been three.[132] [130] Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 163. [131] Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ p. 228. [132] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i, 170. The runaway English sailor, Roberts, who had long resided in the islands, assured the Russian explorer Lisiansky "that, on the death of a priest, three men must be sacrificed; two of whom are hung up in the burying-ground, while the third is cut to pieces, and eaten by visitors; all but the head, which is placed upon one of the idols. When the flesh of the first two are wasted away, the bones that remain are burnt. The custom of the country requires, that the men destined for sacrifice should belong to some neighbouring nation, and accordingly they are generally stolen. This occasions a war of six, and sometimes of twelve, months: its duration, however, depends upon the nearest relation of the deceased priest; who, as soon as he is acquainted with his death, retires to a place of taboo; and till he chooses to come out, the blood of the two parties does not cease to flow. During his retirement, he is furnished with everything he may require, human flesh not excepted."[133] [133] U. Lisiansky, _Voyage round the World_, pp. 81 _sq._ A curious mode of preparing a dead man to appear to advantage before the gods in the other world was to flay his corpse. A Catholic missionary tells us that when a dead body began to swell up, in consequence of internal putrefaction, it was customary to flay it and to preserve the skin as a precious relic in the family treasury, where the eye of a profane stranger could never fall on it.[134] The reason for observing the custom is not mentioned by this missionary, but it is explained by another missionary, Father Amable. It happened that the king or head chief of the island of Tahuata died, and that his body was brought to the house of the queen on the bay where Father Amable resided. For thirty days she kept the corpse in the house and occupied herself with skinning it with her fingers. Questioned by the missionary as to her reasons for this strange procedure, she answered that her husband's body must be without spot or stain, in order that the great goddess Upu might give him leave to dwell in her land and to bathe in her lake. For this deity rules over a sort of submarine Eden, planted with all sorts of excellent fruits and beautified by the calm waters of an azure lake. The natives of Tahuata believe that the souls of all who die in the archipelago assemble on the top of a high mountain called Kiukiu. When a great multitude of souls is there gathered together, the sea opens and the souls fall plump down into the paradise of the goddess Upu. However, not all of them are permitted to enter the happy land and to enjoy the pleasures which it offers. Only such are admitted as have owned in their lifetime many servants and many pigs and have not been wicked. Further, none may enter in who bear on their body any marks of tattooing.[135] Hence the reason for flaying dead bodies seems to have been to efface, by removing the skin, the tattooed marks which would have acted as a fatal bar to the entrance of the ghost into paradise. As to the souls of slaves and the poor, in the opinion of the natives of Tahuata they go to a gloomy land, which is never illumined by the sun, and where there is nothing but muddy water to drink.[136] Nevertheless the people would seem to have believed that the souls of the dead lingered for a time beside their mouldering bodies before they took their departure for the far country. In this belief they sacrificed to them pigs, some baked, and some alive. The baked pigs they put in a hollow log and hung from the roof of the hut, and they said that a god named Mapuhanui, who in the beginning had bestowed pigs on men, used to come and feast on the carcasses in company with the ghost. But when they offered live pigs, they tethered the animals to the hut in which the dead body lay, and they fed them till the flesh dropped from the skeleton; after that they allowed the pigs to die of hunger.[137] Perhaps, like some other peoples, they imagined that the ghost hovered about his remains so long as the flesh adhered to the bones, but that when even that faint semblance of life had vanished he went away and had no further occasion for pigs, whether alive or dead. [134] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 116. [135] Lettre du R. P. Amable, in _Annales de la Propagation de la Foi_, xix. (1847) pp. 22 _sq._, 24. [136] Lettre du R. P. Amable, _op. cit._ p. 24. [137] Lettre du R. P. Amable, _op. cit._ pp. 23 _sq._ However, the souls of the dead were not supposed to be permanently confined to the other world. After a long sojourn in it, all alike, whatever the region they inhabited in their disembodied state, could return to earth and be born again.[138] Indeed, according to the natives of Nukahiva, the interval between death and reincarnation was not unduly long; for "every one here is persuaded, that the soul of a grandfather is transmitted by Nature into the body of his grandchildren; and that, if an unfruitful wife were to place herself under the corpse of her deceased grandfather, she would be sure to become pregnant."[139] Occasionally the soul of a dead person might even inhabit the body of an animal. Once when a whale was stranded on one of the islands, a priestess declared that it was the soul of a certain priest, which would wander until eight human victims were sacrificed to the gods. In vain her son would have substituted turtles for human beings; the people would not hear of it; the prescribed victims were captured from a neighbouring tribe and put to death in order to lay the ghost of the whale, or rather of the priest who had animated the whale's body.[140] [138] Lettre du R. P. Amable, _op. cit._ p. 24. [139] Lisiansky, _op. cit._ p. 89. [140] Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 161 _sq._ But the souls of the dead were also believed to return from the spirit land for other purposes than to be born again in the flesh. They might come as ghosts to haunt and torment the living, and as such they were greatly dreaded by the people.[141] The first watch of the night was the hour when they were supposed especially to come on errands of mischief.[142] Particularly dreaded were the ghosts of high priests and great chiefs, who retained in their spiritual form the passions and the rancours which they had nursed in life, and who returned in ghostly shape to earth to meddle with the affairs of the living, and to punish even trivial offences. To guard against these dangerous intrusions, the intervention of a priest or priestess was deemed indispensable; it was his or her business to counteract a spell cast on a family, or to heal a sickness inflicted on an individual by one of these ghostly vagrants.[143] Such was the fear of wandering ghosts that no Marquesan would dare to stir a step abroad at night without the light of a torch; for well he knew that evil spirits lurked beside the path to knock down and throttle any rash wayfarer who should dare to leave his footsteps unillumined.[144] Indeed, we are told that, of all beliefs in the minds of the natives, the belief in ghosts was the most deeply rooted. It is impossible to express the dread which they felt of spectres and apparitions; nobody was exempt from it. But it was only at night that these phantoms were to be feared. Though they remained invisible, they revealed themselves to the terror-stricken wanderer by sound and touch; the least noise heard in the darkness disclosed their presence; the least contact with them was a sentence of death, sudden or slow, but sure. Hence, if a man was obliged to go out after sunset, he would always take somebody with him to bear him company, even if he had to wake a comrade for the purpose. Among the women the fear of ghosts was yet greater, many of them would not stir abroad on a moonless night even in company. In passing by a burial-ground or a solitary tomb, people used to throw food towards it for the purpose of appeasing the ghost, who otherwise would have attacked them.[145] [141] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 40. [142] Mathias G----, _op. cit._ p. 210. [143] Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 224 _sq._ [144] Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 227, 240. [145] Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ pp. 31 _sq._ This deep-seated fear of the dead has survived the conversion, real or nominal, of the Marquesans to Christianity. No native would even now venture into a cave where the remains of the dead have been deposited, not though the greatest treasures were to be found there, for such spots are believed to be constantly haunted by the ghosts of the departed. Nobody, it is said, would live in a house in which somebody has died; every such dwelling is immediately burnt down. Hence, when a person is grievously sick, a little primitive hut is erected beside the house, and he is carried out to die in it, and when he is dead, the hut is in like manner destroyed with fire.[146] A woman will sometimes commit suicide in order that her ghost may haunt and torment her unfaithful husband.[147] [146] Baessler, _op. cit._ p. 234. [147] Baessler, _op. cit._ pp. 193 _sq._ On the other hand, ghosts in the olden time had also their utility, for they could be summoned up by a priest or priestess to give information on various subjects, such as the issue of an illness. On these occasions the wizard would hold a conversation with the spirit, whose voice could be heard by the listeners, though his or her shape, as usual, was invisible in the darkness. Sceptics thought that such communications were made by means of ventriloquism, and indeed a priestess, who had professed to evoke the soul of a dead chieftainess, solemnly maintained that she could make the voice of anybody, whether dead or alive, to speak from her stomach.[148] [148] Radiguet, _op. cit._ pp. 227-238. In such beliefs and customs are contained as in germ the whole theory and practice of the worship of the dead. NOTE.--We possess no thorough account of the native Marquesan society and religion as these existed before they were transformed by European influence. Some of the writers who have described the islanders and their customs spent only a few days or at most a few weeks among them. Captain Cook was at the Marquesas only five days, from the 6th to the 11th of April 1774.[149] The French explorer Marchand spent eight days in the islands from the 13th to the 21st of June 1791.[150] The Russian explorers Krusenstern and Lisiansky were with their two ships, the _Nadeshda_ and _Neva_, at Nukahiva for ten days, from the 7th to the 17th of May 1804; along with them was the naturalist Langsdorff, who wrote an independent account of the voyage.[151] But though their stay was short, they had the advantage of meeting with two Europeans, an Englishman named E. Roberts, and a Frenchman named Jean (or Joseph) Baptiste Cabri, who had lived long in the islands and spoke the native language. These men acted as interpreters to the Russians and supplied them with most of the information which they give in their books concerning the customs and beliefs of the Marquesans. Roberts told them that he had been seven years in Nukahiva and two years previously in Santa Christina (Tau-ata); that he had been put ashore on the latter island out of an English merchant ship, the crew of which had mutinied against their captain and could not prevail upon him to join their party; and that in Nukahiva he had lately married a relation of the king's, by which he acquired great consideration, so that it would be easy for him to be of assistance to them. At the same time he earnestly warned them against the Frenchman, who had also resided for some years in Nukahiva, but whose character he painted in very dark colours. The two Russian captains, Krusenstern and Lisiansky, accordingly put their trust in Roberts and drew most of their information concerning the natives from him. On the other hand their naturalist, Langsdorff, made most use of the Frenchman. He admitted, indeed, that the Englishman was a man of better character, greater natural intelligence, and much higher education; but on the other hand he tells us that the Frenchman had been longer in the island and possessed a more thorough mastery of the language and a greater intimacy with the natives, among whom he had lived as a savage among savages so long that he had almost forgotten his own native tongue. But Langsdorff took care to question both these men and only accepted as true statements in which they agreed with each other, and to this agreement he naturally attached the greater weight because his two informants were bitterly hostile to each other and therefore were unlikely to unite in deceiving him.[152] On the whole, then, the account which Langsdorff gives of Marquesan society and religion is perhaps more trustworthy as well as fuller than that of his two compatriots and companions, Krusenstern and Lisiansky. [149] J. Cook, _Voyages_, iii. 274-281; compare G. Forster, _Voyage round the World_ (London, 1777), ii. 5 _sqq._ [150] C. P. Claret Fleurieu, _Voyage round the World performed during the years 1790, 1791, and 1792 by Étienne Marchand_ (London, 1801), i. 31, 51. Marchand's brief account is supplemented from other sources by his editor Fleurieu (_op. cit._ i. 55 _sqq._). [151] A. J. von Krusenstern, _Voyage round the World in the years 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1806_ (London, 1813), i. 108 _sq._, 133 _sqq._; U. Lisiansky, _Voyage round the World_ (London, 1814), pp. 62, 95; G. H. von Langsdorff, _Bemerkungen auf einer Reise um die Welt in den Jahren 1803 bis 1807_ (Frankfurt am Main, 1812), i. 75, 161. [152] Krusenstern, _op. cit._ i. 110-112; Lisiansky, _op. cit._ p. 79; Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 77, 83-85. As to the subsequent history of Roberts and Cabri, see Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _Iles Marquises ou Nouka-hiva_ (Paris, 1843), pp. 356-359. Captain David Porter of the United States Navy was with his ship the _Essex_ at Nukahiva from October 24th till December 9th, 1813.[153] A great part of his time was spent on shore and in close contact with the natives, and though he did not learn the language, he was able to employ as an interpreter an Englishman named Wilson, who had lived for many years in the islands, spoke the language of the natives with the same facility as his own, and had become a Marquesan in every respect except in colour. He proved indispensable to the American as an organ of communication with the people; and much of the information which Porter gives concerning the customs of the Marquesans was derived by him from this man.[154] [153] Captain David Porter, _Journal of a Cruise made to the Pacific Ocean in the United States frigate Essex in the years 1812, 1813, and 1814_, Second Edition (New York, 1822), ii. 5, 141. [154] D. Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 17 _sq._ The American naval chaplain, the Rev. C. S. Stewart, paid about a fortnight's visit to Nukahiva, from July 27th to August 13th, 1829, while his ship, the _Vincennes_, was anchored at the island. But he received much information from the Rev. W. P. Crook, who spent nearly two years (1797 and 1798) in the Marquesas, having been the first missionary landed in the islands by the missionary ship _Duff_. During his residence in the islands Mr. Crook kept a journal, which he allowed Mr. Stewart to consult. The contents of the journal corroborated Mr. Stewart's own observations as to the inhabitants, and the account which he gives of the religion of the islanders is based mainly on the information derived from Mr. Crook[155] and is therefore valuable; for at the time when Mr. Crook landed in the Marquesas the customs and beliefs of the islanders were still practically unaffected by contact with Europeans. [155] C. S. Stewart, _Visit to the South Seas_ (London, 1832), i. pp. x _sq._, 193, 331. The writer speaks (p. 331) of his stay of "a fortnight at the Washington Islands." Mr. Crook first landed in the island of Santa Christina (Tau-ata) on June 6th, 1797. See James Wilson, _Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean_ (London, 1799), pp. 129 _sqq._ As to his subsequent history in the islands, see Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _Iles Marquises ou Nouka-hiva_, pp. 35-40. The surgeon F. D. Bennett, on a whaling voyage spent a few days in Santa Christina (Tau-ata), from February 28th to March 4th, 1835; and his descriptions of what he saw are good so far as they go; but naturally he could collect but little accurate information as to the habits and ideas of the people in so short a time.[156] [156] F. D. Bennett, _Narrative of a Whaling Voyage round the Globe from the year 1833 to 1836_ (London, 1840), i 296, 346. One of the early Catholic missionaries to the Marquesas, Father Mathias G----, spent two years in the islands and has given us, in a series of letters, an account of the native customs and beliefs, which, though far from complete or systematic, is based on personal observation and is among the best that we possess.[157] [157] Le P. Mathias G----, _Lettres sur les Iles Marquises_ (Paris, 1843). The writer is not explicit as to the dates of his residence in the Marquesas; but he tells us that he spent two years in habitual intercourse with the natives (p. 49), and from other allusions which he makes in his narrative (pp. 28 _sq._) it would seem that the years were 1839 and 1840. The first Catholic missionaries landed in 1838 (_ib._ p. 22), and others in 1839 (_ib._ pp. 23 _sq._). Among the latter were Fathers Garcia and Guilmard (_ib._ p. 24). Father G----may have been one of them. Hermann Melville lived among the Taipiis (Typees) in Nukahiva for more than four months,[158] and wrote a lively narrative of his experiences. His personal observations are valuable, but as he did not master the native language, he was not able to throw much light on the inner life of the people, and in particular on their religious ideas. [158] H. Melville, _Typee_ (London, _Everyman's Library_), p. 254. On the 1st of May, 1842, the Marquesas Islands were taken possession of for France by the French Admiral, Du Petit-Thouars;[159] and next year, to satisfy the interest of the French public in their new possession, a comprehensive work on the islands and their inhabitants was published by MM. Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz.[160] The authors had visited the islands with the expedition of the French navigator, J. Dumont d'Urville, in his ships the _Astrolabe_ and the _Zélée_. But as the expedition stayed only about a week at Nukahiva, from August 26th to September 3rd, 1838,[161] the writers had little opportunity of making personal observations. Their work is mainly a careful compilation from earlier sources, and as such it is a useful and trustworthy summary of what was known about the archipelago and its inhabitants down to the date of publication. [159] Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _op. cit._ pp. 119 _sqq._ [160] Vincendon-Dumoulin et C. Desgraz, _Iles Marquises ou Nouka-hiva_ (Paris, 1843). [161] J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage au Pole Sud et dans l'Océanie, Histoire du Voyage_, iv. (Paris, 1842), pp. 5, 49. Max Radiguet, one of the members of the expedition to the Marquesas under Admiral Du Petit-Thouars, passed a considerable time in the islands and wrote a graphic account of his experiences, which contains some valuable information as to the natives, their customs, religion, and mythology.[162] In the part which concerns the mythology he was assisted by an officer of artillery, M. Rohr, who had lived for several years in Nukahiva and was familiar with the language and customs of the people.[163] [162] Max Radiguet, _Les Derniers Sauvages_, Nouvelle Édition (Paris, 1882). The author does not inform us as to the exact length of his stay in the islands. [163] M. Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 221 note. In 1877 a good general account of the archipelago and its inhabitants was published at Paris. The author was a naval lieutenant, P. E. Eyriaud des Vergnes, who having lived in the islands in the official capacity of Resident for about six years (from 1868 to 1874) had ample time and opportunity for obtaining accurate information on the subject.[164] His work, though somewhat slight, is valuable so far as it goes; but it does not tell us much about the native religion, which in his time had probably lost a good deal of its original character through the influence of the missionaries and of civilisation.[165] [164] P. E. Eyriaud des Vergnes, _L'Archipel des Iles Marquises_ (Paris, 1877). [165] Some years previously a naval lieutenant, M. Jouan, who had been in command of the French military post at Nukahiva, published in the _Revue Coloniale_ (1857-1858) some notes on the Marquesas, which are said to contain some useful information on the archipelago. See M. Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 310 note. I have not seen the work of M. Jouan; but according to Radiguet it shows that in the twelve years and more which had elapsed since the French occupation of the islands the presence of French missionaries and of a French garrison had done little to civilise the natives. Some years later, in 1881 and 1882, a French naval doctor, Clavel by name, passed six months in the Marquesas. During his stay he made personal observations and collected information on the natives. These he subsequently published in a little work, which contains much of value;[166] but when he wrote almost all the natives had been nominally converted to Christianity and their ancient religion was practically extinct.[167] [166] _Les Marquisiens_, par M. le Docteur Clavel (Paris, 1885). [167] Clavel, _op. cit._ pp. 68-71. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the German traveller Arthur Baessler paid a short visit to the Marquesas. In his book of travel in the South Sea he has given us descriptions of the islands and the people as he saw them, including some account of the scanty remains of their stone monuments and images.[168] [168] Arthur Baessler, _Neue Südsee-Bilder_ (Berlin, 1900), pp. 189-242. The writer omits to mention the date of his visit to the islands, and the length of his stay in them. CHAPTER VII THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE HAWAIIANS § 1. _The Sandwich or Hawaiian Islands_ The Sandwich or Hawaiian Islands form an archipelago lying in the North Pacific Ocean just within the northern tropic. They stretch in a direction from north-west to south-east for more than four hundred miles and include eight inhabited islands, of which the most important are Hawaii, Maui, Oahu, and Kauai. Of these Hawaii is by far the largest; indeed it is the largest island in Polynesia with the exception of New Zealand. The islands are all mountainous and of volcanic formation. In Hawaii two of the mountains are between 13,000 and 14,000 feet in height, and two of them are active volcanoes; one of them, named Kilauea, possesses the greatest active crater in the world, a huge cauldron of seething lava, which presents a spectacle of awe-inspiring grandeur when seen on a moonless night. The other and much loftier volcano, Mauna Loa, was the scene of a terrific eruption in 1877 and of another in 1881. Craters, large and small, hot springs, and other evidences of volcanic activity, abound throughout the archipelago. One of the craters on the island of Maui is said to be no less than fifteen miles in circumference and about two thousand feet deep. The islands appear to have been known to the Spaniards as early as the sixteenth century; but they were rediscovered in 1778 by Captain Cook, who was afterwards killed in a fight with the natives in Hawaii.[1] [1] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, iv. 4 _sqq._; J. J. Jarves, _History of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands_ (London, 1843), pp. 1 _sqq._; J. Remy, _Histoire de l'Archipel Havaiien_ (Paris and Leipzig, 1862), pp. vii _sqq._; C. E. Meinicke, _Die Inseln des Stillen Oceans_, ii. 271 _sqq._; _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, Ninth Edition, xi. 528 _sqq._; A. Marcuse, _Die Hawaiischen Inseln_ (Berlin, 1894), pp. 1 _sqq._; F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, ii. 533 _sqq._ Viewed from the sea the islands are apt to present an appearance of barrenness and desolation. The mountains descend into the sea in precipices often hundreds of feet high: their summits are capped with snow or lost in mist and clouds; and their sides, green and studded with clumps of trees in some places, but black, scorched and bare in others, are rent into ravines, down which in the rainy seasons cataracts rush roaring to the sea. With the changes of sunshine and shadow the landscape as a whole strikes the beholder now as in the highest degree horrid, dismal, and dreary, now as wildly beautiful and romantic with a sort of stern and sombre magnificence.[2] Inland, however, in many places the summits of the ridges crowned with forests of perpetual verdure, the slopes covered with flowering shrubs or lofty trees, the rocks mantled in creepers, the waterfalls dropping from stupendous cliffs, and the distant prospects of snowy peaks, bold romantic headlands, and blue seas, all arched by a summer sky of the deepest azure, combine to make up pictures of fairy-like and enchanting loveliness.[3] [2] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 94; W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, iv. 34, 379; C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, Fifth Edition (Boston, 1839), pp. 69 _sqq._, 140; D. Tyerman and G. Bennet, _Journal of Voyages and Travels_, i. 366, 391; Ch. Wilkes, _United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 373. [3] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 13 _sq._; C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ pp. 213 _sqq._, 229 _sqq._; Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 426 _sqq._; J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. xiv _sq._; Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 390 _sq._; F. D. Bennett, _Narrative of a Whaling Voyage round the Globe_ (London, 1840), i. 198 _sqq._ The vale of Anuanu, which runs up into the mountains from the plain of Honululu in the island of Oahu, is especially famed for its natural beauty. The climate naturally varies with the height above the sea. On the coasts, though warm, it is remarkably equable, and perhaps no country in the world enjoys a finer or healthier climate than some parts of Hawaii and Maui. On the mountains all varieties of climate are to be found, from the tropical heat of the lowlands to the arctic cold of the two great peaks of Hawaii, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa with their perpetual snows, which are not, however, always visible from the sea or from the foot of these giants. In the lowlands frost is unknown. The fresh breezes, which blow from the sea during the day and from the mountains at night, temper the heat of the sun, and render the evenings delicious; nothing can surpass the splendour and clearness of the moonlight. Rain falls more abundantly on the windward or eastern side of the islands than on the leeward or western side. Thus at Hilo, on the eastern side of Hawaii, it rains almost every day, whereas in Kena, on the western side, rain hardly ever falls, and along the coast not a single water-course is to be seen for many miles. In general it may be said that the archipelago suffers from drought and hence occasionally from dearth.[4] [4] J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. xvi _sqq._ Compare J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 99 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 21 _sq._; Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iv. 283 _sq._; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 12 _sqq._; _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, 9th edition, xi. 530. § 2. _The Natives and their Mode of Life_ The natives of the Sandwich Islands are typical Polynesians. In general they are rather above the middle stature, well formed, with fine muscular limbs, open countenances, and features frequently resembling those of Europeans. The forehead is usually well developed, the lips thick, and the nostrils full, without any flatness or spreading of the nose. The complexion is tawny or olive in hue, but sometimes reddish brown. The hair is black or brown and occasionally fair or rather ruddy in colour, in texture it is strong, smooth, and sometimes curly. The gait is graceful and even stately. But in these islands, as in other parts of Polynesia, there is a conspicuous difference between the chiefs and the commoners, the superiority being altogether on the side of the chiefs. "The nobles of the land," says Stewart, "are so strongly marked by their external appearance, as at all times to be easily distinguishable from the common people. They seem, indeed, in size and stature to be almost a distinct race. They are all large in their frame, and often excessively corpulent, while the common people are scarce of the ordinary height of Europeans, and of a thin rather than full habit."[5] And the difference between the two ranks is as obvious in their walk and general deportment as in their stature and size, the nobles bearing themselves with a natural dignity and grace which are wanting in their social inferiors. Yet there seems to be no reason to suppose that they belong to a different race from the commoners; the greater care taken of them in childhood, their better living, sexual selection, and the influence of heredity appear sufficient to account for their physical superiority. The women are well built and "beautiful as ancient statues" with a sweet and engaging expression of countenance. Yet on the whole the Hawaiians are judged to be physically inferior both to the Tahitians and to the Marquesans; according to Captain King, they are rather darker than the Tahitians, and not altogether so handsome a people. On the other hand they are said to be more intelligent than either the Tahitians or the Marquesans. Captain King describes them as of a mild and affectionate disposition, equally remote from the extreme levity and fickleness of the Tahitians, and from the distant gravity and reserve of the Tongans.[6] They practised tattooing much less than many other Polynesians, but their faces, hands, arms, and the forepart of their bodies were often tattooed with a variety of patterns.[7] [5] C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, p. 104. [6] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 112 _sq._, 115 _sq._; U. Lisiansky, _Voyage round the World_, pp. 123 _sq._; L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. Deuxième partie (Paris, 1839), p. 570; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 23; C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, pp. 104, 106; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 77 _sqq._; J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. xxxvii _sq._; F. D. Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 209. The last of these writers speaks in unfavourable terms of the personal appearance of the women, whom he found less handsome than the men and very inferior to the women of the Society Islands. [7] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 213 _sq._, vii. 121; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 23. The staple food of the Hawaiians consists of taro (_kalo_), sweet potatoes, and fish, but above all of taro. That root (_Arum_ or _Caladium esculentum_) is to the Hawaiians what bread-fruit is to the Tahitians, and its cultivation is their most important agricultural industry. It is grown wherever there is water or a marsh, and it is even planted on some arid heights in the island of Hawaii, where it yields excellent crops. Artificial irrigation was practised and even regulated by law or custom in the old days; for it was a rule that water should be conducted over every plantation twice a week in general, and once a week during the dry season. The bread-fruit tree is not so common, and its fruit not so much prized, as in the Marquesas and Tahiti. The natives grew sweet potatoes even before the arrival of Europeans. Yams are found wild, but are hardly eaten except in times of scarcity. There are several sorts of bananas; the fruit for the most part is better cooked than raw. In the old days the cooking was done in the ordinary native ovens, consisting of holes in the ground lined with stones which were heated with fire. After being baked in an oven the roots of the taro are mashed and diluted with water so as to form a paste or pudding called _poe_ or _poi_, which is sometimes eaten sweet but is more generally put aside till it has fermented, in which condition it is preferred by the natives. It is a highly nutritious substance, and though some Europeans complain of the sourness of taro pudding, others find it not unpalatable. Fish used to be generally eaten raw, seasoned with brine or sea-water. But they also commonly salt their fish, not for the sake of preserving it for a season of scarcity, but because they prefer the taste. They construct artificial fish-ponds, into which they let young fish from the sea, principally the fry of the grey mullet, of which the chiefs are particularly fond. Every chief has, or used to have, his own fish-pond. The natives are very skilful fishermen. In the old days they made a great variety of fish-hooks out of mother-of-pearl and tortoise shell as well as out of bone, and these they dragged by means of lines behind their canoes, and so caught bonettas, dolphins, and albicores. They took prodigious numbers of flying fish in nets. At the time when the islands were discovered by Captain Cook, the natives possessed pigs and dogs. The flesh of both of these animals was eaten, but only by persons of higher rank. Fowls were also bred and eaten, but they were not very common, and their flesh was not very much esteemed. The sugar-cane was indigenous in the islands, and the people ate it as a fruit; along with bananas and plantains it occupied a considerable portion of every plantation. Captain Cook found the natives skilful husbandmen, but thought that with a more extensive system of agriculture, the islands could have supported three times the number of the existing inhabitants.[8] He remarked that the chiefs were much addicted to the drinking of kava, and he attributed some of the cutaneous and other diseases from which they suffered to an immoderate use of what he calls the pernicious drug.[9] [8] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 215 _sq._, 219, 224 _sq._, vii. 126 _sq._; U. Lisiansky, _Voyage round the World_, p. 126; Archibald Campbell, _Voyage round the World_ (Edinburgh, 1816), pp. 161-63, 182 _sq._, 194-197; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 61, 215 _sq._, 420 (as to irrigation); C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, pp. 111-113; Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 412, 426, 428, 430, 472; O. von Kotzebue, _Neue Reise um die Welt_ (Weimar, 1830), ii. 96; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 68 _sq._; J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. xxiv _sq._, xliii; F. D. Bennett, _Narrative of a Whaling Voyage round the World_, i. 213 _sqq._ As to the system of irrigating the taro fields, see especially O. von Kotzebue, _Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beering's Straits_ (London, 1821), i. 340 _sq._ [9] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 113 _sq._ § 3. _Houses, Mechanical Arts_ Captain King observed that in some respects the natives of the Sandwich Islands approached nearer in their manners and customs to the Maoris of New Zealand than to their less distant neighbours of the Society and Friendly Islands, the Tahitians and the Tongans. In nothing, he says, is this more observable than in their method of living together in small towns or villages, containing from about one hundred to two hundred houses, built pretty close together, without any order, and with a winding path leading through them. They were generally flanked towards the sea with loose detached walls, intended for shelter and defence.[10] The shape of the houses was very simple. They were oblong with very high thatched roofs, so that externally they resembled the top of hay-stacks or rather barns with the thatched roof sloping down steeply to two very low sides, and with gable ends to match. The entrance, placed indifferently in one of the sides or ends, was an oblong hole, so low that one had rather to creep than walk in, and often shut by a board of planks fastened together, which served as a door. No light entered the house but by this opening, for there were no windows. Internally every house consisted of a single room without partitions. In spite of the extreme simplicity of their structure, the houses were kept very clean; the floors were covered with a large quantity of dried grass, over which they spread mats to sit and sleep upon. At one end stood a kind of bench about three feet high, on which were kept the household utensils. These consisted merely of a few wooden bowls and trenchers, together with gourd-shells, serving either as bottles or baskets. The houses varied in size with the wealth or rank of the owners. Those of the poor were mere hovels, which resembled the sties and kennels of pigs and dogs rather than the abodes of men. The houses of the chiefs were generally large and commodious by comparison, some forty to sixty feet long by twenty or thirty feet broad, and eighteen or twenty feet high at the peak of the roof. Chiefs had always a separate eating-house, and even people of the lower ranks had one such house to every six or seven families for the men. The women were forbidden to eat in company with the men and even to enter the eating-house during the meals; they ate in the same houses in which they slept. The houses of the chiefs were enclosed in large yards, and sometimes stood on stone platforms, which rendered them more comfortable.[11] [10] J. Cook, vii. 125. [11] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 214 _sq._; U. Lisiansky, _Voyage round the World_, p. 127; A. Campbell, _Voyage round the World_, pp. 180-182; C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, p. 107; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 320-322; Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 371 _sq._; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 67 _sq._ In the mechanical arts the Hawaiians displayed a considerable degree of ingenuity and skill. While the men built the houses and canoes and fashioned wooden dishes and bowls, the women undertook the manufacture of bark-cloth (_kapa_) and mats. Bark-cloth was made in the usual way from the bark of the paper-mulberry, which was beaten out with grooved mallets. The cloth was dyed a variety of colours, and patterns at once intricate and elegant were stamped on it and stained in different tints. The mats were woven or braided by hand without the use of any frame or instrument. The materials were rushes or palm-leaves; the mats made of palm-leaves were much the more durable and therefore the more valuable. The coarser and plainer were spread on the floor to sleep on; the finer were of white colour with red stripes, rhombuses, and other figures interwoven on one side. Among the most curious specimens of native carving were the wooden bowls in which the chiefs drank kava. They were perfectly round, beautifully polished, and supported on three or four small human figures in various attitudes. These figures were accurately proportioned and neatly finished; even the anatomy of the muscles strained to support the weight were well expressed. The fishing-hooks made by the men, especially the large hooks made to catch shark, are described by Captain Cook as really astonishing for their strength and neatness; he found them on trial much superior to his own.[12] [12] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 218 _sq._, vii. 133-135; L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. 611 _sq._; A. Campbell, _Voyage round the World_, pp. 192-195; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 109-113; C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, pp. 114-116; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 66 _sq._ The mechanical skill of these people was all the more remarkable because of the extreme rudeness and simplicity of the tools with which they worked. Their chief implement was an adze made of a black or clay-coloured volcanic stone and polished by constant friction with pumice-stone in water. They had also small instruments made each of a single shark's tooth, some of which were fixed to the forepart of a dog's jawbone and others to a thin wooden handle of the same shape. These served as knives, and pieces of coral were used as files. Captain Cook found the natives in possession of two iron tools, one of them a piece of iron hoop, and the other an edge-tool, perhaps the point of a broadsword. These they could only have procured from a European vessel or from a wreck drifted on their coast. No mines of any kind are known to exist in the islands.[13] [13] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 220-224; A. Campbell, _op. cit._ p. 198; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 322; O. von Kotzebue, _Neue Reise um die Welt_, ii. 97 (as to the kava bowls); J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 66. As to the absence of mines in the Hawaiian Islands, see J. Remy, _op. cit._ p. xvi. Their weapons of war included spears, javelins, daggers, and clubs, all of them made of wood. They also slung stones with deadly effect. But they had no defensive armour; for the war-cloaks and wicker-work helmets, surmounted with lofty crests and decked with the tail feathers of the tropic bird, while they heightened the imposing and martial appearance of the wearers, must have proved rather encumbrances than protections. Captain Cook found the natives in possession of bows and arrows, but from their scarcity and the slenderness of their make he inferred that the Hawaiians, like other Polynesians, never used them in battle.[14] [14] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 227 _sq._, vii. 136 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 156 _sq._; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 56 _sq._ § 4. _Government, Social Ranks, Taboo_ The government of the Hawaiian Islands was an absolute monarchy or despotism; all rights of power and property vested in the king, whose will and power alone were law, though in important matters he was to a certain extent guided by the opinion of the chiefs in council. The rank of the king and the chiefs was hereditary, descending from father to son; but the appointment to all offices of authority and dignity was made by the king alone. Nevertheless posts of honour, influence, and emolument often continued in the same family for many generations. Nor were hereditary rank and authority confined to men; they were inherited also by women. According to tradition, several of the islands had been once or twice under the government of a queen. The king was supported by an annual tribute paid by all the islands at different periods according to his directions. It comprised both the natural produce of the country and manufactured articles. But besides the regular tribute the king was at liberty to levy any additional tax he might please, and even to seize and appropriate any personal possessions of a chief or other subject. Not infrequently the whole crop of a plantation was thus carried off by his retainers without the least apology or compensation.[15] However, the government of the whole Hawaiian archipelago by a single monarch was a comparatively modern innovation. Down to nearly the end of the eighteenth century the different islands were independent of each other and governed by separate kings, who were often at war one with the other; indeed there were sometimes several independent kingdoms within the same island. But towards the close of the eighteenth century an energetic and able king of Hawaii, by name Kamehameha (Tamehameha), succeeded in extending his sway by conquest over the whole archipelago, and at his death in 1819 he bequeathed the undivided monarchy to his successors.[16] [15] U. Lisiansky, _op. cit._ pp. 116 _sq._; A. Campbell, _op. cit._ pp. 169 _sq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 411 _sq._; C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, p. 102; Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 380; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 30 _sqq._ According to Jarves (_op. cit._ p. 33), "Rank was hereditary, and descended chiefly from the females, who frequently held the reins of government in their own right. This custom originated in the great license existing between the sexes; no child, with certainty, being able to designate his father, while no mistake could be made in regard to the mother." [16] C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, p. 101; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 30; J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. lxi _sq._; _Encyclopædia Britannica_, 9th Edition, xi. 528. The whole body of chiefs fell into three classes or ranks. The first included the royal family and all who were intimately connected with it. The second included such as held hereditary offices of power or governorships of islands, after the time when the whole archipelago was united in a single kingdom. The third class embraced the rulers of districts, the headmen of villages, and all inferior chiefs. The members of the first two classes were usually called "high chiefs"; they were few in number and closely related both by blood and marriage. The members of the third class were known as "small" or "low" chiefs. They were by far the most numerous body of chiefs in any island, and were generally called _haku aina_ or landowners, though strictly speaking the king was acknowledged in every island as the supreme lord and proprietor of the soil by hereditary right or the law of conquest. When Kamehameha had subdued the greater part of the islands, he distributed them among his favourite chiefs and warriors on condition of their rendering him not only military service, but a certain proportion of the produce of their lands. In this he appears to have followed the ancient practice invariably observed on the conquest of an island.[17] For "from the earliest periods of Hawaiian history, the tenure of lands has been, in most respects, feudal. The origin of the fiefs was the same as in the northern nations of Europe. Any chieftain who could collect a sufficient number of followers to conquer a district, or an island, and had succeeded in his object, proceeded to divide the spoils, or 'cut up the land,' as the natives termed it. The king, or principal chief, made his choice from the best of the lands. Afterwards the remaining part of the conquered territory was distributed among the leaders, and these again subdivided their shares to others, who became vassals, owing fealty to the sovereigns of the fee. The king placed some of his own particular servants on his portion as his agents, to superintend the cultivation. The original occupants who were on the land, usually remained under their new conqueror, and by them the lands were cultivated, and rent or taxes paid."[18] [17] C. S. Stewart, _op. cit._ p. 97; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 412 _sq._, 414; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 33. Compare J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 137 _sqq._ [18] Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iv. 34. Below the chiefs or nobles were the commoners, who included small farmers, fishermen, mechanics, such as house-builders and canoe-builders, musicians and dancers, in short, all the labouring classes, whether they worked for a chief or farmer or cultivated patches of land for their own benefit.[19] According to one account, "the common people are generally considered as attached to the soil, and are transferred with the land from one chief to another."[20] But this statement is contradicted by an earlier and perhaps better-informed writer, who spent some thirteen months in Oahu, while the islands were still independent and before the conversion of the people to Christianity. He tells us that commoners were not slaves nor attached to the soil, but at liberty to change masters when they thought proper.[21] On this subject Captain King observes: "How far the property of the lower class is secured against the rapacity and despotism of the great chiefs, I cannot say, but it should seem that it is sufficiently protected against private theft, or mutual depredation; for not only their plantations, which are spread over the whole country, but also their houses, their hogs, and their cloth, were left unguarded, without the smallest apprehensions. I have already remarked, that they not only separate their possessions by walls in the plain country, but that, in the woods likewise, wherever the horse-plantains grow, they make use of small white flags in the same manner, and for the same purpose of discriminating property, as they do bunches of leaves at Otaheite. All which circumstances, if they do not amount to proofs, are strong indications that the power of the chiefs, where property is concerned, is not arbitrary, but at least so far circumscribed and ascertained, as to make it worth the while for the inferior orders to cultivate the soil, and to occupy their possessions distinct from each other."[22] Yet on the other hand we are told by later writers that "in fact, the condition of the common people is that of slaves; they hold nothing which may not be taken from them by the strong hand of arbitrary power, whether exercised by the sovereign or a petty chief." On one occasion the writers saw nearly two thousand persons, laden with faggots of sandal-wood, coming down from the mountains to deposit their burdens in the royal store-houses, and then departing to their homes, weary with their unpaid labours, yet without a murmur at their bondage.[23] When at last, through contact with civilisation, they had learned to utter their grievances, they complained that "the people was crushed by the numerous forced labours and contributions of every sort exacted from them by the chiefs. It was, indeed, very hard to furnish the chiefs, on every requisition, with pigs, food, and all the good things which the folk possessed, and to see the great despoiling the humble. In truth, the people worked for the chiefs incessantly, they performed every kind of painful task, and they paid the chiefs all the taxes which it pleased them to demand."[24] [19] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 413. [20] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 417. Compare J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 34. [21] A. Campbell, _op. cit._ p. 169. As to the length of Campbell's residence in Wahoo (Oahu), see _id._, p. 153 note. The date of his residence was 1809-1810. Compare O. von Kotzebue, _Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beering's Straits_ (London, 1821), iii. 246: "The people are almost subject to the arbitrary will of the lord, but there are no slaves or vassals (_glebae adscripti_). The peasant and the labourer may go wherever they please. The man is free, he may be killed, but not sold and not detained." [22] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 141 _sq._ [23] Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 415. [24] J. Remy, _op. cit._ p. 167. Certainly commoners were bound to pay great outward marks of deference to their social superiors, the chiefs, or nobles. Indeed, the respect almost amounted to adoration, for they were on no occasion allowed to touch their persons, but prostrated themselves before them, and might not enter their houses without first receiving permission.[25] Above all, the system of taboo or _kapu_, as it was called in the Hawaiian dialect,[26] oppressed the common people and tended to keep them in a state of abject subjection to the nobles; for the prescriptions of the system were numerous and vexatious, and the penalty for breaches of them was death. If the shadow of a subject fell on a chief, the subject was put to death; if he robed himself in the cloth or assumed the girdle of a chief, he was put to death; if he climbed on the wall of a chief's courtyard, he was put to death; if he stood upright instead of prostrating himself when a vessel of water was brought for the chief to wash with or his garments to wear, he was put to death; if he stepped on the shadow of a chief's house with his head smeared with white clay, or decked with a garland of flowers, or merely wetted with water, he was put to death; if he slept with his wife on a taboo day, he was put to death; if he made a noise during public prayers, he was put to death; if a woman ate pig, or coco-nuts, or bananas, or lobster, or the fish called _ulua_, she was put to death; if she went in a canoe on a taboo day, she was put to death; if husband and wife ate together, they were both put to death.[27] [25] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 413; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 33 _sq._ Compare J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 137. [26] In the Hawaiian dialect the ordinary Polynesian T is pronounced K, and the Tongan B is pronounced P. Hence the Tongan _taboo_ becomes in Hawaiian _kapoo_ (_kapu_). See E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. xxiii. [27] J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. 159, 161, 167. In Hawaii, as in other parts of Polynesia, the taboo formed an important and essential part both of the religious and of the political system, of which it was at once a strong support and a powerful instrument. The proper sense of the word taboo (in Hawaiian _kapu_) is "sacred." This did not, however, imply any moral quality; it expressed rather "a connexion with the gods, or a separation from ordinary purposes, and exclusive appropriation to persons or things considered sacred"; sometimes it meant devoted as by a vow. Chiefs who traced their genealogy to the gods were called _arii taboo_, "chiefs sacred"; a temple was a _wahi taboo_, "place sacred"; the rule which prohibited women from eating with men, and from eating, except on special occasions, any fruits or animals ever offered in sacrifice to the gods, while it allowed the men to partake of them, was called _ai taboo_, "eating sacred." The opposite of _kapu_ was _noa_, which means "general" or "common"; for example, _ai noa_ signifies "eating generally" or "having food in common." Although it was employed for civil as well as sacred purposes, the taboo was essentially a religious ceremony and could be imposed only by the priests. A religious motive was always assigned for laying it on, though it was often done at the instance of the civil authorities; and persons called _kiaimoku_, "island keepers," a kind of police officers, were always appointed by the king to see that the taboo was strictly observed.[28] [28] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 385 _sqq._ Compare L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. 597. The application of the restriction implied by taboo was either general or particular, either permanent or occasional. To take examples of permanent taboos, the idols and temples, the persons and names of the king and other members of the royal family, the persons of priests, canoes belonging to the gods, the houses, clothes, and mats of the king and priests, and the heads of men who were the devotees of any particular idol, were always taboo or sacred. The flesh of hogs, fowls, turtles, and several sorts of fish, coco-nuts, and almost everything offered in sacrifice were taboo or consecrated to the use of the gods and the men; hence women were, except in cases of particular indulgence, forbidden to partake of them. Particular places, such as those frequented by the king for bathing, were also permanently taboo. As examples of temporary taboos may be mentioned those which were imposed on an island or district for a certain time, during which no canoe or person was allowed to approach it. Particular fruits, animals, and the fish of certain places were occasionally taboo for several months, during which neither men nor women might eat them.[29] The predecessor of Kamehameha, king of Hawaii, "was taboo to such a degree that he was not allowed to be seen by day. He only showed himself in the night: if any person had but accidentally seen him by daylight he was immediately put to death; a sacred law, the fulfilment of which nothing could prevent."[30] [29] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 387. [30] O. von Kotzebue, _Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beering's Straits_ (London, 1821), iii. 247. The seasons generally kept taboo were on the approach of some great religious ceremony, immediately before going to war, and during the sickness of chiefs. Their duration was various, and much longer in ancient than in modern times. Tradition tells of a taboo which lasted thirty years, during which men might not trim their beards and were subject to other restrictions. Another was kept for five years. Before the reign of Kamehameha forty days was the usual period; but in his time the period was shortened to ten or five days, or even to a single day. The taboo seasons might be either common or strict. During a common taboo the men were only required to abstain from their usual avocations, and to attend morning and evening prayers at the temple. But during a strict taboo every fire and light in the district or island must be extinguished; no canoe might be launched; no person might bathe or even appear out of doors, unless his attendance was required at the temple; no dog might bark, no pig grunt, and no cock crow; for if any of these things were to happen the taboo would be broken and fail to accomplish its object. To prevent this disaster the mouths of dogs and pigs were tied up, and fowls were put under a calabash, or a cloth was fastened over their eyes.[31] [31] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 387 _sq._ The prohibitions of the taboo were strictly enforced; every breach of them was punished with death, unless the delinquent had powerful friends among the priests or chiefs, who could save him. The culprits were generally offered in sacrifice, being either strangled or clubbed at the temple; according to one account, they were burnt.[32] [32] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 389. As to the taboo in Hawaii, see also J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 146 _sq._; L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. 597; C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, pp. 31 _sq._; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 50-52; J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. xxxviii _sq._, 159 _sqq._ The system seems to have been found at last too burdensome to be borne even by the king, who under it was forbidden to touch his food with his own hands, and had to submit to having it put into his mouth by another person, as if he were an infant.[33] Whatever his motive, Liholiho, son of Kamehameha, had hardly succeeded his father on the throne of Hawaii when he abolished the system of taboo and the national religion at a single blow. This remarkable reformation took place in November 1819. When the first Christian missionaries arrived from America, some months later, March 30th, 1820, they were astonished to learn of a peaceful revolution, which had so opportunely prepared the way for their own teaching.[34] [33] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 388. [34] L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. 603; O. von Kotzebue, _Neue Reise um die Welt_, ii. 109 _sqq._; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 30, 126 _sqq._, 137, 204, 312; C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, pp. 31, 32 _sq._; Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 378 _sq._, 397 _sq._, 442 _sq._; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 197 _sq._, 201; J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. lxv, 133 _sqq._; H. Bingham, _Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands_ (Hartford, 1849), pp. 69 _sqq._ King Kamehameha the First died 8th May 1819. § 5. _Religion, the Gods_ Of the native Hawaiian religion, as it existed before the advent of Europeans and the conversion of the people to Christianity, we possess no adequate account. The defect is probably due in great measure to the readiness with which the islanders relinquished their old faith and adopted the new one. The transition seems to have been effected with great ease and comparatively little opposition; hence when the missionaries settled in the islands a few months after the formal abolition of the ancient religion, paganism was already almost a thing of the past, and the Christian teachers were either unable or perhaps unwilling to record in detail the beliefs and rites which they regarded as false and pernicious. Be that as it may, we possess no such comparatively full and accurate records of the old Hawaiian religion, as we possess, for example, of the old pagan religion of the Tongans and the Samoans, who clung much more pertinaciously to the creed of their fathers than their more enlightened or more fickle kinsfolk in the Sandwich Islands. Hence we are obliged to content ourselves with some more or less meagre and fragmentary notices of the ancient Hawaiian system of religious belief and practice. But as the Hawaiians are, or were, pure-blooded Polynesians, we may assume with a fair degree of probability that in its broad lines their religious system conformed to the ordinary Polynesian type. On this subject Captain King, the colleague and successor of Captain Cook in his last voyage, observes as follows: "The religion of these people resembles, in most of its principal features, that of the Society and Friendly Islands. Their _Morais_, their _Whattas_, their idols, their sacrifices, and their sacred songs, all of which they have in common with each other, are convincing proofs that their religious notions are derived from the same source. In the length and number of their ceremonies this branch indeed far exceeds the rest; and though in all these countries there is a certain class of men to whose care the performance of their religious rites is committed, yet we had never met with a regular society of priests, till we discovered the cloisters of Kakooa in Karakakooa Bay [in the island of Hawaii]. The head of this order was called _Orono_; a title which we imagined to imply something highly sacred, and which, in the person of Omeeah, was honoured almost to adoration.... It has been mentioned that the title of _Orono_, with all its honours, was given to Captain Cook; and it is also certain that they regarded us generally as a race of people superior to themselves; and used often to say that great _Eatooa_ [_atuas_, spirits] dwelled in our country. The little image, which we have before described as the favourite idol on the _Morai_ in Karakakooa Bay, they called _Koonooraekaiee_, and said it was Terreeoboo's god, and that he also resided amongst us. There are found an infinite variety of these images both on the _Morais_, and within and without their houses, to which they give different names; but it soon became obvious to us in how little estimation they were held, from their frequent expressions of contempt of them, and from their even offering them to sale for trifles. At the same time there seldom failed to be some one particular figure in favour, to which, whilst this preference lasted, all their adoration was addressed. This consisted in arraying it in red cloth, beating their drums, and singing hymns before it, laying bunches of red feathers, and different sorts of vegetables, at its feet, and exposing a pig or a dog to rot on the _whatta_ that stood near it. In a bay to the southward of Karakakooa, a party of our gentlemen were conducted to a large house, in which they found the black figure of a man, resting on his fingers and toes, with his head inclined backward, the limbs well formed and exactly proportioned, and the whole beautifully polished. This figure the natives call _Maee_; and round it were placed thirteen others of rude and distorted shapes, which they said were the _Eatooas_ [spirits] of several deceased chiefs, whose names they recounted. The place was full of _whattas_, on which lay the remains of their offerings. They likewise give a place in their houses to many ludicrous and some obscene idols, like the Priapus of the ancients."[35] [35] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 142-144. The general Hawaiian name for god was _akua_, corresponding to the more usual Polynesian form _atua_.[36] The four principal Hawaiian deities were Ku, Kane, Kanaloa, and Lono.[37] Their names are only dialectically different forms of Tu, Tane, Tangaroa or Tagaloa, and Rongo, four of the greatest Polynesian gods.[38] Of these deities it is said that Ku, Kane, and Lono formed the original Hawaiian triad or trinity, who were worshipped as a unity under the name of Ku-kau-akahi, "the one established."[39] The meaning or essence of the three persons of the trinity is said to be Stability (Ku), Light (Tane), and Sound (Lono).[40] "These gods," we are told, "created the three heavens as their dwelling-place, then the earth, sun, moon, and stars, then, the host of angels and ministers. Kanaloa (Tangaroa), who represented the spirit of evil, was a later introduction into the Hawaiian theology; he it was who led the rebellion of spirits, although Milu is in other traditions credited with this bad pre-eminence."[41] We read that when the trinity were at work on the task of creating the first man, the bad spirit Kanaloa, out of rivalry, also made an image, but he could not endow it with life. So, in a rage, he cried to Kane, "I will take your man, he shall die!" And that, it is said, was the origin of death. The reason why the spirits, under the leadership of Kanaloa, rebelled was that they had been denied the sacrifice of kava. For their rebellion they were thrust down to the lowest depth of Darkness or Night (_Po_).[42] [36] J. Remy, _op. cit._ p. xxxix; E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 30, _s.v._ "Atua." [37] J. Remy, _op. cit._ p. xxxix; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 40; H. T. Cheever, _Life in the Sandwich Islands_ (London, 1851), p. 11; A. Bastian, _Die heilige Sage der Polynesier_ (Leipzig, 1881), p. 131; _id._, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_ (Berlin, 1883), p. 225; A. Marcuse, _Die Hawaiischen Inseln_, pp. 97 _sq._ [38] E. Tregear, _op. cit._ 425, 461, 464, 540, _s.vv._ "Rongo," "Tane," "Tangaroa," "Tu." [39] E. Tregear, _op. cit._ p. 425, _s.v._ "Rongo." [40] E. Tregear, _op. cit._ pp. 461, 540, _s.vv._ "Tane," "Tu." [41] E. Tregear, _op. cit._ p. 540, _s.v._ "Tu." [42] E. Tregear, _op. cit._ p. 464, _s.v._ "Tangaroa." According to another account, the evil spirit was not Kanaloa, but Ku; Kanaloa was a younger brother of Kane, and helped him in his beneficent labours. See A. Marcuse, _Die Hawaiischen Inseln_, pp. 97 _sq._ This latter version agrees with the view of Kane and Kanaloa as divine twins. See below, pp. 394 _sq._ A fuller account of these momentous transactions presents a close, perhaps a suspicious, resemblance to the Biblical narrative of the same events. It runs as follows: "According to ancient Hawaiian traditions, there existed in the chaos three mighty gods, Kane, Ku, and Lono. By their common action light was brought into the chaos. Then the gods created three heavenly spheres, in which they dwelt, and last of all the earth, sun, moon, and stars. Out of their spittle they thereupon created a host of angels, who had to render service to the three original deities. Last of all came the creation of man. His body was fashioned out of red earth, and his head out of white clay, and Kane, the highest of the gods, breathed into this Hawaiian Adam the breath of life. Out of one of his ribs the Hawaiian Eve was created. The newly formed pair, by name Kumuhonua and Keolakuhonua, were placed in a beautiful paradise called Paliuli, which was watered by the three rivers of life, and planted with many fine trees, among them the sacred bread-fruit tree. The mightiest of the angels, Kanaloa, the Hawaiian Lucifer, desired that the newly created human pair should worship him, which was forbidden by God the Father, Kane. After vain attempts to create a new man devoted to himself, Kanaloa, out of desire for vengeance, resolved to ruin the first human pair created by the gods. In the likeness of a great lizard he crept into Paradise and seduced the two inhabitants of the same into committing sin, whereupon they were driven out of Paradise by a powerful bird sent by Kane. Then follow, as in the Bible, the legends of the Hawaiian Cain (Laka) and the Hawaiian Noah (Nuu), by whom the ancestors of the Hawaiian people are said to have been saved from the universal flood."[43] The story of the creation of the first woman out of a rib of the first man appears to have been widespread in Polynesia, for it is reported also from Tahiti,[44] Fakaofo or Bowditch Island,[45] and New Zealand.[46] [43] A. Marcuse, _Die Hawaiischen Inseln_, p. 97. [44] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, i. 110 _sq._; Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 312 _sq._ [45] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 267 _sq._ [46] J. L. Nicholas, _Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand_ (London, 1817), i. 59. Compare _Folk-lore in the Old Testament_, i. 9 _sq._ Of the three persons in the Hawaiian trinity, Kane (Tane) is said to have been the principal. He was especially associated with light; in a fragment of an ancient liturgy he is called Heaven-father (_Lani-makua_) and in a very ancient chant he is identified with the Creator. When after the great flood the Hawaiian Noah, who is called Nuu, left his vessel, he offered up sacrifice to the moon, saying, "You are doubtless a transformation of Tane." But the deity was angry at this worship of a material object; nevertheless, when Nuu expressed his contrition, the rainbow was left as a pledge of forgiveness.[47] [47] E. Tregear, _op. cit._ p. 461, _s.v._ "Tane." According to one account, the two great gods Kane and Kanaloa were twins. In Hawaii twins are regarded as superior to ordinary mortals both in mind and body; hence it was natural to conceive of a pair of divine twins, like the Dioscuri in Greek mythology. And, like the Dioscuri, the divine Hawaiian twins sometimes appeared together to their worshippers as helpers in time of need. Thus, in a season of dearth, when people were dying of hunger, a poor fisher lad in the island of Lanai set up a tiny hut on the sea-shore, and there day by day he offered a little from the scanty store of fish which his family had caught; and as he did so he prayed, saying, "Here, O god, is fish for thee." One day, as he sat there, racked with unsatisfied yearning for the divine assistance, two men came walking that way and rested at the hut; and, taking them to be weary wanderers, the fisher lad willingly gave them what little food he had left over. They slept there that night, and next day, when they were departing, they revealed themselves to him as the two gods Kane and Kanaloa, and they told him that his prayer had been heard, and that salvation would follow. Sure enough, plenty soon returned to the land, and on the spot where the little hut had stood, a stone temple was built in stately terraces.[48] Again, we hear how when drought had lasted long in the island of Oahu, and death stared the farmers in the face for lack of water, the gods Kane and Kanaloa appeared in the likeness of two young men and showed them a spring, which was afterwards consecrated to the divine twins.[49] Once more, it is said that, when the two deities were in Oahu, it chanced that they could find no water with which to moisten their dry food. Then at Kane's direction Kanaloa struck a stone with his spear, and from the stone there sprang a fountain, which bears the name of Kane to this day, and still it rises and sinks on the day of the moon which is sacred to that divinity.[50] [48] A. Bastian, _Die heilige Sage der Polynesier_, pp. 131, 132. [49] A. Bastian, _op. cit._ pp. 132 _sq._ [50] A. Bastian, _op. cit._ p. 133. As to the divine twins in Hawaii, see also _id._, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_, p. 243. The god Lono was, as we have seen, no other than the great Polynesian deity Rongo, the two names being the same word in dialectically different forms. He was one of the most popular gods of Hawaii;[51] the seasons and other natural phenomena were associated with him, and prayers for rain were particularly addressed to him.[52] According to one account, he was an uncreated, self-existent deity;[53] but according to another account he was an ancient king of Hawaii, who rashly killed his wife on a suspicion of infidelity, and then, full of remorse, carried her lifeless body to a temple and made a great wail over it. Thereafter he travelled through Hawaii in a state of frenzy, boxing and wrestling with every one whom he met. The people in astonishment said, "Is Lono entirely mad?" He replied, "I am frantic with my great love." Having instituted games to commemorate his wife's death, he embarked in a triangular canoe for a foreign land. Before he departed, he prophesied, saying, "I will return in after times, on an island bearing coco-nut trees, swine, and dogs." After his departure he was deified by his countrymen, and annual games of boxing and wrestling were instituted in his honour.[54] When Captain Cook arrived in Hawaii, the natives took him to be their god Lono returned according to his prophecy. The priests threw a sacred red mantle on his shoulders and did him reverence, prostrating themselves before him; they pronounced long discourses with extreme volubility, by way of prayer and worship. They offered him pigs and food and clothes, and everything that they offered to the gods. When he landed, most of the inhabitants fled before him, full of fear, and those who remained prostrated themselves in adoration. They led him to a temple, and there they worshipped him. But afterwards in a brawl, when they saw his blood flowing and heard his groans, they said, "No, this is not Rono," and one of them struck him, so that he died. But even after his death, some of them still thought that he was Rono, and that he would come again. So they looked on some of his bones, to wit his ribs and his breastbone, as sacred; they put them in a little basket covered all over with red feathers, and they deposited it in a temple dedicated to Rono. There religious homage was paid to the bones, and thence they were carried every year in procession to several other temples, or borne by the priests round the island, to collect the offerings of the faithful for the support of the worship of the god Rono.[55] [51] J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 41. [52] A. Marcuse, _Die Hawaiischen Inseln_, p. 98. [53] E. Tregear, _op. cit._ p. 425, _s.v._ "Rongo." [54] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 135; O. von Kotzebue, _Neue Reise um die Welt_ (Weimar, 1830), ii. 88 _sq._; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 41 _sq._; H. Bingham, _Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands_ (Hartford, 1849), p. 32; A. Bastian, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_, p. 246. [55] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 134-136; Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 376; J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. 29-37; O. von Kotzebue, _Neue Reise um die Welt_, ii. 98 _sq._ The great Polynesian god or hero Maui was known in Hawaii, where the stories told of him resembled those current in other parts of the Pacific. He is said to have dragged up the islands on his fishing-hook from the depths of the ocean, and to have brought men their first fire.[56] One day, when his wife was making bark-cloth and had not time to finish it before night, Maui laid his hand on the sun and prevented it from going down till the work was completed.[57] [56] E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. 236, _s.v._ "Maui"; A. Marcuse, _Die Haiwaiischen Inseln_, p. 98. [57] Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 433; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 26. The national war-god of Hawaii was named Tairi (Kaili). In the evening he used to be seen flitting about near his temple in the form of a sort of luminous vapour, like a flame or the tail of a comet. A similar appearance is also occasionally seen in the Society Islands, where the terrified natives formerly identified it with their god Tane, and supposed that the meteor was the deity flying from temple to temple or seeking whom he might destroy.[58] The image of the war-god Tairi used to be carried to battle by the priest, who held it aloft above the ranks. It was four or five feet high; the upper part was of wicker-work, covered with red feathers; the face grinned hideously; the mouth displayed triple rows of dog's or shark's teeth; the eyes gleamed with mother of pearl; and the head was crowned with a helmet crested with long tresses of human hair. In the battle the priest used to distort his face into a variety of frightful grimaces and to utter appalling yells, which were supposed to proceed from the god whom he bore or attended. But the national war-god was not the only deity whose image was borne to battle. Other chiefs of rank had their war-gods carried near them by their priests; and if the king or chief was killed or taken, the god himself was usually captured also. The presence of their deities inspired the warriors with courage; for they imagined the divine influence to be essential to victory.[59] The diviners were consulted immediately before a battle. They slew the victims, and noticed the face of the heavens, the passage of clouds over the sun, and the appearance of a rainbow. If the omens were favourable, the image of the principal war-god was brought out in front of the whole army and placed near the king. The priest then prayed to the gods, beseeching them to prove themselves stronger than the gods of the enemy in the ensuing engagement, and promising them hecatombs of victims in the event of victory. The bodies of foes slain in the battle were dragged to the king or priest, who offered them as victims to his gods.[60] [58] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 119. [59] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 158 _sq._ [60] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 157 _sq._, 159. The gods of Hawaii fell into two classes, according as they were believed to have been primaeval deities born of Night (Po), or the souls of men who had been deified after death. For it was believed to be possible to detain the soul of a beloved or honoured person at death by keeping his clothes or his bones; and the soul could thereafter be invoked and could speak through the mouth of the person into whom it had entered. Both classes of deities, the primaeval and the human, were credited with the power of making people ill.[61] One way of obtaining a guardian deity for a family was to take the body of a still-born child and throw it into the sea or bury it in the earth; in the former case the embryo was supposed to turn into a shark, in the latter case into a grasshopper. When it was deemed necessary to obtain the help of a deity (_akua_) for a special purpose, such as success in fishing or in canoe-building, the divine spirit could be conjured into an image (_kii_), and could thereafter appear in a dream to his worshipper and reveal to him what food he desired to have dedicated to him, and what accordingly the worshipper must abstain from eating. Often the god showed himself to the dreamer in the shape of a stone or other object; and on awakening the man was bound to procure the object, whatever it was, and to honour it with prayer and sacrifice, in order to ensure the protection of the deity. Prayers addressed to private gods were usually the property of the owner, who was commonly also their author; whereas prayers addressed to a public god, such as Kane, had to be learned from a priest or other adept.[62] [61] A. Bastian, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_, pp. 269 _sq._ [62] A. Bastian, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_, pp. 271 _sq._ Among the deities who had once been men would seem to have been the god of medicine, the Hawaiian Aesculapius. It is said that many generations ago a certain man named Koreamoku received all medicinal herbs from the gods, who also taught him the use of them. After his death he was deified, and a wooden image of him was placed in a large temple at Kairua, to which offerings of hogs, fish, and coco-nuts were frequently presented. Oronopuha and Makanuiairomo, two friends and disciples of Koreamoku, continued to practise the healing art after the death of their master, and they too were deified after death, particularly because they were often successful in driving away the evil spirits which afflicted the people and threatened them with death. To these deified men the priests addressed their prayers when they administered medicine to the sick.[63] [63] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 335 _sq._; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 71. Of all the deities of Hawaii the most dreaded was Pele, the goddess of the volcanic fire, whose home was in the great and ever active volcano of Kilauea. There she dwelt with the other members of her family, brothers and sisters. They were all said to have come to Hawaii from a foreign country called Tahiti after the great deluge had subsided. The cones which rise like islands from the vast sea of boiling lava, vomiting columns of smoke or pyramids of flame, were the houses where these volcanic deities lived and amused themselves by playing at draughts: the crackling of the flames and the roaring of the furnaces were the music of their dance; and the red flaming surge was the surf wherein they sported, swimming on the rolling fiery waves.[64] The filaments of volcanic glass, of a dark olive colour and as fine as human hair, some straight, some crimped or frizzled, which are to be seen abundantly on the sides of the crater, and on the plain for miles round, are called by the natives "Pele's hair"; in some places they lie so thick as to resemble cobwebs covering the surface of the ground.[65] Near the crater grow bushes bearing clusters of red and yellow berries resembling large currants; of these the natives formerly would never eat till they had thrown some of the clusters into the thickest of the smoke and vapour as an offering to the goddess of the volcano.[66] Vast numbers of hogs, some alive, others cooked, used to be cast into the craters when they were in action or when they threatened an eruption; and when they boiled over, the animals were flung into the rolling torrent of lava to appease the gods and arrest the progress of the fiery stream. For the whole island had to pay tribute to the gods of the volcano and to furnish provisions for the support of their ministers; and whenever the chiefs or people failed to send the proper offerings or incurred the displeasure of the dreadful beings by insulting them or their ministers, or by breaking the taboos which had to be observed in the vicinity of the craters, the angry deities would spout lava from the mountain or march by subterranean passages to the abode of the culprits and overwhelm them under a flood of molten matter. And if the fishermen did not offer them enough fish, they would rush down, kill the fish with fire, and, filling up the shoals, destroy the fishing-grounds entirely.[67] People who passed by the volcano of Kilauea often presented locks of hair to Pele by throwing them into the crater with an appropriate address to the deity.[68] On one occasion, when a river of lava threatened destruction to the people of the neighbourhood, and the sacrifice of many hogs, cast alive into the stream, had not availed to stay its devastating course, King Kamehameha cut off some of his own sacred locks and threw them into the torrent, with the result that in a day or two the lava ceased to flow.[69] In the pleasant and verdant valley of Kaua there used to be a temple of the goddess, where the inhabitants of Hamakua, a district of Hawaii, formerly celebrated an annual festival designed to propitiate the dread divinity and to secure their country from earthquakes and floods of lava. On such occasions large offerings of hogs, dogs, and fruit were made, and the priests performed certain rites.[70] Worshippers of Pele also threw some of the bones of their dead into the volcano, in the belief that the spirits of the deceased would then be admitted to the society of the volcanic deities, and that their influence would preserve the survivors from the ravages of volcanic fire.[71] Nevertheless the apprehensions uniformly entertained by the natives of the fearful consequences of Pele's anger prevented them from paying very frequent visits to the vicinity of the volcano; and when on their inland journeys they had occasion to approach the mountain, they were scrupulously attentive to every injunction of her priests, and regarded with a degree of superstitious veneration and awe the appalling spectacle which the crater, with its sea of molten and flaming lava, presented to their eyes.[72] They even requested strangers not to dig or scratch the sand in its neighbourhood for fear of displeasing the goddess and provoking her to manifest her displeasure by an eruption.[73] [64] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 237, 246-249; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 42 _sq._ [65] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 363 _sq._; Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iv. 129. [66] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 234-236. [67] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 250. [68] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 350. [69] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 59. _sq._ [70] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 350. [71] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 361. [72] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 275. [73] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 239. The service of Pele was regularly cared for by an hereditary steward (_kahu_) and an hereditary priestess. The duty of the steward was to provide the materials for the public sacrifices, including the food and raiment for the goddess; it was for him to furnish the hogs and fowls, to cultivate the taro, sweet potatoes, and sugar-cane which were to serve her for nourishment, to tend the plants from which her garments were to be made, and to have all things in readiness for the offerings at the appointed seasons. Of the plantations sacred to this use, one was on the sea-shore, and another in the broken ground within the precincts of the crater; and the steward with his family resided sometimes in the one place and sometimes in the other. When the time came for offering the sacrifice, the priestess descended into the depths of the volcano, and there approaching as near as possible to the spot where the fire burned most furiously, she cast into it her gifts, saying, "Here, Pele, is food for you, and here is cloth," whereby she mentioned each article as she flung it into the flames.[74] Sometimes the priestess claimed to be inspired by Pele and even to be the goddess in person. One of the priestesses, in an interview with the missionary William Ellis, assumed a haughty air and declared, "I am Pele; I shall never die; and those who follow me, when they die, if part of their bones be taken to Kilauea, will live with me in the bright fires there." In a song she gave a long account of the deeds and honours of the goddess, who, she said, dwelt in the volcano and had come in former times from the land beyond the sky. This song she chanted or recited in a rapid and vociferous manner, accompanied by extravagant gestures, working herself up to a state of excitement in which she appeared to lose all self-command. She also claimed to be able to heal the sick through the indwelling spirit of the goddess.[75] But the goddess was served also by priests. We read of one such who offered prayers to her and assured the people that thereafter she would do them no harm.[76] [74] C. S. Stewart, _A Visit to the South Seas_ (London, 1832), ii. 104. [75] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 309-311. For other interviews with priestesses of the goddess see _id._, iv. 275 _sq._; C. S. Stewart, _Visit to the South Seas_, ii. 100-103. [76] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 378. The Hawaiians also paid religious reverence to certain birds, fish, and animals. In a village Captain King saw two tame ravens which the people told him were _eatooas_ (_atuas_, _akuas_), that is, gods or spirits, cautioning him at the same time not to hurt or offend them.[77] The native authors of a work on the history of Hawaii, speaking of the ancient religion of their people, tell us that "birds served some as idols; if it was a fowl, the fowl was taboo for the worshippers, and the same for all the birds which were deified. The idol of another was a four-footed animal, and if it was a pig, the pig was taboo for him. So with all the animals who became gods. Another had a stone for his idol; it became taboo, and he could not sit upon the stone. The idol of another was a fish, and if it was a shark, the shark was taboo for him. So with all the fish, and so they deified all things in earth and heaven, and all the bones of men."[78] Further, the same writers observe that "the trees were idols for the people and for the chiefs. If a man had for his idol the _ohia_ tree, the _ohia_ was taboo for him; if the bread-fruit tree was the idol of another, the bread-fruit tree was taboo for him. The taboo existed likewise for all the trees out of which men had made divine images, and it was the same also for food. If taro was a person's idol, taro was taboo for him. It was the same for all the eatables of which they had made gods."[79] This deification of birds, fish, animals, plants, and inanimate objects resembles the Samoan system and may, like it, be a relic of totemism.[80] Among the living creatures to which they thus accorded divine honours were lizards, rats, and owls.[81] [77] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 144. [78] J. Remy, _op. cit._ p. 165. [79] J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. 163, 165. [80] See above, pp. 182 _sqq._, 200 _sqq._ [81] L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. 594. Among the deified fishes it would seem that the shark held a foremost place. On almost every cape jutting out into the sea, a temple used to be built for the worship of the shark. The first fish of each kind, taken by the fishermen, were always carried to the temple and offered to the god, who was supposed to have driven them towards the shore.[82] When the king or the priests imagined that the shark wanted food, they sallied forth with their attendants, one of whom carried a rope with a running noose. On coming to a group or crowd of people, they threw the rope among them, and whoever happened to be taken in the snare, whether man, woman, or child, was strangled on the spot, the body cut in pieces, and flung into the sea, to be bolted by the ravenous monsters.[83] Fishermen sometimes wrapped their dead in red native cloth, and threw them into the sea to be devoured by the sharks. They thought that the soul of the deceased would animate the shark which had eaten his body, and that the sharks would therefore spare the survivors in the event of a mishap at sea.[84] It was especially stillborn children that were thus disposed of. The worshipper of the shark would lay the body of the infant on a mat, and having placed beside it two roots of taro, one of kava, and a piece of sugar-cane, he would recite some prayers, and then throw the whole bundle into the sea, fully persuaded that by means of this offering the transmigration of the soul of the child into the body of a shark would be effected, and that thenceforth the formidable monster would be ready to spare such members of the family as might afterwards be exposed to his attack. In the temples dedicated to sharks there were priests who, at sunrise and sunset, addressed their prayers to the image which represented the shark; and they rubbed themselves constantly with water and salt, which, drying on their skin, made it appear covered with scales. They also dressed in red cloth, uttered piercing yells, and leaped over the wall of the sacred enclosure; moreover they persuaded the islanders that they knew the exact moment when the children that had been thrown into the sea were transformed into sharks, and for this discovery they were rewarded by the happy parents with liberal presents of little pigs, roots of kava, coco-nuts, and so forth.[85] The priests also professed to be inspired by sharks and in that condition to foretell future events. Many people accepted these professions in good faith and contributed to support the professors by their offerings.[86] [82] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 90; compare _id._, pp. 129 _sq._ [83] Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 422 _sq._; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 45. [84] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 361. [85] L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. 595 _sq._ [86] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ ii. 65. From the foregoing account it appears that some at least of the worshipful sharks were supposed to be animated by the souls of the dead. Whether the worship of other sacred animals in Hawaii was in like manner combined with a theory of transmigration, there seems to be no evidence to decide. We have seen that a similar doubt rests on the worship of animals in Tonga.[87] [87] See above, pp. 92 _sqq._ § 6. _Priests, Sorcerers, Diviners_ The priesthood formed a numerous and powerful body. Their office was hereditary. They owned much property in people and lands, which were heavily taxed for their support. Each chief had his family priest, who followed him to battle, carried his war-god, and superintended all the sacred rites of his household. The priests took rank from their gods and chiefs. The keeper of the national war-god, who was immediately attached to the person of the king, was the high priest.[88] In the inner court of the great temple dedicated to Tairi, the war-god, stood a lofty frame of wicker-work, in shape something like an obelisk, hollow within and measuring four or five feet square at the base. Within this framework the priest stood and gave oracles in the name of the god, whenever the king came to consult the deity on any matter of importance, such as a declaration of war or the conclusion of peace; for the war-god was also the king's oracle. The oracular answer, given by the priest in a distinct and audible voice, was afterwards reported by the king, publicly proclaimed, and generally acted upon.[89] When the villages failed to pay their tribute punctually to the king, he used to send forth a priest bearing the image of the great god Rono, who scoured the country of the defaulters for twenty-three days and obliged them to pay double tribute. The priest who bore the image was strictly tabooed; during his peregrination he might not touch anything with his hands; his food had to be put into his mouth either by the chiefs of the villages where he halted or by the king himself, who accompanied him.[90] [88] J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 48. [89] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 97. [90] L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. 596. Distinct from the regular priests were the diviners or sorcerers who formed a sort of lower priesthood or clergy. Their services were employed for various purposes, such as to discover the cause of illness or to detect a thief. The people generally believed that all deaths, which were not due to acts of violence, were wrought either by the action of a deity or by the incantations of a sorcerer. Hence in cases of protracted illness the aid of one of these inferior clergy was almost invariably sought by all who could procure a dog and a fowl for the necessary sacrifice to the god, and a piece or two of cloth as a fee for the priest. But the offerings to the god and the fees to the priest naturally varied with the rank or wealth of the sufferer. After sacrificing the victims the priest lay down to sleep, and if his prayers were answered, he was usually able to inform the invalid of the cause of his illness, which had been revealed to him in a dream. But the same men, who could thus heal the sick by ascertaining and removing the cause of sickness, were supposed to possess the power of praying or enchanting people to death by the recitation of spells or incantations. The prayers or incantations which they employed for these beneficent or maleficent purposes varied with the individual: every practitioner had his own formulas, the knowledge of which he carefully confined to his own family; and he who was thought to have most influence with his god was most frequently employed by the people and derived the greatest emoluments from his profession.[91] Of this class of men the most dreaded were those who invoked the god Uli as their patron deity. Their special business was to kill people by their spells, which they recited secretly, and for the most part by night; but to render these effectual it was necessary for them to obtain some of the personal refuse of their victim, such as his spittle, the parings of his nails, or the clippings of his hair, which they buried or burned with the appropriate incantations.[92] Hence the king of Hawaii was constantly attended by a servant carrying a spittoon in which he collected the royal saliva to prevent it from being used by the king's enemies for his injury or destruction.[93] Ordinary chiefs seem to have adopted the same precaution; a confidential servant deposited their spittle carefully in a portable spittoon and buried it every morning.[94] [91] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 293-295. Compare U. Lisiansky, _op. cit._ pp. 120 _sq._; A. Campbell, _Voyage round the World_, pp. 171 _sqq._; C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, pp. 202 _sq._; Tyerman and Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 414; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 36 _sq._, 71 _sq._; A. Marcuse, _op. cit._ pp. 103-105. [92] A. Marcuse, _op. cit._ p. 104. [93] O. von Kotzebue, _Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beering's Straits_ (London, 1821), i. 313. [94] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ i. 365. A form of divination or magic was employed to detect a thief. The person who had suffered the loss used to apply to a priest, to whom he presented a pig and told his story. Thereupon the priest kindled a fire by rubbing two pieces of wood together, and having taken three nuts he broke the shells and threw one of the kernels into the fire, saying, "Kill or shoot the fellow." If the thief did not appear before the nut was consumed in the flames, the priest repeated the ceremony with the other two nuts. Such was the fear inspired by this rite that the culprit seldom failed to come forward and acknowledge his guilt. But if he persisted in concealing his crime, the king would cause proclamation to be made throughout the island that so-and-so had been robbed, and that the robber or robbers had been prayed to death. So firm was the belief of the people in the power of these prayers, that the criminal, on hearing the proclamation, would pine away, refuse food, and fall a victim to his own credulity.[95] [95] A. Campbell, _Voyage round the World_, pp. 171-173. § 7. _Temples, Images, Human Sacrifices_ Of the Hawaiian temples, as they existed before the abolition of the native religion, we seem to possess no good and clear description. When Captain Cook first visited Hawaii and was sailing along the coast, he noticed from the ship at every village one or more elevated white objects, like pyramids or rather obelisks; one of them he judged to be fifty feet high. On landing to examine it, he could not reach it on account of an intervening pool of water. However, he visited another structure of the same sort in a more accessible situation, and found that it stood in what he calls a burying-ground or _morai_ closely resembling those which he had seen in other Polynesian islands and especially in Tahiti. This particular _morai_ was an oblong space, of considerable extent, surrounded by a wall of stone, about four feet high. The area enclosed was loosely paved with smaller stones; and at one end of it stood the pyramid or obelisk, measuring about four feet square at the base and about twenty feet high. The four sides were composed, not of stones, but of small poles interwoven with twigs and branches, thus forming an indifferent wicker-work, hollow or open within from bottom to top. It seemed to be in a rather ruinous state, but enough remained to show that it had been originally covered with the light grey cloth to which the natives attached a religious significance. It was no doubt with similar cloth that the white pyramids or obelisks were covered which Captain Cook beheld in the distance from the deck of his ship. Beside the particular pyramid which he examined Captain Cook found a sacrificial stage or altar with plantains laid upon it. The pyramids or obelisks which he thus saw and described were presumably the structures in which the priests concealed themselves when they gave oracles in the name of the god. On the farther side of the area of the _morai_ of which Captain Cook has given us a description stood a house or shed about ten feet high, forty feet long, and ten broad in the middle, but tapering somewhat towards the ends. The entrance into it was at the middle of the side, which was in the _morai_. On the farther side of the house, opposite the entrance, stood two wooden images, each cut out of a single piece, with pedestals, in all about three feet high, not badly designed nor executed. They were said to represent goddesses (_eatooa no veheina_). On the head of one of them was a carved helmet, and on the other a cylindrical cap like the head-dress worn at Tahiti. In the middle of the house, and before the two images, was an oblong space, enclosed by a low edging of stone and covered with shreds of the same grey cloth which draped the pyramid or obelisk. Within this enclosure seven chiefs lay buried; and outside the house, just on one side of the entrance, were two small square spaces in which a man and a hog were buried respectively, after being killed and sacrificed to the divinity. At a little distance from these, and near the middle of the _morai_, were three more of these square enclosed places, in which three chiefs had been interred. In front of their graves was an oblong enclosed space in which, as Captain Cook was told, three human victims were buried, each of them having been sacrificed at the funeral of one of the three chiefs. Within the area of the _morai_ or burying-ground, as Captain Cook calls it, were planted trees of various kinds. Similar sanctuaries appeared to Captain Cook to abound in the island; the particular one described by him he believed to be among the least considerable, being far less conspicuous than several others which he had seen in sailing along the coast.[96] [96] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 183-187. The cloth-covered pyramid or obelisk was called a _henananoo_ (_ib._ p. 187). From his description we may infer that the temples (_morais_) observed by him did not contain stone pyramids like those which formed such prominent features in the Tahitian sanctuaries and in the burial grounds of the Tooitongas in Tongataboo; for the pyramids, or rather obelisks, of wicker-work seen by Captain Cook in the Hawaiian sanctuaries were obviously structures of a wholly different kind. But there seem to be some grounds for thinking that stone pyramids, built in steps or terraces, did occur in some of the Hawaiian temples. Thus Captain King saw a _morai_, as he calls it, which consisted of a square solid pile of stones about forty yards long, twenty broad, and fourteen [feet?] in height. The top was flat and well paved, and surrounded by a wooden rail, on which were fixed the skulls of captives who had been sacrificed on the death of chiefs. The ascent to the top of the pile was easy, but whether it was a staircase or an inclined plane is not mentioned by Captain King. At one end of the temple or sacred enclosure was an irregular kind of scaffold supported on poles more than twenty feet high, at the foot of which were twelve images ranged in a semicircle with a sacrificial table or altar in front of them. On the scaffold Captain Cook was made to stand, and there, swathed in red cloth, he received the adoration of the natives, who offered him a hog and chanted a long litany in his honour.[97] [97] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 5-7. When Kamehameha was busy conquering the archipelago in the last years of the eighteenth century, he built a great temple (_heiau_) for his war-god Tairi in the island of Hawaii. Some thirty years later the ruined temple was visited and described by the missionary William Ellis. He says: "Its shape is an irregular parallelogram, 224 feet long, and 100 wide. The walls, though built of loose stones, were solid and compact. At both ends, and on the side next the mountains, they were twenty feet high, twelve feet thick at the bottom, but narrowed in gradually towards the top, where a course of smooth stones, six feet wide, formed a pleasant walk. The walls next the sea were not more than seven or eight feet high, and were proportionally wide. The entrance to the temple is by a narrow passage between two high walls.... The upper terrace within the area was spacious, and much better finished than the lower ones. It was paved with flat smooth stones, brought from a distance. At the south end was a kind of inner court, which might be called the sanctum sanctorum of the temple, where the principal idol used to stand, surrounded by a number of images of inferior deities.... On the outside, near the entrance to the inner court, was the place of the _rere_ (altar) on which human and other sacrifices were offered. The remains of one of the pillars that supported it were pointed out by the natives, and the pavement around was strewed with bones of men and animals, the mouldering remains of those numerous offerings once presented there. About the centre of the terrace was the spot where the king's sacred house stood, in which he resided during the season of strict _tabu_, and at the north end, the place occupied by the houses of priests, who, with the exception of the king, were the only persons permitted to dwell within the sacred enclosures. Holes were seen on the walls, all around this, as well as the lower terraces, where wooden idols of varied size and shape formerly stood, casting their hideous stare in every direction."[98] [98] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 96-98. Compare J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 45 _sq._ From this somewhat indistinct description we gather that the temple was a large oblong area enclosed by high stone walls and open to the sky, and that at some place within the enclosure there rose a structure in a series of terraces, of which the uppermost was paved with flat stones and supported the king's house, while the houses of the priests stood in another part of the sacred enclosure. If this interpretation is correct, we may infer that the temple resembled a Tahitian _morai_, which was a walled enclosure enclosing a sort of stepped and truncated pyramid built of stone.[99] The inference is confirmed by the language used by Captain King in speaking of the temple which he describes, for he calls it a _morai_,[100] and the same term is applied to the sacred edifices in Hawaii by other voyagers.[101] [99] See above, pp. 278 _sqq._ [100] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 5. [101] O. von Kotzebue, _Neue Reise um die Welt_, ii. 89 _sq._; A. Campbell, _Voyage round the World_, p. 175. Another ruined temple (_heiau_) seen by Ellis in Hawaii, is described by him as built of immense blocks of lava, and measuring a hundred and fifty feet long by seventy feet wide. At the north end was a smaller enclosure, sixty feet long and ten wide, partitioned off by a high wall, with but one narrow entrance. The places where the idols formerly stood were apparent, though the idols had been removed. The spot where the altar had been erected could be distinctly traced; it was a mound of earth, paved with smooth stones, and surrounded by a firm curb of lava. The adjacent ground was strewn with bones of the ancient offerings.[102] Another temple (_heiau_), in good preservation, visited by Ellis, measured no less than two hundred and seventy feet in one direction by two hundred and ten in another. The walls were thick and solid; on the top of them the stones were piled in a series of small spires. The temple was said to have been built by a queen of Hawaii about eleven generations back.[103] Once more in one of the _puhonuas_ or cities of refuge, which in Hawaii afforded an inviolable sanctuary to fugitives, Ellis saw another temple (_heiau_), which he describes as "a compact pile of stones, laid up in a solid mass, 126 feet by 65, and ten feet high. Many fragments of rock, or pieces of lava, of two or more tons each, were seen in several parts of the wall, raised at least six feet from the ground." Ellis was told that the city of refuge, of which this temple formed part, had been built for Keave, who reigned in Hawaii about two hundred and fifty years before the time when the missionary was writing.[104] From his descriptions we may infer that some at least of the Hawaiian temples deserved to rank among megalithic structures, and that the natives had definite traditions of the kings or queens by whom the temples had been built. [102] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 116. [103] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 117 _sq._ [104] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 169. In the island of Oahu a temple (_heiau_) visited by the missionary Stewart was forty yards long by twenty yards broad. The walls, of dark stone, were perfectly regular and well built, about six feet high, three feet wide at the level of the ground, and two feet wide at the top. It was enclosed only on three sides, the oblong area formed by the walls being open on the west; from that side there was a descent by three regular terraces or very broad steps.[105] This brief account confirms the inference which I have drawn from the more detailed description of Ellis, as to the terraced structure of some Hawaiian temples. [105] C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, pp. 226 _sq._ In the mountains of Hawaii, at a height of about five thousand feet above the sea, Commodore Wilkes saw the ruins of an ancient temple of the god Kaili (Tairi), round about which stood eight small pyramids built of compact blocks of lava laid without cement. These pyramids were said to have been erected at the command of Umi, an ancient king, to commemorate his conquests. They seem to have measured each some ten or twelve feet square. The temple which they surrounded was about ninety-two feet long by seventy-two feet wide; the outer walls were about seven feet high and as many thick. Internally the edifice was divided by partition walls three feet high. The building was said to have been formerly covered with idols, of which no traces remained at the time of Wilkes's visit.[106] [106] Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iv. 99 _sq._, with the plate. Often, apparently, a Hawaiian temple consisted of little more than a walled or palisaded enclosure containing a number of rudely carved images and a place of sacrifice in the form of a platform raised on poles. Such a temple is described by the Russian navigator Lisiansky. The images in it were grouped and arranged so as to form a sort of semicircle. The chief priest of the temple informed the Russians "that the fifteen statues wrapped in cloth represented the gods of war; the two to the right of the place of sacrifice, the gods of spring; those on the opposite side, the guardians of autumn; and that the altar was dedicated to the god of joy, before which the islanders dance and sing on festivals appointed by their religion." With regard to the temples in general, Lisiansky observes that they "were by no means calculated to excite in the mind of a stranger religious veneration. They are suffered to remain in so neglected and filthy a condition, that, were it not for the statues, they might be taken rather for hog-sties than places of worship."[107] [107] U. Lisiansky, _op. cit._ pp. 105-107. He says (p. 106) that the temple was "called by the natives _Heavoo_, not _Morai_, as some navigators have said." The word _Heavoo_ is probably identical with the word _heiau_, which other writers give as the Hawaiian name for a temple. As to the form of the temples see also A. Campbell, _Voyage round the World_, pp. 175 _sq._: "Their Morais, or places of worship, consist of one large house or temple, with some smaller ones round it, in which are the images of their inferior gods. The tabooed or consecrated precincts are marked out by four square posts, which stand thirty or forty yards from the building. In the inside of the principal house there is a screen or curtain of white cloth, hung across one end within which the image of Etooah [_atua_, _akua_] is placed." Remy (_op. cit._ p. xl) describes the Hawaiian temples as "simple enclosures of stones, roofless, where the religious ceremonies were performed." The images of the gods were usually carved of wood. When a new idol was to be made, a royal and priestly procession went forth, with great ceremony, to the destined tree, where the king himself, with a stone axe, struck the first blow at the root. After the tree was felled, a man or a hog was killed and buried on the spot where it had grown.[108] Sometimes, apparently, the direction to carve an idol out of a particular tree was given by a god in a dream. There is a tradition that once when the woodmen were felling such a tree with their stone axes, the chips flew out and killed two of them; whereupon the other woodmen covered their faces with masks, and cut down the tree with their daggers.[109] Another famous idol was said to be made of wood so poisonous, that if chips of it were steeped in water, and anybody drank of the water, he would die in less than twenty-four hours.[110] The Hawaiians seem to have made their idols hideous on purpose to inspire terror.[111] The features of some of the images were violently distorted, their mouths set with a double row of the fangs of dogs, their eyes made of large pearl oysters with black nuts in the middle; some had long pieces of carved wood, shaped like inverted cones, rising from the top of their heads;[112] some had tongues of a monstrous size, others had no tongues at all; some had mouths that reached from ear to ear; the heads of some were a great deal larger than their bodies.[113] Some of the idols were stones. In the island of Hawaii there is a pebbly beach from which pebbles used to be carried away to be deified or to represent deities. They were generally taken in couples, a male and a female, and having been wrapt up very carefully together in a piece of native cloth, they were conveyed to a temple (_heiau_), where ceremonies of consecration or deification were performed over them.[114] [108] Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 450. [109] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 92 _sq._ [110] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 91. [111] A. Marcuse, _Die Hawaiischen Inseln_, p. 101. [112] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 6, 15; compare A. Campbell, _op. cit._ p. 76. [113] U. Lisiansky, _op. cit._ p. 107. [114] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 212 _sq._ The human sacrifice offered at the making of an idol was intended to impart strength to the image.[115] But human sacrifices were offered on many other occasions, such as on the approach of war, on the death of a chief, and so forth. There is a tradition that Umi, a famous king of Hawaii, once offered eighty men to his god as a thank-offering for victory. The victims were generally prisoners of war, but in default of captives any men who had broken taboos or rendered themselves obnoxious to the chiefs were sacrificed. It does not appear that they were slain in the presence of the idol or within the temple, but either on the outside or where they were first taken; in all cases an attempt seems to have been made to preserve the body entire or as little mangled as possible. Generally the victims were despatched by a blow on the head with a club or stone; sometimes, however, they were stabbed. Having been stripped naked, the bodies were carried into the temple and laid in a row, with their faces downwards, on the altar immediately before the idol. The priest thereupon, in a kind of prayer, offered them to the gods; and if hogs were sacrificed at the same time, they were afterwards piled on the human bodies and left there to rot and putrefy together.[116] [115] J. Remy, _op. cit._ p. 161. [116] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 150-152; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 47 _sq._; J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. xl _sq._ Compare U. Lisiansky, _op. cit._ pp. 121 _sq._; Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 423 _sq._ When a new temple was about to be dedicated, some of the people used to flee into the mountains to escape being sacrificed. The last human sacrifices are said to have been offered in 1807, when the queen of the islands was seriously ill.[117] Whenever war was in contemplation, the diviners used to sacrifice animals, generally hogs and fowls, and to draw omens from the manner in which they expired, from the appearance of their entrails, and from other signs. Sometimes, when the animal was slain, they disembowelled it, took out the spleen, and, holding it in their hands, offered their prayers. But if the contemplated expedition was of any importance or the danger was imminent, human sacrifices were offered to ensure the co-operation of the war-gods in the destruction of their enemies.[118] [117] A. Marcuse, _op. cit._ p. 103. [118] W. Ellis, iv. 150 _sq._ § 8. _Festivals_ In every lunar month the people celebrated four festivals. The festival of the new moon lasted three nights and two days; the three others lasted two nights and one day. These nights and days were taboo or sacred: men who took part in the festivals might not speak to a woman under pain of death, and all the people were forbidden to sail the sea, to fish, to make bark-cloth, and to play games.[119] Besides these monthly festivals there was one called Macahity, which lasted for a whole month and seems to have celebrated the end of the old year. It fell in November, and has been compared by Lisiansky to our festival of Christmas. He tells us that "it continues a whole month, during which the people amuse themselves with dances, plays, and sham-fights of every kind. The king must open this festival wherever he is. On this occasion, his majesty dresses himself in his richest cloak and helmet, and is paddled in a canoe along the shore, followed sometimes by many of his subjects. He embarks early, and must finish his excursion at sun-rise. The strongest and most expert of the warriors is chosen to receive him on his landing. This warrior watches the royal canoe along the beach; and as soon as the king lands, and has thrown off his cloak, he darts his spear at him, from a distance of about thirty paces, and the king must either catch the spear in his hand, or suffer from it: there is no jesting in the business. Having caught it, he carries it under his arm, with the sharp end downwards, into the temple or _heavoo_. On his entrance, the assembled multitude begin their sham-fights, and immediately the air is obscured by clouds of spears, made for the occasion with blunted ends. Hamamea [the king, Kamehameha] has been frequently advised to abolish this ridiculous ceremony, in which he risks his life every year; but to no effect. His answer always is, that he is as able to catch a spear, as any one on the island is to throw it at him. During the Macahity, all punishments are remitted throughout the country; and no person can leave the place in which he commences these holidays, let the affair requiring his absence be ever so important."[120] The ceremony of throwing a spear at the king during the festival of Macahity has been described also by the Scotch sailor Archibald Campbell, who may have witnessed it. He says: "The king remains in the _morai_ for the whole period; before entering it, a singular ceremony takes place. He is obliged to stand till three spears are darted at him: he must catch the first with his hand, and with it ward off the other two. This is not a mere formality. The spear is thrown with the utmost force; and should the king lose his life, there is no help for it."[121] This curious rite may perhaps have been a relic of an old custom which obliged the king to submit once a year to the ordeal of battle, in order to prove his fitness for a renewed tenure of office, death being the penalty of defeat and the kingdom the reward of victory in the combat.[122] During the continuance of the festival the priests were employed in collecting the taxes, which were paid by the chiefs in proportion to the extent of their territories; these taxes consisted of mats, feathers, and the produce of the country. The people celebrated the festival by dancing, wrestling, and other amusements.[123] The victor in the boxing matches and martial evolutions was crowned and treated as king of the festival, which was held in honour of the god Rono.[124] [119] L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. 595. Compare U. Lisiansky, _Voyage round the World_, p. 118. According to the latter writer, there were no taboos (festivals) in the eleventh month. [120] U. Lisiansky, _Voyage round the World_, pp. 118 _sq._ From A. Campbell, _Voyage round the World_, p. 178, we learn that the festival fell in November, and from a brief native notice we may gather that the New Year celebration was the festival of Macahity. See J. Remy, _Histoire de l'Archipel Havaiien_, pp. 167, 169, "_à la célébration de la nouvelle année, les citoyens, les chefs, les femmes, les enfants se livraient à des boxes furieuses, et plusieurs recevaient dans ces jeux des blessures très graves_." [121] A. Campbell, _op. cit._ p. 179. [122] Compare _The Golden Bough_, Part III. _The Dying God_, pp. 117 _sq._ [123] A. Campbell, _op. cit._ pp. 178 _sq._ [124] O. von Kotzebue, _Neue Reise um die Welt_, ii. 88 _sq._ No one might go to war during the New Year festival; all the people had to repair to the temples (_morais_). Three kinds of idols were worshipped at this season; the principal of them, called Kekou-Aroha, was carried round the island by a priest; everything that he could seize with his left hand he had the right to appropriate, whether it was dogs, pigs, vegetables, or what not; and any person on whom he in like manner laid a hand was bound to assist him in carrying or leading to the temple the tribute or booty he had thus taken possession of.[125] [125] L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. 596. Of the rigour with which the laws of taboo were enforced during one of these festivals we may gather an idea from a statement of the Russian navigator von Kotzebue. He says: "As Kareimoku's guests, we were present at the celebration of a _Tabu pori_, which lasted from the setting of the sun to sunrise on the third day. It is already known what degree of sanctity is imparted to him who joins in this communion with the gods during the time. Should he accidentally touch a woman, she must be instantly put to death. Should he enter a woman's house, the flames must immediately consume it."[126] [126] O. von Kotzebue, _Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beering's Straits_, iii. 248 _sq._ Compare A. von Chamisso, _Reise um die Welt_ (Leipzig, 1836), ii. 312. §9. _Death and Funeral Rites_ The Hawaiians explained life as usual by the hypothesis of a soul (_uhane_), which animated the whole body, but had its seat especially in the sockets of the eyes, and above all in the lachrymal gland. During sleep the soul quits the body, wanders away, and sees the places and things which appear to it in dreams; usually it returns in time to resume its functions in the body without endangering the health of the sleeper. Occasionally, however, it happens that in its rambles it loses its way through falling in with a ghost or spectre, who frightens it; but even then it may be brought back with the help of a familiar spirit despatched to seek out and guide home the wanderer. When a man falls sick, his soul begins to feel ill at ease in his body, and if the sickness proves fatal, the soul quits him never to return.[127] According to another account, the Hawaiians held that every man had two souls in his body, of which one never left him in life, while the other went forth from time to time in dreams or ecstasy, but only to return to its corporeal tabernacle. Sometimes a diviner would warn a man that he had seen his dream-soul roaming about, and that perhaps it might never come back, because a certain deity was angry with him. Upon that the terrified owner of the soul would naturally engage the diviner to recover his spiritual property by propitiating the angry deity with a valuable offering.[128] [127] A. Bastian, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_, pp. 272 _sq._ [128] J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 39 note; A. Marcuse, _Die Hawaiischen Inseln_, p. 105. Sickness was commonly explained by the presence in the sufferer of an evil spirit, who must be exorcised if the patient was to be restored to health. For this purpose the services of a priest (_kahuna_) were engaged, who by the recitation of a suitable incantation invited or compelled the demon to declare through the mouth of the sick man why he had entered into him, and on what terms he would consent to take his departure. Sometimes, the demon was induced to perch on the head or shoulders of one of the bystanders, and from that coign of vantage to answer the interrogatory of the priest. But at other times he burrowed so deep into the patient's body and held his tongue so obstinately, that the priest had no alternative but to prick the sick man's body with bamboo needles and to drop water into his eyes in order to drive out the evil spirit.[129] [129] A. Bastian, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_, p. 269. When all remedies had proved vain and death had followed, the bodies of common people were buried in a crouching position. The upper part of the body was raised; the face was bent forwards to meet the knees; the hands were put under the hams and passed up between the knees; then head, hands, and knees were bound together with cinnet or cord. Afterwards the corpse was wrapt up in a coarse mat and interred on the first or second day after death. But the corpses of chiefs and priests were not thus doubled up; they were laid out straight, wrapt up in many folds of native cloth, and buried in that posture. Priests were generally committed to the earth within the precincts of the temple in which they had officiated. A pile of stones or a circle of high poles marked their grave. But it was only the bodies of priests or of persons of some importance that were thus interred. For ordinary people natural graves were preferred, where suitable places could be found, such as caves in the face of cliffs or large subterranean grottos. Sometimes the inhabitants of a village deposited their dead in one great cavern, but generally each family had a distinct sepulchral cave. Their artificial graves were either simple pits dug in the earth or large enclosures, which might be surrounded with high stone walls so as to resemble the ordinary temples (_heiaus_). Occasionally they buried their dead in sequestered spots near their dwellings, but often in their gardens, and sometimes in their houses. The graves were not deep, and the bodies were usually placed in them in a sitting posture.[130] A rude method of embalming by means of the flower of the sugar-cane was often practised, whereby the entrails and brains were extracted and the body desiccated.[131] When the dead was interred in the dwelling, the house was not uncommonly shut up and deserted, the survivors seeking for themselves a new habitation.[132] The custom no doubt sprang from a fear of the ghosts, which were supposed to linger about their final resting-places and to injure such as came within their reach; hence their apparitions were much dreaded. For the same reason burials were conducted in a private manner and by night. If people were seen carrying a dead body past a house, the inmates would abuse or even stone them for not taking it some other way; for they imagined that the ghost would ply to and fro between the grave and his old home along the path by which his corpse had been carried.[133] Sometimes, apparently, to prevent the ghost from straying, his grave was enclosed by a sort of fence composed of long poles stuck in the ground at intervals of three or four inches and fastened together at the top. At all events Ellis saw a priest's tomb thus enclosed, and he received this explanation of the fence from some people; though others merely said that it was a custom so to inter persons of consequence.[134] Nightmare was believed to be caused by a ghost attempting to strangle the dreamer; under the influence of this belief a strong man has been seen to run shrieking down the street, tugging with both hands at his throat to tear the incubus away, till he reached the door of a neighbour's house and, bursting in, fell fainting on the floor. He thought that the ghost of a chief, who had died the day before, had a grip on his throat and was trying to throttle him.[135] Sometimes, however, affection for the dead sufficed to overcome the fear of the ghost, and the mouldering bones were carried about as relics by relations and friends.[136] When the Scotch sailor Archibald Campbell was in the islands in the early years of the nineteenth century, his patroness the queen kept by her the bones of her father wrapt up in a piece of cloth. Whenever she slept in her own house, the bones were placed by her side; in her absence they were set on a feather-bed which she had received from the captain of a ship, and which she used only for this purpose. On being asked by the Scotchman why she observed this singular custom, she replied that it was because she loved her father so dearly.[137] More usually, however, the bones of a beloved chief were carefully hidden to prevent his enemies from finding them and making arrow-heads out of them, with which to hunt rats, or otherwise profaning them. Hence there was a proverb to the effect that the bones of bad chiefs were not concealed. When the great King Kamehameha died in 1819, his bones were hidden and disappeared completely in some secret cave.[138] [130] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 359 _sq._; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 73 _sq._ [131] J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 73; J. Remy, _op. cit._ p. xlvii. [132] Tyerman and Bennet, _op. cit._ i. 429. [133] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 360 _sq._; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 74; A. Marcuse, _Die Hawaiischen Inslen_, p. 109. [134] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 129. [135] H. T. Cheever, _Life in the Sandwich Islands_ (London, 1851), pp. 11 _sq._, quoting Sheldon Dibble, _History of the Sandwich Islands_, p. 99. [136] O. von Kotzebue, _Neue Reise um die Welt_, ii. 98; A. Bastian, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_, p. 261. [137] A. Campbell, _Voyage round the World_, pp. 206 _sq._ [138] J. Remy, _op. cit._ p. 153. The death of a king or great chief in former days was the occasion for the observance of some singular ceremonies and customs. The grief, real or pretended, of the people found expression in many extravagant forms. Men and women knocked out some of their front teeth with stones; but the custom seems to have been observed even more extensively by men than by women. The kinsmen or friends of the deceased chief set the example, and their retainers were obliged to imitate them. Sometimes a man broke out his own tooth with a stone, but more usually the service was rendered him by another, who fixed one end of a stick against the tooth and hammered the stick with a stone till the tooth broke off. If the men deferred the operation, the women would perform it on them in their sleep. More than one tooth was seldom sacrificed at one time; but as the mutilation was repeated at the decease of every chief of rank or authority, few men of mature years were to be seen with a whole set of teeth, and many lost all their front teeth both in the upper and the lower jaw. Another mutilation practised at such times was to cut one or both ears, but it seems to have been comparatively rare. Much commoner was the custom of burning circles or semi-circles on the face or breast by means of strips of burning bark. The mourners also polled their hair in various ways. Sometimes they made bald a small round piece on the crown of the head, like the tonsure of Catholic priests; sometimes they shaved or cropped close the whole head except round the edge, where a short fringe was left to hang down; sometimes they made their heads quite bald on one side and allowed the hair to remain long on the other; occasionally they cut out a patch in the shape of a horse-shoe either at the back of the head or above the forehead; sometimes they shore a number of curved furrows from ear to ear or from the forehead to the neck. When a chief who had lost a relative or friend had his own hair cut after any particular pattern, his followers and dependants usually cropped their hair in the same style. Not to clip or shave the hair in mourning was regarded as disrespectful to the dead, but the particular manner of cutting it was left to the taste of the individual.[139] Some people in their frenzy knocked out their eyes with clubs and stones and cut as well as burned their flesh.[140] Another peculiar badge of mourning, adopted principally by the chiefs, was a black spot or line tattooed on the tongue. The painful operation was performed by puncturing the tongue with sharp fish-bones dipped in colouring matter.[141] But though these personal mutilations were popular and almost universal on the decease of chiefs, they appear not to have been practised by the common people among themselves. Thus a wife did not knock out her teeth on the death of her husband, and a son did not thus express his grief for the loss of his parents, nor they for the death of a child.[142] [139] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 175 _sqq._, 181. Compare U. Lisiansky, _op. cit._ p. 123; A. Campbell, _op. cit._ pp. 142 _sq._; J. Remy, _op. cit._ p. xlvii. [140] C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, p. 166; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 65 _sq._ [141] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 177, 180 _sq._ [142] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 180. Similar extravagances in the expression of grief were commonly exhibited by mourners, as we have seen, in other parts of Polynesia; but in Hawaii the rites observed at the death of a king or high chief were in so far peculiar that they assumed the character of a Saturnalia or orgy of unbridled lust and crime. On this subject the Russian navigator Lisiansky, who visited the islands while the ancient system of superstition was still in full vogue, reports as follows: "On the death of the king, a scene of horror takes place that is hardly credible. Twelve men are sacrificed; and shortly after the whole island abandons itself for a month to the utmost disorder and licentiousness. During this period, both sexes go entirely naked, and men cohabit with women without any distinction: the woman who should dare to make resistance, would be considered as violating the laws of the country. The same licentiousness is observed on the death of a noble; but it does not extend beyond the domains of the deceased, and is of a much shorter duration, not continuing, as Mr. Young informed me, more than a few days, though attempts are made by the youth of the party to prolong the period. Those who are put to death on the demise of the king, or any great personage, are such as have offered themselves for the purpose during the life of their master; and they are in consequence considered and treated by him as his best friends, since they have sworn to live and die with him. When I reflect upon the horrid nature of this ceremony, I hardly know how to credit its existence amongst a race of men so mild and good as these islanders in general appear to be; but Mr. Young, whose veracity I had no reason to doubt, assured me of the fact."[143] [143] U. Lisiansky, _Voyage round the World_, pp. 122 _sq._ This John Young, who gave Lisiansky information as to the customs and religion of the Hawaiians, was an Englishman who had resided in the islands for many years at the time of the Russian navigator's visit in 1804. Originally a sailor, born at Liverpool, he had been compulsorily detained by the natives when he landed from his ship in Hawaii in March 1790. But from the first he received the kindest treatment from the king, Kamehameha, whose full confidence and high esteem he enjoyed and deserved. The king gave him a fine estate and appointed him to several responsible offices; in particular Young was governor of Hawaii for no less than nine years during the king's absence. He married a native woman of rank, by whom he had six children. While he remained warmly attached to his native country and rendered essential services to English vessels touching at the islands, he remained a voluntary exile for forty-five years in Hawaii, where he died at the patriarchal age of ninety-two in December 1835. During this long period he enjoyed the favour of the kings, chiefs, and people, and was highly respected and esteemed for his intelligence and good offices by European voyagers to the islands.[144] Thus he had the best opportunities for acquainting himself with the customs and beliefs of the natives, and it is much to be regretted that of the ample store of knowledge which he thus acquired nothing remains but a few scattered notices recorded by travellers to whom he had verbally communicated them. [144] G. Vancouver, _Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and round the World_ (London, 1798), ii. 135 _sq._; W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, iv. 96; Tyerman and Bennet, _Journal of Voyages and Travels_, i. 377 _sq._; F. D. Bennett, _Narrative of a Whaling Voyage_, i. 238 _sq._ In 1809, some five years after Lisiansky's visit to Hawaii, the Scotch sailor Archibald Campbell witnessed one of these Saturnalia held on the occasion of the death of the king's brother. He says: "The public mourning that took place on this occasion was of so extraordinary a nature that had I not been an eye-witness, I could not have given credit to it. The natives cut out their hair, and went about completely naked. Many of them, particularly the women, disfigured themselves, by knocking out their front teeth, and branding their faces with red-hot stones, and the small end of calabashes, which they held burning to their faces till a circular mark was produced; whilst, at the same time, a general, I believe I may say an universal, public prostitution of the women took place. The queens, and the widow of the deceased, were alone exempted. When the captain of a ship that lay in the harbour remonstrated with the king upon these disgraceful scenes, he answered, that such was the law, and he could not prevent them."[145] [145] A. Campbell, _Voyage round the World_, pp. 142 _sq._ To these enormities the French navigator L. de Freycinet bore similar testimony a few years later. He says: "The despair which is affected after the loss of royal personages or great nobles presents also a remarkable resemblance to what takes place under similar circumstances among the inhabitants of the Marianne Islands. When we landed in Owhyhi [Hawaii], signs of sorrow everywhere presented themselves to our eyes and witnessed to the excesses that had been committed at the recent death of Tamehameha. At such a crisis anarchy displays all its horrors: the laws and the rules of taboo are broken without shame: the prohibited foods are devoured without scruple, chiefly by the women: the rights of property are ignored; force becomes the supreme law: the voice of chiefs is powerless: old enmities are avenged by blood or pillage: in a word, incredible scenes of disorder, of cruelty, and of lust are everywhere renewed under the stimulus of impunity. Calm does not begin to reign again until the heir is definitely invested with the royal power. Such is the mode in which the common people, freed for the moment from all restraint, express the grief which they are supposed to feel at the death of their sovereign."[146] [146] L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. 602. The early missionaries to Hawaii also testified to the disorders which prevailed on these occasions, though they seem not to have witnessed them. From their accounts we gather that at such times the rights of property were as little respected as the chastity of women. "On such an occasion," says Stewart, "every restraint was cast off, and all were in the habit of following the impulse of any and every wild passion that might seize them. Rights of person or of property were no longer regarded; and he who had the greatest muscular powers committed whatever depredation he chose, and injured any one he thought proper. Even the chiefs lost their ordinary pre-eminence, and could exert no influence of restraint on the excesses of their subjects. It was the time of redressing private wrongs, by committing violence on the property and person of an enemy; and everything that any one possessed was liable to be taken from him. Their grief was expressed by the most shocking personal outrages, not only by tearing off their clothes entirely, but by knocking out their eyes and teeth with clubs and stones, and pulling out their hair, and by burning and cutting their flesh; while drunkenness, riot, and every species of debauchery continued to be indulged in for days after the death of the deceased."[147] To the same effect Ellis writes that "as soon as the chief had expired, the whole neighbourhood exhibited a scene of confusion, wickedness, and cruelty, seldom witnessed even in the most barbarous society. The people ran to and fro without their clothes, appearing and acting more like demons than human beings; every vice was practised, and almost every species of crime perpetrated. Houses were burnt, property plundered, even murder sometimes committed, and the gratification of every base and savage feeling sought without restraint. Injuries or accidents, long forgotten perhaps by the offending party, were now revenged with unrelenting cruelty."[148] According to Jarves, the early historian of Hawaii, on these occasions no women were exempt from violation except the widows of the deceased.[149] [147] C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_, pp. 165 _sq._ [148] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, iv. 177. [149] J. J. Jarves, _History of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands_, p. 66. Compare J. Remy, _op. cit._ p. xlvii. Such outbursts of passion, released from all restraints of custom or law, are not unknown elsewhere on the occasion of a death. Among the Ba-ila of Northern Rhodesia it is customary at funerals for the women to sing lewd songs. "Under ordinary circumstances it would be reckoned taboo for women to utter such things in the presence of men; but at funerals all restraints are removed. People do as they like. Grass may be plucked out of the thatched roofs; the fields may be robbed of the growing corn; all passions are let loose; and no complaint for damage, theft, or adultery can be made. This last item used to be the case; nowadays fines are claimed."[150] [150] E. W. Smith and A. M. Dale, _The Ila-speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia_ (London, 1920), ii. 113 _sq._ The number of human victims sacrificed at the death of a chief varied with his rank. For a king of Hawaii the general number would seem to have been ten or twelve.[151] But when King Kamehameha died in 1819, the priest declared somewhat differently the custom in regard to human sacrifice on such an occasion. When the corpse had been removed from the king's own dwelling to a consecrated house for the performance of the proper rites, a sacred hog was baked and offered to it by the priest; for the dead king was now deemed to be a god. Then addressing the chiefs and the new king, the priest spoke as follows: "I will now make known to you the rules to be observed respecting persons to be sacrificed on the burial of his body. If you obtain one man before the corpse is removed, one will be sufficient; but after it leaves this house four will be required. If delayed until we carry the corpse to the grave, there must be ten; but after it is deposited in the grave, there must be fifteen. To-morrow morning there will be a tabu, and if the sacrifice be delayed until that time, forty men must die." However, on this occasion, no human blood was shed, but three hundred dogs were sacrificed.[152] The victims who were killed at the death of the king, princes, and distinguished chiefs, and were buried with their remains, belonged to the lowest class of society. In certain families the obligation of dying with the different members of such or such a noble house was hereditary, so that at the birth of a child it was known at whose death he must be sacrificed. The victims knew their destiny, and their lot seems to have had no terror for them.[153] [151] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vii. 145; U. Lisiansky, _op. cit._ p. 122. [152] J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 189, 190. Compare J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. 125, 127; H. Bingham, _Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands_, p. 71. [153] O. von Kotzebue, _Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beering's Straits_ (London, 1821), iii. 247. At Honaunau, in the island of Hawaii, there was a sort of mausoleum in which the bones of dead kings and princes were deposited. For some reason it was spared in the general destruction of pagan monuments which took place in 1819, and it was still almost intact when the missionary Ellis visited and described it a few years later. It was a compact building, twenty-four feet long by sixteen feet wide, built of the most durable timber, and thatched with leaves. It stood on a bed of lava jutting out into the sea, and was surrounded by a strong fence, leaving a paved area in front and at the two ends. Several rudely carved male and female images of wood were placed on the outside of the enclosure, some on low pedestals under the shade of a tree, others on high posts planted on the jutting rocks which overhung the edge of the water. A number of effigies stood on the fence at unequal distances all around; but the principal assemblage of idols was at the south-east end of the enclosed space, where twelve of them stood in a semicircle on a crescent-shaped basement of stone raised about two feet above the pavement. Some of them rested on small pedestals, others on pillars eight or ten feet high. The principal idol, distinguished by the variety and superiority of the carving on its body and especially on its head, stood in the middle, the others on either side of it, "as if perpetual guardians of 'the mighty dead' reposing in the house adjoining."[154] [154] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, iv. 164 _sq._ When a death had taken place, the house in which it occurred, was deemed defiled, and continued in that state until after the burial. But if the deceased was a chief, the whole land was polluted, and the heirs sought a residence in another part of the country, until the corpse was dissected and the bones tied in a bundle; for when that was done the season of defilement terminated. Hence on the death of King Kamehameha, his son and successor, Liholiho, had to retire for a time to another district.[155] [155] J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 191; H. Bingham, _Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands_, pp. 71 _sq._; J. Remy, _op. cit._ pp. 127, 129. § 10. _Fate of the Soul after Death_ The Hawaiians in general believed that the human soul exists after death, but their notions on the subject were, as usual, vague, confused, and contradictory. Some said that all the souls of the departed went to the Po, or place of night, and were there annihilated or eaten by the gods.[156] According to another account, the souls of the dead that had no claim to divinity fluttered about their old homes till the moment arrived when they became the food of the gods. It is not certain, adds de Freycinet, that they recognised the immortality of the soul in the case of persons of the lowest class.[157] Others said that some souls went to the regions of Akea (Wakea) and Miru (Milu), two ancient kings of Hawaii. Of these two, Akea was reported to have been the first king of the island. When he died, he descended into the nether world and there founded a kingdom. His successor on the throne of Hawaii, by name Miru or Milu, also descended into the underworld at death, and shared the government of the infernal realm with his predecessor Akea. Their land is a place of darkness, their food, lizards and butterflies. But there are streams of water of which they drink, and wide-spreading trees under which they recline.[158] Milu is described as the Hawaiian Pluto, the lord of the lower world to whose dominions departed spirits go. His abode was in the west, hence the ghosts of such as died on the eastern shore of an island always had to cross to the western shore before they could set out for their final place of rest in the spirit land. Some said that Milu had his dwelling under the ocean, and that he was the prince of wicked spirits.[159] However, according to some accounts, the two ancient kings, Milu and Akea, ruled over separate regions in the spirit land, which were tabooed to each other, so that nobody could pass from the one to the other. Akea or Wakea dwelt in the upper region, and there the souls of chiefs dwelt with him; whereas Milu occupied the muddy lower region, and there the souls of common folk abode with him. In the upper region all was peaceful and orderly, and there persons who had faithfully complied with the precepts of religion in life were received after death. On the other hand the lower region, ruled over by Milu, was noisy and disorderly; evil spirits played their pranks there, and the souls of the dead subsisted on lizards and butterflies.[160] When persons recovered from a death-like swoon, it was supposed that their souls had gone to the underworld and been sent back to earth by Milu. The best account of the spirit land was given by one who had spent eight days in it, and on returning to life reported to his family what he had seen. According to his observations, the spirit land is flat and fruitful, it is tolerably well lighted, and everything grows there spontaneously, so that, contrary to some reports, the palace of Milu is a really delightful place. Milu himself is not married to any one particular wife; but from time to time he chooses for his consorts the most beautiful of the female ghosts when they arrive in deadland, and the women thus honoured are naturally taboo for the male ghosts. All souls live there in exactly the same state in which they quitted their bodies. The souls of those who died young, especially of those who fell in battle, are hale and strong; whereas the souls of those who perished of disease are sickly and weak, and weak, too, are the souls of such as died in old age.[161] [156] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 365 _sq._ [157] L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. 594. [158] W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 366; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ p. 38; A. Bastian, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_, p. 262. Ellis gives Miru as the form of the name, but the correct Hawaiian form is Milu; for in the Hawaiian dialect the ordinary Polynesian R is replaced by L. See E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, p. xxiii. In New Zealand and Mangaia the name Miru was given to the goddess of hell or of the dead. See E. Tregear, _op. cit._ pp. 243, 244, _s.v._ "Miru." [159] E. Tregear, _Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary_, pp. 243 _sq._, _s.v._ "Miru." [160] H. T. Cheever, _Life in the Sandwich Islands_ (London, 1851), p. 12; A. Bastian, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_, pp. 264 _sqq._; A. Marcuse, _Die Hawaiischen Inseln_, p. 99. [161] A. Bastian, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_, p. 264. There were three places in the islands from which the ghosts took their departure for the other world. One was at the northern extremity of the island of Hawaii; one was at the western end of Maui; and one was at the southern point of Oahu.[162] According to one account, the ghosts on their passage to Milu's subterranean realm went westward in the direction of the setting sun, and either leaped from a rock into the sea or vanished into a hole in the ground.[163] [162] H. T. Cheever, _Life in the Sandwich Islands_, p. 12; A. Marcuse, _Die Hawaiischen Inseln_, p. 99. [163] A. Bastian, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_, p. 265. But before bidding a last farewell to earth, the soul of the deceased was believed to linger for a time in the neighbourhood of the grave or of the house. It had now become an _akua_ or divine spirit, but during its stay on earth it was dreaded as an _akua-lapu_ or "terrifying spirit," because it appeared to the living as a spectre or ghost. In time, however, it grew weaker and weaker and gradually disappeared altogether, like the other spirits (_akuas_). By that time it had found a guide to show it the way to Milu's realm, from which there is no return. Sometimes, however, the guardian god of a family would oppose the passage of a soul to the other world, and send it back to life, so that the seemingly dead man recovered.[164] It is said to have been a firmly established belief that the dead appeared to the living and communicated with them in dreams.[165] The priests in particular were favoured with such messages from the other world.[166] [164] A. Bastian, _op. cit._ p. 266. [165] L. de Freycinet, _Voyage autour du Monde, Historique_, ii. 594. [166] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, iv. 367. A legend tells how a certain chief of Hawaii, sorrowing for the death of his wife, applied to a priest, who furnished him with a god called Kane-i-kou-alii (God of Chiefs), to guide him to the nether world of Milu, whither his beloved spouse had departed. Journeying together, the god and the man came to the end of the world, where grew a tree, which split open and allowed them to glide down into the depths. There the god hid behind a rock and allowed the chief to go on alone, but first he rubbed stinking oil over the chief's body. On arriving at Milu's palace the chief found the whole court full of spirits engaged in such noisy and tumultuous sports, that he could steal in among them unobserved, all the more because the nearest spirits mistook him for a ghost newly arrived with the stench of his dead body still on him, so that they turned away from him in disgust and made uncomplimentary remarks on his unsavoury condition. When they had played all sorts of games, the chief suggested that, as a new form of sport, they should all take out their eyes and throw them in a heap. The suggestion was accepted, and every one hastened to comply with it. But the chief took care to mark where the eyes of Milu fell, and snatching them up he hid them in the coco-nut beaker which he carried with him. As all the spirits were now blind, it was easy for the chief to make his way to the neighbouring realm of Akea or Wakea, which was tabooed to the spirits that swarmed in Milu's kingdom and might not be entered by them. However, after long negotiations, Milu was allowed to recover his eyes, on condition that the soul of the chief's wife should be sent back to earth and reunited to her body, which was happily accomplished.[167] [167] A. Bastian, _Inselgruppen in Oceanien_, pp. 265 _sq._ The Hawaiians were not without some notion of a general resurrection of the dead. When the missionary William Ellis was conversing with some of the natives on that subject, they said that they had heard of it before from a native priest named Kapihe, who had lived at their village in the time of King Kamehameha. The priest told the king that at his death he would see his ancestors, and that hereafter all the kings, chiefs, and people of Hawaii would live again. When Ellis asked them how this would be effected, and with what circumstances it would be attended, whether they would live again in Hawaii or in Miru (Milu), the Hades of the Sandwich Islands, they replied that there were two gods, who conducted the departed spirits of their chiefs to some place in the heavens, where the souls of kings and chiefs sometimes dwelt, and that afterwards the two divine conductors returned with the royal and princely souls to earth, where they accompanied the movements and watched over the destinies of their survivors. The name of one of these gods was Kaonohiokala, which means the eyeball of the sun; and the name of the other was Kuahairo. Now Kapihe was priest to the latter god, and professed to have received a revelation, in accordance with which he informed King Kamehameha that, when the monarch should depart this life, the god Kuahairo would carry his spirit to the sky and afterwards accompany it back to earth again, whereupon his body would be restored to life and youth; that he would have his wives again and resume his government in Hawaii; that at the same time the existing generation would see and know their parents and ancestors, and that all the people who had died would rise again from the dead.[168] It is to be feared, however, that the priest was a deceiver; for King Kamehameha has not yet come to life again, and up to the present time the general resurrection has not taken place in Hawaii. [168] W. Ellis, _Polynesian Researches_, iv. 144 _sq._ That must conclude what I have to say about the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead in Polynesia, The notions which the Polynesians entertained on this subject cannot but strike a civilised European as childish, while the customs which they based on them must appear to him in great part foolish, even where they were not barbarous and cruel. How far such childish notions and foolish customs tend to confirm or to refute the widespread, almost universal, belief in the survival of the human soul after death, is a question which I must leave my readers to answer for themselves. NOTE TABOO AMOUNG THE MAORIS The power which Maori chiefs possessed of imposing, or at all events of enforcing, a taboo seems not to have been quite so absolute as might perhaps be inferred from the statement in the text.[1] We are told that the power of the taboo mainly depended on the influence of the person who imposed it. If it were put on by a great chief, it would not be broken, but a powerful man often violated the taboo of an inferior. A chief, for example, would frequently lay one of these sacred interdicts on a road or a river, and then nobody would dare to go by either, unless he felt himself strong enough to set the chief's taboo at defiance. The duration of the taboo was arbitrary, and depended on the will of the person who imposed it. Similarly with the extent to which the prohibition applied: sometimes it was limited to a particular object, sometimes it embraced many: sometimes it was laid on a single spot, at other times it covered a whole district.[2] [1] Above, p. 47. [2] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants_, Second Edition (London, 1870), p. 168. Compare J. Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage autour du Monde et à la recherche de la Pérouse, Histoire du Voyage_ (Paris, 1832-1833), ii. 530. To render a place taboo a chief had only to tie one of his old garments to a pole and stick it up on the spot which he proposed to make sacred, while at the same time he declared that the prohibited area was part of his own body, such as his backbone, or that it bore the name of one of his ancestors. In the latter case all the persons descended from that particular ancestor were in duty bound to rally to the defence of the chief's taboo, and the more distant the ancestor, and the more numerous his descendants, the greater the number of the champions thus pledged to the support of the family honour. Hence the longer a man's pedigree, the better chance he stood of maintaining his taboo against all comers, for the larger was the troop of adherents whom he enlisted in its defence. Thus chiefs, with family trees which reached backward to the gods, were in a far better position to make good their arbitrary interdicts than mere ordinary mortals, who hardly remembered their grandfathers. In this as in other respects the taboo was essentially an aristocratic institution.[3] [3] R. Taylor, _op. cit._ p. 169. INDEX Abortions, spirits of, dreaded, 49 _n._^1 Adam, the Hawaiian, 393 Adoption among the Marquesans, 339 Aesculapius, the Hawaiian, 398 _Afiatouca_, burial-place, 102, 103 Agriculture of Maoris, 8 _sq._; of the Tongans, 59 _sq._; Samoan, 164 _sqq._; of the Hervey Islanders, 221 _sq._; of the Society Islanders, 249; of the Hawaiians, 378 _sq._ Air, gods of the, 277 _Aitu_, Samoan gods embodied in visible objects, animals, birds, etc., 182, 201, 207 Akaanga, a god, spreads a net to catch ghosts, 242, 244 Akea (Wakea), king of the nether world, 427, 428, 430 _Akua_, god, in the Hawaiian dialect, equivalent to _atua_, 392, 398 _Akuas_, spirits, 429 Alai Valoo, a Tongan god, 74 Alo Alo, a Tongan god, 71 _sq._ Altars in the Society Islands, 291 Amable, Father, Catholic missionary, 367 Ambler, English sailor, 84 Amusements of the Marquesans, 339 _sqq._ Ancestors worshipped by Maoris, 32 _sqq._; skulls of, brought out at marriages, 288, 311 Ancestral spirits watch over the living, 33; do not follow their kinsfolk among strangers, 34; cause disease, 49; worshipped by Society Islanders, 300, 315; guardians of newly wedded pairs, 311 Angas, G. F., 48 _n._^1 Animals, gods in form of, 66, 92 _sqq._, 182 _sqq._; deified spirits of men resident in, 227 _sq._; worshipped in Hawaii, 401 _sqq._ Anointing a king of Samoa, 177 Anuanu, vale of, 376 _n._^2 _Ao_, titles of chiefs in Samoa, 172 _sq._ Apolima, Samoan island, 149, 151 Apparitions dreaded, 205, 217 Araia, 241, 242 Aremauku, starting-place for spirit-land, 239 Areois, Society of the, 259 _sqq._ _Arii taboo_, sacred chiefs, 387 _Ariki_, sacred chief, 41; king, 224 Astronomy of priests, 293 _Atua_, the Polynesian word for god or spirit, 35, 36, 37, 41, 42, 44, 46, 64 _n._^3, 89, 277, 322, 323, 348, 349. _Compare akua, eatooa, etua_ _Atuas_, consecrated feathers called, 291; inspired priests called, 294; great national gods, distinguished from _oramatuas tiis_, the spirits of dead relatives, 324 Auraka, a burial cavern, 233, 237, 238, 241 Avaiki, subterranean region, home of the dead, 238, 239, 241, 243, 244 Axes or adzes of stone, 61, 180, 233, 251, 335, 382 Ba-ila, their licence at funerals, 425 Baessler, A., 221 _n._^1, 279 _n._^1, 285, 286, 374 Baganda, superstition as to twins among the, 270 _sq._ Baldness as penalty of impiety, 95; the penalty of breach of taboo, 209 _sq._ Baluba, of the Congo, customs as to twins among the, 273 Banishment of chiefs in Samoa, 176 Banqueting-halls of the Marquesans, 343 _sq._ Baptism among the Maoris, 16 Bark-cloth, manufacture of, 61, 168, 222, 251 _sq._, 334, 381; not made in time of mourning, 234 _sq._ Baronga, of S.E. Africa, their superstitions concerning twins, 268 _sq._ Barundi, of E. Africa, customs as to twins among the, 272 _sq._ Bastian, Adolf, on sun-worship, 131 _n._ Bathing after burial, 21; of king at installation, 255 _n._^1; after contact with a corpse, 313 Bats, goddess incarnate in, 185; local deity, 196 Bay of Plenty, 23 Bennett, F. D., 332 _sq._, 359, 360, 372 Best, Elsdon, 6 _n._, 33, 35 Birds, gods incarnate in, 187 _sq._; sacred, 228; small land birds formerly oracular, 228; gods in the form of, 277, 294; worshipped in Hawaii, 402 Birth, a man's god determined at, 200 _sq._, 223; ceremonies after a, 288 Blackened faces in mourning, 231, 235 Blood of chief sacred, 45 _sq._; human, acceptable offering to deity, 188; offered to the dead, 209; of relatives offered to bride at marriage, 289; of bride's mother offered to bridegroom, 289; of mourners offered to the dead, 303, 304, 311 Bolotoo (Boolotoo, Bulotu), fabulous island, residence of Tongan gods and of noble dead, 65, 66, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89 _sq._, 92, 93, 98, 135 Bones of Captain Cook worshipped, 396 ---- of dead dug up, 21; painted red, 21; concealed, 21; profaned, 21; festival at removal of, 22; burned, 23; of sacrificial victims not broken, 291; of famous men carried off by enemies, 311; thrown into volcano, 400; carried about by relatives, 419 _sq._; hidden to prevent profanation, 420 ---- of dead chiefs buried in temples (_morais_), 311; hidden in caves, 312, 420 Boolotoo Katoa, a Tongan god, 94 Borabora, one of the Society Islands, 246, 281, 317 Bows and arrows, unknown to Maoris, 10; used by the Society Islanders as an amusement, 252 _sq._; unknown to the Marquesans, 335; found among the Hawaiians, 383 Boxing-matches in mourning, 211 Branch plucked from sacred trees, 255 _n._^1 Bread-fruit the staple food of the Society Islanders, 249; of the Rarotongans, 222; and of the Marquesans, 333, 334 Breath of chief sacred, 45 Brenchley, J. L., 124, 125 _n._^1 Brown, Dr. George, 56, 161, 173 _n._^1, 201, 204, 206 _n._^1, 212, 213, 214, 216 _n._^2, 218 Buffoonery in mourning for the dead, 211 Burial, Maori modes of, 20 _sq._; in house, 20, 27; on a stage, 20, 21; on a tree, 20 _sq._; secret, 21; and mourning, rites of, in Tonga, 132 _sqq._; by night, 419 Burial customs in Samoa, 209 _sqq._; in the Hervey Islands, 231 _sqq._; in the Society Islands, 308 _sqq._; in the Marquesas, 356 _sqq._; in the Hawaiian Islands, 418 _sqq._ ---- ground dreaded, 27 ---- places (_morais_) of the Marquesans, 357 _sq._ Burying the sins of the dead, 305 Busoga, superstition as to twins in, 270 Cabri, J. Baptiste, 371 Cain, the Hawaiian, 393 Campbell, A., 385, 412 _n._^1, 415, 419, 423 Cannibalism, 26, 62, 158 _sq._; in the Hervey Islands, 221 Canoe-shaped coffins, 20, 353, 356, 363 Canoes, Maori, 9; Tongan, 59; Marquesan, 337; provided for the dead to enable them to reach the spirit land, 364 _sqq._ Caterpillars, servants of owl-god, 188 Caves, bones or bodies of dead deposited in, 22, 232, 233, 237, 312, 320 _sq._, 357, 418 Centipedes, family god in, 188 _sq._; worshipped in Mangaia, 228 Ceremonies, magical, of Maoris, 13 _sq._; observed at death, 19 _sqq._; to facilitate passage of soul to other world, 24 _sqq._, 29; magical, of Tongans, 67 _sq._; observed for unburied dead, 205 _sq._; of mourning in the Hervey Islands, 234 _sqq._; at the inauguration of a king, 254 _sq._, 255 _n._^1; over dead Areoi, 261; after childbirth, 288; at marriage, 288 _sq._; for the protection of the living against ghosts, 305 _sqq._ _See_ Rites Ceremony of anointing a king of Samoa, 177; performed by parents of twins to fertilise plantains, 271 Chiefs descended from the gods, 29; their souls immortal, 29; tabooed, 41 _sqq._; physical superiority of, 58 _sq._, 377 _sq._; Samoan, 171 _sqq._; deified, 204; embalmed, 205; in the Marquesas, 344; in Hawaii, 384 _sq._ Chiefs' language in Samoa, 173 _sqq._ Chieftainship hereditary in Samoa, 176 Children sacrificed, 75 _sq._, 81 _sq._ Christianity in Tonga Islands, 60 Circumcision, in the Tonga Islands, 81; in the Hervey Islands, 223 _sq._; invented by god Rongo, 224 Civil lords and sacred kings in Mangaia, 224 _sq._ Clans, gods of, in animals or other natural objects, 94, 95 _sq._ Clavel, Dr., 338, 374 Cockles, god in, 183; prayers to cockle-god, 188 Coco-nuts, god in, 183; offered to the dead, 233 Coffins shaped like canoes, 20, 353, 356, 363 Collocot, E. E. V., 65 _n._^2, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98 _n._^1, 267 _n._^2 Comedies acted in mourning, 236 Commoners, the question of their souls, 66, 85 Communistic system in Samoa, 170 _sq._ Confession of sins, 189 Cook, Captain James, 1, 9, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61 _n._^2, 63, 81, 86, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 111 _n._, 117, 123, 128, 129, 132, 246, 248, 249, 251, 257, 258 _n._^5, 262, 275, 277 _n._^2 and ^4, 279, 280, 282, 283, 293, 297, 304, 310, 314 _n._^3, 315, 321, 328, 331, 371, 375, 379, 382, 383, 391, 395 _sq._, 406, 407, 408 ---- or Hervey Islands, 219 _sq._ Cooking in ovens of hot stones, 222, 379 Coral reefs, their formation, 55 _sq._ Corpses, sent adrift on the sea or exposed on stages, 210; broken in pieces, 362; flayed, 367 _sq._ Courage seated in liver, 85 Cousin marriage, 223 Creation, Hawaiian tradition of the, 393 Cremation among the Maoris, 23 Crickets, omens from, 231 Crimes, Tongan ideas about, 67 Crook, William P., first missionary to the Marquesas, 328, 349, 361, 372 Cruise, R. A., 31 _n._^2 _Curse of Manaia_, 12 Curses, Maori, 15; Tongan, 67; of sisters specially dreaded, 207 Customs observed at the birth of twins, 268 _sqq._ _See_ Burial customs, Ceremonies, Rites Cuttings in mourning for the dead, 19, 208 _sq._, 231, 302, 309, 311, 353; in Tonga, 133 _sqq._; intention of the, 145 _sq._ Cuttle-fish, household god in, 184; omens from, 190; temple of, 195; myth of the, 202 _sq._; a god in Mangaia,228; myth of Maui and the, 275 Dances at the birth of twins, 270 _sqq._; funeral, 139, 353 _sq._; of widow, 353, 354 Dancing among the Marquesans, 340 _sq._ ---- -places of the Marquesans, 340 _sq._ Danger Island, 230 Darwin, Charles, on coral reefs, 55 De Sainson, 112 D'Urville, J. Dumont, 11, 58, 110, 123, 357 _n._^3, 359 _n._^3, 373 Dead, disposal of the bodies of the (Maori), 20 _sqq._; buried in sitting posture, 20; spirits of, appear in dreams, 31, 91 _sq._; spirits of the dead become gods, 31; taboo entailed by contact with the, 39,137 _sq._; buried in _morais_, 117 _sqq._, 282 _sqq._, 311; worship of the, in Samoa, 204 _sq._; blood offered to the, 209; buried with head to the east, 210; buried with the head to the rising sun, 232; songs sung in honour of the, 236; buried in sitting posture, 262; images of spirits of the, 287 _sq._, 313 _sq._, 324 _sq._; blood of mourners offered to the, 303, 304, 311; fear of the spirits of the, 304 _sq._; disposal of the, in the Society Islands, 308 _sqq._; souls of the, in images, 313 _sq._; worship of the, in the Society Islands, 322 _sqq._; assimilated to deities, 327; disposal of the, among the Marquesans, 356 _sqq._; in the Hawaiian Islands, 418 _sqq._; evocation of the, 370 _sq._; buried in crouching posture, 418. _See_ Ghosts ---- men deified, 276 Death, Maori notion as to the cause of, 16; stories as to the origin of, 16 _sqq._, 392; Maori goddess of, 18; fate of the soul after, 24 _sqq._, 85 _sqq._, 213 _sqq._, 238 _sqq._, 313 _sqq._, 363 _sqq._, 427 _sqq._; the second, 29; theories of the Society Islanders concerning, 299 _sqq._; Marquesan contempt for, 352 _sq._; Hawaiian beliefs and customs concerning,417 _sqq._ Deaths caused by the anger of the gods or by sorcery, 229; traced to the agency of gods or sorcerers, 405 Decadence of magic, 68 Deification of ancestors, 33, 35; of kings in their lifetime, 255; of dead men, 276; of men after death, 351 _sq._, 397; of animals, 402 Deified kings, priests, and warriors, 227 ---- men, 276, 349; the spirits of,resident in animals, 228 ---- spirits of chiefs, 204 Deities, primaeval, personifications of nature, 32, 34 Deity, Maori conception of, 35 _sq._ Democratic spirit of Samoans, 171, 175 Desgraz, C., 118, 358, 373 Despotism in Hawaii, 63 Dieffenbach, E., 6 _n._^2, 8 _n._, 48 _n._^1 Diet of the Samoans, 164 _sq._; of the Hervey Islanders, 222; of the Society Islanders, 249; of the Marquesans, 333 _sq._; of the Hawaiians, 378 _sq._ Dirges in the Hervey Islands, 235 _sq._ Disease, caused by souls of ancestors, 49; and death ascribed to agency of gods, spirits, or ghosts, 206 _sq._, 217; theories of the Society Islanders concerning, 299 _sqq._; of the Marquesans concerning, 325. _See_ Sickness Disorders, internal, supposed to be caused by entrance of a god into the patient, 351 District gods, 182, 185 Divination, in Samoa, 190 _sq._; to detect thieves, 298, 406; to ascertain the cause of death, 301 Diviners consulted before battle, 397, 414; Hawaiian, 404 _sq._, 414, 417 Division of labour among the Samoans, 166 _sqq._ Dogs, sacred, 94; omens from, 190; eaten, 379; sacrificed, 405, 426 Doobludha, land of dead, 86 Dramatic performances of the Areois, 259 _sq._, 263, 266 _n._^4 Dreamers held in repute, 320 Dreams, Maori theories of, 12; souls of the dead appear in, 31, 91 _sq._; Samoan theory of, 205; ideas of the Hervey Islanders concerning, 229; ideas of the Society Islanders concerning, 297 _sq._; souls of the dead communicate with the living in, 320, 429; Marquesan ideas about, 352; revelations to priests in, 405, 429; Hawaiian ideas about, 417 Drums, special, beaten after the birth of twins, 271; accompanying dances, 342, 354 Du Petit-Thouars, 373 Duke of York Island, 212 Earth cleft with axes, as a mourning rite, 235 _sq._; fished up from the sea by Maui, 275 Earthquakes, Tongan theory of, 72; caused by Maui, 275 _Eatooas_, gods, spirits of the dead, 277 _n._^4, 300, 322, 391, 392, 402. See _Atua_ Eclipses, superstitions as to, 287 Eel-god, 227 Eels sacred, 95, 182, 184, 185 Eimeo or Moörea, one of the Society Islands, 246, 266 Ella, S., 206 _n._^1, 212 Ellis, William, 117, 118 _n._^1, 247, 249, 256 _sq._, 262, 265 _n._, 267 _n._^2, 276, 277, 284, 286 _n._^5, 290 _n._^3, 292, 295, 298 _n._^2, 308 _n._^1, 311, 314 _n._^1, 315, 319, 323, 327, 401, 409, 410, 411, 419, 424, 426, 430, 431 Embalmment of the dead, 117, 205; in Samoa, 210, 213; in the Society Islands, 309, 310 _sqq._; in the Marquesas, 356 _sq._; in Hawaii, 418 Erskine, J. E., 114 Ethical influence of the Tongan religion, 146 _sq._ _Etua_, a god, 348. Compare _Atua_ Eua, one of Tonga Islands, 52, 123 Euhemerism, 69 Eve, the Hawaiian, 393 Evocation of the dead, 370 _sq._ Exogamy, Samoan religious system independent of, 201; in the Hervey Islands, 223 Exorcisers, 351 Exorcism practised for the healing of the sick, 206 _sq._, 417 _sq._ Expiation for sacrilege, 74 _sqq._; for eating sacred animal, 184, 185 Eye, spirit or soul thought to reside in, 42, 417; of human victim presented to king, 292 Fafa, subterranean abode of the dead, 215 Fakaofo or Bowditch Island, 394 Family gods embodied in visible objects, 182 _sqq._; analogous to totems, 200 Fan or Fang, of West Africa, their superstition about a twin, 269 Farmer, Sarah S., 57 _n._^1, 61 _n._, 92, 97, 111 _n._ Fasting after a death, 210, 355 Fate of the soul after death, 213 _sqq._, 238 _sqq._, 313 _sqq._, 363 _sqq._, 427 _sqq_. Fear of the dead, its humanising influence, 300; of ghosts, 369 _sq._, 419. _See_ Ghosts Feast of Calabashes, 354 Feasts, funeral, 144, 355, 362 _sq._, 366; annual, in honour of the gods, 187 _sq._ _See_ Festivals Feathers, sacred red, 254; gods conjured into, 265; placed in images of the gods, 290 _sq._; called gods, 291 Female line, nobility traced in, 75 Ferry-boat for souls of dead, 26 Fertilising virtue attributed to twins, 269 _sqq._ Festival, great annual, 289; called "the ripening of the year," 326 _sq._ Festivals, of the Samoans, 188; of the Marquesans, 341 _sq._; Hawaiian, 414 _sqq._ _See_ Feasts _Fiatooka_, place of burial and of worship, 103, 104, 105, 109, 116, 120, 132, 133 Fijian influence in Tonga, 59 Fingers mutilated in mourning, 19; sacrificed, 80 _sq._ Finow, king of Tonga, 79, 80, 81, 82, 91, 92, 103, 105, 120, 121, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140; obsequies of, 135 _sqq._ Finow the Second, king of Fiji, 135 Fire, Polynesian knowledge of, 56 _sq._; kindled by friction of wood, 181; robbed by Ti'iti'i from Mafuie, 203; kept up in house after a death, 209, 212; first brought to men by Maui, 226, 239; hidden in wood by Mauike, 238; stick and groove method of kindling, invented by Maui, 275, 335; stolen by Maui, 350; first given to men by Maui, 396 Fires not kindled near house of death, 355; extinguished during periods of strict taboo, 389 First-born sons, sacrifice of, 89 First-fruits, offerings of, in Tonga, 122; in the Society Islands, 257; of taro presented to eel-god, 188 Fish, sacrifices of, 257, 291; human victims called fish, 292; worshipped, 402; offered to shark god, 402 ---- hooks made out of bones of dead, 21, 23, 311 _sq._ Fishing, modes of, 252, 337, 379 Flax cultivated by Maoris, 9 Flaying the dead, custom of, 367 _sq._ Flood, tradition of a great, 393, 394 Flying-foxes, gods in, 96; incarnations of war-god, omens from, 190 _Fono_, representative assembly, parliament, 159, 179 Food buried with the dead, 24, 232; not to be touched by tabooed person with his hands, 38, 44, 45, 137, 138, 209, 312; not eaten in a house so long as a corpse is in it, 209; offered at tomb, 362 Footprints in magic, 15 Forbes, Dr. Charles, 12 Forster, George, 262, 283, 287 _n._, 397, 314, 331 Forster, J. R., 117 _n._^1, 278 _n._^1, 287 _n._, 314, 323 _n._^1 Foundation sacrifices, 292 Fowls bred and eaten, 379 Freycinet, L. de, 423, 427 Friendly Islands. _See_ Tonga Funeral dances, 139, 353 _sq._; feasts, 144, 355, 362 _sq._, 366 ---- games in Tonga, 140, 144; in the Hervey Islands, 235 _sq._ ---- rites in the Hervey Islands, 231 _sqq._ Futtafaihe or Fatafehi, family name of the Tuitongas, 108, 109 _Fytoca_, grave, burial-place, 67, 82, 102, 103, 137, 139, 141 G----, Father Mathias, 373 Games, funeral, in honour of the dead, 140, 144, 235; athletic, at religious festivals, 188 Garment, evil magic wrought through, 67 Gerland, G., 266 _n._^4 Ghost personated by priest or kinsman, 306 _sqq._ Ghosts, fear of, 27, 31, 304 _sq._, 320 _sq._, 369 _sq._, 419 _sq._; their passage to nether world, 27 _sq._; live on sweet potatoes, 30; slaying the, 234; journeying with the sun, 239 _sqq._; caught in nets, 242, 244; eaten by Miru, 242; driven away by force of arms, 355; food offered to, 355, 356 Gill, W. W., 221 _n._^1, 225 _n._^1, 227, 228 _n._^1, 237, 238 Girdle, sacred, of kings, 254 God, patron, determined at birth, 200 _sq._, 223 "God-boxes," inspired priests, 228 _sq._ Godless, the Samoans called, 181 _sq._ Gods, chiefs and priests descended from the, 29; confused with spirits of the dead, 31; the great Polynesian, 35 _n._; of the Maoris, 36 _sq._; of the Tongans, 64 _sqq._; souls of dead men as, 64 _sq._, 66, 69, 70, 84, 91; men descended from, 66; omens sent by, 67; in form of animals, 66, 92 _sqq._, 182 _sqq._; the primary or non-human, of Tonga, 68 _sqq._; national and tribal, of Tonga, 93 _sq._; temples of, in Tonga, 73 _sqq._, 99 _sqq._; worship of, 79 _sqq._; annual feasts in honour of, 187 _sq._; tame, 191; vegetable, 192; totemic, 202; high gods, 202 _sqq._; the life of the, 238; punished, 257; born of Night (_Po_), 258, 277; of the sea, 276 _sq._; of the air, 277; worship of the gods in the Society Islands, 277 _sqq._; the causes of disease and death, 299, 351; Hawaiian, two classes of, 397 Government, monarchical and aristocratic, of the Tongans, 62 _sq._; democratic, of Samoans, 171 _sqq._; of the Society Islands, 253; in the Marquesas, 344 _sq._; in the Hawaiian Islands, 383 _sq._ Grandfather, soul of, reborn in grandchild, 368 _sq._ Grange, Jérôme, 60 _n._^5, 113 _sq._ Grasshoppers, souls of dead children in, 318 Graves, sacred, 99; in relation to temples, 99 _sqq._; of Tongan kings, 103, 105; prayers at, 121, 217; of great chiefs religiously revered, 120; enclosed with stones, 211; in Society Islands, 309; in Hawaii, 418. _See_ Tombs Guardian deity, how obtained, 398 Gudgeon, W. E., 41, 42 _n._^1, 48 _n._^1 Guillemard, F. H. H., 132 _Haamonga_, megalithic monument in Tonga, 125, 126 Haapai (Haabai), one of the Tonga Islands, 52, 95, 126 Haddon, A. C., 6 _n._^2 Hahunga, Maori festival, 22 Hair cut in mourning, 19, 303 _sq._, 420_sq._; ceremonies at cutting the, 44 _sq._; used in evil magic, 300, 325, 405; offered by mourners to the dead, 303, 304; sacrificed to volcano, 400 Hale, Horatio, 6 _n._^2, 63, 214 Hands tabooed, 38, 45, 137, 138, 209, 312, 404 Happahs (Happas), a tribe of Marquesans, 364, 365 _Harepo_, sacred recorder, 296, 298 Harris, J. Rendel, 267 _n._^1 Havaiki, subterranean region of the dead, 363. _Compare_ Avaiki Hawaii, 375, 376, 378, 394, 400, 406, 409, 410, 411, 413, 426, 429 Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands, 375 _sqq._ Hawaiians or Sandwich Islanders, 377 _sqq._ Hawaiki, original home of Maoris, 5 _sq._, 29, 155 Head, sanctity of the, 44, 212, 388 Heads of dead dried and preserved, 23 _sq._; of chiefs cut off and buried separately, 212; of children moulded, 224; of pigs attached to biers, 355; of slain enemies kept as trophies, 362 Heart the special seat of the soul, 85 Heaven, ascent of souls to, 24 _sqq._, 29 "Heavenly family," gods incarnate in animals, 228 Hebrew prophets, Renan on the, 147 _Heiau_, temple, 409, 410, 411, 412 _n._^1, 418 Herero, of S.W. Africa, customs as to twins among the, 273 _sq._ Herons sacred, 95; omens from, 190; superstition about, 277 _n._^2 Hervey, Philip, 123, 125 _n._^1, 127 Hervey or Cook Islands, 219 _sq._ Hervey Islanders, 220 _sqq._ _Heva_, ceremony observed after a death, 306 Higgolayo, god of the dead, 86 Hikuleo, god of the dead, 88 _sq._, 90 Hina (O-Heena), a goddess, perhaps of the moon, 266, 267, 287 Hine-nui-te-po, the Maori goddess of death, 17 _sq._ Hiro, god of thieves, 326 Hivaoa (Dominica), one of the Marquesas Islands, 328, 337, 364 Hogs, sacrificed, 79; to volcano, 399. _See_ Pigs Holiness and uncleanness blent in taboo, 173 Honolulu, 376 _n._^2 Hos of Togo, customs as to twins among the, 271 _sq._ _Hotooas_ (_atuas_), gods, 64 Houmis, a tribe of Marquesans, 347 House, dead buried in, 20, 27, 418; dying people removed from the, 39; abandoned after a death, 356 Houses, Maori, 8; Samoan, 163 _sq._; in the Society Islands, 250; of the Marquesans, 335 _sqq._; of the Hawaiians, 380 _sq._ Huahine, one of the Society Islands, 117, 246, 280, 283, 284, 289, 293, 326 Human sacrifices at burials, 24; to the sun, tradition of, 158; not offered by Samoans, 158; at making king's girdle, 254; offered to Oro, 258 _sq._; in the Society Islands, 291 _sq._; offered to living men, 349 _sq._; at deification of men, 351 _sq._; at the death of chiefs and priests, 365 _sqq._, 421 _sq._; to sharks, 402 _sq._; in Hawaii, 413 _sq._, 421 _sq._, 425 _sq._ Hunchbacks thought to be favourites of spirits, 153 Hurricanes in Samoa, 153 _sq._ Idols, Hawaiian, 412 _sq._ _See_ Images _Ifi_ tree, 74, 121, 133, 137 Image of basket-work, 275 _sq._; wooden, of deified man, 398 Images of the gods, 290, 391 _sq._; in which the souls of the dead were supposed to lodge, 287 _sq._, 313 _sq._, 324 _sq._; carried to battle, 397; spirits conjured into, 398; of the gods, Hawaiian, 411 _sqq._ Immortality, belief in, its effect on the Maoris, 51; restricted to chiefs and their ministers, 85; of the human soul, 313. _See_ Soul Incantations, Maori, 13 _sqq._; of sorcerers, 325; Hawaiian, 405, 417 Incarnation of gods in animals, 182 _sqq._ Inconsistency of savage thought, 84, 90 _sq._ Indonesians, 3 Infanticide, in Polynesia, 157; among the Areois, 263 Infants, souls of dead, cause disease, 49, 299 Inspiration by drinking kava, 75, 77 _sqq._; by souls of dead, 91; of Samoan priests, 194; of priests, in the Society Islands, 293 _sqq._; of men by deities, 351 Inspired men, 350 _sqq._ Iron in Tonga, 61 _n._^2 ---- tools among the Hawaiians, 382 Irrigation practised by Maoris, 9; artificial, in Hawaii, 378 _sq._ Jarves, J. J., 383 _n._^2, 425 Jaw-bones of human victims hung in temple, 258 Jumping-off stone of souls of the dead, 214, 215. _See_ Leaping-off place Jupiter, the planet, emblem of deified chiefs, 204; the shrine of a god, 228 Justice, administration of, in Samoa, 159 _sq._ _Kahuna_, priest, 417 Kaili. _See_ Tairi Kamehameha (Tamehameha), king of Hawaii, 384, 388, 389, 400, 409, 415, 420, 422, 425, 427, 430, 431 Kanaloa, a great Hawaiian deity, 392, 393, 394, 395 Kane, a great Hawaiian deity, 392, 393, 394, 395, 398 Kaonohiokala, "eye-ball of the sun," a Hawaiian god, 431 Kapihe, a priest, 430, 431 _Kapu_, taboo, in Hawaiian dialect, 387 Karakakooa Bay in Hawaii, 391 _Karakias_, prayers or spells (Maori), 32, 39 Kauai, one of the Sandwich Islands, 375 Kava as source of inspiration, 75, 78, 229; offered to the gods, 79, 187; offered to whales, 93; offered at graves, 121, 205; drunk by the Marquesans, 334; by the Hawaiians, 380 Keolakuhonua, the first woman, 393 Kilauea, volcano in Hawaii, 375, 399, 401 King, Captain, 378, 379, 385 _sq._, 391, 402, 408, 410 King, of Samoa, 176 _sq._; customs observed on the death of a king in Hawaii, 420 _sqq._ "King of Fiji," a Samoan family god, 192 Kingfisher sacred, 93; superstition about, 277 _n._^2 Kingfishers, incarnations of war-god, omens from, 190; gods of families, villages, or districts, embodied in, 193; consulted oracularly, 196 Kings, two, in Tonga, one civil, the other religious, 62 _sq._; the priests or mouthpieces of a god, 224; sacred, in the Hervey Islands, 224 _sq._; primary and secondary, in Mangaia, 225; as gods or descended from gods in the Society Islands, 253 _sq._; as high-priests, 253, 255; in Hawaii, 383 _sq._ Kingship, double, 63 Kitchen, dying chief carried into the, 82 Koreamoku, a deified man, 398 Kotzebue, O. von, 385 _n._^4, 388 _sq._, 416 Kpelle, of Liberia, their superstitions about twins, 269, 274 Krusenstern, A. J. von, 346, 348, 362, 371, 372 Ku, a great Hawaiian deity, 392, 393 Kuahairo, a Hawaiian god, 431 Kumuhonua, the first man, 393 La Pérouse, 149 Labillardière, 81 Langsdorff, G. H. von, 118, 341, 351 _n._^2, 371, 372 Language, Polynesian, 2; special form of, used in speaking of chiefs, 173 _sqq._ Leaping-off place for souls of dead, 27, 241. _See_ Jumping-off stone Leeward Islands, 246, 319 Lifuka (Lefooga), one of the Tonga Islands, 52, 73, 109 Lightning, omens from, 191 Lipolipo, king of Hawaii, 389 _sq._, 427 Lisiansky, U., 338, 366 _sq._, 368 _sq._, 371, 372, 411, 412, 414, 421, 422, 423 Litany chanted after a death, 355 Liturgies, in the Society Islands, 296 Liturgy, ancient Hawaiian, 394 Liver, the seat of courage, 85; a disease of, attributed to breach of taboo, 76 _sq._; of pig a god, 98 Lizard, the tempter in the form of a, 393 Lizards feared as causes of disease, 50; gods in, 66, 92, 94, 96, 182, 227, 228; omens from, 190 Lono (Rono), a great Hawaiian deity, the equivalent of Rongo, 392, 393, 395; Captain Cook identified with, 396 Lord of Mangaia, 224 Lucifer, the Hawaiian, 393 Macahity, a Hawaiian festival, 414 _sqq._ Mafanga, burial-place of chiefs in Tongataboo, 120, 121 Mafuie, god of earthquakes, 203 Magic, among the Maoris, 13 _sqq._; among the Tongans, 68; black, not practised in Samoa, 161; in the Society Islands, 300, 325 _sq._; in Hawaii, 405 _sq_. _See_ Sorcerers Magicians (Maori), 13 _sqq._ Mahoike, god of the infernal regions, original possessor of fire, 350 Mahoui, a god, apparently identical with Maui, 266 _n._^4, 286 _n._^5 Maitea, one of the Society Islands, 246 Malays, how related to the Polynesians, 2 _sqq._ Man, the creation of, 393 _Mana_, 42 Manaia, 13, 23 Mangaia, one of the Hervey Islands, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224, 225, 228, 232, 233, 237, 238, 239, 240, 244 Manona, Samoan island, 149 Manua, group of Samoan islands, 149, 155, 158, 162, 215 Maoris, 5 _sqq._; their culture, 8 _sqq._; beliefs concerning the souls of the living, 10 _sqq._; beliefs concerning the souls of the dead, 19 _sqq._; their notion as to the cause of death, 16; their story of the origin of death, 16 _sqq._; mourning, 19 _sq._; disposal of the dead, 20 _sqq._; their conception of deity, 35 _sq._; taboo among the, 37 _sqq._, 432 Mapuhanui, a Marquesan god, 368 _Marae_. _See Morai_ _Marae_, a sacred grove, 225 _n._^3, 240, 241 _Marai_. _See Morai_ Marchand, Captain E., 358 _n._^6, 371 Marcuse, A., 393 Mariner, William, 62, 64, 67, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78 _sq._, 80, 82, 83, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98 _n._, 99, 102, 103, 110 _n._^1, 127, 135, 136, 138, 141, 142, 143 Marquesan islanders, 331 _sqq._ Marquesas Islands, 328 _sqq._; _morais_ (_marais_) in the, 116 _sqq._ Marriage rites, 288 _sq._, 311 Martin, John, 64 Maruiwi, primitive inhabitants of New Zealand, 8 Mask worn by an actor personifying a ghost, 306 Masons in Tonga, 127 _Matabooles_, minister of Tongan nobles, 65, 66, 74, 85, 76, 77, 79, 85, 87, 121, 136, 139 Mateialona, Governor of Haapai, 126 Mats, fine Samoan, 168 _sq._; Hawaiian, 381 _sq._ Maui, mythical Polynesian hero, 266 _n._^4; his contest with the goddess of death, 16 _sqq._; said to have drawn up the Tongan Islands on a fish-hook, 72; puts god Hikuleo in durance, 88; said to have brought great stones from Uea, 125; a kind of Polynesian Hercules, 126; brought fire to men, 226, 239; his exploits, 275, 287 _n._, 396; his image, 275 _sq._; steals fire from Mahoike, 350 ---- one of the Sandwich Islands, 375, 429 ---- Atalanga, mythical first owner of fire, 57 ---- Kijikiji, the Polynesian Prometheus, 57 Mauike, the fire-god, 226, 238, 239 Mauna Kea, mountain in Hawaii, 376 ---- Loa, volcano in Hawaii, 375, 376 Mausoleum of the kings of Hawaii, 426 Medicine, the Hawaiian god of, 398 Megalithic monuments of the Tooitongas, 119; in the Pacific, Dr. Rivers's theory as to, 119; of the Tongans, 123; in Lefooga (Lifuka), 128 _sq._; their supposed relation to sun-worship, 266 _n._^4; in the Marquesas, 360 _sq._ Megalithic tombs, 119, 123, 132 Meinicke, C. E., 118 _n._^2 Melanesian blood, admixture of, in the Hervey Islands, 221 ---- type, 6; population of New Zealand, 6 _sq._ ---- totemism, 218 Melanesians, now related to Polynesians, 2 _sq._; magic among the, 161; sham-fights at funerals among the, 212 Melville, Hermann, 330, 332, 333, 338, 354, 357 _n._^3, 360 _sq._, 361 _sq._, 373 Men deified in their lifetime, 349; deified after death, 351 _sq._, 397 Metals unknown to the Polynesians, 61, 222, 250, 335 Metempsychosis, theory that Melanesian totemism has been developed out of, 218 Milu (Miru), king of the nether world, 427, 428, 429, 430. _See_ Miru ----, a rebel spirit, 392 Minstrels, wandering, in the Marquesas, 342 Miru, king of the nether world, 427; goddess of hell or of the dead, 428 _n._^1; the Hades of the Sandwich Islanders, 431. _See_ Milu ----, an infernal hag, devours ghosts, 242 Moerenhout, J. A., 118, 263 _n._^2, 264 _n._^3, 266 _n._^4, 284, 286 _n._^5, 297, 308 _n._^1 Monarchy, absolute, in Hawaii, 383 Mooa, old capital of Tongataboo, 106, 108, 111, 112 _Mooas_, middle-class in Tonga, 66, 85 Moomooe (Moomooi), king of Tonga, 83, 91, 108, 133, 141, 145 Moon, family god in, 192; tradition of sacrifice to the, 394; festival of the new, 414 Moon-goddess, 267, 287 _n._ Mo'ooi (Maui), Tongan god, 72 _Morai_ (_marai_, _marae_), burial-place, temple, 103, 116, 117, 118, 119; dead buried in, 117 _sqq._, 282 _sqq._; in the Society Islands, 278 _sqq_. _Morais_, bones of dead chiefs buried in, 311; burial-places, 357 _sq._, 361 _sq._; mummies deposited in, 357; in Hawaii, 391, 406 _sqq._; dead chiefs buried in, 407 _sq._ Morality reinforced by superstitious terrors, 83; not influenced by religion, 318 Mortality of souls of commoners, 66, 85 Motoro, a great god in the Hervey Islands, 241 Mourning for death of divine owl, 186 _sq._ ---- customs of Maoris, 19 _sq._; in Tonga, 132 _sqq._; in Samoa, 208 _sq._; in the Hervey Islands, 231; among the Society Islands, 301 _sqq._; of the Marquesans, 353 _sqq._; in Hawaii, 420 _sqq._ Mouth and nostrils of dying stopped to prevent the escape of the soul, 352 Mueu, a female demon of death, 235 Mukasa, great god of the Baganda, 270 Mullets sacred, 95, 184 Mummies kept in the house or deposited in a _morai_, 357 Muru, a god, spreads a net to catch ghosts, 244 Mythology of the Society Islanders, 257 _sq._, 277; of the Marquesans, 348 _sqq._ Nails, parings of, used in evil magic, 325, 405 Names of relatives changed after a death, 233; of kings sacred, 254; new, given at admission to the Society of the Areois, 261; exchange of, 339 Namuka, one of the Tonga Islands, 52 Nature, personifications of, 32, 34; worship of, 93 Necromancy among the Maoris, 30 _sq._ Negritoes, 3 Net to catch ghosts, 242, 244 New Zealand, the Maoris of, 5 _sqq._; Melanesian population of, 6 _sq._ Neyra, Alvaro Mendana de, 328 Ngati-apa, a Maori tribe, 23 Nicholas, J. L., 16 _n._^3 Night, or the primaeval darkness (_Po_), 258, 276, 277, 298 _n._^1, 305, 315, 323, 393, 397, 427; burials by, 419 Nightmare caused by a ghost, 419 _Noa_, common, 38, 39, 40; general, as opposed to _taboo_, sacred, 388 Noah, the Hawaiian, 393, 394 Nobility traced in female line in Tonga, 75 Nobles, souls of dead, as gods, 64, 66, 84, 91 North Cape of New Zealand, place of departure for souls of the dead, 27, 28, 30 Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas Islands, 328, 337, 350, 352, 360, 361, 364, 368, 371, 372 Nuu, the Hawaiian Noah, 393, 394 O-Heena, a goddess, 287 _n._ _See_ Hina O-rongo, in Mangaia, 225 Oahu, one of the Sandwich Islands, 375, 376 _n._^2, 385, 395, 411, 429 Obsequies of kings and chiefs in Tonga, 133 _sqq._; of the Tooitongas, 140 _sqq._; of Samoan chiefs, 211 _sq._; of chiefs, in the Society Islands, 303 Octopus, god in, 95, 96, 183 Offerings to gods, 79; to Samoan deities, 187, 188, 189; to priests, 195; to the dead, 311; of food at tombs, 362; to volcanic goddess, 401. _See_ Sacrifices Omens sent by gods, 67; from sacred birds, animals, or fish, 189 _sq._; from sacrificial victims, clouds, and rainbow, 397, 414 Opoa, metropolis of idolatry in the Society Islands, 255, 258, 259, 289 Oracles delivered by priests, 295; given by priests in the name of gods, 404 _Oramatuas_ or _oromatuas_, worshipful spirits of departed relatives, 277, 299, 323 _sq._; sacred feathers called, 291 Origin of Samoan gods of families, villages, and districts, 200 _sqq._ Oro, war-god in the Society Islands, 255, 255 _n._^1, 258, 259, 261, 263, 265, 266, 289, 295, 315, 326 Orono, head of a priestly order in Hawaii, 391 Orotetefa, patron deity of the Areoi Society, 263, 265, 267 Ovens, souls of dead in, 26 _sq._; of hot stones, 222, 379 Owl god, festival of, 188; kept tame, 191 Owls sacred, 95, 182; mourning for dead, 186 _sq._; omens from, 190 Pantheon recruited by dead men, 98 Papa, goddess of earth, 34 _n._^2; wife of Vatea, 226 Papatea, mythical island, 158 Papo, Samoan war-god, 186 Paradise of the Society Islanders, 319, 327 Parliamentary form of government in Samoa, 179 _sq._ _Pas_, Maori forts, 8 _n._^3 Pele, goddess of the volcano Kilauea in Hawaii, 399 _sqq._ Personifications of nature, 32, 34; of ghost by an actor, 306 Pied fantail in Maori story of origin of death, 18 _sq._ Pigeons, divine, 184; kept tame, 191 Pigs' liver a god, 96 Pigs offered to the dead, 231; sacrificed, 264, 265, 291; for recovery of sick, 351; to the dead, 368. _See_ Hogs Planets, the shrine of a god, 228 Pleiades, emblems of deified chiefs, 204 Po, region of departed souls (Maori), 27 _Po_, Night or the primaeval darkness, the abode of the gods and of the dead, 258, 277, 298 _n._^1, 305, 308, 315, 316, 317, 323, 393, 397, 427 Pollution caused by death, 312 _sq._, 427 Polack, J. S., 7 _n._^1 Polyandry among the Marquesans, 337 _sq._ Polygamy in the Hervey Islands, 223 Polynesians, 1 _sqq._; their origin and language, 2 _sqq._; mode of life, 4; dispersal from Savaii (Hawaiki), 6, 154 _sq._; or from Tonga, 56; their knowledge of fire, 56 _sq._; ignorant of metals, 61, 250 Polytheism developed out of totemism, 94 Porpoises, gods in, 66, 92 Porter, Captain David, 330, 332, 344 _n._^1, 350, 353, 357 _n._^3, 362, 364 _sq._, 372 Pottery unknown to the Samoans, 181 Prayers to the gods, 79; to the dead, 121; to animal gods, 182; for temporal benefits, 189; before going to war, 189; for the dying, 208; offered to souls of dead relatives at their graves, 217; rhythmical and ancient, 225; offered to kings, 255; of the Society Islanders, 257; for the recovery of the sick, 257, 398; to Oro, 261; liturgical, 295 _sq._; over the dead, 310; for the dead, 318; at temples, 327; before battle, 397 "Praying people," sorcerers, 229 Presents brought to dying people, 207 _sq._ Priestess claiming to personify goddess, 401 Priests practise enchantments, 13 _sq._; descended from the gods, 29; their souls immortal, 29; summon up spirits of dead, 31; Tongan, their inspiration, 77 _sqq._; Samoan, 192 _sq._; inspired, 194; consulted as to cause of sickness, 207; inspired, called "god-boxes," 228 _sq._; speaking in name of gods, 258, 293 _sqq._; of shark gods, 276; in the Society Islands, 292 _sqq._; inspired by sharks, 403; Hawaiian, 404 Property buried with the dead, 20, 140 _sq._, 211, 232 _sq._; private, in relation to taboo, 47 _sq._; rights of, in Samoa, 169 _sqq._ Prostitution, general, of women at the death of a great chief, 423 Pukapuka, Danger Island, 230 Pulotu, Samoan name for abode of the dead and of the gods, 204, 205, 214, 216, 217. _Compare_ Bolotoo Punishments in Samoa, 159 _sq._ Purification of king at installation, 255 _n._^1; of land after defilement, 287 _sq._; after contact with the dead, 210, 313; of the souls of the dead, 316 Pyramidal tombs, 115 Pyramidical temples of Tahiti and the Marquesas, 119 Pyramids, stepped or terraced, 116, 117, 278 _sqq._; of stone, stepped or terraced, in Hawaii, 408 _sqq._ Quiros, Fernandez de, 246 Ra, the sun-god, caught by Maui in nooses, 226 Radiguet, M., 338, 341, 357 _n._^1, 358, 373 Raiatea, one of the Society Islands, 246, 255, 258, 259, 266, 289, 315, 317, 318, 319 Rail-bird sacred, 95; omens from, 190 Rainbow worshipped, 93, 182; omens from, 191, 397; emblem of deified chiefs, 204 _sq._; superstitions about, 267, 269 _Rangatira_, gentleman, 43, 44; landowners, 224 Rangi, god of sky, 34 _n._^2 Rarotonga, one of the Hervey Islands, 219, 221, 222, 224, 226, 228, 232, 243, 244 Raupa, a burial cave, 237 Recorders, sacred, 295 _sq._, 298 Red, bones of dead painted, 21; tabooed, 227; feathers regarded as divine, 290 _sq._ ---- Cave, 239, 240 Reincarnation of the dead, 368 _sq._ Reinga, leaping-off place of souls (Maori), 27 Religion of Maoris concentrated on worship of dead kinsfolk, 34; homogeneity of Polynesian, 35 _n._; the Tongan, 64 _sqq._; ethical influence of the Tongan, 146 _sq._; of the Samoans, 181 _sqq._; of the Hervey Islanders, 225 _sqq._; early stage of, 226; of the Society Islanders, 256 _sqq._; without influence on morality, 318; of the Marquesans, 348 _sqq._; of the Hawaiians, 390 _sqq._ Remy, J., 412 _n._^1, 415 _n._^1 Renan, Ernest, on the Hebrew prophets, 147 Respect for chiefs in Samoa, 171 _sqq._ Resurrection of the dead, Hawaiian notions about the, 430 _sq._ Rewards, posthumous, no belief in, 67, 146 Rhodesia, Northern, belief as to mother of twins in, 269 Rib of the first man, the first woman created out of the, 393 _sq._ Rites, of burial and mourning in Tonga, 132 _sqq._; funeral, in the Hervey Islands, 231 _sqq._; religious, of the Society Islanders, 257; of purification, 288. _See_ Ceremonies River of the Water of Life (Maori), 28; in the nether world, 216 Rivers, W. H. R., 4 _n._^1, 119, 124 _n._^1, 128, 202, 218, 266 _n._^4 Roberts, E., 371 Rohutu, the abode of the dead, 319 _sq._, 327 Rongo, god of peace and agriculture, 35 _n._; a great Polynesian god, 224, 225, 226, 392, 395; his sacred stream and grove, 240, 241; god, inventor of circumcision, 224 Rono, a great Hawaiian god, 404, 416. _See_ Lono Roscoe, J., 271 Routledge, S. and K., 279 _n._^1 Ruahatu, a sea-god, 276 S[=a]-le-Fe'e, the Samoan Tartarus, 216 Sacredness of chiefs, 172 _sqq._ Sacrifice of children, 75 _sq._, 81 _sq._; of hogs, 79; of fingers, 80; of first-born sons, 89; as magical, 83; of pigs to the dead, 368; of hogs to volcano, 399 Sacrifices in the Society Islands, 291 _sq._; of pigs for the recovery of the sick, 351. _See_ Human sacrifices Sacrilege, 67; its expiation, 74 _sqq._, 183 _sqq._ Samoa, general name for the group of islands, 148; original seat of Polynesian race, 154 Samoan Islands, 148 _sqq._; volcanic activity in, 151 _sq._; climate, 152 _sqq._ ---- Islanders, their appearance and character, 156 _sqq._; houses, agriculture, and industries, 163 _sqq._; rights of property, 169 _sqq._; government, 171 _sqq._; religion, 181 _sqq._ ---- worship of natural objects, 93, 96 _sq._; of animals and other natural objects developed out of totemism, 200 _sqq._, 218 Sanctity of kings in the Society Islands, 253 _sq._; of priest of Tani (Tane), 293 Sanctuaries for criminals, 282 Sandwich or Hawaiian Islands, 375 _sqq._ Sandwich Islanders, 377 _sqq._; their four chief gods, 35 _n._ Saturnalia at the death of a king or high chief in Hawaii, 421 _sqq._ Savage thought inconsistent, 84, 90 _sq._ Savages not addicted to sun-worship, 131 Savaii, one of the Samoan islands, centre of Polynesian dispersion, 6, 148 _sq._, 150 _sq._, 154 _sq._, 192, 195, 202, 215 Saveasiuleo, the king of the lower regions, 216 _sq._ Scalps of slain foes taken, 162 Sea, gods of the, 276 _sq._ ---- eels sacred, 93, 94, 185 ---- gull sacred, 93 ---- -snake as god, 185 ---- -urchin, family god in, 183 Second death, 29 Secret burial, 21 Semites sacrifice first-born sons, 89 Serfdom, alleged, in Hawaii, 385 Shadow, soul associated with, 205 _sq._ Sham fights at obsequies of Samoan chiefs, 211, 212; at Melanesian funerals, 212; after a death, 234, 235, 236, 303 Shark-gods, 227, 276 Shark's teeth, omens from, 191 Sharks as ministers of justice, 77; gods in, 96, 182; sacred, 93; still-born children turned into, 398, 403; worshipped in Hawaii, 402 _sqq._ Shells (_Murex namoces_) in which the souls of the dead were supposed to lodge, 325 Shortland, E., 6 _n._^2 Sick people carried to temple, 195 Sickness supposed to be caused by evil spirits, 417. _See_ Disease Sinnet tenanted by a god, 228 Sins of the dead buried in a hole, 305 Sisters, curses of, specially dreaded, 207 Skins of the dead preserved as relics, 367 Skulls of dead kept in houses, 118; of ancestors kept in temple or house, 288, 311; of dead rulers worshipped, 324; of dead hidden in caves, 357 Sky raised by Maui, 226, 275 Slaves killed to accompany their dead lords, 24; in the Society Islands, 253 "Slaying the ghosts," 234 Smith, E. W. and Dale, A. M., 425 ----, S. Percy, 155 Snakes, water, gods in, 66, 92 Sneezing, Hervey Islanders' theory of, 229 Social ranks in Samoa, 171 _sqq._; in Rarotonga, 224; in the Society Islands, 253; among the Marquesans, 344; in Hawaii, 383 _sqq._ Society Islanders, 248 _sqq._ Society Islands, 246 _sqq._ Songs in honour of the dead, 236. _See_ Dirges Sorcerers (Maori), 13 _sqq._; disease and death ascribed to arts of, 300, 325 _sq._; Hawaiian, 405. _See_ Magic Soul, Maori ideas concerning the, 10 _sqq._; as shadow, 11; as breath, 11; departure of soul from body, 12 _sqq._; its fate after death, 24 _sqq._, 66, 86 _sqq._, 213 _sqq._, 238 _sqq._, 313 _sq._, 427 _sqq._; survival of, 24; ascent to heaven, 24 _sqq._, 29; Tongan theory of, 66, 84 _sqq._; Samoan belief concerning the, 205 _sq._; associated with shadow, 205 _sq._; of the same shape as body, 205; belief of the Society Islanders concerning the, 297 _sqq._; beliefs of the Hervey Islanders concerning the, 229 _sqq._; beliefs of the Marquesans concerning the, 352; Hawaiian beliefs concerning the, 417 Souls of commoners mortal, 29; souls of chiefs and priests immortal, 29; of the dead appear in dreams, 31, 91 _sq._; of ancestors cause disease, 49; of dead infants cause disease, 49, 299; of dead nobles as gods, 64 _sq._, 66, 84, 91; of dead men as gods, 64, 66, 69, 85, 91, 351 _sq._, 397; of Tongan commoners mortal, 66, 85; caught in traps, 230 _sq._; leaping-place of, 27, 241; ascribed to animals, trees, and stones, 297; of the dead eaten by the gods, 315, 427; of children supposed to transmigrate into sharks, 403 Spells (Maori), 13 _sqq._ Spencer, Herbert, his theory that temples are derived from tombs, 100 Spirit world, Maori ideas of, 29 _sq._ Spirits of the dead become gods, 31 _sq._; threatened, 208. _See_ Gods, Souls Spittle used in magic, 15, 300, 325, 405; collected to prevent its use in magic, 405 _sq._ Stair, J. B., 152, 173 _n._^1, 203 _n._^2, 206 _n._^1 Star, shooting, worshipped, 93 Stars observed by the Samoans, 161 Sterndale, H. B., 197, 198, 199 Stewart, C. S., 157 _n._^7, 337 _sq._, 340 _sq._, 344 _n._^1, 348 _sq._, 349 _sq._, 358, 372, 377, 424 Stick-and-groove mode of kindling fire, 181 Stilts, racing or combating on, 339 _sq._ Stinging ray fish, divine, 184, 185; taboo to some Marquesans, 347 Stone-cutting in Tonga, craft of, 127 Stone monuments in Samoa, 197 _sqq._ Stone temple, ruins of, in Samoa, 196 _sq._ Stone tools and weapons, 10, 61, 180, 250 _sq._, 335, 382; in Tonga, 61; in Samoa, 180 Stonehenge, trilithons at, 123, 129, 130 Stones worshipped, 182, 187; piled on graves to prevent the dead from rising, 232 Succession of eldest sons at their birth, 255 _sq._ Sugar-cane cultivated, 379 Suicides, their fate after death, 363 Sun, supposed secret worship of the, in the Pacific, 119; Stonehenge supposed by some to be a temple of the, 130; Tongans not worshippers of the, 131; tradition of human sacrifices to, 158; not worshipped in Samoa, 192; ghosts journeying with the, 239 _sqq._; caught and stopped by Maui, 275, 287 _n._, 396; not worshipped by the Society Islanders, 286; souls of the dead gather in the, 320 Sun god caught by Maui, 226; supposed worship of, 266, 286 _n._^5 Sun worship, savages not addicted to, 131 "Sun-dried gods," title applied to embalmed bodies of chiefs, 205 Superstitious terrors reinforce morality, 83 Taaroa (Taroa), a great god, 255 _n._^1, 258, 266, 267, 276, 287 _n._; supreme god of Polynesia, 290. _Compare_ Tanaroa, Tangaloa, Tangaroa Taboo (_tapu_) among the Maoris, 32, 34, 37 _sqq._, 432; contracted by contact with the dead, 39, 209; of sacred chiefs, 41 _sqq._; its effect in confirming the rights of private property, 47 _sq._; ultimate sanction of, 49; supposed effects of breaking a, 76 _sq._; consequent on touching a dead body, 137 _sq._; comprises ideas of holiness and uncleanness, 173; signified by white cloth, 344; in the Marquesas, 345 _sqq._; a definition of, 348; in Hawaii, 387 _sqq._; breaches of, punished with death, 389; abolished in Hawaii, 389 _sq._; rigour of, 416; an aristocratic institution, 432 Tabooed priest, 404 Taboos imposed by chiefs, 175, 432 Tahaa, one of the Society Islands, 246, 258 Tahiti, 246, 247, 255, 266, 279, 282, 283, 314, 321; _morais_ in, 116 _sqq._, 279 _sqq._ _Tahowa_, priest, 293 Tahuata (Santa Christina), one of the Marquesas, 349, 359, 360, 364, 367 Taipii (Typee), valley of, in Nukahiva, 360, 365 Taipiis or Typees, a tribe of Nukahiva, 330, 332, 365, 373 Tairi (Kaili), the national war-god of Hawaii, 396, 397, 404, 411 Takalaua, a Tooitonga, 108 Tali-y-Toobo, Tongan god of royal family, 70, 73, 77, 79, 121 Tame gods, 191 Tamehameha, king of Hawaii, 384, 423. _See_ Kamehameha Tanaroa, Tangaroa, Tagaloa, Taaroa, dialectically different names of a great Polynesian god, 258, 392 Tane (Tani), a great Polynesian god, 35 _n._, 241, 258, 280, 284, 293, 392, 394, 397 Tane-kio, a god, enshrined in the planets Venus and Jupiter, 228 Tangaloa, god, drew up Tonga Islands on a fishing-hook, 65, 72 _sq._; god of artificers, 72; puts god Hikuleo in durance, 88; ancestor of Tui-ta-tui, 127; temple of, 196; principal god of Samoans, the creator, 202 _sq._; said to have fished up the islands, 202, 203 Tangaroa, god of ocean, 35 _n._; a great god, brother of Rongo, 226 _Tapu_. _See_ Taboo Taro the staple food of the Samoans, 165; of the Mangaians, 222; and of the Hawaiians, 378 Tattooing, not applied to the Tooitonga, 81; nor to the sacred kings of Mangaia, 224; as a punishment in Samoa, 160; of the Marquesan islanders, 331 _sq._; marks of, removed from corpse, 368; of the Hawaiians, 378; of the tongue in mourning, 421 _Tauas_, inspired men, 350 _sq._ Tauata (Santa Christina), one of the Marquesas Islands, 337 Taylor, R., 7 _n._^1, 32 _n._^1, _n._^2, 36, 42 _Tee_, _teehee_, _tii_, spirit of the dead, guardian spirit, 313, 322, 323 _n._^1 Teeth, loss of, penalty for breach of taboo, 209 _sq._; knocked out in mourning, 231, 420, 423, 424 Tekuraaki, a god, incarnate in the woodpecker, 228 Temple, dead Areois buried in, 261; bones of human victims buried in, 292; bones of dead chiefs buried in, 311 Temples of the gods in Tonga, 73 _sqq._, 99 _sqq._; and graves, question of, 99 _sqq._; and tombs, 99 _sqq._; Samoan, 194 _sqq._; in the Society Islands, 278 _sqq._; dedicated to sharks, 402, 403; Hawaiian, 406 _sqq._ Theft, ordeal for detection of, 77 Thieves, Hiro the god of, 326; divination to detect, 406 Thunder and lightning, no Tongan god of, 71; Tongan idea concerning, 90 Thunder-god kept in captivity, 191 _sq._ Thomas, Rev. John, 57 _n._^1, 111 _n._ Thomson, A. S., 6 _n._^2 Thomson, Sir Basil, 87 _n._^1, 106, 107, 115, 116, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129 Tiaio, a god of the Hervey Islanders, 227 Tiaraboo (Tiarroboo, Tairaboo), the southern peninsula of Tahiti, 257, 283 Tiburones, a mythical paradise, 352, 364 Ti'iti'i, hero, robs Mafuie of fire, 203 _Tii_, a worshipful spirit of the dead, 324. Compare _Tee_ Tiki, the god of the dead, 231, 232 ----, a heroine, 239; warder of the land of the dead, 244 _sq._ ----, a Marquesan god, 343, 350 _n._^4 Timatekore, a god of the Hervey Islanders, 226 Tofua, Tongan island, 96 Togo, in West Africa, 271 _Tohunga_, Maori priest, 16 _n._^3 Tombs, megalithic, of the Tooitongas, 99 _sqq._, 105 _sqq._, 119, 123, 132; and temples, 99 _sqq._ Tonga or Friendly Islands, 52 _sqq._ ---- Islanders, 57 _sqq._; their religion, 64 _sqq._; their national and tribal gods, 93 _sq._ Tongataboo, 52, 86, 94, 106, 111, 112, 113, 114, 119, 120, 123 Tonga-iti, a god in the Hervey Islands, 227 _Tooas_ (_tuas_), Tongan commoners, 66, 85, 86, 87 Toobo Toty, a Tongan god, 71 Toogoo Ahoo, king of Tonga, 81 Tooi fooa Bolotoo, a Tongan god, 70 _sq._ Tooitonga, sacred chief or king of Tonga, 62, 66, 73, 81, 82, 94, 106, 107, 108, 110, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127, 144, 145; tombs of the Tooitongas, 105 _sqq._; obsequies of the, 140 _sqq._ Tooi-tonga-fafine, sister of the Tooitonga, 110 Totemic gods of Samoa, 202 Totemism, Tongan polytheism developed out of, 94; Samoan worship of animals developed out of, 200 _sqq._, 218; theory that it has been developed out of metempsychosis, 218; relics of, in the Hervey Islands, 227 _sq._; traces of, among the Marquesans, 347; relics of, in Hawaii, 402 Trade guilds among the Samoans, 167 _sq._ Transmigration of souls not believed in by the Samoans, 218; of souls of children into sharks, 403 Traps set for souls, 230 Tree, family god in, 192; on which ghosts perch, 241 Trees, dead deposited on, 20 _sq._; tenanted by gods, 228; sacred, 281 _sq._; worshipped, 402 Tregear, E., 6 _n._^2, 126 _n._^2, 392 Tribes or clans among the Hervey Islanders, 223 Trilithon in Tongataboo, 123 _sqq._ Trilithons at Stonehenge, 123, 129, 130 Trinity, the Hawaiian, 392 Triton-shell, god in, 228 Tropic-bird sacred, 93 Tu, Maori war-god, 35 _n._; a great Polynesian deity, 392 Tuaraatai, a sea god in the Society Islands, 276 Tufoa, volcanic island, 53 Tui-ta-tui, a Tooitonga, 127, 128 _Tulafales_, householders or gentry in Samoa, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180 Tuoro, in Rarotonga, the meeting-place of ghosts, 243, 244 Turnbull, J., 262 Turner, Dr. George, 183 _n._^1, 203 _n._^2, 206 _n._^1, 212, 213 Turtles, family god in, 183 _sq._ Tutuila, Samoan island, 149, 175, 176, 180, 215 Twins, divine, 226; heavenly, 267; customs and superstitions concerning, 267 _sqq._; thought able to influence the weather, 267 _sq._; fertilising power ascribed to, 269 _sqq._; divine Hawaiian, 394 Tyerman and Bennet, 260, 281, 283, 295, 315, 386 Tylor, E. B., 3 _n._^3 Typee. _See_ Taipii Typees or Taipiis, a tribe of Nukahiva, 330, 332 365, 375 Uea (Wallis Island), 125 Uganda, human sacrifice in, 84 _Uhane_, soul, 417 Ui, a heroine, beloved by the sun, 158 Uli, a Hawaiian god, 405 Umi, king of Hawaii, 411, 413 Unburied dead, Samoan ceremonies for, 205 _sq._ Uncleanness, and holiness blent in taboo, 173; caused by contact with a corpse, 312 _sq._, 427 Underworld, home of the souls of the dead, 27 Upolu, Samoan island, 149, 152, 155, 162, 185, 196, 202, 214, 215 Upu, a Marquesan goddess of the dead, 367, 368 Uriwera, a Maori people, 15 Urutetefa, patron deity of the Areoi Society, 263, 265, 267 Utakea, a god incarnate in the woodpecker, 228 Vatea, a primary god, 226 Vavau, a Tongan island, 52, 53, 73 Veachi, sacred personage in Tonga, 66 Veeson, George, 86 Vegetable gods in Samoa, 192 Ventriloquism, 370 Venus, the planet, the shrine of a god, 228 Vergnes, P. E. Eyriaud des, 374 Village gods, 182, 185 Villages, Samoan, self-governing, 178 _sq._ Vincendon-Dumoulin, 118, 358, 373 Virtue, Tongan ideas of, 66 _sq._, 146 _sq._ Volcanic activity in Tonga Islands, 53 _sqq._; in Samoa, 151; in Hawaii, 375 Volcano, goddess of, in Hawaii, 399 _sqq._; offerings to, 399 _sq._ _Wahi taboo_, sacred place, temple, 387 _sq._ _Wahine ariki_, 40 Waimate Plains in New Zealand, 23 Wakea. _See_ Akea Wallis Island (Uea), 125 Wallis rediscovers Society Islands, 246 War gods, Samoan, 186, 188, 189 _sq._ War-gods, images of, carried to battle, 397 Warriors tabooed, 40 _sq._ Warriors, fate of souls of dead, 242 _sq._, 244 _sq._ Water of Life, River of the, 28; in the nether world, 216 Weaving practised by Maoris, 9 West, Thomas, 114 Whale, soul of dead priest in a, 369 Whales worshipped, 93 _Whattas_, altars, 391, 392 White cloth as mark of taboo, 344; flags as marks of property, 386 Widowers tabooed, 39 Widows killed to accompany their dead husbands, 24; tabooed, 39; strangled and buried with their husbands, 145; dances of, 353, 354 Wilkes, Charles (Commodore), 57, 61 _n._, 87, 89 _n._^1, 90, 155 _n._^1, 384 _sq._, 411 Williams, John, 80, 157 _n._^7, 158, 181, 185, 221, 231 Wilson, James, 264 _n._^5 Winds imprisoned by two gods, 277 Windward Islands, 246 Wiro, evil spirit, 27 Woman, the first, created out of a rib of the first man, 393 _sq._ Women well treated by Tongans, 61 _sq._; well treated by the Samoans, 157; excluded from temples, 288 _sq._; forbidden to eat with men, 381; forbidden to partake of sacrifices, 388 Woodpecker, gods incarnate in the, 228 Worms, souls of the dead in the shape of, 29 Worship of ancestors among the Maoris, 32 _sqq._; of the Tongan gods, 79 _sqq._; of nature, 93; of the dead tends to encroach on the worship of the high gods, 97 _sq._; of animals and other natural objects in Samoa, 182 _sqq._, 200 _sqq._; of the dead in Samoa, 204 _sq._; of the dead, elements of the, 205; of the sun, supposed, 266, 286 _n._^5; of the dead in the Society Islands, 322 _sqq._; of animals in Hawaii, 401 _sqq._ _See_ Religion Wrestling matches as funeral rite, 140, 144, 211; at obsequies of chiefs, 303 ---- and boxing matches at obsequies of Samoan chiefs, 211; in honour of Lono (Rono), 395, 416 Yam festival in Tonga, 71 _sq._ Yams, new, offered at grave, 122 Young, John, 422 _sq._ Zulu superstition as to twins, 270 THE END _Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_. WORKS BY SIR J. G. FRAZER THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AND THE WORSHIP OF THE DEAD VOL. I. THE BELIEF AMONG THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA, THE TORRES STRAITS ISLANDS, NEW GUINEA, AND MELANESIA. THE GIFFORD LECTURES, ST. ANDREWS, 1911-1912. 8vo. 12s. 6d. net. Mr. EDWARD CLODD in the _DAILY CHRONICLE_.--"'If a man die, shall he live again?' is a question asked chiliads before Job put it, and the generations of mankind repeat it. In this profoundly interesting volume, Professor Frazer, out of the treasury of his knowledge, and with consummate art of attractive presentment, gives the answers devised by the Lower Races." _FOLK-LORE_.--"It displays all the best qualities, both in respect of style and matter, that characterise Dr. Frazer's former works." _NEW STATESMAN_.--"Dr. Frazer does not profess to explain the ultimate source of religion, but only to attempt to follow the steps of its growth among the races of men. It is his aim to set before us a continent of facts known, or partly known, to the anthropologists, not a solution of the mystery of the Universe. That aim he has achieved with masterly success and lucidity." Mr. A. E. CRAWLEY in _NATURE_.--"The analysis of belief and practice among the aborigines of Australia, the Torres Straits, New Guinea, and Melanesia, which occupies nearly 400 pages of this volume, is a masterly performance." _GUARDIAN_.--"The bare facts which Dr. Frazer sets before us are of an absorbing interest.... The Biblical student may gain much from the perusal of Dr. Frazer's work." _OBSERVER_.--"The importance of the work which Dr. Frazer has undertaken cannot be overrated. His study of religion is a contribution to human knowledge of such quality that the country to which he belongs may well be proud of him.... Dr. Frazer has arranged the mass of detail from which he has had to draw with a skill and judgment which in the work of another man would be surprising; and he tells each story with the point and clarity of an artist, so that, apart from the book's high mission, it could be read as a storehouse of good tales. His comments, moreover, are always brief and decisive." * * * * * THE GOLDEN BOUGH A STUDY IN MAGIC AND RELIGION Third Edition, revised and enlarged. 8vo. Part I. THE MAGIC ART AND THE EVOLUTION OF KINGS. Two volumes. 25s. net. II. TABOO AND THE PERILS OF THE SOUL. One volume. 12s. 6d. net. III. THE DYING GOD. One volume. 12s. 6d. net. IV. ADONIS, ATTIS, OSIRIS. Two volumes. 25s. net. V. SPIRITS OF THE CORN AND OF THE WILD. Two volumes. 25s. net. VI. THE SCAPEGOAT. One volume, 12s. 6d. net. VII. BALDER THE BEAUTIFUL: THE FIRE-FESTIVALS OF EUROPE AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE EXTERNAL SOUL. Two volumes. 25s. net. Vol. XII. 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With Frontispiece. 8vo. 18s. net. This abridgment has been prepared in response to numerous requests that the work should be issued in a more compendious form. While the book has been greatly reduced in bulk, by omission of all the notes and occasional condensation in the text, all the main principles of the complete work are retained, together with a sufficient amount of evidence to illustrate them clearly. Nothing has been added, and no change has been made in the author's views. It is hoped that in this abridged form the book may prove welcome to students and general readers who cannot afford to buy and read the complete edition. * * * * * FOLK-LORE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend, and Law. Three vols. 8vo. 37s. 6d. net. _TIMES_.--"The idea of illustrating the Old Testament by analogies drawn from the myths, customs, and superstitions of various primitive peoples is not, of course, a new one ... but no one has hitherto published anything to be compared with the vast and varied store of information which Sir James Frazer now places before us.... His book is a mine of instructive facts for which all future students of the subject will be grateful." _NATURE_.--"These three volumes should be the household companion of every religious teacher, nay, of every one who cares or dares to see what that latest daughter of science, folk-lore, has to say about the cherished beliefs from the Old Testament, absorbed in infancy, and rarely visualised differently in later life." _SPECTATOR_.--"We may say at once that Sir James Frazer's new work is profoundly interesting, and that it throws a flood of light on many familiar episodes and references." * * * * * TOTEMISM AND EXOGAMY. A Treatise on Certain Early Forms of Superstition and Society. With Maps. Four vols. 8vo. 50s. net. Mr. A. E. CRAWLEY in _NATURE_.--"That portion of the book which is concerned with totemism (if we may express our own belief at the risk of offending Prof. Frazer's characteristic modesty) is actually 'The Complete History of Totemism, its Practice and its Theory, its Origin and its End.'... Nearly two thousand pages are occupied with an ethnographical survey of totemism, an invaluable compilation. The maps, including that of the distribution of totemic peoples, are a new and useful feature." * * * * * THE MAGICAL ORIGIN OF KINGS. (Formerly published as "Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship.") 8vo. 10s. 6d. net. _ATHENÆUM_.--"It is the effect of a good book not only to teach, but also to stimulate and to suggest, and we think this the best and highest quality, and one that will recommend these lectures to all intelligent readers, as well as to the learned." * * * * * PSYCHE'S TASK. A Discourse concerning the Influence of Superstition on the Growth of Institutions. Second Edition, revised and enlarged. To which is added "The Scope of Social Anthropology." 8vo. 6s. 6d. net. _OUTLOOK_.--"Whether we disagree or agree with Dr. Frazer's general conclusions, he has provided us with a veritable storehouse of correlated facts, for which, and for the learning that has gone to their collection, and for the intellectual brilliance that has gone to their arrangement, we can never be sufficiently grateful." * * * * * PAUSANIAS'S DESCRIPTION OF GREECE. Translated with a Commentary, Illustrations, and Maps. Second Edition. Six vols. 8vo. 126s. net. _ATHENÆUM_.--"All these writings in many languages Mr. Eraser has read and digested with extraordinary care, so that his book will be for years the book of reference on such matters, not only in England, but in France and Germany. It is a perfect thesaurus of Greek topography, archæology, and art." * * * * * STUDIES IN GREEK SCENERY, LEGEND AND HISTORY. Selected from Sir J. G. FRAZER'S Commentary on Pausanias. Globe 8vo. 5s. net. _GUARDIAN_.--"Here we have material which every one who has visited Greece, or purposes to visit it, most certainly should read and enjoy.... We cannot imagine a more excellent book for the educated visitor to Greece." * * * * * SIR ROGER DE COVERLEY, AND OTHER LITERARY PIECES. Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. net. _DAILY TELEGRAPH_.--"These various studies, biographical, fantastic, and romantic, are the fine flower of scholarship and taste, touched continually by the golden light of imagination, and full of that interpretative sympathy which is half-sister to creation." * * * * * LETTERS OF WILLIAM COWPER. Chosen and Edited, with a Memoir and a few Notes, by Sir J. G. FRAZER. Two vols. Globe 8vo. l0s. net. [_Eversley Series._ Mr. CLEMENT SHORTER in the _DAILY CHRONICLE_.--"The introductory Memoir, of some eighty pages in length, is a valuable addition to the many appraisements of Cowper that these later years have seen.... Dr. Frazer has given us two volumes that are an unqualified joy." * * * * * ESSAYS OF JOSEPH ADDISON. Chosen and Edited, with a Preface and a few Notes, by Sir J. G. FRAZER. Two vols. Globe 8vo. 10s. net. [_Eversley Series._ _NATION_.--"Sir James Frazer, who writes a Preface, quite in the Addison manner, has done his work of selection as only a scholar of his breadth and distinction could achieve." LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES 1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_. 2. Images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest paragraph break. 3. Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of the paragraph in which they are referenced. 4. The original text has certain words which use "oe" ligature which is indicated by [oe] within this text. 5. There are certain letters with diacritical marks in the original text which are indicated in this e-text version using: [=a] letter a with macron above [=o] letter o with macron above [)a] letter a with breve 6. In the original text, the words lulu'u, A'ana and Tuia'ana use single high-reversed-9 quotation mark which has been replaced by plain single quotation mark in this e-text version. 7. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained. 
20116	----	page images generously made available by the Humanities Text Initiative (http://www.hti.umich.edu/), a unit of the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service Note: Images of the original pages are available through the Humanities Text Initiative, a unit of the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service. See http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=genpub;idno=AFL0522.0001.001 THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AND THE WORSHIP OF THE DEAD by J. G. FRAZER, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D. Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Liverpool. VOL. I The Belief Among the Aborigines of Australia, the Torres Straits Islands, New Guinea and Melanesia The Gifford Lectures, St. Andrews 1911-1912 MacMillan and Co., Limited St. Martin's Street, London 1913 _Itaque unum illud erat insitum priscis illis, quos cascos appellat Ennius, esse in morte sensum neque excessu vitae sic deleri hominem, ut funditus interiret; idque cum multis aliis rebus; tum e pontificio jure et e caerimoniis sepulchrorum intellegi licet, quas maxumis ingeniis praediti nec tanta cura coluissent nec violatas tam inexpiabili religione sanxissent, nisi haereret in corum mentibus mortem non interitum esse omnia tollentem atque delentem, sed quandam quasi migrationem commutationemque vitae._ Cicero, _Tuscul. Disput._ i. 12. TO MY OLD FRIEND JOHN SUTHERLAND BLACK, LL.D. I DEDICATE AFFECTIONATELY A WORK WHICH OWES MUCH TO HIS ENCOURAGEMENT PREFACE The following lectures were delivered on Lord Gifford's Foundation before the University of St. Andrews in the early winters of 1911 and 1912. They are printed nearly as they were spoken, except that a few passages, omitted for the sake of brevity in the oral delivery, have been here restored and a few more added. Further, I have compressed the two introductory lectures into one, striking out some passages which on reflection I judged to be irrelevant or superfluous. The volume incorporates twelve lectures on "The Fear and Worship of the Dead" which I delivered in the Lent and Easter terms of 1911 at Trinity College, Cambridge, and repeated, with large additions, in my course at St. Andrews. The theme here broached is a vast one, and I hope to pursue it hereafter by describing the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead, as these have been found among the other principal races of the world both in ancient and modern times. Of all the many forms which natural religion has assumed none probably has exerted so deep and far-reaching an influence on human life as the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead; hence an historical survey of this most momentous creed and of the practical consequences which have been deduced from it can hardly fail to be at once instructive and impressive, whether we regard the record with complacency as a noble testimony to the aspiring genius of man, who claims to outlive the sun and the stars, or whether we view it with pity as a melancholy monument of fruitless labour and barren ingenuity expended in prying into that great mystery of which fools profess their knowledge and wise men confess their ignorance. J. G. FRAZER. Cambridge, _9th February 1913._ CONTENTS Dedication Preface Table of Contents Lecture I.--Introduction Natural theology, three modes of handling it, the dogmatic, the philosophical, and the historical, pp. 1 _sq._; the historical method followed in these lectures, 2 _sq._; questions of the truth and moral value of religious beliefs irrelevant in an historical enquiry, 3 _sq._; need of studying the religion of primitive man and possibility of doing so by means of the comparative method, 5 _sq._; urgent need of investigating the native religion of savages before it disappears, 6 _sq._; a portion of savage religion the theme of these lectures, 7 _sq._; the question of a supernatural revelation dismissed, 8 _sq._; theology and religion, their relations, 9; the term God defined, 9 _sqq._; monotheism and polytheism, 11; a natural knowledge of God, if it exists, only possible through experience, 11 _sq._; the nature of experience, 12 _sq._; two kinds of experience, an inward and an outward, 13 _sq._; the conception of God reached historically through both kinds of experience, 14; inward experience or inspiration, 14 _sq._; deification of living men, 16 _sq._; outward experience as a source of the idea of God, 17; the tendency to seek for causes, 17 _sq._; the meaning of cause, 18 _sq._; the savage explains natural processes by the hypothesis of spirits or gods, 19 _sq._; natural processes afterwards explained by hypothetical forces and atoms instead of by hypothetical spirits and gods, 20 _sq._; nature in general still commonly explained by the hypothesis of a deity, 21 _sq._; God an inferential or hypothetical cause, 22 _sq._; the deification of dead men, 23-25; such a deification presupposes the immortality of the human soul or rather its survival for a longer or shorter time after death, 25 _sq._; the conception of human immortality suggested both by inward experience, such as dreams, and by outward experience, such as the resemblances of the living to the dead, 26-29; the lectures intended to collect evidence as to the belief in immortality among certain savage races, 29 _sq._; the method to be descriptive rather than comparative or philosophical, 30. Lecture II.--The Savage Conception of Death The subject of the lectures the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among certain of the lower races, p. 31; question of the nature and origin of death, 31 _sq._; universal interest of the question, 32 _sq._; the belief in immortality general among mankind, 33; belief of many savages that death is not natural and that they would never die if their lives were not cut prematurely short by sorcery, 33 _sq._; examples of this belief among the South American Indians, 34 _sqq._; death sometimes attributed to sorcery and sometimes to demons, practical consequence of this distinction, 37; belief in sorcery as the cause of death among the Indians of Guiana, 38 _sq._, among the Tinneh Indians of North America, 39 _sq._, among the aborigines of Australia, 40-47, among the natives of the Torres Straits Islands and New Guinea, 47, among the Melanesians, 48, among the Malagasy, 48 _sq._, and among African tribes, 49-51; effect of such beliefs in thinning the population by causing multitudes to die for the imaginary crime of sorcery, 51-53; some savages attribute certain deaths to other causes than sorcery, 53; corpse dissected to ascertain cause of death, 53 _sq._; the possibility of natural death admitted by the Melanesians and the Caffres of South Africa, 54-56; the admission marks an intellectual advance, 56 _sq._; the recognition of ghosts or spirits, apart from sorcery, as a cause of disease and death also marks a step in moral and social progress, 57 _sq._ Lecture III.--Myths of the Origin of Death Belief of savages in man's natural immortality, p. 59; savage stories of the origin of death, 59 _sq._; four types of such stories:-- (1) _The Story of the Two Messengers_.--Zulu story of the chameleon and the lizard, 60 _sq._; Akamba story of the chameleon and the thrush, 61 _sq._; Togo story of the dog and the frog, 62 _sq._; Ashantee story of the goat and the sheep, 63 _sq._ (2) _The Story of the Waxing and Waning Moon_.--Hottentot story of the moon, the hare, and death, 65; Masai story of the moon and death, 65 _sq._; Nandi story of the moon, the dog, and death, 66; Fijian story of the moon, the rat, and death, 67; Caroline, Wotjobaluk, and Cham stories of the moon, death, and resurrection, 67; death and resurrection after three days suggested by the reappearance of the new moon after three days, 67 _sq._ (3) _The Story of the Serpent and his Cast Skin_.--New Britain and Annamite story of immortality, the serpent, and death, 69 _sq._; Vuatom story of immortality, the lizard, the serpent, and death, 70; Nias story of immortality, the crab, and death, 70; Arawak and Tamanchier stories of immortality, the serpent, the lizard, the beetle, and death, 70 _sq._; Melanesian story of the old woman and her cast skin, 71 _sq._; Samoan story of the shellfish, two torches, and death, 72. (4) _The Story of the Banana_.--Poso story of immortality, the stone, the banana, and death, 72 _sq._; Mentra story of immortality, the banana, and death, 73. Primitive philosophy in the stories of the origin of death, 73 _sq._; Bahnar story of immortality, the tree, and death, 74; rivalry for the boon of immortality between men and animals that cast their skins, such as serpents and lizards, 74 _sq._; stories of the origin of death told by Chingpaws, Australians, Fijians, and Admiralty Islanders, 75-77; African and American stories of the fatal bundle or the fatal box, 77 _sq._; Baganda story how death originated through the imprudence of a woman, 78-81; West African story of Death and the spider, 81-83; Melanesian story of Death and the Fool, 83 _sq._ Thus according to savages death is not a natural necessity, 84; similar view held by some modern biologists, as A. Weismann and A. R. Wallace, 84-86. Lecture IV.--The Belief in Immortality among the Aborigines of Central Australia In tracing the evolution of religious beliefs we must begin with those of the lowest savages, p. 87; the aborigines of Australia the lowest savages about whom we possess accurate information, 88; savagery a case of retarded development, 88 _sq._; causes which have retarded progress in Australia, 89 _sq._; the natives of Central Australia on the whole more primitive than those of the coasts, 90 _sq._; little that can be called religion among them, 91 _sq._; their theory that the souls of the dead survive and are reborn in their descendants, 92 _sq._; places where the souls of the dead await rebirth, and the mode in which they enter into women, 93 _sq._; local totem centres, 94 _sq._; totemism defined, 95; traditionary origin of the local totem centres (_oknanikilla_) where the souls of the dead assemble, 96; sacred birth-stones or birth-sticks (_churinga_) which the souls of ancestors are thought to have dropped at these places, 96-102; elements of a worship of the dead, 102 _sq._; marvellous powers attributed to the remote ancestors of the _alcheringa_ or dream times, 103 _sq._; the Wollunqua, a mythical water-snake, ancestor of a totemic clan of the Warramunga tribe, 104-106; religious character of the belief in the Wollunqua, 106. Lecture V.--The Belief in Immortality among the Aborigines of Central Australia (_continued_) Beliefs of the Central Australian aborigines concerning the reincarnation of the dead, p. 107; possibility of the development of ancestor worship, 107 _sq._; ceremonies performed by the Warramunga in honour of the Wollunqua, the mythical ancestor of one of their totem clans, 108 _sqq._; union of magic and religion in these ceremonies, 111 _sq._; ground drawings of the Wollunqua, 112 _sq._; importance of the Wollunqua in the evolution of religion and art, 113 _sq._; how totemism might develop into polytheism through an intermediate stage of ancestor worship, 114 _sq._; all the conspicuous features of the country associated by the Central Australians with the spirits of their ancestors, 115-118; dramatic ceremonies performed by them to commemorate the deeds of their ancestors, 118 _sq._; examples of these ceremonies, 119-122; these ceremonies were probably in origin not merely commemorative or historical but magical, being intended to procure a supply of food and other necessaries, 122 _sq._; magical virtue actually attributed to these dramatic ceremonies by the Warramunga, who think that by performing them they increase the food supply of the tribe, 123 _sq._; hence the great importance ascribed by these savages to the due performance of the ancestral dramas, 124; general attitude of the Central Australian aborigines to their dead, and the lines on which, if left to themselves, they might have developed a regular worship of the dead, 124-126. Lecture VI.--The Belief in Immortality among the other Aborigines of Australia Evidence for the belief in reincarnation among the natives of other parts of Australia than the centre, p. 127; beliefs of the Queensland aborigines concerning the nature of the soul and the state of the dead, 127-131; belief of the Australian aborigines that their dead are sometimes reborn in white people, 131-133; belief of the natives of South-Eastern Australia that their dead are not born again but go away to the sky or some distant country, 133 _sq._; beliefs and customs of the Narrinyeri concerning the dead, 134 _sqq._; motives for the excessive grief which they display at the death of their relatives, 135 _sq._; their pretence of avenging the death of their friends on the guilty sorcerer, 136 _sq._; magical virtue ascribed to the hair of the dead, 137 _sq._; belief that the dead go to the sky, 138 _sq._; appearance of the dead to the living in dreams, 139; savage faith in dreams, 139 _sq._; association of the stars with the souls of the dead, 140; creed of the South-Eastern Australians touching the dead, 141; difference of this creed from that of the Central Australians, 141; this difference probably due in the main to a general advance of culture brought about by more favourable natural conditions in South-Eastern Australia, 141 _sq._; possible influence of European teaching on native beliefs, 142 _sq._; vagueness and inconsistency of native beliefs as to the state of the dead, 143; custom a good test of belief, 143 _sq._; burial customs of the Australian aborigines as evidence of their beliefs concerning the state of the dead, 144; their practice of supplying the dead with food, water, fire, weapons, and implements, 144-147; motives for the destruction of the property of the dead, 147 _sq._; great economic loss entailed by developed systems of sacrificing to the dead, 149. Lecture VII.--The Belief in Immortality among the Aborigines of Australia (_concluded_) Huts erected on graves for the use of the ghosts, pp. 150-152; the attentions paid by the Australian aborigines to their dead probably spring from fear rather than affection, 152; precautions taken by the living against the dangerous ghosts of the dead, 152 _sq._; cuttings and brandings of the flesh of the living in honour of the dead, 154-158; the custom of allowing the blood of mourners to drip on the corpse or into the grave may be intended to strengthen the dead for a new birth, 158-162; different ways of disposing of the dead according to the age, rank, manner of death, etc., of the deceased, 162 _sq._; some modes of burial are intended to prevent the return of the spirit, others are designed to facilitate it, 163-165; final departure of the ghost supposed to coincide with the disappearance of the flesh from his bones, 165 _sq._; hence a custom has arisen in many tribes of giving the bones a second burial or otherwise disposing of them when the flesh is quite decayed, 166; tree-burial followed by earth-burial in some Australian tribes, 166-168; general conclusion as to the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the Australian aborigines, 168 _sq._ Lecture VIII.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of the Torres Straits Islands Racial affinities of the Torres Straits Islanders, pp. 170 _sq._; their material and social culture, 171 _sq._; no developed worship of the dead among them, 172 _sq._; their fear of ghosts, 173-175; home of the dead a mythical island in the west, 175 _sq._; elaborate funeral ceremonies of the Torres Straits Islanders characterised by dramatic representations of the dead and by the preservation of their skulls, which were consulted as oracles, 176. Funeral ceremonies of the Western Islanders, 177-180; part played by the brothers-in-law of the deceased at these ceremonies, 177 _sq._; removal of the head and preparation of the skull for use in divination, 178 _sq._; great death-dance performed by masked men who personated the deceased, 179 _sq._ Funeral ceremonies of the Eastern Islanders, 180-188; soul of the dead carried away by a masked actor, 181 _sq._; dramatic performance by disguised men representing ghosts, 182 _sq._; blood and hair of relatives offered to the dead, 183 _sq._; mummification of the corpse, 184; costume of mourners, 184; cuttings for the dead, 184 _sq._; death-dance by men personating ghosts, 185-188; preservation of the mummy and afterwards of the head or a wax model of it to be used in divination, 188. Images of the gods perhaps developed out of mummies of the dead, and a sacred or even secular drama developed out of funeral dances, 189. Lecture IX.--The Belief in Immortality Among the Natives Of British New Guinea The two races of New Guinea, the Papuan and the Melanesian, pp. 190 _sq._; beliefs and customs of the Motu concerning the dead, 192; the Koita and their beliefs as to the human soul and the state of the dead, 193-195; alleged communications with the dead by means of mediums, 195 _sq._; fear of the dead, especially of a dead wife, 196 _sq._; beliefs of the Mafulu concerning the dead, 198; their burial customs, 198 _sq._; their use of the skulls and bones of the dead at a great festival, 199-201; worship of the dead among the natives of the Aroma district, 201 _sq._; the Hood Peninsula, 202 _sq._; beliefs and customs concerning the dead among the natives of the Hood Peninsula, 203-206; seclusion of widows and widowers, 203 _sq._; the ghost-seer, 204 _sq._; application of the juices of the dead to the persons of the living, 205; precautions taken by manslayers against the ghosts of their victims, 205 _sq._; purification for homicide originally a mode of averting the angry ghost of the slain, 206; beliefs and customs concerning the dead among the Massim of south-eastern New Guinea, 206-210; Hiyoyoa, the land of the dead, 207; purification of mourners by bathing and shaving, 207 _sq._; foods forbidden to mourners, 208 _sq._; fires on the grave, 209; the land of the dead, 209 _sq._; names of the dead not mentioned, 210; beliefs and customs concerning the dead among the Papuans of Kiwai, 211-214; Adiri, the land of the dead, 211-213; appearance of the dead to the living in dreams, 213 _sq._; offerings to the dead, 214; dreams as a source of the belief in immortality, 214. Lecture X.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of German New Guinea Andrew Lang, pp. 216 _sq._; review of preceding lectures, 217 _sq._ The Papuans of Tumleo, their material culture, 218-220; their temples, 220 _sq._; their bachelors' houses containing the skulls of the dead, 221; spirits of the dead as the causes of sickness and disease, 222 _sq._; burial and mourning customs, 223 _sq._; fate of the human soul after death, 224; monuments to the dead, 225; disinterment of the bones, 225; propitiation of ghosts and spirits, 226; guardian-spirits in the temples, 226 _sq._ The Monumbo of Potsdam Harbour, 227 _sq._; their beliefs concerning the spirits of the dead, 228 _sq._; their fear of ghosts, 229; their treatment of manslayers, 229 _sq._ The Tamos of Astrolabe Bay, 230; their ideas as to the souls of the dead, 231 _sq._; their fear of ghosts, 232 _sqq._; their Secret Society and rites of initiation, 233; their preservation of the jawbones of the dead, 234 _sq._; their sham fights after a death, 235 _sq._; these fights perhaps intended to throw dust in the eyes of the ghost, 236 _sq._ Lecture XI.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of German New Guinea (_continued_) The Papuans of Cape King William, pp. 238 _sq._; their ideas as to spirits and the souls of the dead, 239 _sq._; their belief in sorcery as a cause of death, 240 _sq._; their funeral and mourning customs, 241 _sq._; the fate of the soul after death, 242. The Yabim of Finsch Harbour, their material and artistic culture, 242 _sq._; their clubhouses for men, 243; their beliefs as to the state of the dead, 244 _sq._; the ghostly ferry, 244 _sq._; transmigration of human souls into animals, 245; the return of the ghosts, 246; offerings to ghosts, 246; ghosts provided with fire, 246 _sq._; ghosts help in the cultivation of land, 247 _sq._; burial and mourning customs, 248 _sq._; divination to discover the sorcerer who has caused a death, 249 _sq._; bull-roarers, 250; initiation of young men, 250 _sqq._; the rite of circumcision, the novices supposed to be swallowed by a monster, 251 _sq._; the return of the novices, 253; the essence of the initiatory rites seems to be a simulation of death and resurrection, 253 _sqq._; the new birth among the Akikuyu of British East Africa, 254. Lecture XII.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of German New Guinea (_continued_) The Bukaua of Huon Gulf, their means of subsistence and men's clubhouses, pp. 256 _sq._; their ideas as to the souls of the dead, 257; sickness and death caused by ghosts and sorcerers, 257 _sq._; fear of the ghosts of the slain, 258; prayers to ancestral spirits on behalf of the crops, 259; first-fruits offered to the spirits of the dead, 259; burial and mourning customs, 259 _sq._; initiation of young men, novices at circumcision supposed to be swallowed and afterwards disgorged by a monster, 260 _sq._ The Kai, a Papuan tribe of mountaineers inland from Finsch Harbour, 262; their country, mode of agriculture, and villages, 262 _sq._; observations of a German missionary on their animism, 263 _sq._; the essential rationality of the savage, 264-266; the Kai theory of the two sorts of human souls, 267 _sq._; death commonly thought to be caused by sorcery, 268 _sq._; danger incurred by the sorcerer, 269; many hurts and maladies attributed to the action of ghosts, 269 _sq._; capturing lost souls, 270 _sq._; ghosts extracted from the body of a sick man or scraped from his person, 271; extravagant demonstrations of grief at the death of a sick man, 271-273; hypocritical character of these demonstrations, which are intended to deceive the ghost, 273; burial and mourning customs, preservation of the lower jawbone and one of the lower arm bones, 274; mourning costume, seclusion of widow or widower, 274 _sq._; widows sometimes strangled to accompany their dead husbands, 275; house or village deserted after a death, 275. Lecture XIII.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of German New Guinea (_continued_) The Kai (continued), their offerings to the dead, p. 276; divination by means of ghosts to detect the sorcerer who has caused a death, 276-278; avenging the death on the sorcerer and his people, 278 _sq._; precautions against the ghosts of the slain, 279 _sq._; attempts to deceive the ghosts of the murdered, 280-282; pretence of avenging the ghost of a murdered man, 282; fear of ghosts by night, 282 _sq._; services rendered by the spirits of the dead to farmers and hunters, 283-285; the journey of the soul to the spirit land, 285 _sq._; life of the dead in the other world, 286 _sq._; ghosts die the second death and turn into animals, 287; ghosts of famous people invoked long after their death, 287-289; possible development of ghosts into gods, 289 _sq._; lads at circumcision supposed to be swallowed and disgorged by a monster, 290 _sq._ The Tami Islanders of Huon Gulf, 291; their theory of a double human soul, a long one and a short one, 291 _sq._; departure of the short soul for Lamboam, the nether world of the dead, 292; offerings to the dead, 292; appeasing the ghost, 292 _sq._; funeral and mourning customs, dances in honour of the dead, offerings thrown into the fire, 293 _sq._; bones of the dead dug up and kept in the house for a time, 294 _sq._ Lecture XIV.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of German and Dutch New Guinea The Tami Islanders of Huon Gulf (continued), their doctrine of souls and gods, pp. 296 _sq._; dances of masked men representing spirits, 297; worship of ancestral spirits and offerings to them, 297 _sq._; life of the souls in Lamboam, the nether world, 299 _sq._; evocation of ghosts by the ghost-seer, 300; sickness caused by ghosts, 300 _sq._; novices at circumcision supposed to be swallowed and disgorged by a monster, 301 _sq._; meaning of the bodily mutilations inflicted on young men at puberty obscure, 302 _sq._ The natives of Dutch New Guinea, 303-323; the Noofoors of Geelvink Bay, their material culture and arts of life, 303-305; their fear and worship of the dead, 305-307; wooden images (_korwar_) of the dead kept in the houses and carried in canoes to be used as oracles, 307 _sq._; the images consulted in sickness and taken with the people to war, 308-310; offerings to the images, 310 _sq._; souls of those who have died away from home recalled to animate the images, 311; skulls of the dead, especially of firstborn children and of parents, inserted in the images, 312 _sq._; bodies of young children hung on trees, 312 _sq._; mummies of dead relatives kept in the houses, 313; seclusion of mourners and restrictions on their diet, 313 _sq._; tattooing in honour of the dead, 314; teeth and hair of the dead worn by relatives, 314 _sq._; rebirth of parents in their children, 315. The natives of islands off the west coast of New Guinea, their wooden images of dead ancestors and shrines for the residence of the ancestral spirits, 315 _sq._; their festivals in honour of the dead, 316; souls of ancestors supposed to reside in the images and to protect the house and household, 317. The natives of the Macluer Gulf, their images and bowls in honour of the dead, 317 _sq._ The natives of the Mimika district, their burial and mourning customs, their preservation of the skulls of the dead, and their belief in ghosts, 318. The natives of Windessi, their burial customs, 318 _sq._; divination after a death, 319; mourning customs, 319 _sq._; festival of the dead, 320 _sq._; wooden images of the dead, 321; doctrine of souls and of their fate after death, 321 _sq._; medicine-men inspired by the souls of the dead, 322 _sq._; ghosts of slain enemies driven away, 323. Lecture XV.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of Southern Melanesia (New Caledonia) The Melanesians in general, their material culture, p. 324; Southern Melanesia, the New Caledonians, and Father Lambert's account of them, 325; their ideas as to the spirit land and the way thither, 325 _sq._; burial customs, 326; cuttings and brandings for the dead, 326 _sq._; property of the dead destroyed, 327; seclusion of gravediggers and restrictions imposed on them, 327; sham fight in honour of the dead, 327 _sq._; skulls of the dead preserved and worshipped on various occasions, such as sickness, fishing, and famine, 328-330; caves used as charnel-houses and sanctuaries of the dead in the Isle of Pines, 330-332; prayers and sacrifices to the ancestral spirits, 332 _sq._; prayer-posts, 333 _sq._; sacred stones associated with the dead and used to cause dearth or plenty, madness, a good crop of bread-fruit or yams, drought, rain, a good catch of fish, and so on, 334-338; the religion of the New Caledonians mainly a worship of the dead tinctured with magic, 338. Evidence as to the natives of New Caledonia collected by Dr. George Turner, 339-342; material culture of the New Caledonians, 339; their burial customs, the skulls and nails of the dead preserved and used to fertilise the yam plantations, 339 _sq._; worship of ancestors and prayers to the dead, 340; festivals in honour of the dead, 340 _sq._; making rain by means of the skeletons of the dead, 341; execution of sorcerers, 341 _sq._; white men identified with the spirits of the dead, 342. Lecture XVI.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of Central Melanesia Central Melanesia divided into two archipelagoes, the religion of the Western Islands (Solomon Islands) characterised by a worship of the dead, the religion of the Eastern Islands (New Hebrides, Banks' Islands, Torres Islands, Santa Cruz Islands) characterised by a worship of non-human spirits, pp. 343 _sq._; Central Melanesian theory of the soul, 344 _sq._; the land of the dead either in certain islands or in a subterranean region called Panoi, 345; ghosts of power and ghosts of no account, 345 _sq._; supernatural power (_mana_) acquired through ghosts, 346 _sq._ Burial customs in the Western Islands (Solomon Islands), 347 _sqq._; land-burial and sea-burial, land-ghosts and sea-ghosts, 347 _sq._; funeral feasts and burnt-offerings to the dead, 348 _sq._; the land of the dead and the ghostly ferry, 350 _sq._; ghosts die the second death and turn into the nests of white ants, 350 _sq._; preservation of the skull and jawbone in order to ensure the protection of the ghost, 351 _sq._; human heads sought in order to add fresh spiritual power (_mana_) to the ghost of a dead chief, 352. Beliefs and customs concerning the dead in the Eastern Islands (New Hebrides, Banks' Islands, Torres Islands), 352 _sqq._; Panoi, the subterranean abode of the dead, 353 _sq._; ghosts die the second death, 354; different fates of the souls of the good and bad, 354 _sq._; descent of the living into the world of the dead, 355; burial customs of the Banks' Islanders, 355 _sqq._; dead sometimes temporarily buried in the house, 355; display of property beside the corpse and funeral oration, 355 _sq._; sham burial of eminent men, 356; ghosts driven away from the village, 356-358; deceiving the ghosts of women who have died in child-bed, 358; funeral feasts, 358 _sq._; funeral customs in the New Hebrides, 359 _sqq._; the aged buried alive, 359 _sq._; seclusion of mourners and restrictions on their diet, 360; sacrifice of pigs, 360 _sq._; the journey of the ghost to the spirit land, 361 _sq._; provisions made by the living for the welfare of the dead, 362. Only ghosts of powerful men worshipped, 362 _sq._; institution of the worship of a martial ghost, 363 _sq._; offerings of food and drink to the dead, 364 _sq._; sacrifice of pigs to ghosts in the Solomon Islands, 365 _sq._ Lecture XVII.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of Central Melanesia (_concluded_) Public sacrifices to ghosts in the Solomon Islands, pp. 367 _sq._; offering of first-fruits to ghosts, 368 _sq._; private ghosts as distinguished from public ghosts, 369 _sq._; fighting ghosts kept as spiritual auxiliaries, 370; ghosts employed to make the gardens grow, 370 _sq._; human sacrifices to ghosts, 371 _sq._; vicarious and other sacrifices to ghosts at Saa in Malanta, 372 _sq._; offerings of first-fruits to ghosts at Saa, 373 _sq._; vicarious sacrifices offered for the sick to ghosts in Santa Cruz, 374; the dead represented by stocks in the houses, 374; native account of sacrifices in Santa Cruz, 374 _sq._; prayers to the dead, 376 _sq._; sanctuaries of ghosts in the Solomon Islands, 377-379; ghosts lodged in animals, birds, and fish, especially in sharks, 379 _sq._ The belief in ghosts underlies the Melanesian conception of magic, 380 _sq._; sickness commonly caused by ghosts and cured by ghost-seers, 381-384; contrast between Melanesian and European systems of medicine, 384; weather regulated by ghosts and spirits and by weather-doctors who have the ear of ghosts and spirits, 384-386; witchcraft or black magic wrought by means of ghosts, 386-388; prophets inspired by ghosts, 388 _sq._; divination operating through ghosts, 389 _sq._; taboos enforced by ghosts, 390 _sq._; general influence which a belief in the survival of the soul after death has exercised on Melanesian life, 391 _sq._ Lecture XVIII.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of Northern and Eastern Melanesia The natives of Northern Melanesia or the Bismarck Archipelago (New Britain, New Ireland, etc.), their material culture, commercial habits, and want of regular government, pp. 393-395; their theory of the soul, 395 _sq._; their fear of ghosts, 396; offerings to the dead, 396 _sq._; burial customs, 397 _sq._; preservation of the skulls, 398; customs and beliefs concerning the dead among the Sulka of New Britain, 398-400, among the Moanus of the Admiralty Islands, 400 _sq._ and among the natives of the Kaniet Islands, 401 _sq._; natural deaths commonly attributed to sorcery, 402; divination to discover the sorcerer who caused the death, 402; death customs in the Duke of York Island, cursing the sorcerer, skulls preserved, feasts and dances, 403; prayers to the dead, 403 _sq._; the land of the dead and the fate of the departed souls, hard lot of impecunious ghosts, 404-406. The natives of Eastern Melanesia (Fiji), their material culture and political constitution, 406-408; means of subsistence, 408; moral character, 408 _sq._; scenery of the Fijian islands, 409 _sq._; the Fijian doctrine of souls, 410-412; souls of rascals caught in scarves, 412 _sq._; fear of sorcery and precautions against it, 413 _sq._; beneficial effect of the fear in enforcing habits of personal cleanliness, 414; fear of ghosts and custom of driving them away, 414 _sq._; killing a ghost, 415 _sq._; outwitting grandfather's ghost, 416; special relation of grandfather to grandchild, 416; grandfather's soul reborn in his grandchild, 417 _sq._ Lecture XIX.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of Eastern Melanesia (Fiji) (_continued_) Indifference of the Fijians to death, p. 419; their custom of killing the sick and aged with the consent of the victims, 419-424; their readiness to die partly an effect of their belief in immortality, 422 _sq._; wives strangled or buried alive to accompany their husbands to the spirit land, 424-426; servants and dependants killed to attend their dead lords, 426; sacrifices of foreskins and fingers in honour of dead chiefs, 426 _sq._; boys circumcised in order to save the lives of their fathers or fathers' brothers, 427; saturnalia attending such rites of circumcision, 427 _sq._; the _Nanga_, or sacred enclosure of stones, dedicated to the worship of ancestors, 428 _sq._; first-fruits of the yams offered to the ancestors in the _Nanga_, 429; initiation of young men in the _Nanga_, drama of death and resurrection, sacrament of food and water, 429-432; the initiation followed by a period of sexual licence, 433; the initiatory rites apparently intended to introduce the novices to the ancestral spirits and endow them with the powers of the dead, 434 _sq._; the rites seem to have been imported into Fiji by immigrants from the west, 435 _sq._; the licence attending these rites perhaps a reversion to primitive communism for the purpose of propitiating the ancestral spirits, 436 _sq._; description of the _Nanga_ or sacred enclosure of stones, 437 _sq._; comparison with the cromlechs and other megalithic monuments of Europe, 438. Lecture XX.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of Eastern Melanesia (Fiji) (_concluded_) Worship of parents and other dead relations in Fiji, pp. 439 _sq._; Fijian notion of divinity (_kalou_), 440; two classes of gods, namely, divine gods and human gods or deified men, 440 _sq._; temples (_bures_) 441 _sq._; worship at the temples, 443; priests (_betes_), their oracular inspiration by the gods, 443-446; human sacrifices on various occasions, such as building a house or launching a new canoe, 446 _sq._; high estimation in which manslaughter was held by the Fijians, 447 _sq._; consecration of manslayers and restrictions laid on them, probably from fear of the ghosts of their victims, 448 _sq._; certain funeral customs based apparently on the fear of ghosts, 450 _sqq._; persons who have handled a corpse forbidden to touch food with their hands, 450 _sq._; seclusion of gravediggers, 451; mutilations, brandings, and fasts in honour of the dead, 451 _sq._; the dead carried out of the house by a special opening to prevent the return of the ghost, 452-461; the other world and the way thither, 462 _sqq._; the ghostly ferry, 462 _sq._; the ghost and the pandanus tree, 463 _sq._; hard fate of the unmarried dead, 464; the Killer of Souls, 464 _sq._; ghosts precipitated into a lake, 465 _sq._; Murimuria, an inferior sort of heaven, 466; the Fijian Elysium, 466 _sq._; transmigration and annihilation, the few that are saved, 467. Concluding observations, 467-471; strength and universality of the belief in immortality among savages, 468; the state of war among savage and civilised peoples often a direct consequence of the belief in immortality, 468 _sq._; economic loss involved in sacrifices to the dead, 469; how does the savage belief in immortality bear on the truth or falsehood of that belief in general? 469; the answer depends to some extent on the view we take of human nature, 469-471; the conclusion left open, 471. Note.--Myth of the Continuance of Death Index LECTURE I INTRODUCTION [Sidenote: Natural theology, and the three modes of handling it, the dogmatic, the philosophical, and the historical.] The subject of these lectures is a branch of natural theology. By natural theology I understand that reasoned knowledge of a God or gods which man may be supposed, whether rightly or wrongly, capable of attaining to by the exercise of his natural faculties alone. Thus defined, the subject may be treated in at least three different ways, namely, dogmatically, philosophically, and historically. We may simply state the dogmas of natural theology which appear to us to be true: that is the dogmatic method. Or, secondly, we may examine the validity of the grounds on which these dogmas have been or may be maintained: that is the philosophic method. Or, thirdly, we may content ourselves with describing the various views which have been held on the subject and tracing their origin and evolution in history: that is the historical method. The first of these three methods assumes the truth of natural theology, the second discusses it, and the third neither assumes nor discusses but simply ignores it: the historian as such is not concerned with the truth or falsehood of the beliefs he describes, his business is merely to record them and to track them as far as possible to their sources. Now that the subject of natural theology is ripe for a purely dogmatic treatment will hardly, I think, be maintained by any one, to whatever school of thought he may belong; accordingly that method of treatment need not occupy us further. Far otherwise is it with the philosophic method which undertakes to enquire into the truth or falsehood of the belief in a God: no method could be more appropriate at a time like the present, when the opinions of educated and thoughtful men on that profound topic are so unsettled, diverse, and conflicting. A philosophical treatment of the subject might comprise a discussion of such questions as whether a natural knowledge of God is possible to man, and, if possible, by what means and through what faculties it is attainable; what are the grounds for believing in the existence of a God; and, if this belief is justified, what may be supposed to be his essential nature and attributes, and what his relations to the world in general and to man in particular. Now I desire to confess at once that an adequate discussion of these and kindred questions would far exceed both my capacity and my knowledge; for he who would do justice to so arduous an enquiry should not only be endowed with a comprehensive and penetrating genius, but should possess a wide and accurate acquaintance with the best accredited results of philosophic speculation and scientific research. To such qualifications I can lay no claim, and accordingly I must regard myself as unfitted for a purely philosophic treatment of natural theology. To speak plainly, the question of the existence of a God is too deep for me. I dare neither affirm nor deny it. I can only humbly confess my ignorance. Accordingly, if Lord Gifford had required of his lecturers either a dogmatic or a philosophical treatment of natural theology, I could not have undertaken to deliver the lectures. [Sidenote: The method followed in these lectures is the historical.] But in his deed of foundation, as I understand it, Lord Gifford left his lecturers free to follow the historical rather than the dogmatic or the philosophical method of treatment. He says: "The lecturers shall be under no restraint whatever in their treatment of their theme: for example, they may freely discuss (and it may be well to do so) all questions about man's conceptions of God or the Infinite, their origin, nature, and truth." In making this provision the founder appears to have allowed and indeed encouraged the lecturers not only to discuss, if they chose to do so, the philosophical basis of a belief in God, but also to set forth the various conceptions of the divine nature which have been held by men in all ages and to trace them to their origin: in short, he permitted and encouraged the lecturers to compose a history of natural theology or of some part of it. Even when it is thus limited to its historical aspect the theme is too vast to be mastered completely by any one man: the most that a single enquirer can do is to take a general but necessarily superficial survey of the whole and to devote himself especially to the investigation of some particular branch or aspect of the subject. This I have done more or less for many years, and accordingly I think that without being presumptuous I may attempt, in compliance with Lord Gifford's wishes and directions, to lay before my hearers a portion of the history of religion to which I have paid particular attention. That the historical study of religious beliefs, quite apart from the question of their truth or falsehood, is both interesting and instructive will hardly be disputed by any intelligent and thoughtful enquirer. Whether they have been well or ill founded, these beliefs have deeply influenced the conduct of human affairs; they have furnished some of the most powerful, persistent, and far-reaching motives of action; they have transformed nations and altered the face of the globe. No one who would understand the general history of mankind can afford to ignore the annals of religion. If he does so, he will inevitably fall into the most serious misconceptions even in studying branches of human activity which might seem, on a superficial view, to be quite unaffected by religious considerations. [Sidenote: An historical enquiry into the evolution of religion prejudices neither the question of the ethical value of religious practice nor the question of the truth or falsehood of religious belief.] Therefore to trace theological and in general religious ideas to their sources and to follow them through all the manifold influences which they have exerted on the destinies of our race must always be an object of prime importance to the historian, whatever view he may take of their speculative truth or ethical value. Clearly we cannot estimate their ethical value until we have learned the modes in which they have actually determined human conduct for good or evil: in other words, we cannot judge of the morality of religious beliefs until we have ascertained their history: the facts must be known before judgment can be passed on them: the work of the historian must precede the work of the moralist. Even the question of the validity or truth of religious creeds cannot, perhaps, be wholly dissociated from the question of their origin. If, for example, we discover that doctrines which we had accepted with implicit faith from tradition have their close analogies in the barbarous superstitions of ignorant savages, we can hardly help suspecting that our own cherished doctrines may have originated in the similar superstitions of our rude forefathers; and the suspicion inevitably shakes the confidence with which we had hitherto regarded these articles of our faith. The doubt thus cast on our old creed is perhaps illogical, since even if we should discover that the creed did originate in mere superstition, in other words, that the grounds on which it was first adopted were false and absurd, this discovery would not really disprove the beliefs themselves, for it is perfectly possible that a belief may be true, though the reasons alleged in favour of it are false and absurd: indeed we may affirm with great probability that a multitude of human beliefs, true in themselves, have been accepted and defended by millions of people on grounds which cannot bear exact investigation for a moment. For example, if the facts of savage life which it will be my duty to submit to you should have the effect of making the belief in immortality look exceedingly foolish, those of my hearers who cherish the belief may console themselves by reflecting that, as I have just pointed out, a creed is not necessarily false because some of the reasons adduced in its favour are invalid, because it has sometimes been supported by the despicable tricks of vulgar imposture, and because the practices to which it has given rise have often been in the highest degree not only absurd but pernicious. [Sidenote: Yet such an enquiry may shake the confidence with which traditional beliefs have been held.] Thus an historical enquiry into the origin of religious creeds cannot, strictly speaking, invalidate, still less refute, the creeds themselves, though it may, and doubtless often does weaken the confidence with which they are held. This weakening of religious faith as a consequence of a closer scrutiny of religious origins is unquestionably a matter of great importance to the community; for society has been built and cemented to a great extent on a foundation of religion, and it is impossible to loosen the cement and shake the foundation without endangering the superstructure. The candid historian of religion will not dissemble the danger incidental to his enquiries, but nevertheless it is his duty to prosecute them unflinchingly. Come what may, he must ascertain the facts so far as it is possible to do so; having done that, he may leave to others the onerous and delicate task of adjusting the new knowledge to the practical needs of mankind. The narrow way of truth may often look dark and threatening, and the wayfarer may often be weary; yet even at the darkest and the weariest he will go forward in the trust, if not in the knowledge, that the way will lead at last to light and to rest; in plain words, that there is no ultimate incompatibility between the good and the true. [Sidenote: To discover the origin of the idea of God we must study the beliefs of primitive man.] Now if we are indeed to discover the origin of man's conception of God, it is not sufficient to analyse the ideas which the educated and enlightened portion of mankind entertain on the subject at the present day; for in great measure these ideas are traditional, they have been handed down with little or no independent reflection or enquiry from generation to generation; hence in order to detect them in their inception it becomes necessary to push our analysis far back into the past. Large materials for such an historical enquiry are provided for us in the literature of ancient nations which, though often sadly mutilated and imperfect, has survived to modern times and throws much precious light on the religious beliefs and practices of the peoples who created it. But the ancients themselves inherited a great part of their religion from their prehistoric ancestors, and accordingly it becomes desirable to investigate the religious notions of these remote forefathers of mankind, since in them we may hope at last to arrive at the ultimate source, the historical origin, of the whole long development. [Sidenote: The beliefs of primitive man can only be understood through a comparative study of the various races in the lower stages of culture.] But how can this be done? how can we investigate the ideas of peoples who, ignorant of writing, had no means of permanently recording their beliefs? At first sight the thing seems impossible; the thread of enquiry is broken off short; it has landed us on the brink of a gulf which looks impassable. But the case is not so hopeless as it appears. True, we cannot investigate the beliefs of prehistoric ages directly, but the comparative method of research may furnish us with the means of studying them indirectly; it may hold up to us a mirror in which, if we do not see the originals, we may perhaps contemplate their reflections. For a comparative study of the various races of mankind demonstrates, or at least renders it highly probable, that humanity has everywhere started at an exceedingly low level of culture, a level far beneath that of the lowest existing savages, and that from this humble beginning all the various races of men have gradually progressed upward at different rates, some faster and some slower, till they have attained the particular stage which each of them occupies at the present time. [Sidenote: Hence the need of studying the beliefs and customs of savages, if we are to understand the evolution of culture in general.] If this conclusion is correct, the various stages of savagery and barbarism on which many tribes and peoples now stand represent, broadly speaking, so many degrees of retarded social and intellectual development, they correspond to similar stages which the ancestors of the civilised races may be supposed to have passed through at more or less remote periods of their history. Thus when we arrange all the known peoples of the world according to the degree of their savagery or civilisation in a graduated scale of culture, we obtain not merely a comparative view of their relative positions in the scale, but also in some measure an historical record of the genetic development of culture from a very early time down to the present day. Hence a study of the savage and barbarous races of mankind is of the greatest importance for a full understanding of the beliefs and practices, whether religious, social, moral, or political, of the most civilised races, including our own, since it is practically certain that a large part of these beliefs and practices originated with our savage ancestors, and has been inherited by us from them, with more or less of modification, through a long line of intermediate generations. [Sidenote: The need is all the more urgent because savages are rapidly disappearing or being transformed.] That is why the study of existing savages at the present day engrosses so much of the attention of civilised peoples. We see that if we are to comprehend not only our past history but our present condition, with all its many intricate and perplexing problems, we must begin at the beginning by attempting to discover the mental state of our savage forefathers, who bequeathed to us so much of the faiths, the laws, and the institutions which we still cherish; and more and more men are coming to perceive that the only way open to us of doing this effectually is to study the mental state of savages who to this day occupy a state of culture analogous to that of our rude progenitors. Through contact with civilisation these savages are now rapidly disappearing, or at least losing the old habits and ideas which render them a document of priceless historical value for us. Hence we have every motive for prosecuting the study of savagery with ardour and diligence before it is too late, before the record is gone for ever. We are like an heir whose title-deeds must be scrutinised before he can take possession of the inheritance, but who finds the handwriting of the deeds so fading and evanescent that it threatens to disappear entirely before he can read the document to the end. With what keen attention, what eager haste, would he not scan the fast-vanishing characters? With the like attention and the like haste civilised men are now applying themselves to the investigation of the fast-vanishing savages. [Sidenote: Savage religion is to be the subject of these lectures.] Thus if we are to trace historically man's conception of God to its origin, it is desirable, or rather essential, that we should begin by studying the most primitive ideas on the subject which are accessible to us, and the most primitive ideas are unquestionably those of the lowest savages. Accordingly in these lectures I propose to deal with a particular side or aspect of savage religion. I shall not trench on the sphere of the higher religions, not only because my knowledge of them is for the most part very slight, but also because I believe that a searching study of the higher and more complex religions should be postponed till we have acquired an accurate knowledge of the lower and simpler. For a similar reason the study of inorganic chemistry naturally precedes the study of organic chemistry, because inorganic compounds are much simpler and therefore more easily analysed and investigated than organic compounds. So with the chemistry of the mind; we should analyse the comparatively simple phenomena of savage thought into its constituent elements before we attempt to perform a similar operation on the vastly more complex phenomena of civilised beliefs. [Sidenote: But only a part of savage religion will be dealt with.] But while I shall confine myself rigidly to the field of savage religion, I shall not attempt to present you with a complete survey even of that restricted area, and that for more reasons than one. In the first place the theme, even with this great limitation, is far too large to be adequately set forth in the time at my disposal; the sketch--for it could be no more than a sketch--would be necessarily superficial and probably misleading. In the second place, even a sketch of primitive religion in general ought to presuppose in the sketcher a fairly complete knowledge of the whole subject, so that all the parts may appear, not indeed in detail, but in their proper relative proportions. Now though I have given altogether a good deal of time to the study of primitive religion, I am far from having studied it in all its branches, and I could not trust myself to give an accurate general account of it even in outline; were I to attempt such a thing I should almost certainly fall, through sheer ignorance or inadvertence, into the mistake of exaggerating some features, unduly diminishing others, and omitting certain essential features altogether. Hence it seems to me better not to commit myself to so ambitious an enterprise but to confine myself in my lectures, as I have always done in my writings, to a comparatively minute investigation of certain special aspects or forms of primitive religion rather than attempt to embrace in a general view the whole of that large subject. Such a relatively detailed study of a single compartment may be less attractive and more tedious than a bird's-eye view of a wider area; but in the end it may perhaps prove a more solid contribution to knowledge. [Sidenote: Introductory observations. The question of a supernatural revelation excluded.] But before I come to details I wish to make a few general introductory remarks, and in particular to define some of the terms which I shall have occasion to use in the lectures. I have defined natural theology as that reasoned knowledge of a God or gods which man may be supposed, whether rightly or wrongly, capable of attaining to by the exercise of his natural faculties alone. Whether there ever has been or can be a special miraculous revelation of God to man through channels different from those through which all other human knowledge is derived, is a question which does not concern us in these lectures; indeed it is expressly excluded from their scope by the will of the founder, who directed the lecturers to treat the subject "as a strictly natural science," "without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation." Accordingly, in compliance with these directions, I dismiss at the outset the question of a revelation, and shall limit myself strictly to natural theology in the sense in which I have defined it. [Sidenote: Theology and religion, how related to each other.] I have called natural theology a reasoned knowledge of a God or gods to distinguish it from that simple and comparatively, though I believe never absolutely, unreasoning faith in God which suffices for the practice of religion. For theology is at once more and less than religion: if on the one hand it includes a more complete acquaintance with the grounds of religious belief than is essential to religion, on the other hand it excludes the observance of those practical duties which are indispensable to any religion worthy of the name. In short, whereas theology is purely theoretical, religion is both theoretical and practical, though the theoretical part of it need not be so highly developed as in theology. But while the subject of the lectures is, strictly speaking, natural theology rather than natural religion, I think it would be not only difficult but undesirable to confine our attention to the purely theological or theoretical part of natural religion: in all religions, and not least in the undeveloped savage religions with which we shall deal, theory and practice fuse with and interact on each other too closely to be forcibly disjoined and handled apart. Hence throughout the lectures I shall not scruple to refer constantly to religious practice as well as to religious theory, without feeling that thereby I am transgressing the proper limits of my subject. [Sidenote: The term God defined.] As theology is not only by definition but by etymology a reasoned knowledge or theory of a God or gods, it becomes desirable, before we proceed further, to define the sense in which I understand and shall employ the word God. That sense is neither novel nor abstruse; it is simply the sense which I believe the generality of mankind attach to the term. By a God I understand a superhuman and supernatural being, of a spiritual and personal nature, who controls the world or some part of it on the whole for good, and who is endowed with intellectual faculties, moral feelings, and active powers, which we can only conceive on the analogy of human faculties, feelings, and activities, though we are bound to suppose that in the divine nature they exist in higher degrees, perhaps in infinitely higher degrees, than the corresponding faculties, feelings, and activities of man. In short, by a God I mean a beneficent supernatural spirit, the ruler of the world or of some part of it, who resembles man in nature though he excels him in knowledge, goodness, and power. This is, I think, the sense in which the ordinary man speaks of a God, and I believe that he is right in so doing. I am aware that it has been not unusual, especially perhaps of late years, to apply the name of God to very different conceptions, to empty it of all implication of personality, and to reduce it to signifying something very large and very vague, such as the Infinite or the Absolute (whatever these hard words may signify), the great First Cause, the Universal Substance, "the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfil the law of their being,"[1] and so forth. Now without expressing any opinion as to the truth or falsehood of the views implied by such applications of the name of God, I cannot but regard them all as illegitimate extensions of the term, in short as an abuse of language, and I venture to protest against it in the interest not only of verbal accuracy but of clear thinking, because it is apt to conceal from ourselves and others a real and very important change of thought: in particular it may lead many to imagine that the persons who use the name of God in one or other of these extended senses retain certain theological opinions which they may in fact have long abandoned. Thus the misuse of the name of God may resemble the stratagem in war of putting up dummies to make an enemy imagine that a fort is still held after it has been evacuated by the garrison. I am far from alleging or insinuating that the illegitimate extension of the divine name is deliberately employed by theologians or others for the purpose of masking a change of front; but that it may have that effect seems at least possible. And as we cannot use words in wrong senses without running a serious risk of deceiving ourselves as well as others, it appears better on all accounts to adhere strictly to the common meaning of the name of God as signifying a powerful supernatural and on the whole beneficent spirit, akin in nature to man; and if any of us have ceased to believe in such a being we should refrain from applying the old word to the new faith, and should find some other and more appropriate term to express our meaning. At all events, speaking for myself, I intend to use the name of God consistently in the familiar sense, and I would beg my hearers to bear this steadily in mind. [Sidenote: Monotheism and polytheism.] You will have observed that I have spoken of natural theology as a reasoned knowledge of a God or gods. There is indeed nothing in the definition of God which I have adopted to imply that he is unique, in other words, that there is only one God rather than several or many gods. It is true that modern European thinkers, bred in a monotheistic religion, commonly overlook polytheism as a crude theory unworthy the serious attention of philosophers; in short, the champions and the assailants of religion in Europe alike for the most part tacitly assume that there is either one God or none. Yet some highly civilised nations of antiquity and of modern times, such as the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and the modern Chinese and Hindoos, have accepted the polytheistic explanation of the world, and as no reasonable man will deny the philosophical subtlety of the Greeks and the Hindoos, to say nothing of the rest, a theory of the universe which has commended itself to them deserves perhaps more consideration than it has commonly received from Western philosophers; certainly it cannot be ignored in an historical enquiry into the origin of religion. [Sidenote: A natural knowledge of God can only be acquired by experience.] If there is such a thing as natural theology, that is, a knowledge of a God or gods acquired by our natural faculties alone without the aid of a special revelation, it follows that it must be obtained by one or other of the methods by which all our natural knowledge is conveyed to us. Roughly speaking, these methods are two in number, namely, intuition and experience. Now if we ask ourselves, Do we know God intuitively in the same sense in which we know intuitively our own sensations and the simplest truths of mathematics, I think most men will acknowledge that they do not. It is true that according to Berkeley the world exists only as it is perceived, and that our perceptions of it are produced by the immediate action of God on our minds, so that everything we perceive might be described, if not as an idea in the mind of the deity, at least as a direct emanation from him. On this theory we might in a sense be said to have an immediate knowledge of God. But Berkeley's theory has found little acceptance, so far as I know, even among philosophers; and even if we regarded it as true, we should still have to admit that the knowledge of God implied by it is inferential rather than intuitive in the strict sense of the word: we infer God to be the cause of our perceptions rather than identify him with the perceptions themselves. On the whole, then, I conclude that man, or at all events the ordinary man, has, properly speaking, no immediate or intuitive knowledge of God, and that, if he obtains, without the aid of revelation, any knowledge of him at all, it can only be through the other natural channel of knowledge, that is, through experience. [Sidenote: The nature of experience.] In experience, as distinct from intuition, we reach our conclusions not directly through simple contemplation of the particular sensations, emotions, or ideas of which we are at the moment conscious, but indirectly by calling up before the imagination and comparing with each other our memories of a variety of sensations, emotions, or ideas of which we have been conscious in the past, and by selecting or abstracting from the mental images so compared the points in which they resemble each other. The points of resemblance thus selected or abstracted from a number of particulars compose what we call an abstract or general idea, and from a comparison of such abstract or general ideas with each other we arrive at general conclusions, which define the relations of the ideas to each other. Experience in general consists in the whole body of conclusions thus deduced from a comparison of all the particular sensations, emotions, and ideas which make up the conscious life of the individual. Hence in order to constitute experience the mind has to perform a more or less complex series of operations, which are commonly referred to certain mental faculties, such as memory, imagination, and judgment. This analysis of experience does not pretend to be philosophically complete or exact; but perhaps it is sufficiently accurate for the purpose of these lectures, the scope of which is not philosophical but historical. [Sidenote: Two kinds of experience, the experience of our own mind and the experience of an external world.] Now experience in the widest sense of the word may be conveniently distinguished into two sorts, the experience of our own mind and the experience of an external world. The distinction is indeed, like the others with which I am dealing at present, rather practically useful than theoretically sound; certainly it would not be granted by all philosophers, for many of them have held that we neither have nor with our present faculties can possibly attain to any immediate knowledge or perception of an external world, we merely infer its existence from our own sensations, which are as strictly a part of our mind as the ideas and emotions of our waking life or the visions of sleep. According to them, the existence of matter or of an external world is, so far as we are concerned, merely an hypothesis devised to explain the order of our sensations; it never has been perceived by any man, woman, or child who ever lived on earth; we have and can have no immediate knowledge or perception of anything but the states and operations of our own mind. On this theory what we call the world, with all its supposed infinitudes of space and time, its systems of suns and planets, its seemingly endless forms of inorganic matter and organic life, shrivels up, on a close inspection, into a fleeting, a momentary figment of thought. It is like one of those glass baubles, iridescent with a thousand varied and delicate hues, which a single touch suffices to shatter into dust. The philosopher, like the sorcerer, has but to wave his magic wand, "And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep." [Sidenote: The distinction rather popular and convenient than philosophically strict.] It would be beyond my province, even if it were within my power, to discuss these airy speculations, and thereby to descend into the arena where for ages subtle dialecticians have battled with each other over the reality or unreality of an external world. For my purpose it suffices to adopt the popular and convenient distinction of mind and matter and hence to divide experience into two sorts, an inward experience of the acts and states of our own minds, and an outward experience of the acts and states of that physical universe by which we seem to be surrounded. [Sidenote: The knowledge or conception of God has been attained both by inward and by outward experience.] Now if a natural knowledge of God is only possible by means of experience, in other words, by a process of reasoning based on observation, it will follow that such a knowledge may conceivably be acquired either by the way of inward or of outward experience; in other words, it may be attained either by reflecting on the processes of our own minds or by observing the processes of external nature. In point of fact, if we survey the history of thought, mankind appears to have arrived at a knowledge, or at all events at a conception, of deity by both these roads. Let me say a few words as to the two roads which lead, or seem to lead, man to God. [Sidenote: The conception of God is attained by inward experience, that is, by the observation of certain remarkable thoughts and feelings which are attributed to the inspiration of a deity. Practical dangers of the theory of inspiration.] In the first place, then, men in many lands and many ages have experienced certain extraordinary emotions and entertained certain extraordinary ideas, which, unable to account for them by reference to the ordinary forms of experience, they have set down to the direct action of a powerful spirit or deity working on their minds and even entering into and taking possession of their bodies; and in this excited state--for violent excitement is characteristic of these manifestations--the patient believes himself to be possessed of supernatural knowledge and supernatural power. This real or supposed mode of apprehending a divine spirit and entering into communion with it, is commonly and appropriately called inspiration. The phenomenon is familiar to us from the example of the Hebrew nation, who believed that their prophets were thus inspired by the deity, and that their sacred books were regularly composed under the divine afflatus. The belief is by no means singular, indeed it appears to be world-wide; for it would be hard to point to any race of men among whom instances of such inspiration have not been reported; and the more ignorant and savage the race the more numerous, to judge by the reports, are the cases of inspiration. Volumes might be filled with examples, but through the spread of information as to the lower races in recent years the topic has become so familiar that I need not stop to illustrate it by instances. I will merely say that among savages the theory of inspiration or possession is commonly invoked to explain all abnormal mental states, particularly insanity or conditions of mind bordering on it, so that persons more or less crazed in their wits, and particularly hysterical or epileptic patients, are for that very reason thought to be peculiarly favoured by the spirits and are therefore consulted as oracles, their wild and whirling words passing for the revelations of a higher power, whether a god or a ghost, who considerately screens his too dazzling light under a thick veil of dark sayings and mysterious ejaculations.[2] I need hardly point out the very serious dangers which menace any society where such theories are commonly held and acted upon. If the decisions of a whole community in matters of the gravest importance are left to turn on the wayward fancies, the whims and vagaries of the insane or the semi-insane, what are likely to be the consequences to the commonwealth? What, for example, can be expected to result from a war entered upon at such dictation and waged under such auspices? Are cattle-breeding, agriculture, commerce, all the arts of life on which a people depend for their subsistence, likely to thrive when they are directed by the ravings of epilepsy or the drivellings of hysteria? Defeat in battle, conquest by enemies, death by famine and widespread disease, these and a thousand other lesser evils threaten the blind people who commit themselves to such blind guides. The history of savage and barbarous tribes, could we follow it throughout, might furnish us with a thousand warning instances of the fatal effects of carrying out this crude theory of inspiration to its logical conclusions; and if we hear less than might be expected of such instances, it is probably because the tribes who consistently acted up to their beliefs have thereby wiped themselves out of existence: they have perished the victims of their folly and left no record behind. I believe that historians have not yet reckoned sufficiently with the disastrous influence which this worship of insanity,--for it is often nothing less--has exercised on the fortunes of peoples and on the development or decay of their institutions. [Sidenote: The belief in inspiration leads to the worship of living men as gods. Outward experience as a source of the idea of God.] To a certain extent, however, the evil has provided its own remedy. For men of strong heads and ambitious temper, perceiving the exorbitant power which a belief in inspiration places in the hands of the feeble-minded, have often feigned to be similarly afflicted, and trading on their reputation for imbecility, or rather inspiration, have acquired an authority over their fellows which, though they have often abused it for vulgar ends, they have sometimes exerted for good, as for example by giving sound advice in matters of public concern, applying salutary remedies to the sick, and detecting and punishing crime, whereby they have helped to preserve the commonwealth, to alleviate suffering, and to cement that respect for law and order which is essential to the stability of society, and without which any community must fall to pieces like a house of cards. These great services have been rendered to the cause of civilisation and progress by the class of men who in primitive society are variously known as medicine-men, magicians, sorcerers, diviners, soothsayers, and so forth. Sometimes the respect which they have gained by the exercise of their profession has won for them political as well as spiritual or ghostly authority; in short, from being simple medicine-men or sorcerers they have grown into chiefs and kings. When such men, seated on the throne of state, retain their old reputation for being the vehicles of a divine spirit, they may be worshipped in the character of gods as well as revered in the capacity of kings; and thus exerting a two-fold sway over the minds of men they possess a most potent instrument for elevating or depressing the fortunes of their worshippers and subjects. In this way the old savage notion of inspiration or possession gradually develops into the doctrine of the divinity of kings, which after a long period of florescence dwindles away into the modest theory that kings reign by divine right, a theory familiar to our ancestors not long ago, and perhaps not wholly obsolete among us even now. However, inspired men need not always blossom out into divine kings; they may, and often do, remain in the chrysalis state of simple deities revered by their simple worshippers, their brows encircled indeed with a halo of divinity but not weighted with the more solid substance of a kingly crown. Thus certain extraordinary mental states, which those who experience and those who witness them cannot account for in any other way, are often explained by the supposed interposition of a spirit or deity. This, therefore, is one of the two forms of experience by which men attain, or imagine that they attain, to a knowledge of God and a communion with him. It is what I have called the road of inward experience. Let us now glance at the other form of experience which leads, or seems to lead, to the same goal. It is what I have called the road of outward experience. [Sidenote: Tendency of the mind to search for causes, and the necessity for their discovery.] When we contemplate the seemingly infinite variety, the endless succession, of events that pass under our observation in what we call the external world, we are led by an irresistible tendency to trace what we call a causal connexion between them. The tendency to discover the causes of things appears indeed to be innate in the constitution of our minds and indispensable to our continued existence. It is the link that arrests and colligates into convenient bundles the mass of particulars drifting pell-mell past on the stream of sensation; it is the cement that binds into an edifice seemingly of adamant the loose sand of isolated perceptions. Deprived of the knowledge which this tendency procures for us we should be powerless to foresee the succession of phenomena and so to adapt ourselves to it. We should be bewildered by the apparent disorder and confusion of everything, we should toss on a sea without a rudder, we should wander in an endless maze without a clue, and finding no way out of it, or, in plain words, unable to avoid a single one of the dangers which menace us at every turn, we should inevitably perish. Accordingly the propensity to search for causes is characteristic of man in all ages and at all levels of culture, though without doubt it is far more highly developed in civilised than in savage communities. Among savages it is more or less unconscious and instinctive; among civilised men it is deliberately cultivated and rewarded at least by the applause of their fellows, by the dignity, if not by the more solid recompenses, of learning. Indeed as civilisation progresses the enquiry into causes tends to absorb more and more of the highest intellectual energies of a people; and an ever greater number of men, renouncing the bustle, the pleasures, and the ambitions of an active life, devote themselves exclusively to the pursuit of abstract truth; they set themselves to discover the causes of things, to trace the regularity and order that may be supposed to underlie the seemingly irregular, confused, and arbitrary sequence of phenomena. Unquestionably the progress of civilisation owes much to the sustained efforts of such men, and if of late years and within our own memory the pace of progress has sensibly quickened, we shall perhaps not err in supposing that some part at least of the acceleration may be accounted for by an increase in the number of lifelong students. [Sidenote: The idea of cause is simply that of invariable sequence suggested by the observation of many particular cases of sequence.] Now when we analyse the conception of a cause to the bottom, we find as the last residuum in our crucible nothing but what Hume found there long ago, and that is simply the idea of invariable sequence. Whenever we say that something is the cause of something else, all that we really mean is that the latter is invariably preceded by the former, so that whenever we find the second, which we call the effect, we may infer that the first, which we call the cause, has gone before it. All such inferences from effects to causes are based on experience; having observed a certain sequence of events a certain number of times, we conclude that the events are so conjoined that the latter cannot occur without the previous occurrence of the former. A single case of two events following each other could not of itself suggest that the one event is the cause of the other, since there is no necessary link between them in the mind; the sequence has to be repeated more or less frequently before we infer a causal connexion between the two; and this inference rests simply on that association of ideas which is established in our mind by the reiterated observation of the things. Once the ideas are by dint of repetition firmly welded together, the one by sheer force of habit calls up the other, and we say that the two things which are represented by those ideas stand to each other in the relation of cause and effect. The notion of causality is in short only one particular case of the association of ideas. Thus all reasoning as to causes implies previous observation: we reason from the observed to the unobserved, from the known to the unknown; and the wider the range of our observation and knowledge, the greater the probability that our reasoning will be correct. [Sidenote: The savage draws his ideas of natural causation from observation of himself. Hence he explains the phenomena of nature by supposing that they are produced by beings like himself. These beings may be called spirits or gods of nature to distinguish them from living human gods.] All this is as true of the savage as of the civilised man. He too argues, and indeed can only argue on the basis of experience from the known to the unknown, from the observed to the hypothetical. But the range of his experience is comparatively narrow, and accordingly his inferences from it often appear to civilised men, with their wider knowledge, to be palpably false and absurd. This holds good most obviously in regard to his observation of external nature. While he often knows a good deal about the natural objects, whether animals, plants, or inanimate things, on which he is immediately dependent for his subsistence, the extent of country with which he is acquainted is commonly but small, and he has little or no opportunity of correcting the conclusions which he bases on his observation of it by a comparison with other parts of the world. But if he knows little of the outer world, he is necessarily somewhat better acquainted with his own inner life, with his sensations and ideas, his emotions, appetites, and desires. Accordingly it is natural enough that when he seeks to discover the causes of events in the external world, he should, arguing from experience, imagine that they are produced by the actions of invisible beings like himself, who behind the veil of nature pull the strings that set the vast machinery in motion. For example, he knows by experience that he can make sparks fly by knocking two flints against each other; what more natural, therefore, than that he should imagine the great sparks which we call lightning to be made in the same way by somebody up aloft, and that when he finds chipped flints on the ground he should take them for thunder-stones dropped by the maker of thunder and lightning from the clouds?[3] Thus arguing from his limited experience primitive man creates a multitude of spirits or gods in his own likeness to explain the succession of phenomena in nature of whose true causes he is ignorant; in short he personifies the phenomena as powerful anthropomorphic spirits, and believing himself to be more or less dependent on their good will he woos their favour by prayer and sacrifice. This personification of the various aspects of external nature is one of the most fruitful sources of polytheism. The spirits and gods created by this train of thought may be called spirits and gods of nature to distinguish them from the human gods, by which I mean the living men and women who are believed by their worshippers to be inspired or possessed by a divine spirit. [Sidenote: In time men reject polytheism as an explanation of natural processes and substitute certain abstract ideas of ethers, atoms, molecules, and so on.] But as time goes on and men learn more about nature, they commonly become dissatisfied with polytheism as an explanation of the world and gradually discard it. From one department of nature after another the gods are reluctantly or contemptuously dismissed and their provinces committed to the care of certain abstract ideas of ethers, atoms, molecules, and so forth, which, though just as imperceptible to human senses as their divine predecessors, are judged by prevailing opinion to discharge their duties with greater regularity and despatch, and are accordingly firmly installed on the vacant thrones amid the general applause of the more enlightened portion of mankind. Thus instead of being peopled with a noisy bustling crowd of full-blooded and picturesque deities, clothed in the graceful form and animated with the warm passions of humanity, the universe outside the narrow circle of our consciousness is now conceived as absolutely silent, colourless, and deserted. The cheerful sounds which we hear, the bright hues which we see, have no existence, we are told, in the external world: the voices of friends, the harmonies of music, the chime of falling waters, the solemn roll of ocean, the silver splendour of the moon, the golden glories of sunset, the verdure of summer woods, and the hectic tints of autumn--all these subsist only in our own minds, and if we imagine them to have any reality elsewhere, we deceive ourselves. In fact the whole external world as perceived by us is one great illusion: if we gave the reins to fancy we might call it a mirage, a piece of witchery, conjured up by the spells of some unknown magician to bewilder poor ignorant humanity. Outside of ourselves there stretches away on every side an infinitude of space without sound, without light, without colour, a solitude traversed only in every direction by an inconceivably complex web of silent and impersonal forces. That, if I understand it aright, is the general conception of the world which modern science has substituted for polytheism. [Sidenote: But while they commonly discard the hypothesis of a deity as an explanation of all the particular processes of nature, they retain it as an explanation of nature in general.] When philosophy and science by their combined efforts have ejected gods and goddesses from all the subordinate posts of nature, it might perhaps be expected that they would have no further occasion for the services of a deity, and that having relieved him of all his particular functions they would have arranged for the creation and general maintenance of the universe without him by handing over these important offices to an efficient staff of those ethers, atoms, corpuscles, and so forth, which had already proved themselves so punctual in the discharge of the minor duties entrusted to them. Nor, indeed, is this expectation altogether disappointed. A number of atheistical philosophers have courageously come forward and assured us that the hypothesis of a deity as the creator and preserver of the universe is quite superfluous, and that all things came into being or have existed from eternity without the help of any divine spirit, and that they will continue to exist without it to the end, if end indeed there is to be. But on the whole these daring speculators appear to be in a minority. The general opinion of educated people at the present day, could we ascertain it, would probably be found to incline to the conclusion that, though every department of nature is now worked by impersonal material forces alone, the universe as a whole was created and is still maintained by a great supernatural spirit whom we call God. Thus in Europe and in the countries which have borrowed their civilisation, their philosophy, and their religion from it, the central problem of natural theology has narrowed itself down to the question, Is there one God or none? It is a profound question, and I for one profess myself unable to answer it. [Sidenote: Whether attained by inward or outward experience, the idea of God is regularly that of a cause inferred, not perceived.] If this brief sketch of the history of natural theology is correct, man has by the exercise of his natural faculties alone, without the help of revelation, attained to a knowledge or at least to a conception of God in one of two ways, either by meditating on the operations of his own mind, or by observing the processes of external nature: inward experience and outward experience have conducted him by different roads to the same goal. By whichever of them the conception has been reached, it is regularly employed to explain the causal connexion of things, whether the things to be explained are the ideas and emotions of man himself or the changes in the physical world outside of him. In short, a God is always brought in to play the part of a cause; it is the imperious need of tracing the causes of events which has driven man to discover or invent a deity. Now causes may be arranged in two classes according as they are perceived or unperceived by the senses. For example, when we see the impact of a billiard cue on a billiard ball followed immediately by the motion of the ball, we say that the impact is the cause of the motion. In this case we perceive the cause as well as the effect. But, when we see an apple fall from a tree to the ground, we say that the cause of the fall is the force of gravitation exercised by the superior mass of the earth on the inferior mass of the apple. In this case, though we perceive the effect, we do not perceive the cause, we only infer it by a process of reasoning from experience. Causes of the latter sort may be called inferential or hypothetical causes to distinguish them from those which are perceived. Of the two classes of causes a deity belongs in general, if not universally, to the second, that is, to the inferential or hypothetical causes; for as a rule at all events his existence is not perceived by our senses but inferred by our reason. To say that he has never appeared in visible and tangible form to men would be to beg the question; it would be to make an assertion which is incapable of proof and which is contradicted by a multitude of contrary affirmations recorded in the traditions or the sacred books of many races; but without being rash we may perhaps say that such appearances, if they ever took place, belong to a past order of events and need hardly be reckoned with at the present time. For all practical purposes, therefore, God is now a purely inferential or hypothetical cause; he may be invoked to explain either our own thoughts and feelings, our impulses and emotions, or the manifold states and processes of external nature; he may be viewed either as the inspirer of the one or the creator and preserver of the other; and according as he is mainly regarded from the one point of view or the other, the conception of the divine nature tends to beget one of two very different types of piety. To the man who traces the finger of God in the workings of his own mind, the deity appears to be far closer than he seems to the man who only infers the divine existence from the marvellous order, harmony, and beauty of the external world; and we need not wonder that the faith of the former is of a more fervent temper and supplies him with more powerful incentives to a life of active devotion than the calm and rational faith of the latter. We may conjecture that the piety of most great religious reformers has belonged to the former rather than to the latter type; in other words, that they have believed in God because they felt, or imagined that they felt, him stirring in their own hearts rather than because they discerned the handiwork of a divine artificer in the wonderful mechanism of nature. [Sidenote: Besides the two sorts of gods already distinguished, namely natural gods and living human gods, there is a third sort which has played an important part in history, namely, the spirits of deified dead men. Euhemerism.] Thus far I have distinguished two sorts of gods whom man discovers or creates for himself by the exercise of his unaided faculties, to wit natural gods, whom he infers from his observation of external nature, and human gods or inspired men, whom he recognises by virtue of certain extraordinary mental manifestations in himself or in others. But there is another class of human gods which I have not yet mentioned and which has played a very important part in the evolution of theology. I mean the deified spirits of dead men. To judge by the accounts we possess not only of savage and barbarous tribes but of some highly civilised peoples, the worship of the human dead has been one of the commonest and most influential forms of natural religion, perhaps indeed the commonest and most influential of all. Obviously it rests on the supposition that the human personality in some form, whether we call it a soul, a spirit, a ghost, or what not, can survive death and thereafter continue for a longer or shorter time to exercise great power for good or evil over the destinies of the living, who are therefore compelled to propitiate the shades of the dead out of a regard for their own safety and well-being. This belief in the survival of the human spirit after death is world-wide; it is found among men in all stages of culture from the lowest to the highest; we need not wonder therefore that the custom of propitiating the ghosts or souls of the departed should be world-wide also. No doubt the degree of attention paid to ghosts is not the same in all cases; it varies with the particular degree of power attributed to each of them; the spirits of men who for any reason were much feared in their lifetime, such as mighty warriors, chiefs, and kings, are more revered and receive far more marks of homage than the spirits of common men; and it is only when this reverence and homage are carried to a very high pitch that they can properly be described as a deification of the dead. But that dead men have thus been raised to the rank of deities in many lands, there is abundant evidence to prove. And quite apart from the worship paid to those spirits which are admitted by their worshippers to have once animated the bodies of living men, there is good reason to suspect that many gods, who rank as purely mythical beings, were once men of flesh and blood, though their true history has passed out of memory or rather been transformed by legend into a myth, which veils more or less completely the real character of the imaginary deity. The theory that most or all gods originated after this fashion, in other words, that the worship of the gods is little or nothing but the worship of dead men, is known as Euhemerism from Euhemerus, the ancient Greek writer who propounded it. Regarded as a universal explanation of the belief in gods it is certainly false; regarded as a partial explanation of the belief it is unquestionably true; and perhaps we may even go further and say, that the more we penetrate into the inner history of natural religion, the larger is seen to be the element of truth contained in Euhemerism. For the more closely we look at many deities of natural religion, the more distinctly do we seem to perceive, under the quaint or splendid pall which the mythical fancy has wrapt round their stately figures, the familiar features of real men, who once shared the common joys and the common sorrows of humanity, who trod life's common road to the common end. [Sidenote: The deification of dead men presupposes the immortality of the human soul, or rather its survival for a longer or shorter time after death.] When we ask how it comes about that dead men have so often been raised to the rank of divinities, the first thing to be observed is that all such deifications must, if our theory is correct, be inferences drawn from experience of some sort; they must be hypotheses devised to explain the unperceived causes of certain phenomena, whether of the human mind or of external nature. All of them imply, as I have said, a belief that the conscious human personality, call it the soul, the spirit, or what you please, can survive the body and continue to exist in a disembodied state with unabated or even greatly increased powers for good or evil. This faith in the survival of personality after death may for the sake of brevity be called a faith in immortality, though the term immortality is not strictly correct, since it seems to imply eternal duration, whereas the idea of eternity is hardly intelligible to many primitive peoples, who nevertheless firmly believe in the continued existence, for a longer or shorter time, of the human spirit after the dissolution of the body. Now the faith in the immortality of the soul or, to speak more correctly, in the continued existence of conscious human personality after death, is, as I remarked before, exceedingly common among men at all levels of intellectual evolution from the lowest upwards; certainly it is not peculiar to adherents of the higher religions, but is held as an unquestionable truth by at least the great majority of savage and barbarous peoples as to whose ideas we possess accurate information; indeed it might be hard to point to any single tribe of men, however savage, of whom we could say with certainty that the faith is totally wanting among them. [Sidenote: The question of immortality is a fundamental problem of natural theology in the wider sense.] Hence if we are to explain the deification of dead men, we must first explain the widespread belief in immortality; we must answer the question, how does it happen that men in all countries and at all stages of ignorance or knowledge so commonly suppose that when they die their consciousness will still persist for an indefinite time after the decay of the body? To answer that question is one of the fundamental problems of natural theology, not indeed in the full sense of the word theology, if we confine the term strictly to a reasoned knowledge of a God; for the example of Buddhism proves that a belief in the existence of the human soul after death is quite compatible with disbelief in a deity. But if we may use, as I think we may, the phrase natural theology in an extended sense to cover theories which, though they do not in themselves affirm the existence of a God, nevertheless appear to be one of the deepest and most fruitful sources of the belief in his reality, then we may legitimately say that the doctrine of human immortality does fall within the scope of natural theology. What then is its origin? How is it that men so commonly believe themselves to be immortal? [Sidenote: If there is any natural knowledge of immortality, it must be acquired either by intuition or experience; it is apparently not given by intuition; hence it must be acquired, if at all, by experience.] If there is any natural knowledge of human immortality, it must be acquired either by intuition or by experience; there is no other way. Now whether other men from a simple contemplation of their own nature, quite apart from reasoning, know or believe themselves intuitively to be immortal, I cannot say; but I can say with some confidence that for myself I have no such intuition whatever of my own immortality, and that if I am left to the resources of my natural faculties alone, I can as little affirm the certain or probable existence of my personality after death as I can affirm the certain or probable existence of a personal God. And I am bold enough to suspect that if men could analyse their own ideas, they would generally find themselves to be in a similar predicament as to both these profound topics. Hence I incline to lay it down as a probable proposition that men as a rule have no intuitive knowledge of their own immortality, and that if there is any natural knowledge of such a thing it can only be acquired by a process of reasoning from experience.[4] [Sidenote: The idea of immortality seems to have been suggested to man both by his inward and his outward experience, notably by dreams, which are a case of inward experience.] What then is the kind of experience from which the theory of human immortality is deduced? Is it our experience of the operations of our own minds? or is it our experience of external nature? As a matter of historical fact--and you will remember that I am treating the question purely from the historical standpoint--men seem to have inferred the persistence of their personality after death both from the one kind of experience and from the other, that is, both from the phenomena of their inner life and from the phenomena of what we call the external world. Thus the savage, with whose beliefs we are chiefly concerned in these lectures, finds a very strong argument for immortality in the phenomena of dreams, which are strictly a part of his inner life, though in his ignorance he commonly fails to discriminate them from what we popularly call waking realities. Hence when the images of persons whom he knows to be dead appear to him in a dream, he naturally infers that these persons still exist somewhere and somehow apart from their bodies, of the decay or destruction of which he may have had ocular demonstration. How could he see dead people, he asks, if they did not exist? To argue that they have perished like their bodies is to contradict the plain evidence of his senses; for to the savage still more than to the civilised man seeing is believing; that he sees the dead only in dreams does not shake his belief, since he thinks the appearances of dreams just as real as the appearances of his waking hours. And once he has in this way gained a conviction that the dead survive and can help or harm him, as they seem to do in dreams, it is natural or necessary for him to extend the theory to the occurrences of daily life, which, as I have said, he does not sharply distinguish from the visions of slumber. He now explains many of these occurrences and many of the processes of nature by the direct interposition of the spirits of the departed; he traces their invisible hand in many of the misfortunes and in some of the blessings which befall him; for it is a common feature of the faith in ghosts, at least among savages, that they are usually spiteful and mischievous, or at least testy and petulant, more apt to injure than to benefit the survivors. In that they resemble the personified spirits of nature, which in the opinion of most savages appear to be generally tricky and malignant beings, whose anger is dangerous and whose favour is courted with fear and trembling. Thus even without the additional assurance afforded by tales of apparitions and spectres, primitive man may come in time to imagine the world around him to be more or less thickly peopled, influenced, and even dominated by a countless multitude of spirits, among whom the shades of past generations of men and women hold a very prominent, often apparently the leading place. These spirits, powerful to help or harm, he seeks either simply to avert, when he deems them purely mischievous, or to appease and conciliate, when he supposes them sufficiently good-natured to respond to his advances. In some such way as this, arguing from the real but, as we think, misinterpreted phenomena of dreams, the savage may arrive at a doctrine of human immortality and from that at a worship of the dead. [Sidenote: It has also been suggested by the resemblance of the living to the dead, which is a case of outward experience.] This explanation of the savage faith in immortality is neither novel nor original: on the contrary it is perhaps the commonest and most familiar that has yet been propounded. If it does not account for all the facts, it probably accounts for many of them. At the same time I do not doubt that many other inferences drawn from experiences of different kinds have confirmed, even if they did not originally suggest, man's confident belief in his own immortality. To take a single example of outward experience, the resemblances which children often bear to deceased kinsfolk appear to have prompted in the minds of many savages the notion that the souls of these dead kinsfolk have been born again in their descendants.[5] From a few cases of resemblances so explained it would be easy to arrive at a general theory that all living persons are animated by the souls of the dead; in other words, that the human spirit survives death for an indefinite period, if not for eternity, during which it undergoes a series of rebirths or reincarnations. However it has been arrived at, this doctrine of the transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages; and from what we know on the subject we seem to be justified in conjecturing that at certain stages of mental and social evolution the belief in metempsychosis has been far commoner and has exercised a far deeper influence on the life and institutions of primitive man than the actual evidence before us at present allows us positively to affirm. [Sidenote: The aim of these lectures is to collect a number of facts illustrative of the belief in immortality and of the customs based on it among some of the lower races.] Be that as it may--and I have no wish to dogmatise on so obscure a topic--it is certain that a belief in the survival of the human personality after death and the practice of a propitiation or worship of the dead have prevailed very widely among mankind and have played a very important part in the development of natural religion. While many writers have duly recognised the high importance both of the belief and of the worship, no one, so far as I know, has attempted systematically to collect and arrange the facts which illustrate the prevalence of this particular type of religion among the various races of mankind. A large body of evidence lies to hand in the voluminous and rapidly increasing literature of ethnology; but it is dispersed over an enormous number of printed books and papers, to say nothing of the materials which still remain buried either in manuscript or in the minds of men who possess the requisite knowledge but have not yet committed it to writing. To draw all those stores of information together and digest them into a single treatise would be a herculean labour, from which even the most industrious researcher into the dusty annals of the human past might shrink dismayed. Certainly I shall make no attempt to perform such a feat within the narrow compass of these lectures. But it seems to me that I may make a useful, if a humble, contribution to the history of religion by selecting a portion of the evidence and submitting it to my hearers. For that purpose, instead of accumulating a mass of facts from all the various races of mankind and then comparing them together, I prefer to limit myself to a few races and to deal with each of them separately, beginning with the lowest savages, about whom we possess accurate information, and gradually ascending to peoples who stand higher in the scale of culture. In short the method of treatment which I shall adopt will be the descriptive rather than the comparative. I shall not absolutely refrain from instituting comparisons between the customs and beliefs of different races, but for the most part I shall content myself with describing the customs and beliefs of each race separately without reference to those of others. Each of the two methods, the comparative and the descriptive, has its peculiar advantages and disadvantages, and in my published writings I have followed now the one method and now the other. The comparative method is unquestionably the more attractive and stimulating, but it cannot be adopted without a good deal of more or less conscious theorising, since every comparison implicitly involves a theory. If we desire to exclude theories and merely accumulate facts for the use of science, the descriptive method is undoubtedly the better adapted for the arrangement of our materials: it may not stimulate enquiry so powerfully, but it lays a more solid foundation on which future enquirers may build. It is as a collection of facts illustrative of the belief in immortality and of all the momentous consequences which have flowed from that belief, that I desire the following lectures to be regarded. They are intended to serve simply as a document of religious history; they make no pretence to discuss philosophically the truth of the beliefs and the morality of the practices which will be passed under review. If any inferences can indeed be drawn from the facts to the truth or falsehood of the beliefs and to the moral worth or worthlessness of the practices, I prefer to leave it to others more competent than myself to draw them. My sight is not keen enough, my hand is not steady enough to load the scales and hold the balance in so difficult and delicate an enquiry. [Footnote 1: Matthew Arnold, _Literature and Dogma_, ch. i., p. 31 (Popular Edition, London, 1893).] [Footnote 2: For a single instance see L. Sternberg, "Die Religion der Giljaken," _Archiv für Religionswissenschaft_, viii. (1905) pp. 462 _sqq._, where the writer tells us that the Gilyaks have boundless faith in the supernatural power of their shamans, and that the shamans are nearly always persons who suffer from hysteria in one form or another.] [Footnote 3: As to the widespread belief that flint weapons are thunderbolts see Sir E. B. Tylor, _Researches into the Early History of Mankind_, Third Edition (London, 1878), pp. 223-227; Chr. Blinkenberg, _The Thunderweapon in Religion and Folklore_ (Cambridge, 1911); W. W. Skeat "Snakestones and Thunderbolts," _Folk-lore_, xxiii. (1912) pp. 60 _sqq._; and the references in _The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings_, ii. 374.] [Footnote 4: Wordsworth, who argues strongly, almost passionately, for "the consciousness of a principle of Immortality in the human soul," admits that "the sense of Immortality, if not a coexistent and twin birth with Reason, is among the earliest of her offspring." See his _Essay upon Epitaphs_, appended to _The Excursion_ (_Poetical Works_, London, 1832, vol. iv. pp. 336, 338). This somewhat hesitating admission of the inferential nature of the belief in immortality carries all the more weight because it is made by so warm an advocate of human immortality.] [Footnote 5: For instance, the Kagoro of Northern Nigeria believe that "a spirit may transmigrate into the body of a descendant born afterwards, male or female; in fact, this is common, as is proved by the likeness of children to their parents or grand-parents, and it is lucky, for the ghost has returned, and has no longer any power to frighten the relatives until the new body dies, and it is free again" (Major A. J. N. Tremearne, "Notes on some Nigerian Head-hunters," _Journal of the R. Anthropological Institute_, xlii. (1912) p. 159). Compare _Taboo and the Perils of the Soul_, pp. 88 _sq._; _The Dying God_, p. 287 (p. 288, Second Impression).] LECTURE II THE SAVAGE CONCEPTION OF DEATH [Sidenote: The subject of these lectures is the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead.] Last day I explained the subject of which I propose to treat and the method which I intend to follow in these lectures. I shall describe the belief in immortality, or rather in the continued existence of the human soul after death, as that belief is found among certain of the lower races, and I shall give some account of the religion which has been based upon it. That religion is in brief a propitiation or worship of the human dead, who according to the degree of power ascribed to them by the living are supposed to vary in dignity from the humble rank of a mere common ghost up to the proud position of deity. The elements of such a worship appear to exist among all races of men, though in some they have been much more highly developed than in others. [Sidenote: Preliminary account of savage beliefs concerning the nature and origin of death.] But before I address myself to the description of particular races, I wish in this and the following lecture to give you some general account of the beliefs of savages concerning the nature and origin of death. The problem of death has very naturally exercised the minds of men in all ages. Unlike so many problems which interest only a few solitary thinkers this one concerns us all alike, since simpletons as well as sages must die, and even the most heedless and feather-brained can hardly help sometimes asking themselves what comes after death. The question is therefore thrust in a practical, indeed importunate form on our attention; and we need not wonder that in the long history of human speculation some of the highest intellects should have occupied themselves with it and sought to find an answer to the riddle. Some of their solutions of the problem, though dressed out in all the beauty of exquisite language and poetic imagery, singularly resemble the rude guesses of savages. So little, it would seem, do the natural powers even of the greatest minds avail to pierce the thick veil that hides the end of life. [Sidenote: The problem of death is one of universal interest.] In saying that the problem is thrust home upon us all, I do not mean to imply that all men are constantly or even often engaged in meditating on the nature and origin of death. Far from it. Few people trouble themselves about that or any other purely abstract question: the common man would probably not give a straw for an answer to it. What he wants to know, what we all want to know, is whether death is the end of all things for the individual, whether our conscious personality perishes with the body or survives it for a time or for eternity. That is the enigma propounded to every human being who has been born into the world: that is the door at which so many enquirers have knocked in vain. Stated in this limited form the problem has indeed been of universal interest: there is no race of men known to us which has not pondered the mystery and arrived at some conclusions to which it more or less confidently adheres. Not that all races have paid an equal attention to it. On some it has weighed much more heavily than on others. While some races, like some individuals, take death almost lightly, and are too busy with the certainties of the present world to pay much heed to the uncertainties of a world to come, the minds of others have dwelt on the prospect of a life beyond the grave till the thought of it has risen with them to a passion, almost to an obsession, and has begotten a contempt for the fleeting joys of this ephemeral existence by comparison with the hoped-for bliss of an eternal existence hereafter. To the sceptic, examining the evidence for immortality by the cold light of reason, such peoples and such individuals may seem to sacrifice the substance for the shadow: to adopt a homely comparison, they are like the dog in the fable who dropped the real leg of mutton, from his mouth in order to snap at its reflection in the water. Be that as it may, where such beliefs and hopes are entertained in full force, the whole activity of the mind and the whole energy of the body are apt to be devoted to a preparation for a blissful or at all events an untroubled eternity, and life becomes, in the language of Plato, a meditation or practising of death. This excessive preoccupation with a problematic future has been a fruitful source of the most fatal aberrations both for nations and individuals. In pursuit of these visionary aims the few short years of life have been frittered away: wealth has been squandered: blood has been poured out in torrents: the natural affections have been stifled; and the cheerful serenity of reason has been exchanged for the melancholy gloom of madness. "Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise! One thing at least is certain--_This_ Life flies; One thing is certain and the rest is Lies; The Flower that once has blown for ever dies." [Sidenote: The belief in immortality general among mankind.] The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative. On this point sceptical or agnostic peoples are nearly, if not wholly, unknown. Accordingly if abstract truth could be determined, like the gravest issues of national policy, by a show of hands or a counting of heads, the doctrine of human immortality, or at least of a life after death, would deserve to rank among the most firmly established of truths; for were the question put to the vote of the whole of mankind, there can be no doubt that the ayes would have it by an overwhelming majority. The few dissenters would be overborne; their voices would be drowned in the general roar. For dissenters there have been even among savages. The Tongans, for example, thought that only the souls of noblemen are saved, the rest perish with their bodies.[6] However, this aristocratic view has never been popular, and is not likely to find favour in our democratic age. [Sidenote: Belief of many savages that they would never die if their lives were not cut short by sorcery. Belief of the Abipones.] But many savage races not only believe in a life after death; they are even of opinion that they would never die at all if it were not for the maleficent arts of sorcerers who cut the vital thread prematurely short. In other words, they disbelieve in what we call a natural death; they think that all men are naturally immortal in this life, and that every death which takes place is in fact a violent death inflicted by the hand of a human enemy, though in many cases the foe is invisible and works his fell purpose not by a sword or a spear but by magic. Thus the Abipones, a now extinct tribe of horse Indians in Paraguay, used to allege that they would be immortal and that none of them would ever die if only the Spaniards and the sorcerers could be banished from America; for they were in the habit of attributing every death, whatever its cause, either to the baleful arts of sorcerers or to the firearms of the Spaniards. Even if a man died riddled with wounds, with his bones smashed, or through the exhaustion of old age, these Indians would all deny that the wounds or old age was the cause of his death; they firmly believed that the death was brought about by magic, and they would make careful enquiries to discover the sorcerer who had cast the fatal spell on their comrade. The relations of the deceased would move every stone to detect and punish the culprit; and they imagined that they could do this by cutting out the heart and tongue of the dead man and throwing them to a dog to be devoured. They thought that this in some way killed the wicked magician who had killed their friend. For example, it happened that in a squabble between two men about a horse a third man who tried to make peace between the disputants was mortally wounded by their spears and died in a few days. To us it might seem obvious that the peacemaker was killed by the spear-wounds which he had received, but none of the Abipones would admit such a thing for a moment. They stoutly affirmed that their comrade had been done to death by the magical arts of some person unknown, and their suspicions fell on a certain old woman, known to be a witch, to whom the deceased had lately refused to give a water-melon, and who out of spite had killed him by her spells, though he appeared to the European eye to have died of a spear-wound.[7] [Sidenote: Belief of the Araucanians.] Similarly the warlike Araucanians of Chili are said to disbelieve in natural death. Even if a man dies peaceably at the age of a hundred, they still think that he has been bewitched by an enemy. A diviner or medicine-man is consulted in order to discover the culprit. Some of these wizards enjoy a great reputation and the Indians will send a hundred miles or more to get the opinion of an eminent member of the profession. In such cases they submit to him some of the remains of the dead man, for example, his eyebrows, his nails, his tongue, or the soles of his feet, and from an examination of these relics the man of skill pronounces on the author of the death. The person whom he accuses is hunted down and killed, sometimes by fire, amid the yells of an enraged crowd.[8] [Sidenote: Belief of the Bakaïri.] When the eminent German anthropologist was questioning a Bakaïri Indian of Brazil as to the language of his tribe, he gave the sentence, "Every man must die" to be translated into the Bakaïri language. To his astonishment, the Indian remained long silent. The same long pause always occurred when an abstract proposition, with which he was unfamiliar, was put before the Indian for translation into his native tongue. On the present occasion the enquirer learned that the Indian has no idea of necessity in the abstract, and in particular he has no conception at all of the necessity of death. The cause of death, in his opinion, is invariably an ill turn done by somebody to the deceased. If there were only good men in the world, he thinks that there would be neither sickness nor death. He knows nothing about a natural end of the vital process; he believes that all sickness and disease are the effects of witchcraft.[9] [Sidenote: Belief of the Indians of Guiana in sorcery as the cause of sickness and death.] Speaking of the Indians of Guiana, an English missionary, who knew them well, says that the worst feature in their character is their proneness to blood revenge, "by which a succession of retaliatory murders may be kept up for a long time. It is closely connected with their system of sorcery, which we shall presently consider. A person dies,--and it is supposed that an enemy has secured the agency of an evil spirit to compass his death. Some sorcerer, employed by the friends of the deceased for that purpose, pretends by his incantations to discover the guilty individual or family, or at any rate to indicate the quarter where they dwell. A near relative of the deceased is then charged with the work of vengeance. He becomes a _kanaima_, or is supposed to be possessed by the destroying spirit so called, and has to live apart, according to strict rule, and submit to many privations, until the deed of blood be accomplished. If the supposed offender cannot be slain, some innocent member of his family--man, woman, or little child--must suffer instead."[10] The same writer tells us that these Indians of Guiana attribute sickness and death directly to the agency of certain evil spirits called _yauhahu_, who delight in inflicting miseries upon mankind. Pain, in the language of the Arawaks (one of the best-known tribes of Guiana), is called _yauhahu simaira_ or "the evil spirit's arrow."[11] It is these evil spirits whom wicked sorcerers employ to accomplish their fell purpose. Thus while the demon is the direct cause of sickness and death, the sorcerer who uses him as his tool is the indirect cause. The demon is thought to do his work by inserting some alien substance into the body of the sufferer, and a medicine-man is employed to extract it by chanting an invocation to the maleficent spirit, shaking his rattle, and sucking the part of the patient's frame in which the cause of the malady is imagined to reside. "After many ceremonies he will produce from his mouth some strange substance, such as a thorn or gravel-stone, a fish-bone or bird's claw, a snake's tooth, or a piece of wire, which some malicious _yauhahu_ is supposed to have inserted in the affected part. As soon as the patient fancies himself rid of this cause of his illness his recovery is generally rapid, and the fame of the sorcerer greatly increased. Should death, however, ensue, the blame is laid upon the evil spirit whose power and malignity have prevailed over the counteracting charms. Some rival sorcerer will at times come in for a share of the blame, whom the sufferer has unhappily made his enemy, and who is supposed to have employed the _yauhahu_ in destroying him. The sorcerers being supposed to have the power of causing, as well as of curing diseases, are much dreaded by the common people, who never wilfully offend them. So deeply rooted in the Indian's bosom is this belief concerning the origin of diseases, that they have little idea of sickness arising from other causes. Death may arise from a wound or a contusion, or be brought on by want of food, but in other cases it is the work of the _yauhahu_"[12] or evil spirit. [Sidenote: Some deaths attributed to sorcery and others to evil spirits: practical consequence of this distinction.] In this account it is to be observed that while all natural deaths from sickness and disease are attributed to the direct action of evil spirits, only some of them are attributed to the indirect action of sorcerers. The practical consequences of this theoretical distinction are very important. For whereas death by sorcery must, in the opinion of savages, be avenged by killing the supposed sorcerer, death by the action of a demon cannot be so avenged; for how are you to get at the demon? Hence, while every death by sorcery involves, theoretically at least, another death by violence, death by a demon involves no such practical consequence. So far, therefore, the faith in sorcery is far more murderous than the faith in demons. This practical distinction is clearly recognised by these Indians of Guiana; for another writer, who laboured among them as a missionary, tells us that when a person dies a natural death, the medicine-man is called upon to decide whether he perished through the agency of a demon or the agency of a sorcerer. If he decides that the deceased died through the malice of an evil spirit, the body is quietly buried, and no more is thought of the matter. But if the wizard declares that the cause of death was sorcery, the corpse is closely inspected, and if a blue mark is discovered, it is pointed out as the spot where the invisible poisoned arrow, discharged by the sorcerer, entered the man. The next thing is to detect the culprit. For this purpose a pot containing a decoction of leaves is set to boil on a fire. When it begins to boil over, the side on which the scum first falls is the quarter in which the supposed murderer is to be sought. A consultation is then held: the guilt is laid on some individual, and one of the nearest relations of the deceased is charged with the duty of finding and killing him. If the imaginary culprit cannot be found, any other member of his family may be slain in his stead. "It is not difficult to conceive," adds the writer, "how, under such circumstances, no man's life is secure; whilst these by no means unfrequent murders must greatly tend to diminish the number of the natives."[13] [Sidenote: Among the Indians of Guiana death is oftener attributed to sorcery than to demons.] However, it would seem that among the Indians of Guiana sickness and death are oftener ascribed to the agency of sorcerers than to the agency of demons acting alone. For another high authority on these Indians, Sir Everard F. im Thurn, tells us that "every death, every illness, is regarded not as the result of natural law, but as the work of a _kenaima_" or sorcerer. "Often indeed," he adds, "the survivors or the relatives of the invalid do not know to whom to attribute the deed, which therefore perforce remains unpunished; but often, again, there is real or fancied reason to fix on some one as the _kenaima_, and then the nearest relative of the injured individual devotes himself to retaliate. Strange ceremonies are sometimes observed in order to discover the secret _kenaima_. Richard Schomburgk describes a striking instance of this. A Macusi boy had died a natural death, and his relatives endeavoured to discover the quarter to which the _kenaima_ who was supposed to have slain him belonged. Raising a terrible and monotonous dirge, they carried the body to an open piece of ground, and there formed a circle round it, while the father, cutting from the corpse both the thumbs and little fingers, both the great and the little toes, and a piece of each heel, threw these pieces into a new pot, which had been filled with water. A fire was kindled, and on this the pot was placed. When the water began to boil, according to the side on which one of the pieces was first thrown out from the pot by the bubbling of the water, in that direction would the _kenaima_ be. In thus looking round to see who did the deed, the Indian thinks it by no means necessary to fix on anyone who has been with or near the injured man. The _kenaima_ is supposed to have done the deed, not necessarily in person, but probably in spirit."[14] For these Indians believe that each individual man has a body and a spirit within it, and that sorcerers can despatch their spirits out of their bodies to harm people at a distance. It is not always in an invisible form that these spirits of sorcerers are supposed to roam on their errands of mischief. The wizard can put his spirit into the shape of an animal, such as a jaguar, a serpent, a sting-ray, a bird, an insect, or anything else he pleases. Hence when an Indian is attacked by a wild beast, he thinks that his real foe is not the animal, but the sorcerer who has transformed himself into it. Curiously enough they look upon some small harmless birds in the same light. One little bird, in particular, which flits across the savannahs with a peculiar shrill whistle at morning and evening, is regarded by the Indians with especial fear as a transformed sorcerer. They think that for every one of these birds that they shoot they have an enemy the less, and they burn its little body, taking great care that not even a single feather escapes to be blown about by the wind. On a windy day a dozen men and women have been seen chasing the floating feathers of these birds about the savannah in order utterly to extinguish the imaginary wizard. Even the foreign substance, the stick, bone, or whatever it is, which the good medicine-man pretends to suck from the body of the sufferer "is often, if not always, regarded not simply as a natural body, but as the materialised form of a hostile spirit."[15] [Sidenote: Belief of the Tinneh Indians in sorcery as the cause of death.] Beliefs and practices of the same general character are reported to have formerly prevailed among the Tinneh or Déné Indians of North-west America. When any beloved or influential person died, nobody, we are told, would think of attributing the death to natural causes; it was assumed that the demise was an effect of sorcery, and the only difficulty was to ascertain the culprit. For that purpose the services of a shaman were employed. Rigged out in all his finery he would dance and sing, then suddenly fall down and feign death or sleep. On awaking from the apparent trance he would denounce the sorcerer who had killed the deceased by his magic art, and the denunciation generally proved the death-warrant of the accused.[16] [Sidenote: Belief of the Australian aborigines in sorcery as the cause of death.] Again, similar beliefs and customs in regard to what we should call natural death appear to have prevailed universally amongst the aborigines of Australia, and to have contributed very materially to thin the population. On this subject I will quote the words of an observer. His remarks apply to the Australian aborigines in general but to the tribes of Victoria in particular. He says: "The natives are much more numerous in some parts of Australia than they are in others, but nowhere is the country thickly peopled; some dire disease occasionally breaks out among the natives, and carries off large numbers.... But there are two other causes which, in my opinion, principally account for their paucity of numbers. The first is that infanticide is universally practised; the second, that a belief exists that no one can die a natural death. Thus, if an individual of a certain tribe dies, his relatives consider that his death has been caused by sorcery on the part of another tribe. The deceased's sons, or nearest relatives, therefore start off on a _bucceening_ or murdering expedition. If the deceased is buried, a fly or a beetle is put into the grave, and the direction in which the insect wings its way when released is the one the avengers take. If the body is burnt, the whereabouts of the offending parties is indicated by the direction of the smoke. The first unfortunates fallen in with are generally watched until they encamp for the night; when they are buried in sleep, the murderers steal quietly up until they are within a yard or two of their victims, rush suddenly upon and butcher them. On these occasions they always abstract the kidney-fat, and also take off a piece of the skin of the thigh. These are carried home as trophies, as the American Indians take the scalp. The murderers anoint their bodies with the fat of their victims, thinking that by that process the strength of the deceased enters into them. Sometimes it happens that the _bucceening_ party come suddenly upon a man of a strange tribe in a tree hunting opossums; he is immediately speared, and left weltering in his blood at the foot of the tree. The relatives of the murdered man at once proceed to retaliate; and thus a constant and never-ending series of murders is always going on.... I do not mean to assert that for every man that dies or is killed another is murdered; for it often happens that the deceased has no sons or relatives who care about avenging his death. At other times a _bucceening_ party will return without having met with any one; then, again, they are sometimes repelled by those they attack."[17] [Sidenote: Belief of the natives of Western Australia in sorcery as a cause of death. Beliefs of the tribes of Victoria and South Australia.] Again, speaking of the tribes of Western Australia, Sir George Grey tells us that "the natives do not allow that there is such a thing as a death from natural causes; they believe, that were it not for murderers or the malignity of sorcerers, they might live for ever; hence, when a native dies from the effect of an accident, or from some natural cause, they use a variety of superstitious ceremonies, to ascertain in what direction the sorcerer lives, whose evil practices have brought about the death of their relative; this point being satisfactorily settled by friendly sorcerers, they then attach the crime to some individual, and the funeral obsequies are scarcely concluded, ere they start to revenge their supposed wrongs."[18] Again, speaking of the Watch-an-die tribe of Western Australia, another writer tells us that they "possess the comfortable assurance that nearly all diseases, and consequently deaths, are caused by the enchantments of hostile tribes, and that were it not for the malevolence of their enemies they would (with a few exceptions) live for ever. Consequently, on the first approach of sickness their first endeavour is to ascertain whether the _boollia_ [magic] of their own tribe is not sufficiently potent to counteract that of their foes. Should the patient recover, they are, of course, proud of the superiority of their enchantment over that of their enemies: but should the _boollia_ [magical influence] within the sick man prove stronger than their own, as there is no help for it, he must die, the utmost they can do in this case is to revenge his death."[19] But the same writer qualifies this general statement as follows: "It is not true," he says, "that the New Hollanders impute _all_ natural deaths to the _boollia_ [magic] of inimical tribes, for in most cases of persons wasting visibly away before death, they do not entertain the notion. It is chiefly in cases of sudden death, or when the body of the deceased is fat and in good condition, that this belief prevails, and it is only in such contingencies that it becomes an imperative duty to have revenge."[20] Similarly, speaking of the tribes of Victoria in the early days of European settlement among them, the experienced observer Mr. James Dawson says that "natural deaths are generally--but not always--attributed to the malevolence and the spells of an enemy belonging to another tribe."[21] Again, with regard to the Encounter Bay tribe of South Australia we read that "there are but few diseases which they regard as the consequences of natural causes; in general they consider them the effects of enchantment, and produced by sorcerers."[22] Similarly of the Port Lincoln tribes in South Australia it is recorded that "in all cases of death that do not arise from old age, wounds, or other equally palpable causes, the natives suspect that unfair means have been practised; and even where the cause of death is sufficiently plain, they sometimes will not content themselves with it, but have recourse to an imaginary one, as the following case will prove:--A woman had been bitten by a black snake, across the thumb, in clearing out a well; she began to swell directly, and was a corpse in twenty-four hours; yet, another woman who had been present when the accident occurred, stated that the deceased had named a certain native as having caused her death. Upon this statement, which was in their opinion corroborated by the circumstance that the snake had drawn no blood from the deceased, her husband and other friends had a fight with the accused party and his friends; a reconciliation, however, took place afterwards, and it was admitted on the part of the aggressors that they had been in error with regard to the guilty individual; but nowise more satisfied as to the bite of the snake being the true cause of the woman's death, another party was now suddenly discovered to be the real offender, and accordingly war was made upon him and his partisans, till at last the matter was dropped and forgotten. From this case, as well as from frequent occurrences of a similar nature, it appears evident that thirst for revenge has quite as great a share in these foul accusations as superstition."[23] [Sidenote: Other testimonies as to the belief of the natives of South Australia and Victoria.] However, other experienced observers of the Australian aborigines admit no such limitations and exceptions to the native theory that death is an effect of sorcery. Thus in regard to the Narrinyeri tribe of South Australia the Rev. George Taplin, who knew them intimately for years, says that "no native regards death as natural, but always as the result of sorcery."[24] Again, to quote Mr. R. Brough Smyth, who has collected much information on the tribes of Victoria: "Mr. Daniel Bunce, an intelligent observer, and a gentleman well acquainted with the habits of the blacks, says that no tribe that he has ever met with believes in the possibility of a man dying a natural death. If a man is taken ill, it is at once assumed that some member of a hostile tribe has stolen some of his hair. This is quite enough to cause serious illness. If the man continues sick and gets worse, it is assumed that the hair has been burnt by his enemy. Such an act, they say, is sufficient to imperil his life. If the man dies, it is assumed that the thief has choked his victim and taken away his kidney-fat. When the grave is being dug, one or more of the older men--generally doctors or conjurors (_Buk-na-look_)--stand by and attentively watch the laborers; and if an insect is thrown out of the ground, these old men observe the direction which it takes, and having determined the line, two of the young men, relations of the deceased, are despatched in the path indicated, with instructions to kill the first native they meet, who they are assured and believe is the person directly chargeable with the crime of causing the death of their relative. Mr. John Green says that the men of the Yarra tribe firmly believe that no one ever dies a natural death. A man or a woman dies because of the wicked arts practised by some member of a hostile tribe; and they discover the direction in which to search for the slayer by the movements of a lizard which is seen immediately after the corpse is interred."[25] Again, speaking of the aborigines of Victoria, another writer observes: "All deaths from natural causes are attributed to the machinations of enemies, who are supposed to have sought for and burned the excrement of the intended victim, which, according to the general belief, causes a gradual wasting away. The relatives, therefore, watch the struggling feet of the dying person, as they point in the direction whence the injury is thought to come, and serve as a guide to the spot where it should be avenged. This is the duty of the nearest male relative; should he fail in its execution, it will ever be to him a reproach, although other relatives may have avenged the death. If the deceased were a chief, then the duty devolves upon the tribe. Chosen men are sent in the direction indicated, who kill the first persons they meet, whether men, women, or children; and the more lives that are sacrificed, the greater is the honour to the dead."[26] Again, in his account of the Kurnai tribe of Victoria the late Dr. A. W. Howitt remarks: "It is not difficult to see how, among savages, who have no knowledge of the real causes of diseases which are the common lot of humanity, the very suspicion even of such a thing as death from disease should be unknown. Death by accident they can imagine; death by violence they can imagine; but I question if they can, in their savage condition, imagine death by mere disease. Rheumatism is believed to be produced by the machinations of some enemy. Seeing a Tatungolung very lame, I asked him what was the matter? He said, 'Some fellow has put _bottle_ in my foot.' I asked him to let me see it. I found he was probably suffering from acute rheumatism. He explained that some enemy must have found his foot track, and have buried in it a piece of broken bottle. The magic influence, he believed, caused it to enter his foot.... Phthisis, pneumonia, bowel complaints, and insanity are supposed to be produced by an evil spirit--Brewin--'who is like the wind,' and who, entering his victims, can only be expelled by suitable incantations.... Thus the belief arises that death occurs only from accident, open violence, or secret magic; and, naturally, that the latter can only be met by counter-charms."[27] [Sidenote: Belief of the aborigines of New South Wales in sorcery as the cause of sickness and death.] The beliefs and practices of the aborigines of New South Wales in respect of death were similar. Thus we are told by a well-informed writer that "the natives do not believe in death from natural causes; therefore all sickness is attributed to the agency of sorcery, and counter charms are used to destroy its effect.... As a man's death is never supposed to have occurred naturally, except as the result of accident, or from a wound in battle, the first thing to be done when a death occurs is to endeavour to find out the person whose spells have brought about the calamity. In the Wathi-Wathi tribe the corpse is asked by each relative in succession to signify by some sign the person who has caused his death. Not receiving an answer, they watch in which direction a bird flies, after having passed over the deceased. This is considered an indication that the sorcerer is to be found in that direction. Sometimes the nearest relative sleeps with his head on the corpse, which causes him, they think, to dream of the murderer. There is, however, a good deal of uncertainty about the proceedings, which seldom result in more than a great display of wrath, and of vowing of vengeance against some member of a neighbouring tribe. Unfortunately this is not always the case, the man who is supposed to have exercised the death-spell being sometimes waylaid and murdered in a most cruel manner."[28] With regard to the great Kamilaroi tribe of New South Wales we read that "in some parts of the country a belief prevails that death, through disease, is, in many, if not in all cases, the result of an enemy's malice. It is a common saying, when illness or death comes, that some one has thrown his belt (_boor_) at the victim. There are various modes of fixing upon the murderer. One is to let an insect fly from the body of the deceased and see towards whom it goes. The person thus singled out is doomed."[29] [Sidenote: Belief of the aborigines of Central Australia in sorcery as the cause of death.] Speaking of the tribes of Central Australia, Messrs. Spencer and Gillen observe that "in the matter of morality their code differs radically from ours, but it cannot be denied that their conduct is governed by it, and that any known breaches are dealt with both surely and severely. In very many cases there takes place what the white man, not seeing beneath the surface, not unnaturally describes as secret murder, but, in reality, revolting though such slaughter may be to our minds at the present day, it is simply exactly on a par with the treatment accorded to witches not so very long ago in European countries. Every case of such secret murder, when one or more men stealthily stalk their prey with the object of killing him, is in reality the exacting of a life for a life, the accused person being indicated by the so-called medicine-man as one who has brought about the death of another man by magic, and whose life must therefore be forfeited. It need hardly be pointed out what a potent element this custom has been in keeping down the numbers of the tribe; no such thing as natural death is realised by the native; a man who dies has of necessity been killed by some other man, or perhaps even by a woman, and sooner or later that man or woman will be attacked. In the normal condition of the tribe every death meant the killing of another individual."[30] [Sidenote: Belief of the natives of the Torres Straits Islands and New Guinea in sorcery as the cause of death.] Passing from Australia to other savage lands we learn that according to the belief of the Torres Straits Islanders all sickness and death were due to sorcery.[31] The natives of Mowat or Mawatta in British New Guinea "do not believe in a natural death, but attribute even the decease of an old man to the agency of some enemy known or unknown."[32] In the opinion of the tribes about Hood Peninsula in British New Guinea no one dies a natural death. Every such death is caused by the evil magic either of a living sorcerer or of a dead relation.[33] Of the Roro-speaking tribes of British New Guinea Dr. Seligmann writes that "except in the case of old folk, death is not admitted to occur without some obvious cause such as a spear-thrust. Therefore when vigorous and active members of the community die, it becomes necessary to explain their fate, and such deaths are firmly believed to be produced by sorcery. Indeed, as far as I have been able to ascertain, the Papuasian of this district regards the existence of sorcery, not, as has been alleged, as a particularly terrifying and horrible affair, but as a necessary and inevitable condition of existence in the world as he knows it."[34] Amongst the Yabim of German New Guinea "every case of death, even though it should happen accidentally, as by the fall of a tree or the bite of a shark, is laid at the door of the sorcerers. They are blamed even for the death of a child. If it is said that a little child never hurt anybody and therefore cannot have an enemy, the reply is that the intention was to injure the mother, and that the malady had been transferred to the infant through its mother's milk."[35] [Sidenote: Belief of the Melanesians in sorcery as the cause of sickness and death.] Again, in the island of Malo, one of the New Hebrides, a Catholic missionary reports that according to a belief deeply implanted in the native mind every disease is the effect of witchcraft, and that nobody dies a natural death but only as a consequence of violence, poison, or sorcery.[36] Similarly in New Georgia, one of the Solomon Islands, when a person is sick, the natives think that he must be bewitched by a man or woman, for in their opinion nobody can be sick or die unless he is bewitched; what we call natural sickness and death are impossible. In case of illness suspicion falls on some one who is supposed to have buried a charmed object with intent to injure the sufferer.[37] Of the Melanesians who inhabit the coast of the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain it is said that all deaths by sickness or disease are attributed by them to the witchcraft of a sorcerer, and a diviner is called in to ascertain the culprit who by his evil magic has destroyed their friends.[38] "Amongst the Melanesians few, if any, are believed to die from natural causes only; if they are not killed in war, they are supposed to die from the effects of witchcraft or magic. Whenever any one was sick, his friends made anxious inquiries as to the person who had bewitched (_agara'd_) him. Some one would generally be found to admit that he had buried some portion of food or something belonging to the sick man, which had caused his illness. The friends would pay him to dig it up, and after that the patient would generally get well. If, however, he did not recover, it was assumed that some other person had also _agara'd_ him."[39] [Sidenote: The belief of the Malagasy in sorcery as a cause of death.] Speaking of the Malagasy a Catholic missionary tells us that in Madagascar nobody dies a natural death. With the possible exception of centenarians everybody is supposed to die the victim of the sorcerer's diabolic art. If a relation of yours dies, the people comfort you by saying, "Cursed be the sorcerer who caused his death!" If your horse falls down a precipice and breaks its back, the accident has been caused by the malicious look of a sorcerer. If your dog dies of hydrophobia or your horse of a carbuncle, the cause is still the same. If you catch a fever in a district where malaria abounds, the malady is still ascribed to the art of the sorcerer, who has insinuated some deadly substances into your body.[40] Again, speaking of the Sakalava, a tribe in Madagascar, an eminent French authority on the island observes: "They have such a faith in the power of talismans that they even ascribe to them the power of killing their enemies. When they speak of poisoning, they do not allude, as many Europeans wrongly suppose, to death by vegetable or mineral poisons; the reference is to charms or spells. They often throw under the bed of an enemy an _ahouli_ [talisman], praying it to kill him, and they are persuaded that sooner or later their wish will be accomplished. I have often been present at bloody vendettas which had no other origin but this. The Sakalava think that a great part of the population dies of poison in this way. In their opinion, only old people who have attained the extreme limits of human longevity die a natural death."[41] [Sidenote: Belief of African tribes in sorcery as the cause of sickness and death.] In Africa similar beliefs are widely spread and lead, as elsewhere, to fatal consequences. Thus the Kagoro of Northern Nigeria refuse to believe in death from natural causes; all illnesses and deaths, in their opinion, are brought about by black magic, however old and decrepit the deceased may have been. They explain sickness by saying that a man's soul wanders from his body in sleep and may then be caught, detained, and even beaten with a stick by some evil-wisher; whenever that happens, the man naturally falls ill. Sometimes an enemy will abstract the patient's liver by magic and carry it away to a cave in a sacred grove, where he will devour it in company with other wicked sorcerers. A witch-doctor is called in to detect the culprit, and whomever he denounces is shut up in a room, where a fire is kindled and pepper thrown into it; and there he is kept in the fumes of the burning pepper till he confesses his guilt and returns the stolen liver, upon which of course the sick man recovers. But should the patient die, the miscreant who did him to death by kidnapping his soul or his liver will be sold as a slave or choked.[42] In like manner the Bakerewe, who inhabit the largest island in the Victoria Nyanza lake, believe that all deaths and all ailments, however trivial, are the effect of witchcraft; and the person, generally an old woman, whom the witch-doctor accuses of having cast the spell on the patient is tied up, severely beaten, or stabbed to death on the spot.[43] Again, we are told that "the peoples of the Congo do not believe in a natural death, not even when it happens through drowning or any other accident. Whoever dies is the victim of witchcraft or of a spell. His soul has been eaten. He must be avenged by the punishment of the person who has committed the crime." Accordingly when a death has taken place, the medicine-man is sent for to discover the criminal. He pretends to be possessed by a spirit and in this state he names the wretch who has caused the death by sorcery. The accused has to submit to the poison ordeal by drinking a decoction of the red bark of the _Erythrophloeum guiniense_. If he vomits up the poison, he is innocent; but if he fails to do so, the infuriated crowd rushes on him and despatches him with knives and clubs. The family of the supposed culprit has moreover to pay an indemnity to the family of the supposed victim.[44] "Death, in the opinion of the natives, is never due to a natural cause. It is always the result either of a crime or of sorcery, and is followed by the poison ordeal, which has to be undergone by an innocent person whom the fetish-man accuses from selfish motives."[45] [Sidenote: Effect of such beliefs in thinning the population by causing multitudes to die for the imaginary crime of sorcery.] Evidence of the same sort could be multiplied for West Africa, where the fear of sorcery is rampant.[46] But without going into further details, I wish to point out the disastrous effects which here, as elsewhere, this theory of death has produced upon the population. For when a death from natural causes takes place, the author of the death being of course unknown, suspicion often falls on a number of people, all of whom are obliged to submit to the poison ordeal in order to prove their innocence, with the result that some or possibly all of them perish. A very experienced American missionary in West Africa, the Rev. R. H. Nassau, the friend of the late Miss Mary H. Kingsley, tells us that for every person who dies a natural death at least one, and often ten or more have been executed on an accusation of witchcraft.[47] Andrew Battel, a native of Essex, who lived in Angola for many years at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, informs us that "in this country none on any account dieth, but they kill another for him: for they believe they die not their own natural death, but that some other has bewitched them to death. And all those are brought in by the friends of the dead whom they suspect; so that there many times come five hundred men and women to take the drink, made of the foresaid root _imbando_. They are brought all to the high-street or market-place, and there the master of the _imbando_ sits with his water, and gives every one a cup of water by one measure; and they are commanded to walk in a certain place till they make water, and then they are free. But he that cannot urine presently falls down, and all the people, great and small, fall upon him with their knives, and beat and cut him into pieces. But I think the witch that gives the water is partial, and gives to him whose death is desired the strongest water, but no man of the bye-standers can perceive it. This is done in the town of Longo, almost every week throughout the year."[48] A French official tells us that among the Neyaux of the Ivory Coast similar beliefs and practices were visibly depopulating the country, every single natural death causing the death of four or five persons by the poison ordeal, which consisted in drinking the decoction of a red bark called by the natives _boduru_. At the death of a chief fifteen men and women perished in this way. The French Government had great difficulty in suppressing the ordeal; for the deluded natives firmly believed in the justice of the test and therefore submitted to it willingly in the full consciousness of their innocence.[49] In the neighbourhood of Calabar the poison ordeal, which here consists in drinking a decoction of a certain bean, the _Physostigma venenosum_ of botanists, has had similar disastrous results, as we learn from the testimony of a missionary, the Rev. Hugh Goldie. He tells us that the people have firm faith in the ordeal and therefore not only accept it readily but appeal to it, convinced that it will demonstrate their innocence. A small tribe named Uwet in the hill-country of Calabar almost swept itself off the face of the earth by its constant use of the ordeal. On one occasion the whole population drank the poison to prove themselves pure, as they said; about half perished, "and the remnant," says Mr. Goldie, "still continuing their superstitious practice, must soon become extinct"[50] These words were written a good many years ago, and it is probable that by this time these poor fanatics have actually succeeded in exterminating themselves. So fatal may be the practical consequences of a purely speculative error; for it is to be remembered that these disasters flow directly from a mistaken theory of death. [Sidenote: General conclusion as to the belief in sorcery as the great cause of death.] Much more evidence of the same kind could be adduced, but without pursuing the theme further I think we may lay it down as a general rule that at a certain stage of social and intellectual evolution men have believed themselves to be naturally immortal in this life and have regarded death by disease or even by accident or violence as an unnatural event which has been brought about by sorcery and which must be avenged by the death of the sorcerer. If that has been so, we seem bound to conclude that a belief in magic or sorcery has had a most potent influence in keeping down the numbers of savage tribes; since as a rule every natural death has entailed at least one, often several, sometimes many deaths by violence. This may help us to understand what an immense power for evil the world-wide faith in magic or sorcery has been among men. [Sidenote: But some savages have attributed death to other causes than sorcery.] But even savages come in time to perceive that deaths are sometimes brought about by other causes than sorcery. We have seen that some of them admit extreme old age, accidents, and violence as causes of death which are independent of sorcery. The admission of these exceptions to the general rule certainly marks a stage of intellectual progress. I will give a few more instances of such admissions before concluding this part of my subject. [Sidenote: Some savages dissect the corpse to ascertain whether death was due to natural causes or to sorcery.] In the first place, certain savage tribes are reported to dissect the bodies of their dead in order to ascertain from an examination of the corpse whether the deceased died a natural death or perished by magic. This is reported by Mr. E. R. Smith concerning the Araucanians of Chili, who according to other writers, as we saw,[51] believe all deaths to be due to sorcery. Mr. Smith tells us that after death the services of the _machi_ or medicine-man "are again required, especially if the deceased be a person of distinction. The body is dissected and examined. If the liver be found in a healthy state, the death is attributed to natural causes; but if the liver prove to be inflamed, it is supposed to indicate the machinations of some evil-intentioned persons, and it rests with the medicine-man to discover the conspirator. This is accomplished by much the same means that were used to find out the nature of the disease. The gall is extracted, put in the magic drum, and after various incantations taken out and placed over the fire, in a pot carefully covered; if, after subjecting the gall to a certain amount of roasting, a stone is found in the bottom of the pot, it is declared to be the means by which death was produced. These stones, as well as the frogs, spiders, arrows, or whatever else may be extracted from the sick man, are called _Huecuvu_--the 'Evil One.' By aid of the _Huecuvu_ the _machi_ [medicine-man] throws himself into a trance, in which state he discovers and announces the person guilty of the death, and describes the manner in which it was produced."[52] Again, speaking of the Pahouins, a tribe of the Gaboon region in French Congo, a Catholic missionary writes thus: "It is so rare among the Pahouins that a death is considered natural! Scarcely has the deceased given up the ghost when the sorcerer appears on the scene. With three cuts of the knife, one transverse and two lateral, he dissects the breast of the corpse and turns down the skin on the face. Then he grabbles in the breast, examines the bowels attentively, marks the last muscular contractions, and thereupon pronounces whether the death was natural or not." If he decides that the death was due to sorcery, the suspected culprit has to submit to the poison ordeal in the usual manner to determine his guilt or innocence.[53] [Sidenote: The possibility of natural death admitted by the Melanesians.] Another savage people who have come to admit the possibility of merely natural death are the Melanesians of the New Hebrides and other parts of Central Melanesia. Amongst them "any sickness that is serious is believed to be brought about by ghosts or spirits; common complaints such as fever and ague are taken as coming in the course of nature. To say that savages are never ill without supposing a supernatural cause is not true of Melanesians; they make up their minds as the sickness comes whether it is natural or not, and the more important the individual who is sick, the more likely his sickness is to be ascribed to the anger of a ghost whom he has offended, or to witchcraft. No great man would like to be told that he was ill by natural weakness or decay. The sickness is almost always believed to be caused by a ghost, not by a spirit.... Generally it is to the ghosts of the dead that sickness is ascribed in the eastern islands as well as in the western; recourse is had to them for aid in causing and removing sickness; and ghosts are believed to inflict sickness not only because some offence, such as a trespass, has been committed against them, or because one familiar with them has sought their aid with sacrifice and spells, but because there is a certain malignity in the feeling of all ghosts towards the living, who offend them by being alive."[54] From this account we learn, first, that the Melanesians admit some deaths by common diseases, such as fever and ague, to be natural; and, second, that they recognise ghosts and spirits as well as sorcerers and witches, among the causes of death; indeed they hold that ghosts are the commonest of all causes of sickness and death. [Sidenote: The possibility of natural death admitted by the Caffres of South Africa.] The same causes of death are recognised also by the Caffres of South Africa, as we learn from Mr. Dudley Kidd, who tells us that according to the beliefs of the natives, "to start with, there is sickness which is supposed to be caused by the action of ancestral spirits or by fabulous monsters. Secondly, there is sickness which is caused by the magical practices of some evil person who is using witchcraft in secret. Thirdly, there is sickness which comes from neither of these causes, and remains unexplained. It is said to be 'only sickness, and nothing more.' This third form of sickness is, I think, the commonest. Yet most writers wholly ignore it, or deny its existence. It may happen that an attack of indigestion is one day attributed to the action of witch or wizard; another day the trouble is put down to the account of ancestral spirits; on a third occasion the people may be at a loss to account for it, and so may dismiss the problem by saying that it is merely sickness. It is quite common to hear natives say that they are at a loss to account for some special case of illness. At first they thought it was caused by an angry ancestral spirit; but a great doctor has assured them that it is not the result of such a spirit. They then suppose it to be due to the magical practices of some enemy; but the doctor negatives that theory. The people are, therefore, driven to the conclusion that the trouble has no ascertainable cause. In some cases they do not even trouble to consult a diviner; they speedily recognise the sickness as due to natural causes. In such a case it needs no explanation. If they think that some friend of theirs knows of a remedy, they will try it on their own initiative, or may even go off to a white man to ask for some of his medicine. They would never dream of doing this if they thought they were being influenced by magic or by ancestral spirits. The Kafirs quite recognise that there are types of disease which are inherited, and have not been caused by magic or by ancestral spirits. They admit that some accidents are due to nothing but the patient's carelessness or stupidity. If a native gets his leg run over by a waggon, the people will often say that it is all his own fault through being clumsy. In other cases, with delightful inconsistency, they may say that some one has been working magic to cause the accident. In short, it is impossible to make out a theory of sickness which will satisfy our European conception of consistency."[55] [Sidenote: The admission that death may be due to natural causes, marks an intellectual advance. The recognition of ghosts or spirits as a cause of disease, apart from sorcery, also marks a step in intellectual, moral, and social progress.] From the foregoing accounts we see that the Melanesians and the Caffres, two widely different and widely separated races, agree in recognising at least three distinct causes of what we should call natural death. These three causes are, first, sorcery or witchcraft; second, ghosts or spirits; and third, disease.[56] That the recognition of disease in itself as a cause of death, quite apart from sorcery, marks an intellectual advance, will not be disputed. It is not so clear, though I believe it is equally true, that the recognition of ghosts or spirits as a cause of disease, quite apart from witchcraft, marks a real step in intellectual, moral, and social progress. In the first place, it marks a step in intellectual and moral progress; for it recognises that effects which before had been ascribed to human agency spring from superhuman causes; and this recognition of powers in the universe superior to man is not only an intellectual gain but a moral discipline: it teaches the important lesson of humility. In the second place it marks a step in social progress because when the blame of a death is laid upon a ghost or a spirit instead of on a sorcerer, the death has not to be avenged by killing a human being, the supposed author of the calamity. Thus the recognition of ghosts or spirits as the sources of sickness and death has as its immediate effect the sparing of an immense number of lives of men and women, who on the theory of death by sorcery would have perished by violence to expiate their imaginary crime. That this is a great gain to society is obvious: it adds immensely to the security of human life by removing one of the most fruitful causes of its destruction. It must be admitted, however, that the gain is not always as great as might be expected; the social advantages of a belief in ghosts and spirits are attended by many serious drawbacks. For while ghosts or spirits are commonly, though not always, supposed to be beyond the reach of human vengeance, they are generally thought to be well within the reach of human persuasion, flattery, and bribery; in other words, men think that they can appease and propitiate them by prayer and sacrifice; and while prayer is always cheap, sacrifice may be very dear, since it can, and often does, involve the destruction of an immense deal of valuable property and of a vast number of human lives. Yet if we could reckon up the myriads who have been slain in sacrifice to ghosts and gods, it seems probable that they would fall far short of the untold multitudes who have perished as sorcerers and witches. For while human sacrifices in honour of deities or of the dead have been for the most part exceptional rather than regular, only the great gods and the illustrious dead being deemed worthy of such costly offerings, the slaughter of witches and wizards, theoretically at least, followed inevitably on every natural death among people who attributed all such deaths to sorcery. Hence if natural religion be defined roughly as a belief in superhuman spiritual beings and an attempt to propitiate them, we may perhaps say that, while natural religion has slain its thousands, magic has slain its ten thousands. But there are strong reasons for inferring that in the history of society an Age of Magic preceded an Age of Religion. If that was so, we may conclude that the advent of religion marked a great social as well as intellectual advance upon the preceding Age of Magic: it inaugurated an era of what might be described as mercy by comparison with the relentless severity of its predecessor. [Footnote 6: W. Martin, _An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands_, Second Edition (London, 1818), ii. 99.] [Footnote 7: M. Dobrizhoffer, _Historia de Abiponibus_ (Vienna, 1784), ii. 92 _sq._, 240 _sqq._ The author of this valuable work lived as a Catholic missionary in the tribe for eighteen years.] [Footnote 8: C. Gay, "Fragment d'un Voyage dans le Chili et au Cusco," _Bulletin de la Société de Géographie_ (Paris), Deuxième Série, xix. (1843) p. 25; H. Delaporte, "Une visite chez les Araucaniens," _Bulletin de la Société de Géographie_ (Paris), Quatrième Série, x. (1855) p. 30.] [Footnote 9: K. von den Steinen, _Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens_ (Berlin, 1894), pp. 344, 348.] [Footnote 10: Rev. W. H. Brett, _The Indian Tribes of Guiana_ (London, 1868), p. 357.] [Footnote 11: W. H. Brett, _op. cit._ pp. 361 _sq._] [Footnote 12: Rev. W. H. Brett, _op. cit._ pp. 364 _sq._] [Footnote 13: Rev. J. H. Bernau, _Missionary Labours in British Guiana_ (London, 1847), pp. 56 _sq._, 58.] [Footnote 14: (Sir) E. F. im Thurn, _Among the Indians of Guiana_ (London, 1883), pp. 330 _sq._ For the case described see R. Schomburgk, _Reisen in Britisch-Guiana_, i. (Leipsic, 1847) pp. 324 _sq._ The boy died of dropsy. Perhaps the mode of divination adopted, by boiling some portions of him in water, had special reference to the nature of the disease.] [Footnote 15: (Sir) E. F. im Thurn, _op. cit._ pp. 332 _sq._] [Footnote 16: Father A. G. Morice, "The Canadian Dénés," _Annual Archaeological Report, 1905_ (Toronto, 1906), p. 207.] [Footnote 17: Albert A. C. Le Souëf, "Notes on the Natives of Australia," in R. Brough Smyth's _Aborigines of Victoria_ (Melbourne and London, 1878), ii. 289 _sq._] [Footnote 18: (Sir) George Grey, _Journals of two Expeditions of Discovery in Northwest and Western Australia_ (London, 1841), ii. 238.] [Footnote 19: A. Oldfield, "The Aborigines of Australia," _Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London_, N.S. iii. (1865) p. 236.] [Footnote 20: A. Oldfield, _op. cit._ p. 245.] [Footnote 21: J. Dawson, _Australian Aborigines_ (Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, 1881), p. 63.] [Footnote 22: H. E. A. Meyer, "Manners and Customs of the Aborigines of the Encounter Bay Tribe," _Native Tribes of South Australia_ (Adelaide, 1879), p. 195.] [Footnote 23: C. W. Schürmann, "The Aboriginal Tribes of Port Lincoln in South Australia," _Native Tribes of South Australia_, pp. 237 _sq._] [Footnote 24: Rev. G. Taplin, "The Narrinyeri," _Native Tribes of South Australia_ (Adelaide, 1879), p. 25.] [Footnote 25: R. Brough Smyth, _The Aborigines of Victoria_ (Melbourne and London, 1878) i. 110.] [Footnote 26: W. E. Stanbridge, "Some Particulars of the General Characteristics, Astronomy, and Mythology of the Tribes in the Central Part of Victoria, Southern Australia," _Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London_, New Series, i. (1861) p. 299.] [Footnote 27: Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt, _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_ (Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, and Brisbane, 1880), pp. 250 _sq._] [Footnote 28: A. L. P. Cameron, "Notes on some Tribes of New South Wales," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_ xiv. (1885) pp. 361, 362 _sq._] [Footnote 29: Rev. W. Ridley, _Kamilaroi_, Second Edition (Sydney, 1875), p. 159.] [Footnote 30: Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_ (London, 1899), pp. 46-48.] [Footnote 31: _Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, v. (Cambridge, 1904) pp. 248, 323.] [Footnote 32: E. Beardmore, "The Natives of Mowat, British New Guinea," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xix. (1890) p. 461.] [Footnote 33: R. E. Guise, "On the Tribes inhabiting the Mouth of the Wanigela River, New Guinea," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxviii. (1899) p. 216.] [Footnote 34: C. G. Seligmann, _The Melanesians of British New Guinea_ (Cambridge, 1910), p. 279.] [Footnote 35: K. Vetter, _Komm herüber und hilf uns! oder die Arbeit der Neuen-Dettelsauer Mission_, iii. (Barmen, 1898) pp. 10 _sq._; _id._, in _Nachrichten über Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land und den Bismarck-Archipel, 1897_, pp. 94, 98. Compare B. Hagen, _Unter den Papuas_ (Wiesbaden, 1899), p. 256; _Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie, und Urgeschichte, 1900_, p. (415).] [Footnote 36: Father A. Deniau, "Croyances religieuses et moeurs des indigènes de l'Ile Malo," _Missions Catholiques_, xxxiii. (1901) pp. 315 _sq._] [Footnote 37: C. Ribbe, _Zwei Jahre unter den Kannibalen der Salomo-Inseln_ (Dresden-Blasewitz, 1903), p. 268.] [Footnote 38: P. A. Kleintitschen, _Die Küstenbewohner der Gazellehalbinsel_ (Hiltrup bei Münster, N.D.), p. 344. As to beliefs of this sort among the Sulka of New Britain, see _P._ Rascher, "Die Sulka," _Archiv für Anthropologie_, xxix. (1904) pp. 221 _sq._; R. Parkinson, _Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee_ (Stuttgart, 1907), pp. 199-201.] [Footnote 39: G. Brown, D.D., _Melanesians and Polynesians_ (London, 1910), p. 176. Dr. Brown's account, of the Melanesians applies to the natives of New Britain and more particularly of the neighbouring Duke of York islands.] [Footnote 40: Father Abinal, "Astrologie Malgache," _Missions Catholiques_, xi. (1879) p. 506.] [Footnote 41: A. Grandidier, "Madagascar," _Bulletin de la Société de Géographie_ (Paris), Sixième Série, iii. (1872) pp. 399 _sq._ The talismans (_ahouli_) in question consist of the horns of oxen stuffed with a variety of odds and ends, such as sand, sticks, nails, and so forth.] [Footnote 42: Major A. J. N. Tremearne, _The Tailed Head-hunters of Nigeria_ (London, 1912), pp. 171 _sq._; _id._, "Notes on the Kagoro and other Headhunters," _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_, xlii. (1912) pp. 160, 161.] [Footnote 43: E. Hurel, "Religion et vie domestique des Bakerewe," _Anthropos_, vi. (1912) pp. 85-87.] [Footnote 44: Father Campana, "Congo Mission Catholique de Landana," _Missions Catholiques_, xxvii. (1895) pp. 102 _sq_.] [Footnote 45: Th. Masui, _Guide de la Section de l'�tat Indépendant du Congo à l'Exposition de Bruxelles--Tervueren en 1874_ (Brussels, 1897), p. 82.] [Footnote 46: See for example O. Lenz, _Skizzen aus Westafrika_ (Berlin, 1878), pp. 184 _sq._; C. Cuny, "De Libreville au Cameroun," _Bulletin de la Société de Géographie_ (Paris), Septième Série, xvii. (1896) p. 341; Ch. Wunenberger, "La mission et le royaume de Humbé, sur les bords du Cunène," _Missions Catholiques_, xx. (1888) p. 262; Lieut. Herold, "Bericht betreffend religiöse Anschauungen und Gebräuche der deutschen Ewe-Neger," _Mittheilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten_, v. (1892) p. 153; Dr. R. Plehn, "Beiträge zur Völkerkunde des Togo-Gebietes," _Mittheilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen zu Berlin_, ii. Dritte Abtheilung (1899), p. 97; R. Fisch, "Die Dagbamba," _Baessler-Archiv_, iii. (1912) p. 148. For evidence of similar beliefs and practices in other parts of Africa, see Brard, "Der Victoria-Nyanza," _Petermann's Mittheilungen_, xliii. (1897) pp. 79 _sq._; Father Picarda, "Autour du Mandéra," _Missions Catholiques_, xviii. (1886) p. 342.] [Footnote 47: Rev. R. H. Nassau, _Fetichism in West Africa_ (London, 1904), pp. 241 _sq._] [Footnote 48: "Strange Adventures of Andrew Battel," in John Pinkerton's _Voyages and Travels_, xvi. (London, 1814) p. 334.] [Footnote 49: _Gouvernement Général de l'Afrique Occidentale Française, Notices publiées par le Gouvernement Central à l'occasion de l'Exposition Coloniale de Marseille, La Côte d'Ivoire_ (Corbeil, 1906), pp. 570-572.] [Footnote 50: Hugh Goldie, _Calabar and its Mission_, New Edition (Edinburgh and London, 1901), pp. 34 _sq._, 37 _sq._] [Footnote 51: Above, p. 35.] [Footnote 52: E. R. Smith, _The Araucanians_ (London, 1855), pp. 236 _sq._] [Footnote 53: Father Trilles, "Milles lieues dans l'inconnu; à travers le pays Fang, de la côte aux rives du Djah," _Missions Catholiques_, xxxv. (1903) pp. 466 _sq._, and as to the poison ordeal, _ib._ pp. 472 _sq._] [Footnote 54: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_ (Oxford, 1891), p. 194.] [Footnote 55: Dudley Kidd, _The Essential Kafir_ (London, 1904), pp. 133 _sq._] [Footnote 56: In like manner the Baganda generally ascribed natural deaths either to sorcery or to the action of a ghost; but when they could not account for a person's death in either of these ways they said that Walumbe, the God of Death, had taken him. This last explanation approaches to an admission of natural death, though it is still mythical in form. The Baganda usually attributed any illness of the king to ghosts, because no man would dare to practise magic on him. A much-dreaded ghost was that of a man's sister; she was thought to vent her spite on his sons and daughters by visiting them with sickness. When she proved implacable, a medicine-man was employed to catch her ghost in a gourd or a pot and throw it away on waste land or drown it in a river. See Rev. J. Roscoe, _The Baganda_ (London, 1911), pp. 98, 100, 101 _sq._, 286 _sq._, 315 _sq._] LECTURE III MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF DEATH [Sidenote: Belief of savages in man's natural immortality.] In my last lecture I shewed that many savages do not believe in what we call a natural death; they imagine that all men are naturally immortal and would never die, if their lives were not cut prematurely short by sorcery. Further, I pointed out that this mistaken view of the nature of death has exercised a disastrous influence on the tribes who entertain it, since, attributing all natural deaths to sorcery, they consider themselves bound to discover and kill the wicked sorcerers whom they regard as responsible for the death of their friends. Thus in primitive society as a rule every natural death entails at least one and often several deaths by violence; since the supposed culprit being unknown suspicion may fall upon many persons, all of whom may be killed either out of hand or as a consequence of failing to demonstrate their innocence by means of an ordeal. [Sidenote: Savage stories of the origin of death.] Yet even the savages who firmly believe in man's natural immortality are obliged sorrowfully to admit that, as things are at the present day, men do frequently die, whatever explanation we may give of so unexpected and unnatural an occurrence. Accordingly they are hard put to it to reconcile their theory of immortality with the practice of mortality. They have meditated on the subject and have given us the fruit of their meditation in a series of myths which profess to explain the origin of death. For the most part these myths are very crude and childish; yet they have a value of their own as examples of man's early attempts to fathom one of the great mysteries which encompass his frail and transient existence on earth; and accordingly I have here collected, in all their naked simplicity, a few of these savage guesses at truth. [Sidenote: Four types of such stories.] Myths of the origin of death conform to several types, among which we may distinguish, first, what I will call the type of the Two Messengers; second, the type of the Waxing and Waning Moon; third, the type of the Serpent and his Cast Skin; and fourth, the type of the Banana-tree. I will illustrate each type by examples, and will afterwards cite some miscellaneous instances which do not fall under any of these heads. [Sidenote: I. The tale of the Two Messengers. Zulu story of the chameleon and the lizard. The same story among other Bantu tribes.] First, then, we begin with the type of the Two Messengers. Stories of this pattern are widespread in Africa, especially among tribes belonging to the great Bantu family, which occupies roughly the southern half of the continent. The best-known example of the tale is the one told by the Zulus. They say that in the beginning Unkulunkulu, that is, the Old Old One, sent the chameleon to men with a message saying, "Go, chameleon, go and say, Let not men die." The chameleon set out, but it crawled very slowly, and it loitered by the way to eat the purple berries of the _ubukwebezane_ tree, or according to others it climbed up a tree to bask in the sun, filled its belly with flies, and fell fast asleep. Meantime the Old Old One had thought better of it and sent a lizard posting after the chameleon with a very different message to men, for he said to the animal, "Lizard, when you have arrived, say, Let men die." So the lizard went on his way, passed the dawdling chameleon, and arriving first among men delivered his message of death, saying, "Let men die." Then he turned on his heel and went back to the Old Old One who had sent him. But after he was gone, the chameleon at last arrived among men with his glad tidings of immortality, and he shouted, saying, "It is said, Let not men die!" But men answered, "O! we have heard the word of the lizard; it has told us the word, 'It is said, Let men die.' We cannot hear your word. Through the word of the lizard, men will die." And died they have ever since from that day to this. That is why some of the Zulus hate the lizard, saying, "Why did he run first and say, 'Let people die?'" So they beat and kill the lizard and say, "Why did it speak?" But others hate the chameleon and hustle it, saying, "That is the little thing which delayed to tell the people that they should not die. If he had only brought his message in time we should not have died; our ancestors also would have been still living; there would have been no diseases here on the earth. It all comes from the delay of the chameleon."[57] The same story is told in nearly the same form by other Bantu tribes, such as the Bechuanas,[58] the Basutos,[59] the Baronga,[60] and the Ngoni.[61] To this day the Baronga and the Ngoni owe the chameleon a grudge for having brought death into the world, so when children find a chameleon they will induce it to open its mouth, then throw a pinch of tobacco on its tongue, and watch with delight the creature writhing and changing colour from orange to green, from green to black in the agony of death; for thus they avenge the wrong which the chameleon has done to mankind.[62] [Sidenote: Akamba story of the chameleon and the thrush.] A story of the same type, but with some variations, is told by the Akamba, a Bantu tribe of British East Africa; but in their version the lizard has disappeared from the legend and has been replaced by the _itoroko_, a small bird of the thrush tribe, with a black head, a bluish-black back, and a buff-coloured breast. The tale runs thus:--Once upon a time God sent out the chameleon, the frog, and the thrush to find people who died one day and came to life again the next. So off they set, the chameleon leading the way, for in those days he was a very important personage. Presently they came to some people lying like dead, so the chameleon went up to them and said, _Niwe, niwe, niwe_. The thrush asked him testily what he was making that noise for, to which the chameleon replied mildly, "I am only calling the people who go forward and then came back again," and he explained that the dead people would come to life again. But the thrush, who was of a sceptical turn of mind, derided the idea. Nevertheless, the chameleon persisted in calling to the dead people, and sure enough they opened their eyes and listened to him. But here the thrush broke in and told them roughly that dead they were and dead they must remain. With that away he flew, and though the chameleon preached to the corpses, telling them that he had come from God on purpose to bring them to life again, and that they were not to believe the lies of that shallow sceptic the thrush, they obstinately refused to pay any heed to him; not one of those dead corpses would budge. So the chameleon returned crestfallen to God and reported to him how, when he preached the gospel of resurrection to the corpses, the thrush had roared him down, so that the corpses could not hear a word he said. God thereupon cross-questioned the thrush, who stated that the chameleon had so bungled his message that he, the thrush, felt it his imperative duty to interrupt him. The simple deity believed the thrush, and being very angry with the chameleon he degraded him from his high position and made him walk very slow, lurching this way and that, as he does down to this very day. But the thrush he promoted to the office of wakening men from their slumber every morning, which he still does punctually at 2 A.M. before the note of any other bird is heard in the tropical forest.[63] [Sidenote: Togo story of the dog and the frog.] In this version, though the frog is sent out by God with the other two messengers he plays no part in the story; he is a mere dummy. But in another version of the story, which is told by the negroes of Togoland in German West Africa, the frog takes the place of the lizard and the thrush as the messenger of death. They say that once upon a time men sent a dog to God to say that when they died they would like to come to life again. So off the dog trotted to deliver the message. But on the way he felt hungry and turned into a house, where a man was boiling magic herbs. So the dog sat down and thought to himself, "He is cooking food." Meantime the frog had set off to tell God that when men died they would like not to come to life again. Nobody had asked him to give that message; it was a piece of pure officiousness and impertinence on his part. However, away he tore. The dog, who still sat watching the hell-broth brewing, saw him hurrying past the door, but he thought to himself, "When I have had something to eat, I will soon catch froggy up." However, froggy came in first and said to the deity, "When men die, they would like not to come to life again." After that, up comes the dog, and says he, "When men die, they would like to come to life again." God was naturally puzzled and said to the dog, "I really do not understand these two messages. As I heard the frog's request first, I will comply with it. I will not do what you said." That is the real reason why men die and do not come to life again. If the frog had only minded his own business instead of meddling with other people's, the dead would all have come to life again to this day.[64] In this version of the story not only are the persons of the two messengers different, the dog and the frog having replaced the chameleon and the lizard of the Bantu version, but the messengers are sent from men to God instead of from God to men. [Sidenote: Ashantee story of the goat and the sheep.] In another version told by the Ashantees of West Africa the persons of the messengers are again different, but as in the Bantu version they are sent from God to men. The Ashantees say that long ago men were happy, for God dwelt among them and talked with them face to face. For example, if a child was roasting yams at the fire and wanted a relish to eat with the yams, he had nothing to do but to throw a stick in the air and say, "God give me fish," and God gave him fish at once. However, these happy days did not last for ever. One unlucky day it happened that some women were pounding a mash with pestles in a mortar, while God stood by looking on. For some reason they were annoyed by the presence of the deity and told him to be off; and as he did not take himself off fast enough to please them, they beat him with their pestles. In a great huff God retired altogether from the world and left it to the direction of the fetishes; and still to this day people say, "Ah, if it had not been for that old woman, how happy we should be!" However, after he had withdrawn to heaven, the long-suffering deity sent a kind message by a goat to men upon earth to say, "There is something which they call Death. He will kill some of you. But even if you die, you will not perish completely. You will come to me in heaven." So off the goat set with this cheering intelligence. But before he came to the town he saw a tempting bush by the wayside and stopped to browse on it. When God in heaven saw the goat thus loitering by the way, he sent off a sheep with the same message to carry the glad tidings to men without delay. But the sheep did not give the message aright. Far from it: he said, "God sends you word that you will die and that will be an end of you." Afterwards the goat arrived on the scene and said, "God sends you word that you will die, certainly, but that will not be the end of you, for you will go to him." But men said to the goat, "No, goat, that is not what God said. We believe that the message which the sheep brought us is the one which God sent to us." That was the beginning of death among men.[65] However, in another Ashantee version of the tale the parts played by the sheep and the goat are reversed. It is the sheep who brings the tidings of immortality from God to men, but the goat overruns him and offers them death instead. Not knowing what death was, men accepted the seeming boon with enthusiasm and have died ever since.[66] [Sidenote: II. The story of the Waxing and Waning Moon. Hottentot story of the Moon, the hare, and death.] So much for the tale of the Two Messengers. In the last versions of it which I have quoted, a feature to be noticed is the perversion of the message by one of the messengers, who brings tidings of death instead of life eternal to men. The same perversion of the message reappears in some examples of the next type of story which I shall illustrate, namely the type of the Waxing and Waning Moon. Thus the Namaquas or Hottentots say that once the Moon charged the hare to go to men and say, "As I die and rise to life again, so shall you die and rise to life again." So the hare went to men, but either out of forgetfulness or malice he reversed the message and said, "As I die and do not rise to life again, so you shall also die and not rise to life again." Then he went back to the Moon, and she asked him what he had said. He told her, and when she heard how he had given the wrong message, she was so angry that she threw a stick at him and split his lip, which is the reason why the hare's lip is still split. So the hare ran away and is still running to this day. Some people, however, say that before he fled he clawed the Moon's face, which still bears the marks of the scratching, as anybody may see for himself on a clear moonlight night. So the Hottentots are still angry with the hare for bringing death into the world, and they will not let initiated men partake of its flesh.[67] There are traces of a similar story among the Bushmen.[68] In another Hottentot version two messengers appear, an insect and a hare; the insect is charged by the Moon with a message of immortality or rather of resurrection to men, but the hare persuades the insect to let him bear the tidings, which he perverts into a message of annihilation.[69] Thus in this particular version the type of the Two Messengers coincides with the Moon type. [Sidenote: Masai story of the moon and death.] A story of the same type, though different in details, is told by the Masai of East Africa. They say that in the early days a certain god named Naiteru-kop told a man named Le-eyo that if a child were to die he was to throw away the body and say, "Man, die, and come back again; moon, die, and remain away." Well, soon afterwards a child died, but it was not one of the man's own children, so when he threw the body away he said, "Man, die, and remain away; moon, die, and return." Next one of his own children died, and when he threw away the body he said, "Man, die, and return; moon, die, and remain away." But the god said to him, "It is of no use now, for you spoilt matters with the other child." That is why down to this day when a man dies he returns no more, but when the moon dies she always comes to life again.[70] [Sidenote: Nandi story of the moon, the dog, and death.] Another story of the origin of death which belongs to this type is told by the Nandi of British East Africa. They say that when the first people lived upon the earth a dog came to them one day and said: "All people will die like the moon, but unlike the moon you will not return to life again unless you give me some milk to drink out of your gourd, and beer to drink through your straw. If you do this, I will arrange for you to go to the river when you die and to come to life again on the third day." But the people laughed at the dog, and gave him some milk and beer to drink off a stool. The dog was angry at not being served in the same vessels as a human being, and though he put his pride in his pocket and drank the milk and the beer from the stool, he went away in high dudgeon, saying, "All people will die, and the moon alone will return to life." That is the reason why, when people die, they stay away, whereas when the moon goes away she comes back again after three days' absence.[71] The Wa-Sania of British East Africa believe that in days gone by people never died, till one unlucky day a lizard came and said to them, "All of you know that the moon dies and rises again, but human beings will die and rise no more." They say that from that day people began to die and have persisted in dying ever since.[72] [Sidenote: Fijian story of the moon, the rat, and death. Caroline Islands story of the moon, death, and resurrection. Wotjobaluk story of the moon, death, and resurrection. Cham story of the moon, death, and resurrection.] With these African stories of the origin of death we may compare one told by the Fijians on the other side of the world. They say that once upon a time the Moon contended that men should be like himself (for the Fijian moon seems to be a male); that is, he meant that just as he grows old, disappears, and comes in sight again, so men grown old should vanish for a while and then return to life. But the rat, who is a Fijian god, would not hear of it. "No," said he, "let men die like rats." And he had the best of it in the dispute, for men die like rats to this day.[73] In the Caroline Islands they say that long, long ago death was unknown, or rather it was a short sleep, not a long, long one, as it is now. Men died on the last day of the waning moon and came to life again on the first appearance of the new moon, just as if they had awakened from a refreshing slumber. But an evil spirit somehow contrived that when men slept the sleep of death they should wake no more.[74] The Wotjobaluk of south-eastern Australia relate that, when all animals were men and women, some of them died and the moon used to say, "You up-again," whereupon they came to life again. But once on a time an old man said, "Let them remain dead"; and since then nobody has ever come to life again except the moon, which still continues to do so down to this very day.[75] The Chams of Annam and Cambodia say that the goddess of good luck used to resuscitate people as fast as they died, till the sky-god, tired of her constant interference with the laws of nature, transferred her to the moon, where it is no longer in her power to bring the dead to life again.[76] [Sidenote: Cycle of death and resurrection after three days, like the monthly disappearance and reappearance of the moon.] These stories which associate human immortality with the moon are products of a primitive philosophy which, meditating on the visible changes, of the lunar orb, drew from the observation of its waning and waxing a dim notion that under a happier fate man might have been immortal like the moon, or rather that like it he might have undergone an endless cycle of death and resurrection, dying then rising again from the dead after three days. The same curious notion of death and resurrection after three days is entertained by the Unmatjera and Kaitish, two savage tribes of Central Australia. They say that long ago their dead used to be buried either in trees or underground, and that after three days they regularly rose from the dead. The Kaitish tell how this happy state of things came to an end. It was all through a man of the Curlew totem, who finding some men of the Little Wallaby totem burying a Little Wallaby man, fell into a passion and kicked the body into the sea. Of course after that the dead man could not come to life again, and that is why nowadays nobody rises from the dead after three days, as everybody used to do long ago.[77] Although no mention is made of the moon in this Australian story, we may conjecture that these savages, like the Nandi of East Africa, fixed upon three days as the normal interval between death and resurrection simply because three days is the interval between the disappearance of the old and the reappearance of the new moon. If that is so, the aborigines of Central Australia may be added to the many races of mankind who have seen in the waning and waxing moon an emblem of human immortality. Nor does this association of ideas end with a mere tradition that in some former age men used to die with the old moon and come to life again with the new moon. Many savages, on seeing the new moon for the first time in the month, observe ceremonies which seem to be intended to renew and increase their life and strength with the renewal and the increase of the lunar light. For example, on the day when the new moon first appeared, the Indians of San Juan Capistrano in California used to call together all the young men and make them run about, while the old men danced in a circle, saying, "As the moon dieth and cometh to life again, so we also having to die will again live."[78] Again, an old writer tells us that at the appearance of every new moon the negroes of the Congo clapped their hands and cried out, sometimes falling on their knees, "So may I renew my life as thou art renewed."[79] [Sidenote: III. Story of the Serpent and his Cast Skin. New Britain story of immortality, the serpent, and death. Annamite story of immortality, the serpent, and death. Vuatom story of immortality, the lizard, the serpent, and death.] Another type of stories told to explain the origin of death is the one which I have called the type of the Serpent and his Cast Skin. Some savages seem to think that serpents and all other animals, such as lizards, which periodically shed their skins, thereby renew their life and so never die. Hence they imagine that if man also could only cast his old skin and put on a new one, he too would be immortal like a serpent. Thus the Melanesians, who inhabit the coast of the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain, tell the following story of the origin of death. They say that To Kambinana, the Good Spirit, loved men and wished to make them immortal; but he hated the serpents and wished to kill them. So he called his brother To Korvuvu and said to him, "Go to men and take them the secret of immortality. Tell them to cast their skin every year. So will they be protected from death, for their life will be constantly renewed. But tell the serpents that they must thenceforth die." But To Korvuvu acquitted himself badly of his task; for he commanded men to die and betrayed to the serpents the secret of immortality. Since then all men have been mortal, but the serpents cast their skins every year and are immortal.[80] In this story we meet again with the incident of the reversed message; through a blunder or through the malice of the messenger the glad tidings of immortality are perverted into a melancholy message of death. A similar tale, with a similar incident, is told in Annam. They say that Ngoc hoang sent a messenger from heaven to men to say that when they had reached old age they should change their skins and live for ever, but that when serpents grew old they must die. The messenger came down to earth and said, rightly enough, "When man is old, he shall cast his skin; but when serpents are old, they shall die and be laid in coffins." So far, so good. But unfortunately there happened to be a brood of serpents within hearing, and when they heard the doom pronounced on their kind they fell into a fury and said to the messenger, "You must say it over again and just the contrary, or we will bite you." That frightened the messenger and he repeated his message, changing the words thus: "When he is old, the serpent shall cast his skin; but when he is old, man shall die and be laid in the coffin." That is why all creatures are now subject to death, except the serpent, who, when he is old, casts his skin and lives for ever.[81] The natives of Vuatom, an island in the Bismarck Archipelago, say that a certain To Konokonomiange bade two lads fetch fire, promising that if they did so they should never die, but that if they refused their bodies would perish, though their shades or souls would survive. They would not hearken to him, so he cursed them, saying, "What! You would all have lived! Now you shall die, though your soul shall live. But the iguana (_Goniocephalus_) and the lizard (_Varanus indicus_) and the snake (_Enygrus_), they shall live, they shall cast their skin and they shall live for evermore." When the lads heard that, they wept, for bitterly they rued their folly in not going to fetch the fire for To Konokonomiange.[82] [Sidenote: Nias story of immortality, the crab, and death. Arawak and Tamanachier stories of immortality, the serpent, the lizard, the beetle, and death.] Other peoples tell somewhat different stories to explain how men missed the boon of immortality and serpents acquired it. Thus the natives of Nias, an island off the coast of Sumatra, say that, when the earth was created, a certain being was sent down by God from heaven to put the last touches to the work of creation. He should have fasted for a month, but unable to withstand the pangs of hunger he ate some bananas. The choice of food was most unlucky, for had he only eaten river-crabs instead of bananas men would have cast their skins like crabs and would never have died.[83] The Arawaks of British Guiana relate that once upon a time the Creator came down to earth to see how his creature man was getting on. But men were so wicked that they tried to kill him so he deprived them of eternal life and bestowed it on the animals which renew their skin, such as serpents, lizards, and beetles.[84] A somewhat different version of the story is told by the Tamanachiers, an Indian tribe of the Orinoco. They say that after residing among them for some time the Creator took boat to cross to the other side of the great salt water from which he had come. Just as he was shoving off from the shore, he called out to them in a changed voice, "You will change your skins," by which he meant to say, "You will renew your youth like the serpents and the beetles." But unfortunately an old woman, hearing these words, cried out "Oh!" in a tone of scepticism, if not of sarcasm, which so annoyed the Creator that he changed his tune at once and said testily, "Ye shall die." That is why we are all mortal.[85] [Sidenote: Melanesian story of the old woman who renewed her youth by casting her skin.] The natives of the Banks' Islands and the New Hebrides believe that there was a time in the beginning of things when men never died but cast their skins like snakes and crabs and so renewed their youth. But the unhappy change to mortality came about at last, as it so often does in these stories, through an old woman. Having grown old, this dame went to a stream to change her skin, and change it she did, for she stripped off her wizened old hide, cast it upon the waters, and watched it floating down stream till it caught on a stick. Then she went home a buxom young woman. But the child whom she had left at home did not know her and set up such a prodigious squalling that to quiet it the woman went straight back to the river, fished out her cast-off old skin, and put it on again. From that day to this people have ceased to cast their skins and to live for ever.[86] The same legend of the origin of death has been recorded in the Shortlands Islands[87] and among the Kai of German New Guinea.[88] It is also told with some variations by the natives of the Admiralty Islands. They say that once on a time there was an old woman and she was frail. She had two sons, and they went a-fishing, and she herself went to bathe. She stripped off her wrinkled old skin and came forth as young as she had been long ago. Her sons came home from the fishing, and very much astonished were they to see her. The one said, "It is our mother," but the other said, "She may be your mother, but she shall be my wife." Their mother heard them and said, "What were you two saying?" The two said, "Nothing! We only said that you are our mother." "You are liars," said she, "I heard you both. If I had had my way, we should have grown to be old men and women, and then we should have cast our skin and been young men and young women. But you have had your way. We shall grow old men and old women and then we shall die." With that she fetched her old skin, and put it on, and became an old woman again. As for us, her descendants, we grow up and we grow old. And if it had not been for those two young men there would have been no end of our days, we should have lived for ever and ever.[89] [Sidenote: Samoan story of the shellfish, two torches, and death.] The Samoans tell how the gods held a council to decide what was to be done with men. One of them said, "Bring men and let them cast their skin; and when they die, let them be turned to shellfish or to a coco-nut leaf torch, which when shaken in the wind blazes out again." But another god called Palsy (_Supa_) rose up and said, "Bring men and let them be like the candle-nut torch, which when it is once out cannot be blown up again. Let the shellfish change their skin, but let men die." While they were debating, a heavy rain came on and broke up the meeting. As the gods ran for shelter to their houses, they cried, "Let it be according to the counsel of Palsy! Let it be according to the counsel of Palsy!" So men died, but shellfish cast their skins.[90] [Sidenote: IV. The Banana Story. Poso story of immortality, the stone, the banana, and death. Mentra story of immortality, the banana, and death.] The last type of tales of the origin of death which I shall notice is the one which I have called the Banana type. We have already seen that according to the natives of Nias human mortality is all due to eating bananas instead of crabs.[91] A similar opinion is entertained by other people in that region of the world. Thus the natives of Poso, a district of Central Celebes, say that in the beginning the sky was very near the earth, and that the Creator, who lived in it, used to let down his good gifts to men at the end of a rope. One day he thus lowered a stone; but our first father and mother would have none of it and they called out to their Maker, "What have we to do with this stone? Give us something else." The Creator complied and hauled away at the rope; the stone mounted up and up till it vanished from sight. Presently the rope was seen coming down from heaven again, and this time there was a banana at the end of it instead of a stone. Our first parents ran at the banana and took it. Then there came a voice from heaven, saying: "Because ye have chosen the banana, your life shall be like its life. When the banana-tree has offspring, the parent stem dies; so shall ye die and your children shall step into your place. Had ye chosen the stone, your life would have been like the life of the stone changeless and immortal." The man and his wife mourned over their fatal choice, but it was too late; that is how through the eating of a banana death came into the world.[92] The Mentras or Mantras, a shy tribe of savages in the jungles of the Malay Peninsula, allege that in the early days of the world men did not die, but only grew thin at the waning of the moon and then waxed fat again as she waxed to the full. Thus there was no check whatever on the population, which increased to a truly alarming extent. So a son of the first man brought this state of things to his father's notice and asked him what was to be done. The first man said, "Leave things as they are"; but his younger brother, who took a more Malthusian view of the situation, said, "No, let men die like the banana, leaving their offspring behind." The question was submitted to the Lord of the Underworld, and he decided in favour of death. Ever since then men have ceased to renew their youth like the moon and have died like the banana.[93] [Sidenote: Primitive philosophy in the stories of the origin of death.] Thus the three stories of the origin of death which I have called the Moon type, the Serpent type, and the Banana type appear to be products of a primitive philosophy which sees a cheerful emblem of immortality in the waxing and waning moon and in the cast skins of serpents, but a sad emblem of mortality in the banana-tree, which perishes as soon as it has produced its fruit. But, as I have already said, these types of stories do not exhaust the theories or fancies of primitive man on the question how death came into the world. I will conclude this part of my subject with some myths which do not fall under any of the preceding heads. [Sidenote: Bahnar story of immortality, the tree, and death. Rivalry for the boon of immortality between men and animals that cast their skins, such as serpents and lizards.] The Bahnars of eastern Cochinchina say that in the beginning when people died they used to be buried at the foot of a tree called Lông Blô, and that after a time they always rose from the dead, not as infants but as full-grown men and women. So the earth was peopled very fast, and all the inhabitants formed but one great town under the presidency of our first parents. In time men multiplied to such an extent that a certain lizard could not take his walks abroad without somebody treading on his tail. This vexed him, and the wily creature gave an insidious hint to the gravediggers. "Why bury the dead at the foot of the Lông Blô tree?" said he; "bury them at the foot of Lông Khung, and they will not come to life again. Let them die outright and be done with it." The hint was taken, and from that day the dead have not come to life again.[94] In this story there are several points to be noticed. In the first place the tree Lông Blô would seem to have been a tree of life, since all the dead who were buried at its foot came to life again. In the second place the lizard is here, as in so many African tales, the instrument of bringing death among men. Why was that so? We may conjecture that the reason is that the lizard like the serpent casts its skin periodically, from which primitive man might infer, as he infers with regard to serpents, that the creature renews its youth and lives for ever. Thus all the myths which relate how a lizard or a serpent became the maleficent agent of human mortality may perhaps be referred to an old idea of a certain jealousy and rivalry between men and all creatures which cast their skin, notably serpents and lizards; we may suppose that in all such cases a story was told of a contest between man and his animal rivals for the possession of immortality, a contest in which, whether by mistake or by guile, the victory always remained with the animals, who thus became immortal, while mankind was doomed to mortality. [Sidenote: Chingpaw story of the origin of death. Australian story of the tree, the bat, and death. Fijian story of the origin of death.] The Chingpaws of Upper Burma say that death originated in a practical joke played by an old man who pretended to be dead in the ancient days when nobody really died. But the Lord of the Sun, who held the threads of all human lives in his hand, detected the fraud and in anger cut short the thread of life of the practical joker. Since then everybody else has died; the door for death to enter into the world was opened by the folly of that silly, though humorous, old man.[95] The natives about the Murray River in Australia used to relate how the first man and woman were forbidden to go near a tree in which a bat lived, lest they should disturb the creature. One day, however, the woman was gathering firewood and she went near the tree. The bat flew away, and after that death came into the world.[96] Some of the Fijians accounted for human mortality as follows. When the first man, the father of the human race, was being buried, a god passed by the grave and asked what it meant, for he had never seen a grave before. On learning from the bystanders that they had just buried their father, "Do not bury him," said he, "dig the body up again." "No," said they, "we cannot do that. He has been dead four days and stinks." "Not so," pleaded the god; "dig him up, and I promise you that he will live again." Heedless of the divine promise, these primitive sextons persisted in leaving their dead father in the grave. Then said the god to these wicked men, "By disobeying me you have sealed your own fate. Had you dug up your ancestor, you would have found him alive, and you yourselves, when you passed from this world, should have been buried, as bananas are, for the space of four days, after which you should have been dug up, not rotten, but ripe. But now, as a punishment for your disobedience, you shall die and rot." And still, when they hear this sad tale told, the Fijians say, "O that those children had dug up that body!"[97] [Sidenote: Admiralty Islanders' stories of the origin of death.] The Admiralty Islanders tell various stories to explain why man is mortal. One of them has already been related. Here is another. A Souh man went once to catch fish. A devil tried to devour him, but he fled into the forest and took refuge in a tree. The tree kindly closed on him so that the devil could not see him. When the devil was gone, the tree opened up and the man clambered down to the ground. Then said the tree to him, "Go to Souh and bring me two white pigs." He went and found two pigs, one was white and one was black. He took chalk and chalked the black pig so that it was white. Then he brought them to the tree, but on the way the chalk fell off the black pig. And when the tree saw the white pig and the black pig, he chid the man and said, "You are thankless. I was good to you. An evil will overtake you; you will die. The devil will fall upon you, and you will die." So it has been with us as it was with the man of Souh. An evil overtakes us or a spirit falls upon us, and we die. If it had been as the tree said, we should not have died.[98] Another story told by the Admiralty Islanders to account for the melancholy truth of man's mortality runs thus. Kosi, the chief of Moakareng, was in his house. He was hungry. He said to his two sons, "Go and climb the breadfruit trees and bring the fruit, that we may eat them together and not die." But they would not. So he went himself and climbed the breadfruit tree. But the north-west wind blew a storm, it blew and threw him down. He fell and his body died, but his ghost went home. He went and sat in his house. He tied up his hair and he painted his face with red ochre. Now his wife and his two sons had gone after him into the wood. They went to fetch home the breadfruits. They came and saw Kosi, and he was dead. The three returned home, and there they saw the ghost of Kosi sitting in his house. They said, "You there! Who's that dead at the foot of the breadfruit tree? Kosi, he is dead at the foot of the breadfruit tree." Kosi, he said, "Here am I. I did not fall. Perhaps somebody else fell down. I did not. Here I am." "You're a liar," said they. "I ain't," said he. "Come," said they, "we'll go and see." They went. Kosi, he jumped into his body. He died. They buried him. If his wife had behaved well, we should not die. Our body would die, but our ghost would go about always in the old home.[99] [Sidenote: Stories of the origin of death: the fatal bundle or the fatal box.] The Wemba of Northern Rhodesia relate how God in the beginning created a man and a woman and gave them two bundles; in one of them was life and in the other death. Most unfortunately the man chose "the little bundle of death."[100] The Cherokee Indians of North America say that a number of beings were engaged in the work of creation. The Sun was made first. Now the creators intended that men should live for ever. But when the Sun passed over them in the sky, he told the people that there was not room enough for them all and that they had better die. At last the Sun's own daughter, who was with the people on earth, was bitten by a snake and died. Then the Sun repented him and said that men might live always; and he bade them take a box and go fetch his daughter's spirit in the box and bring it to her body, that she might live. But he charged them straitly not to open the box until they arrived at the dead body. However, moved by curiosity, they unhappily opened the box too soon; away flew the spirit, and all men have died ever since.[101] Some of the North American Indians informed the early Jesuit missionaries that a certain man had received the gift of immortality in a small packet from a famous magician named Messou, who repaired the world after it had been seriously damaged by a great flood. In bestowing on the man this valuable gift the magician strictly enjoined him on no account to open the packet. The man obeyed, and so long as the packet was unopened he remained immortal. But his wife was both curious and incredulous; she opened the packet to see what was in it, the precious contents flew away, and mankind has been subject to death ever since.[102] [Sidenote: Baganda story how death came into the world through the forgetfulness and imprudence of a woman.] As these American Indians tell how death came through the curiosity and incredulity of one woman, the Baganda of Central Africa relate how it came through the forgetfulness and imprudence of another. According to the Baganda the first man who came to earth in Uganda was named Kintu. He brought with him one cow and lived on its milk, for he had no other food. But in time a woman named Nambi, a daughter of Gulu, the king of heaven, came down to earth with her brother or sister, and seeing Kintu she fell in love with him and wished to have him for her husband. But her proud father doubted whether Kintu was worthy of his daughter's hand, and accordingly he insisted on testing his future son-in-law before he would consent to the marriage. So he carried off Kintu's cow and put it among his own herds in heaven. When Kintu found that the cow was stolen, he was in a great rage, but hunger getting the better of anger, he made shift to live by peeling the bark of trees and gathering herbs and leaves, which he cooked and ate. In time his future wife Nambi happened to spy the stolen cow among her father's herds and she told Kintu, who came to heaven to seek and recover the lost animal. His future father-in-law Gulu, Lord of Heaven, obliged him to submit to many tests designed to prove his fitness for marriage with the daughter of so exalted a being as the Lord of Heaven. All these tests Kintu successfully passed through. At last Gulu was satisfied, gave him his daughter Nambi to wife, and allowed him to return to earth with her. [Sidenote: The coming of Death.] But Nambi had a brother and his name was Death (_Walumbe_). So before the Lord of Heaven sent her away with her husband he called them both to him and said, "You must hurry away before Death comes, or he will wish to go with you. You must not let him do so, for he would only cause you trouble and unhappiness." To this his daughter agreed, and she went to pack up her things. She and her husband then took leave of the Lord of Heaven, who gave them at parting a piece of advice. "Be sure," said he, "if you have forgotten anything, not to come back for it; because, if you do, Death will wish to go with you, and you must go without him." So off they set, the man and his wife, taking with them his cow and its calves, also a sheep, a goat, a fowl, and a banana tree. But on the way the woman remembered that she had forgotten the grain to feed the fowl, so she said to her husband, "I must go back for the grain to feed the fowl, or it will die." Her husband tried to dissuade her, but in vain. She said, "I will hurry back and get it without any one seeing me." So back she went in an evil hour and said to her father the Lord of Heaven, "I have forgotten the grain for the fowl and I am come back to fetch it from the doorway where I put it." Her father said sadly, "Did I not tell you that you were not to return if you had forgotten anything, because your brother Death would wish to go with you? Now he will accompany you." The woman fled, but Death saw her and followed hard after her. When she rejoined her husband, he was angry, for he saw Death and said, "Why have you brought your brother with you? Who can live with him?" [Sidenote: The importunity of Death.] When they reached the earth, Nambi planted her garden, and the bananas sprang up quickly and formed a grove. They lived happily for a time till one day Death came and asked for one of their daughters, that she might go away with him and be his cook. But the father said, "If the Lord of Heaven comes and asks me for one of my children, what am I to say? Shall I tell him that I have given her to you to be your cook?" Death was silent and went away. But he came back another day and asked again for a child to be his cook. When the father again refused, Death said, "I will kill your children." The father did not know what that meant, so he asked Death, "What is that you will do?" However, in a short time one of the children fell ill and died, and then another and another. So the man went to the Lord of Heaven and complained that Death was taking away his children one by one. The Lord of Heaven said, "Did I not tell you, when you were going away, to go at once with your wife and not to return if you had forgotten anything, but you let your wife return to fetch the grain? Now you have Death living with you. If you had obeyed me, you would have been free from him and not lost any of your children." [Sidenote: The hunt for Death.] However, the man pleaded with him, and the Lord Heaven at last consented to send Death's brother Kaikuzi to help the woman and to prevent Death from killing her children. So down came Kaikuzi to earth, and when he met his brother Death they greeted each other lovingly. Then Kaikuzi told Death that he had come to fetch him away from earth to heaven. Death was willing to go, but he said, "Let us take our sister too." "Nay," said his brother, "that cannot be, for she is a wife and must stay with her husband." The dispute waxed warm, Death insisting on carrying off his sister, and his brother refusing to allow him to do so. At last the brother angrily ordered Death to do as he was bid, and so saying he made as though he would seize him. But Death slipped from between his hands and fled into the earth. For a long time after that there was enmity between the two brothers. Kaikuzi tried in every way to catch Death, but Death always escaped. At last Kaikuzi told the people that he would have one final hunt for Death, and while the hunt was going on they must all stay in their houses; not a man, a woman, a child, nor even an animal was to be allowed to pass the threshold; and if they saw Death passing the window, they were not to utter a cry of terror but to keep still. Well, for some days his orders were obeyed. Not a living soul, not an animal, stirred abroad. All without was solitude, all within was silence. Encouraged by the universal stillness Death emerged from his lair, and his brother was just about to catch him, when some children, who had ventured out to herd their goats, saw Death and cried out. Death's good brother rushed to the spot and asked them why they had cried out. They said, "Because we saw Death." So his brother was angry because Death had again made good his escape into the earth, and he went to the first man and told him that he was weary of hunting Death and wished to return home to heaven. The first man thanked him kindly for all he had done, and said, "I fear there is nothing more to be done. We must only hope that Death will not kill all the people." It was a vain hope. Since then Death has lived on earth and killed everybody who is born into the world; and always, after the deed of murder is done, he escapes into the earth at Tanda in Singo.[103] [Sidenote: In the preceding story Death is distinctly personified. Death personified in a West African story of the origin of death. Death and the spider and the spider's daughter.] If this curious tale of the origin of death reveals no very deep philosophy, it is at least interesting for the distinctness with which Death is conceived as a personal being, the son of the Lord of Heaven, the brother of the first man's wife. In this personification of Death the story differs from all the others which we have examined and marks an intellectual advance upon them; since the power of picturing abstract ideas to the mind with all the sharpness of outline and vividness of colour which are implied by personification is a faculty above the reach of very low intelligences. It is not surprising that the Baganda should have attained to this power, for they are probably the most highly cultured and intellectual of all the many Bantu tribes of Africa. The same conception of Death as a person occurs in a story of the origin of death which is told by the Hos, a negro tribe in Togoland, a district of West Africa. These Hos belong to the Ewe-speaking family of the true negroes, who have reached a comparatively high level of barbarism in the notorious kingdom of Dahomey. The story which the Hos tell as to the origin of death is as follows. Once upon a time there was a great famine in which even the hunters could find no flesh to eat. Then Death went and made a road as broad as from here to Sokode, and there he set many snares. Every animal that tried to pass that way fell into a snare. So Death had much flesh to eat. One day the Spider came to Death and said to him, "You have so much meat!" and she asked if she might have some to take home with her. Death gave her leave. So the Spider made a basket as long as from Ho to Akoviewe (a distance of about five miles), crammed it full of meat, and dragged it home. In return for this bounty the Spider gave Death her daughter Yiyisa to wife. So when Death had her for his wife, he gave her a hint. He said, "Don't walk on the broad road which I have made. Walk on the footpath which I have not made. When you go to the water, be sure to take none but the narrow way through the wood." Well, some time afterwards it had rained a little; the grass was wet, and Yiyisa wished to go to the watering-place. When she tried to walk on the narrow path through the forest, the tall damp grass wet her through and through, so she thought to herself, "In future I will only go on the broad road." But scarce had she set foot on the beautiful broad road when she fell into a snare and died on the spot. When Death came to the snare and saw his wife in it dead, he cut her up into bits and toasted them on the fire. One day the Spider paid a visit to her son-in-law Death, and he set a good meal before her. When she had eaten and drunk her fill and had got up to go home, she asked Death after her daughter. "If you take that meat from the fire," said Death, "you will see her." So the Spider took the flesh from the fire and there, sure enough, she found her dead daughter. Then she went home in great wrath and whetted her knife till it was so sharp that a fly lighting on the edge was cut in two. With that knife she came back to attack Death. But Death shot an arrow at her. She dodged it, and the arrow whizzed past her and set all the forest on fire. Then the Spider flung her sharp knife at Death, but it missed him and only sliced off the tops of the palms and all the other trees of the wood. Seeing that her stroke had failed, the Spider fled away home and shut herself up in her house. But Death waited for her on the edge of the town to kill her as soon as she ventured out. Next morning some women came out of the town to draw water at the watering-place, and as they went they talked with one another. But Death shot an arrow among them and killed several. The rest ran away home and said, "So and so is dead." Then Death came and looked at the bodies and said, "That is my game. I need go no more into the wood to hunt." That is how Death came into the world. If the Spider had not done what she did, nobody would ever have died.[104] [Sidenote: Death personified in a Melanesian story of the origin of death.] Again, the Melanesians of the Banks Islands tell a story of the origin of Death, in which that grim power is personified. They say that Death (_Mate_) used to live underground in a shadowy realm called Panoi, while men on earth changed their skins like serpents and so renewing their youth lived for ever. But a practical inconvenience of immortality was that property never changed hands; newcomers had no chance, everything was monopolised by the old, old stagers. To remedy this state of things and secure a more equitable distribution of property Death was induced to emerge from the lower world and to appear on earth among men; he came relying on an assurance that no harm would be done him. Well, when they had him, they laid him out on a board, covered him with a pall as if he were a corpse, and then proceeded with great gusto to divide his property and eat the funeral feast. On the fifth day they blew the conch shell to drive away the ghost, as usual, and lifted the pall to see what had become of Death. But there was no Death there; he had absconded leaving only his skeleton behind. They naturally feared that he had made off with an intention to return to his home underground, which would have been a great calamity; for if there were no Death on earth, how could men die and how could other people inherit their property? The idea was intolerable; so to cut off the retreat of the fugitive, the Fool was set to do sentinel duty at the parting of the ways, where one road leads down to the underworld, Death's home, and the other leads up to the upper world, the abode of the living. Here accordingly the Fool was stationed with strict orders to keep his eye on Death if he should attempt to sneak past him and return to the nether world. However, the Fool, like a fool as he was, sat watching the road to the upper world, and Death slipped behind him and so made good his retreat. Since then all men have followed Death down that fatal path.[105] [Sidenote: Thus according to savages death is not a necessary part of the order of nature. A similar view is held by some eminent modern biologists.] So much for savage stories of the origin of death. They all imply a belief that death is not a necessary part of the order of nature, but that it originated in a pure mistake or misdeed of some sort on somebody's part, and that we should all have lived happy and immortal if it had not been for that disastrous blunder or crime. Thus the tales reflect the same frame of mind which I illustrated in the last lecture, when I shewed that many savages still to this day believe all men to be naturally immortal and death to be nothing but an effect of sorcery. In short, whether we regard the savage's attitude to death at the present day or his ideas as to its origin in the remote past, we must conclude that primitive man cannot reconcile himself to the notion of death as a natural and necessary event; he persists in regarding it as an accidental and unnecessary disturbance of the proper order of nature. To a certain extent, perhaps, in these crude speculations he has anticipated certain views of modern biology. Thus it has been maintained by Professor August Weissmann that death is not a natural necessity, that many of the lowest species of living animals do in fact live for ever; and that in the higher animals the custom of dying has been introduced in the course of evolution for the purpose of thinning the population and preventing the degeneration of the species, which would otherwise follow through the gradual and necessary deterioration of the immortal individuals, who, though they could not die, might yet sustain much bodily damage through hard knocks in the hurly-burly of eternal existence on earth. [Sidenote: Weissmann's view that death is not a natural necessity but an adaptation acquired in the course of evolution for the advantage of the race.] On this subject I will quote some sentences from Professor Weissmann's essay on the duration of life. He says, "The necessity of death has been hitherto explained as due to causes which are inherent in organic nature, and not to the fact that it may be advantageous. I do not however believe in the validity of this explanation; I consider that death is not a primary necessity, but that it has been secondarily acquired as an adaptation. I believe that life is endowed with a fixed duration, not because it is contrary to its nature to be unlimited, but because the unlimited existence of individuals would be a luxury without any corresponding advantage. The above-mentioned hypothesis upon the origin and necessity of death leads me to believe that the organism did not finally cease to renew the worn-out cell material because the nature of the cells did not permit them to multiply indefinitely, but because the power of multiplying indefinitely was lost when it ceased to be of use.... John Hunter, supported by his experiments on _anabiosis_, hoped to prolong the life of man indefinitely by alternate freezing and thawing; and the Veronese Colonel Aless. Guaguino made his contemporaries believe that a race of men existed in Russia, of which the individuals died regularly every year on the 27th of November, and returned to life on the 24th of the following April. There cannot however be the least doubt, that the higher organisms, as they are now constructed, contain within themselves the germs of death. The question however arises as to how this has come to pass; and I reply that death is to be looked upon as an occurrence which is advantageous to the species as a concession to the outer conditions of life, and not as an absolute necessity, essentially inherent in life itself. Death, that is the end of life, is by no means, as is usually assumed, an attribute of all organisms. An immense number of low organisms do not die, although they are easily destroyed, being killed by heat, poisons, etc. As long, however, as those conditions which are necessary for their life are fulfilled, they continue to live, and they thus carry the potentiality of unending life in themselves. I am speaking not only of the Amoebae and the low unicellular Algae, but also of far more highly organized unicellular animals, such as the Infusoria."[106] [Sidenote: Similar view expressed by Alfred Russel Wallace.] A similar suggestion that death is not a natural necessity but an innovation introduced for the good of the breed, has been made by our eminent English biologist, Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace. He says: "If individuals did not die they would soon multiply inordinately and would interfere with each other's healthy existence. Food would become scarce, and hence the larger individuals would probably decompose or diminish in size. The deficiency of nourishment would lead to parts of the organism not being renewed; they would become fixed, and liable to more or less slow decomposition as dead parts within a living body. The smaller organisms would have a better chance of finding food, the larger ones less chance. That one which gave off several small portions to form each a new organism would have a better chance of leaving descendants like itself than one which divided equally or gave off a large part of itself. Hence it would happen that those which gave off very small portions would probably soon after cease to maintain their own existence while they would leave a numerous offspring. This state of things would be in any case for the advantage of the race, and would therefore, by natural selection, soon become established as the regular course of things, and thus we have the origin of _old age, decay, and death_; for it is evident that when one or more individuals have provided a sufficient number of successors they themselves, as consumers of nourishment in a constantly increasing degree, are an injury to their successors. Natural selection therefore weeds them out, and in many cases favours such races as die almost immediately after they have left successors. Many moths and other insects are in this condition, living only to propagate their kind and then immediately dying, some not even taking any food in the perfect and reproductive state."[107] [Sidenote: Savages and some men of science agree that death is not a natural necessity.] Thus it appears that two of the most eminent biologists of our time agree with savages in thinking that death is by no means a natural necessity for all living beings. They only differ from savages in this, that whereas savages look upon death as the result of a deplorable accident, our men of science regard it as a beneficent reform instituted by nature as a means of adjusting the numbers of living beings to the quantity of the food supply, and so tending to the improvement and therefore on the whole to the happiness of the species. [Footnote 57: H. Callaway, _The Religious System of the Amazulu_, Part i. pp. 1, 3 _sq._, Part ii. p. 138; Rev. L. Grout, _Zululand, or Life among the Zulu-Kafirs_ (Philadelphia, N.D.), pp. 148 _sq._; Dudley Kidd, _The Essential Kafir_ (London, 1904), pp. 76 _sq._ Compare A. F. Gardiner, _Narrative of a Journey to the Zoolu Country_ (London, 1836), pp. 178 _sq._, T. Arbousset et F. Daumas, _Relation d'un voyage d'Exploration au Nord-Est de la Colonie du Cap de Bonne-Espérance_ (Paris, 1842), p. 472; Rev. J. Shooter, _The Kafirs of Natal and the Zulu Country_ (London, 1857), p. 159; W. H. I. Bleek, _Reynard the Fox in South Africa_ (London, 1864), p. 74; D. Leslie, _Among the Zulus and Amatongas_, Second Edition (Edinburgh, 1875), p. 209; F. Speckmann, _Die Hermannsburger Mission in Afrika_ (Hermannsburg, 1876), p. 164.] [Footnote 58: J. Chapman, _Travels in the Interior of South Africa_ (London, 1868), i. 47.] [Footnote 59: E. Casalis, _The Basutos_ (London, 1861), p. 242; E. Jacottet, _The Treasury of Ba-suto Lore_, i. (Morija, Basutoland, 1908), pp. 46 _sqq._] [Footnote 60: H. A. Junod, _Les Ba-Ronga_ Neuchâtel (1898), pp. 401 _sq._] [Footnote 61: W. A. Elmslie, _Among the Wild Ngoni_ (Edinburgh and London, 1899), p. 70.] [Footnote 62: H. A. Junod and W. A. Elmslie, _ll.cc._] [Footnote 63: C. W. Hobley, _Ethnology of A-Kamba and other East African Tribes_ (Cambridge, 1910), pp. 107-109.] [Footnote 64: Fr. Müller, "Die Religionen Togos in Einzeldarstellungen," _Anthropos_, ii. (1907) p. 203. In a version of the story reported from Calabar a sheep appears as the messenger of mortality, while a dog is the messenger of immortality or rather of resurrection. See "Calabar Stories," _Journal of the African Society_, No. 18 (January 1906), p. 194.] [Footnote 65: E. Perregaux, _Chez les Achanti_ (Neuchâtel, 1906), pp. 198 _sq._] [Footnote 66: E. Perregaux, _op. cit._ p. 199.] [Footnote 67: Sir J. E. Alexander, _Expedition of Discovery into the Interior of Africa_ (London, 1838), i. 169; C. J. Andersson, _Lake Ngami_, Second Edition (London, 1856), pp. 328 _sq._; W. H. I. Bleek, _Reynard the Fox in South Africa_ (London, 1864), pp. 71-73; Th. Hahn, _Tsuni-Goam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi_ (London, 1881), p. 52.] [Footnote 68: W. H. I. Bleek, _A Brief Account of Bushman Folk-lore_ (London, 1875), pp. 9 _sq._] [Footnote 69: W. H. I. Bleek, _Reynard the Fox in South Africa_, pp. 69 _sq._] [Footnote 70: A. C. Hollis, _The Masai_ (Oxford, 1905), pp. 271 _sq._] [Footnote 71: A. C. Hollis, _The Nandi_ (Oxford, 1909), p. 98.] [Footnote 72: Captain W. E. H. Barrett, "Notes on the Customs and Beliefs of the Wa-Giriama, etc., British East Africa," _Journal of the R. Anthropological Institute_, xli. (1911) p. 37.] [Footnote 73: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, Second Edition (London, 1860), i. 205.] [Footnote 74: _Lettres �difiantes et Curieuses_, Nouvelle �dition, xv. (Paris, 1781) pp. 305 _sq._] [Footnote 75: A. W. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_ (London, 1904), pp. 428 _sq._] [Footnote 76: Antoine Cabaton, _Nouvelles Recherches sur les Chams_ (Paris, 1901), pp. 18 _sq._] [Footnote 77: Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_ (London, 1904), pp. 513 _sq._] [Footnote 78: Father G. Boscana, "Chinigchinich," in _Life in California, by an American_ [A. Robinson] (New York, 1846), pp. 298 _sq._] [Footnote 79: Merolla, "Voyage to Congo," in J. Pinkerton's _Voyages and Travels_, xvi. (London, 1814) p. 273.] [Footnote 80: P. A. Kleintitschen, _Die Küstenbewohner der Gazellehalbinsel_ (Hiltrup bei Münster, N.D.), p. 334.] [Footnote 81: A. Landes, "Contes et Légendes Annamites," _Cochinchine française, Excursions et Reconnaissances_, No. 25 (Saigon, 1886), pp. 108 _sq._] [Footnote 82: Otto Meyer, "Mythen und Erzählungen von der Insel Vuatom (Bismarck-Archipel, Südsee)," _Anthropos_, v. (1910) p. 724.] [Footnote 83: H. Sundermann, "Die Insel Nias und die Mission daselbst," _Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift_, xi. (1884) p. 451; E. Modigliani, _Un Viaggio a Nías_ (Milan, 1890), p. 295.] [Footnote 84: R. Schomburgk, _Reisen in Britisch-Guiana_ (Leipsig, 1847-1848), ii. 319.] [Footnote 85: R. Schomburgk, _op. cit._ ii. 320.] [Footnote 86: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_ (Oxford, 1891), p. 265; W. Gray, "Some Notes on the Tannese," _Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie_, vii. (1894) p. 232.] [Footnote 87: C. Ribbe, _Zwei Jahre unter den Kannibalen der Salomo-Inseln_ (Dresden-Blasowitz, 1903), p. 148.] [Footnote 88: Ch. Keysser, "Aus dem Leben der Kaileute," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_ (Berlin, 1911), iii. 161 _sq._] [Footnote 89: Josef Meier, "Mythen und Sagen der Admiralitätsinsulaner," _Anthropos_, iii. (1908) p. 193.] [Footnote 90: George Brown, D.D., _Melanesians and Polynesians_ (London, 1910), p. 365; George Turner, LL.D., _Samoa_ (London, 1884), pp. 8 _sq._] [Footnote 91: See above, p. 70.] [Footnote 92: A. C. Kruijt, "De legenden der Poso-Alfoeren aangaande de erste menschen," _Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap_, xxxviii. (1894) p. 340.] [Footnote 93: D. F. A. Hervey, "The Mêntra Traditions," _Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society_, No. 10 (December 1882), p. 190; W. W. Skeat and C. O. Blagden, _Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula_ (London, 1906), ii. 337 _sq._] [Footnote 94: Guerlach, "Moeurs et Superstitions des sauvages Ba-hnars," _Missions Catholiques_, xix. (1887) p. 479.] [Footnote 95: (Sir) J. G. Scott and J. P. Hardiman, _Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States_, Part i. vol. i. (Rangoon, 1900) pp. 408 _sq._] [Footnote 96: R. Brough Smyth, _The Aborigines of Victoria_ (Melbourne and London, 1878), i. 428. On this narrative the author remarks: "This story appears to bear too close a resemblance to the Biblical account of the Fall. Is it genuine or not? Mr. Bulmer admits that it may have been invented by the aborigines after they had heard something of Scripture history."] [Footnote 97: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, Second Edition (London, 1860), i. 204 _sq._ For another Fijian story of the origin of death, see above, p. 67.] [Footnote 98: Josef Meier, "Mythen und Sagen der Admiralitätsinsulaner," _Anthropos_, iii. (1908) p. 194.] [Footnote 99: Josef Meier, _op. cit._ pp. 194 _sq._] [Footnote 100: C. Gouldsbury and H. Sheane, _The Great Plateau of Northern Rhodesia_ (London, 1911), pp. 80 _sq._ A like tale is told by the Balolo of the Upper Congo. See _Folk-lore_, xii. (1901) p. 461; and below, p. 472.] [Footnote 101: J. Mooney, "Myths of the Cherokee," _Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology_, Part i. (Washington, 1900) p. 436, quoting "the Payne manuscript, of date about 1835." Compare _id._, pp. 252-254, 436 _sq._] [Footnote 102: _Relations des Jésuites_, 1634, p. 13 (Canadian reprint, Quebec, 1858).] [Footnote 103: Sir Harry Johnston, _The Uganda Protectorate_ (London, 1904), ii. 700-705 (the story was taken down by Mr. J. F. Cunningham); Rev. J. Roscoe, _The Baganda_ (London, 1911), pp. 460-464. The story is briefly told by Mr. L. Decle, _Three Years in Savage Africa_ (London, 1898), pp. 439 _sq._] [Footnote 104: J. Spieth, _Die Ewe-Stämme_ (Berlin, 1906), pp. 590-593.] [Footnote 105: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_ (Oxford, 1891), pp. 265 _sq._] [Footnote 106: A. Weissmann, _Essays upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems_, vol. i. (Oxford, 1891) pp. 25 _sq._] [Footnote 107: A. R. Wallace, quoted in A. Weissmann's _Essays upon Heredity_, i. (Oxford, 1891) p. 24 note.] LECTURE IV THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE ABORIGINES OF CENTRAL AUSTRALIA [Sidenote: Proposed survey of the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead, as these are found among the various races of men, beginning with the lowest savages.] In previous lectures we have considered the ideas which savages in general entertain of death and its origin. To-day we begin our survey of the beliefs and practices of particular races in regard to the dead. I propose to deal separately with some of the principal races of men and to shew in detail how the belief in human immortality and the worship of the dead, to which that belief naturally gives rise, have formed a more or less important element of their religion. And in order to trace as far as possible the evolution of that worship in history I shall begin with the lowest savages about whom we possess accurate information, and shall pass from them to higher races until, if time permitted, we might come to the civilised nations of antiquity and of modern times. In this way, by comparing the ideas and practices of peoples on different planes of culture we may be able approximately to reconstruct or represent to ourselves with a fair degree of probability the various stages through which this particular phase of religion may be supposed to have passed in the great civilised races before the dawn of history. Of course all such reconstructions must be more or less conjectural. In the absence of historical documents that is inevitable; but our reconstruction will be more or less probable according to the degree in which the corresponding stages of evolution are found to resemble or differ from each other in the various races of men. If we find that tribes at approximately the same level of culture in different parts of the world have approximately the same religion, we may fairly infer that religion is in a sense a function of culture, and therefore that all races which have traversed the same stages of culture in the past have traversed also the same stages of religion; in short that, allowing for many minor variations, which flow inevitably from varying circumstances such as climate, soil, racial temperament, and so forth, the course of religious development has on the whole been uniform among mankind. This enquiry may be called the embryology of religion, in as much as it seeks to do for the development of religion what embryology in the strict sense of the word attempts to do for the development of life. And just as biology or the science of life naturally begins with the study of the lowest sorts of living beings, the humble protozoa, so we shall begin our enquiry with a study of the lowest savages of whom we possess a comparatively full and accurate record, namely, the aborigines of Australia. [Sidenote: Savagery a case not of degeneracy but of arrested or rather retarded development.] At the outset I would ask you to bear in mind that, so far as evidence allows us to judge, savagery in all its phases appears to be nothing but a case of arrested or rather retarded development. The old view that savages have degenerated from a higher level of culture, on which their forefathers once stood, is destitute alike of evidence and of probability. On the contrary, the information which we possess as to the lower races, meagre and fragmentary as it unfortunately is, all seems to point to the conclusion that on the whole even the most savage tribes have reached their low level of culture from one still lower, and that the upward movement, though so slow as to be almost imperceptible, has yet been real and steady up to the point where savagery has come into contact with civilisation. The moment of such contact is a critical one for the savages. If the intellectual, moral, and social interval which divides them from the civilised intruders exceeds a certain degree, then it appears that sooner or later the savages must inevitably perish; the shock of collision with a stronger race is too violent to be withstood, the weaker goes to the wall and is shattered. But if on the other hand the breach between the two conflicting races is not so wide as to be impassable, there is a hope that the weaker may assimilate enough of the higher culture of the other to survive. It was so, for example, with our barbarous forefathers in contact with the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome; and it may be so in future with some, for example, of the black races of the present day in contact with European civilisation. Time will shew. But among the savages who cannot permanently survive the shock of collision with Europe may certainly be numbered the aborigines of Australia. They are rapidly dwindling and wasting away, and before very many years have passed it is probable that they will be extinct like the Tasmanians, who, so far as we can judge from the miserably imperfect records of them which we possess, appear to have been savages of an even lower type than the Australians, and therefore to have been still less able to survive in the struggle for existence with their vigorous European rivals. [Sidenote: Physical causes which have retarded progress in Australia.] The causes which have retarded progress in Australia and kept the aboriginal population at the lowest level of savagery appear to be mainly two; namely, first, the geographical isolation and comparatively small area of the continent, and, second, the barren and indeed desert nature of a great part of its surface; for the combined effect of these causes has been, by excluding foreign competitors and seriously restricting the number of competitors at home, to abate the rigour of competition and thereby to restrain the action of one of the most powerful influences which make for progress. In other words, elements of weakness have been allowed to linger on, which under the sterner conditions of life entailed by fierce competition would long ago have been eliminated and have made way for elements better adapted to the environment. What is true of the human inhabitants of Australia in this respect is true also of its fauna and flora. It has long been recognised that the animals and plants of Australia represent on the whole more archaic types of life than the animals and plants of the larger continents; and the reason why these antiquated creatures have survived there rather than elsewhere is mainly that, the area of competition being so much restricted through the causes I have mentioned, these comparatively weak forms of animal and vegetable life have not been killed off by stronger competitors. That this is the real cause appears to be proved by the rapidity with which many animals and plants introduced into Australia from Europe tend to overrun the country and to oust the old native fauna and flora.[108] [Sidenote: In the centre of Australia the natural conditions of life are most unfavourable; hence the central aborigines have remained in a more primitive state than those of the coasts, where food and water are more plentiful.] I have said that among the causes which have kept the aborigines of Australia at a very low level of savagery must be reckoned the desert nature of a great part of the country. Now it is the interior of the continent which is the most arid, waste, and barren. The coasts are comparatively fertile, for they are watered by showers condensed from an atmosphere which is charged with moisture by the neighbouring sea; and this condensation is greatly facilitated in the south-eastern and eastern parts of the continent by a high range of mountains which here skirts the coast for a long distance, attracting the moisture from the ocean and precipitating it in the form of snow and rain. Thus the vegetation and hence the supply of food both animal and vegetable in these well-watered portions of the continent are varied and plentiful. In striking contrast with the fertility and abundance of these favoured regions are the stony plains and bare rocky ranges of the interior, where water is scarce, vegetation scanty, and animal life at certain seasons of the year can only with difficulty be maintained. It would be no wonder if the natives of these arid sun-scorched wildernesses should have lagged behind even their savage brethren of the coasts in respect of material and social progress; and in fact there are many indications that they have done so, in other words, that the aborigines of the more fertile districts near the sea have made a greater advance towards civilisation than the tribes of the desert interior. This is the view of men who have studied the Australian savages most deeply at first hand, and, so far as I can judge of the matter without any such first-hand acquaintance, I entirely agree with their opinion. I have given my reasons elsewhere and shall not repeat them here. All that I wish to impress on you now is that in aboriginal Australia a movement of social and intellectual progress, slow but perceptible, appears to have been setting from the coast inwards, and that, so far as such things can be referred to physical causes, this particular movement in Australia would seem to have been initiated by the sea acting through an abundant rainfall and a consequent abundant supply of food.[109] [Sidenote: Backward state of the Central Australian aborigines. They have no idea of a moral supreme being.] Accordingly, in attempting to give you some account of the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the various races of mankind, I propose to begin with the natives of Central Australia, first, because the Australian aborigines are the most primitive savages about whom we have full and accurate information, and, second, because among these primitive savages the inhabitants of the central deserts are on the whole the most primitive. Like their brethren in the rest of the continent they were in their native condition absolutely ignorant of metals and of agriculture; they had no domestic animals except the dog, and they subsisted wholly by the products of the chase and the natural fruits, roots, and seeds, which the ground yielded without cultivation of any sort. In regard to their intellectual outlook upon the world, they were deeply imbued, as I shewed in a former lecture, with a belief in magic, but it can hardly be said that they possessed any religion in the strict sense of the word, by which I mean a propitiation of real or imaginary powers regarded as personal beings superior to man: certainly the Australian aborigines appear to have believed in no beings who deserve to be called gods. On this subject Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, our best authorities on these tribes, observe as follows: "The Central Australian natives--and this is true of the tribes extending from Lake Eyre in the south to the far north and eastwards across to the Gulf of Carpentaria--have no idea whatever of the existence of any supreme being who is pleased if they follow a certain line of what we call moral conduct and displeased if they do not do so. They have not the vaguest idea of a personal individual other than an actual living member of the tribe who approves or disapproves of their conduct, so far as anything like what we call morality is concerned. Any such idea as that of a future life of happiness or the reverse, as a reward for meritorious or as a punishment for blameworthy conduct, is quite foreign to them.... We know of no tribe in which there is a belief of any kind in a supreme being who rewards or punishes the individual according to his moral behaviour, using the word moral in the native sense."[110] [Sidenote: Central Australian theory that the souls of the dead survive and are afterwards reborn as infants.] But if the aborigines of Central Australia have no religion properly so called, they entertain beliefs and they observe practices out of which under favourable circumstances a religion might have been developed, if its evolution had not been arrested by the advent of Europeans. Among these elements of natural religion one of the most important is the theory which these savages hold as to the existence and nature of the dead. That theory is a very remarkable one. With a single exception, which I shall mention presently, they unanimously believe that death is not the end of all things for the individual, but that the human personality survives, apparently with little change, in the form of a spirit, which may afterwards be reborn as a child into the world. In fact they think that every living person without exception is the reincarnation of a dead person who lived on earth a longer or shorter time ago. This belief is held universally by the tribes which occupy an immense area of Australia from the centre northwards to the Gulf of Carpentaria.[111] The single exception to which I have referred is furnished by the Gnanji, a fierce and wild-looking tribe who eat their dead enemies and perhaps also their dead friends.[112] These savages deny that women have spirits which live after death; when a woman dies, that, they say, is the end of her. On the other hand, the spirit of a dead man, in their opinion, survives and goes to and fro on the earth visiting the places where his forefathers camped in days of old and destined to be born again of a woman at some future time, when the rains have fallen and bleached his bones.[113] But why these primitive philosophers should deny the privilege of immortality to women and reserve it exclusively for men, is not manifest. All other Central Australian tribes appear to admit the rights of women equally with the rights of men in a life beyond the grave. [Sidenote: Central Australian theory as to the state of the dead. Certain conspicuous features of the landscape supposed to be tenanted by the souls of the dead waiting to be born again.] With regard to the state of the souls of the dead in the intervals between their successive reincarnations, the opinions of the Central Australian savages are clear and definite. Most civilised races who believe in the immortality of the soul have found themselves compelled to confess that, however immortal the spirits of the departed may be, they do not present themselves commonly to our eyes or ears, nor meddle much with the affairs of the living; hence the survivors have for the most part inferred that the dead do not hover invisible in our midst, but that they dwell somewhere, far away, in the height of heaven, or in the depth of earth, or in Islands of the Blest beyond the sea where the sun goes down. Not so with the simple aborigines of Australia. They imagine that the spirits of the dead continue to haunt their native land and especially certain striking natural features of the landscape, it may be a pool of water in a deep gorge of the barren hills, or a solitary tree in the sun-baked plains, or a great rock that affords a welcome shade in the sultry noon. Such spots are thought to be tenanted by the souls of the departed waiting to be born again. There they lurk, constantly on the look-out for passing women into whom they may enter, and from whom in due time they may be born as infants. It matters not whether the woman be married or unmarried, a matron or a maid, a blooming girl or a withered hag: any woman may conceive directly by the entrance into her of one of these disembodied spirits; but the natives have shrewdly observed that the spirits shew a decided preference for plump young women. Hence when such a damsel is passing near a plot of haunted ground, if she does not wish to become a mother, she will disguise herself as an aged crone and hobble past, saying in a thin cracked voice, "Don't come to me. I am an old woman." Such spots are often stones, which the natives call child-stones because the souls of the dead are there lying in wait for women in order to be born as children. One such stone, for example, may be seen in the land of the Arunta tribe near Alice Springs. It projects to a height of three feet from the ground among the mulga scrub, and there is a round hole in it through which the souls of dead plum-tree people are constantly peeping, ready to pounce out on a likely damsel. Again, in the territory of the Warramunga tribe the ghosts of black-snake people are supposed to gather in the rocks round certain pools or in the gum-trees which border the generally dry bed of a water-course. No Warramunga woman would dare to strike one of these trees with an axe, because she is firmly convinced that in doing so she would set free one of the lurking black-snake spirits, who would immediately dart into her body. They think that the spirits are no larger than grains of sand and that they make their way into women through the navel. Nor is it merely by direct contact with one of these repositories of souls, nor yet by passing near it, that women may be gotten with child against their wish. The Arunta believe that any malicious man may by magic cause a woman or even a child to become a mother: he has only to go to one of the child-stones and rub it with his hands, muttering the words, "Plenty of young women. You look and go quickly."[114] [Sidenote: As a rule, only the souls of persons of one particular totemic clan are thought to congregate in one place.] A remarkable feature in these gathering-places of the dead remains to be noticed. The society at each of them is very select. The ghosts are very clannish; as a rule none but people of one particular totemic clan are supposed to for-gather at any one place. For example, we have just seen that in the Arunta tribe the souls of dead people of the plum-tree totem congregate at a certain stone in the mulga scrub, and that in the Warramunga tribe the spirits of deceased persons who had black snakes for their totem haunt certain gum-trees. The same thing applies to most of the other haunts of the dead in Central Australia. Whether the totem was a kangaroo or an emu, a rat or a bat, a hawk or a cockatoo, a bee or a fly, a yam or a grass seed, the sun or the moon, fire or water, lightning or the wind, it matters not what the totem was, only the ghosts of people of one totemic clan meet for the most part in one place; thus one rock will be tenanted by the spirits of kangaroo folk only, and another by spirits of emu folk only; one water-pool will be the home of dead rat people alone, and another the haunt of none but dead bat people; and so on with most of the other abodes of the souls. However, in the Urabunna tribe the ghosts are not so exclusive; some of them consent to share their abode with people of other totems. For example, a certain pool of water is haunted by the spirits of folk who in their lifetime had for their totems respectively the emu, rain, and a certain grub. On the other hand a group of granite boulders is inhabited only by the souls of persons of the pigeon totem.[115] [Sidenote: Totemism defined.] Perhaps for the sake of some of my hearers I should say a word as to the meaning of totems and totemism. The subject is a large one and is still under discussion. For our present purpose it is not necessary that I should enter into details; I will therefore only say that a totem is commonly a class of natural objects, usually a species of animals or plants, with which a savage identifies himself in a curious way, imagining that he himself and his kinsfolk are for all practical purposes kangaroos or emus, rats or bats, hawks or cockatoos, yams or grass-seed, and so on, according to the particular class of natural objects which he claims as his totem. The origin of this remarkable identification of men with animals, plants, or other things is still much debated; my own view is that the key to the mystery is furnished by the Australian beliefs as to birth and rebirth which I have just described to you; but on that subject I will not now dwell.[116] All that I ask you to remember is that in Central Australia there is no general gathering-place for the spirits of the departed; the souls are sorted out more or less strictly according to their totems and dwell apart each in their own little preserve or preserves, on which ghosts of other totems are supposed seldom or never to trespass. Thus the whole country-side is dotted at intervals with these spiritual parks or reservations, which are respected by the natives as the abodes of their departed kinsfolk. In size they vary from a few square yards to many square miles.[117] [Sidenote: Traditionary origin of the local totem centres (_oknanikilla_) where the souls of the dead are supposed to assemble. The sacred sticks or stones (_churinga_) which the totemic ancestors carried about with them.] The way in which these spiritual preserves originated is supposed to be as follows. In the earliest days of which the aborigines retain a tradition, and to which they give the name of the _alcheringa_ or dream times, their remote ancestors roamed about the country in bands, each band composed of people of the same totem. Thus one band would consist of frog people only, another of witchetty grub people only, another of Hakea flower people only, and so on. Now in regard to the nature of these remote totemic ancestors of the _alcheringa_ or dream times, the ideas of the natives are very hazy; they do not in fact clearly distinguish their human from their totemic nature; in speaking, for example, of a man of the kangaroo totem they seem unable to discriminate sharply between the man and the animal: perhaps we may say that what is before their mind is a blurred image, a sort of composite photograph, of a man and a kangaroo in one: the man is semi-bestial, the kangaroo is semi-human. And similarly with their ancestors of all other totems: if the particular ancestors, for example, had the bean-tree for their totem, then their descendants in thinking of them might, like the blind man in the Gospel, see in their mind's eye men walking like trees and trees perambulating like men. Now each of these semi-human ancestors is thought to have carried about with him on his peregrinations one or more sacred sticks or stones of a peculiar pattern, to which the Arunta give the name of _churinga_: they are for the most part oval or elongated and flattened stones or slabs of wood, varying in length from a few inches to over five feet, and inscribed with a variety of patterns which represent or have reference to the totems. But the patterns are purely conventional, consisting of circles, curved lines, spirals, and dots with no attempt to represent natural objects pictorially. Each of these sacred stones or sticks was intimately associated with the spirit part of the man or woman who carried it; for women as well as men had their _churinga_. When these semi-human ancestors died, they went into the ground, leaving their sacred stones or sticks behind them on the spot, and in every case some natural feature arose to mark the place, it might be a tree, a rock, a pool of water, or what not. The memory of all such spots has been carefully preserved and handed down from generation to generation by the old men, and it is to these spots that down to the present day the souls of all the dead regularly repair in order to await reincarnation. The Arunta call the places _oknanikilla_, and we may call them local totem centres, because they are the centres where the spirits of the departed assemble according to their totems.[118] [Sidenote: Every living person has also his or her sacred stick or stone (_churinga_), with which his or her spirit is closely bound up.] But it is not merely the remote forefathers of the Central Australian savages who are said to have been possessed of these sacred sticks or stones: every man and woman who is born into the world has one of them, with which his or her spirit is believed to be closely bound up. This is intelligible when we remember that every living person is believed to be simply the reincarnation of an ancestor; for that being so he naturally comes to life with all the attributes which belonged to him in his previous state of existence on earth. The notion of the natives is that when a spirit child enters into a woman to be born, he immediately drops his sacred stick or stone on the spot, which is necessarily one of what we have called the local totem centres, since in the opinion of the natives it is only at or near them that a woman can conceive a child. Hence when her child is born, the woman tells her husband the place where she fancies that the infant entered into her, and he goes with some old men to find the precious object, the stick or stone dropped by the spirit of the infant when it entered into the mother. If it cannot be found, the men cut a wooden one from the nearest hard-wood tree, and this becomes the sacred stick or _churinga_ of the newborn child. The exact spot, whether a tree or a stone or what not, in which the child's spirit is supposed to have tarried in the interval between its incarnations, is called its _nanja_ tree or stone or what not. A definite relation is supposed to exist between each individual and his _nanja_ tree or stone. The tree or stone and any animal or bird that lights upon it is sacred to him and may not be molested. A native has been known earnestly to intercede with a white man to spare a tree because it was his _nanja_ or birth-tree, and he feared that evil would befall him if it were cut down.[119] [Sidenote: Sanctity of the _churinga_.] Thus in these Central Australian tribes every man, woman, and child has his or her sacred birth-stone or stick. But though every woman, like every man, has her sacred birth-stone or stick, she is never allowed to see it under pain of death or of being blinded with a fire-stick. Indeed none but old women are aware even of the existence of such things. Uninitiated men are likewise forbidden under the same severe penalties ever to look upon these most sacred objects.[120] The sanctity ascribed to the sticks and stones is intelligible when we remember that the spirits of all the people both living and dead are believed to be intimately associated with them. Each of them, we are told, is supposed to be so closely bound up with a person's spirit that it may be regarded as his or her representative, and those of dead people are believed to be endowed with the attributes of their former owners and actually to impart them to any one who happens to carry them about with him. Hence these apparently insignificant sticks and stones are, in the opinion of the natives, most potent instruments for conveying to the living the virtues and powers of the dead. For example, in a fight the possession of one of these holy sticks or stones is thought to endow the possessor with courage and accuracy of aim and also to deprive his adversary of these qualities. So firmly is this belief held, that if two men were fighting and one of them knew that the other carried a sacred birth-stone or stick while he himself did not, he would certainly lose heart and be beaten. Again, when a man is sick, he will sometimes have one of these sacred stones brought to him and will scrape a little dust off it, mix the dust with water, and drink it. This is supposed to strengthen him. Clearly he imagines that with the scrapings of the stone he absorbs the strength and other qualities of the person to whom the stone belonged.[121] [Sidenote: Sacred store-houses (_ertnatulunga_) of the _churinga_.] All the birth-stones or sticks (_churinga_) belonging to any particular totemic group are kept together, hidden away from the eyes of women and uninitiated men, in a sacred store-house or _ertnatulunga_, as the Arunta and Unmatjera call it. This store-house is always situated in one of the local totem centres or _oknanikilla_, which, as we have seen, vary in size from a few yards to many square miles. In itself the sacred treasure-house is usually a small cave or crevice in some lonely spot among the rugged hills. The entrance is carefully blocked up with stones arranged so artfully as to simulate nature and to awake no suspicion in the mind of passing strangers that behind these tumbled blocks lie concealed the most prized possessions of the tribe. The immediate neighbourhood of any one of these sacred store-houses is a kind of haven of refuge for wild animals, for once they have run thither, they are safe; no hunter would spear a kangaroo or opossum which cowered on the ground at one of these hallowed spots. The very plants which grow there are sacred and may not be plucked or broken or interfered with in any way. Similarly, an enemy who succeeds in taking refuge there, is safe from his pursuer, so long as he keeps within the sacred boundaries: even the avenger of blood, pursuing the murderer hot-foot, would not dare to lift up his hand against him on the holy ground. Thus, these places are sanctuaries in the strict sense of the word; they are probably the most primitive examples of their class and contain the germ out of which cities of refuge for manslayers and others might be developed. It is instructive, therefore, to observe that these rudimentary sanctuaries in the heart of the Australian wilderness derive their sacredness mainly, it would seem, from their association with the spirits of the dead, whose repose must not be disturbed by tumult, violence, and bloodshed. Even when the sacred birth-stones and sticks have been removed from the store-house in the secret recesses of the hills and have been brought into the camp for the performance of certain solemn ceremonies, no fighting may take place, no weapons may be brandished in their neighbourhood: if men will quarrel and fight, they must take their weapons and go elsewhere to do it.[122] And when the men go to one of the sacred store-houses to inspect the treasures which it contains, they must each of them put his open hand solemnly over the mouth of the rocky crevice and then retire, in order to give the spirits due notice of the approach of strangers; for if they were disturbed suddenly, they would be angry.[123] [Sidenote: Exhibition of the _churinga_ to young men.] It is only after a young man has passed through the severe ceremonies of initiation, which include most painful bodily mutilations, that he is deemed worthy to be introduced to the tribal arcana, the sacred sticks and stones, which repose in their hallowed cave among the mountain solitudes. Even when he has passed through all the ordeals, many years may elapse before he is admitted to a knowledge of these mysteries, if he shews himself to be of a light and frivolous disposition. When at last by the gravity of his demeanour he is judged to have proved himself indeed a man, a day is fixed for revealing to him the great secret. Then the headman of his local group, together with other grave and reverend seniors, conducts him to the mouth of the cave: the stones are rolled away from the entrance: the spirits within are duly warned of the approach of visitors; and then the sacred sticks and stones, tied up in bundles, are brought forth. The bundles are undone, the sticks and stones are taken out, one by one, reverently scrutinised, and exhibited to the novice, while the old men explain to him the meaning of the patterns incised on each and reveal to him the persons, alive or dead, to whom they belong. All the time the other men keep chanting in a low voice the traditions of their remote ancestors in the far-off dream times. At the close the novice is told the secret and sacred name which he is thenceforth to bear, and is warned never to allow it to pass his lips in the hearing of anybody except members of his own totemic group.[124] Sometimes this secret name is that of an ancestor of whom the man or woman is supposed to be a reincarnation: for women as well as men have their secret and sacred names.[125] [Sidenote: Number of _churinga_ in a store-house. Significance of the _churinga_. Use of the _churinga_ in magic.] The number of sacred birth-stones and sticks kept in any one store-house naturally varies from group to group; but whatever their number, whether more or less, in any one store-house they all normally belong to the same totem, though a few belonging to other totems may be borrowed and deposited for a time with them. For example, a sacred store-house of the honey-ant totem was found to contain sixty-eight birth-sticks of that totem with a few of the lizard totem and two of the wild-cat totem.[126] Any store-house will usually contain both sticks and stones, but as a rule perhaps the sticks predominate in number.[127] Time after time these tribal repositories are visited by the men and their contents taken out and examined. On each examination the sacred sticks and stones are carefully rubbed over with dry and powdered red ochre or charcoal, the sticks being rubbed with red ochre only, but the stones either with red ochre or charcoal.[128] Further, it is customary on these occasions to press the sacred objects against the stomachs and thighs of all the men present; this is supposed to untie their bowels, which are thought to be tightened and knotted by the emotion which the men feel at the sight of these venerated sticks and stones. Indeed, the emotion is sometimes very real: men have been seen to weep on beholding these mystic objects for the first time after a considerable interval.[129] Whenever the sacred store-house is visited and its contents examined, the old men explain to the younger men the marks incised on the sticks and stones, and recite the traditions associated with the dead men to whom they belonged;[130] so that these rude objects of wood and stone, with the lines and dots scratched on them, serve the savages as memorials of the past; they are in fact rudimentary archives as well as, we may almost say, rudimentary idols; for a stone or stick which represents a revered ancestor and is supposed to be endowed with some portion of his spirit, is not far from being an idol. No wonder, therefore, that they are guarded and treasured by a tribe as its most precious possession. When a group of natives have been robbed of them by thoughtless white men and have found the sacred store-house empty, they have tried to kill the traitor who betrayed the hallowed spot to the strangers, and have remained in camp for a fortnight weeping and wailing for the loss and plastering themselves with pipeclay, which is their token of mourning for the dead.[131] Yet, as a great mark of friendship, they will sometimes lend these sacred sticks and stones to a neighbouring group; for believing that the sticks and stones are associated with the spiritual parts of their former and present owners, they naturally wish to have as many of them as possible and regard their possession as a treasure of great price, a sort of reservoir of spiritual force,[132] which can be turned to account not only in battle by worsting the enemy, but in various other ways, such as by magically increasing the food supply. For instance, when a man of the grass-seed totem wishes to increase the supply of grass-seed in order that it may be eaten by people of other totems, he goes to the sacred store-house, clears the ground all around it, takes out a few of the holy sticks and stones, smears them with red ochre and decorates them with birds' down, chanting a spell all the time. Then he rubs them together so that the down flies off in all directions; this is supposed to carry with it the magical virtue of the sticks or stones and so to fertilise the grass-seed.[133] [Sidenote: Elements of a worship of the dead. Marvellous powers attributed by the Central Australians to their remote ancestors of the _alcheringa_ or dream time.] On the whole, when we survey these practices and beliefs of the Central Australian aborigines, we may perhaps conclude that, if they do not amount to a worship of the dead, they at least contain the elements out of which such a worship might easily be developed. At first sight, no doubt, their faith in the transmigration of souls seems and perhaps really is a serious impediment to a worship of the dead in the strict sense of the word. For if they themselves are the dead come to life again, it is difficult to see how they can worship the spirits of the dead without also worshipping each other, since they are all by hypothesis simply these worshipful spirits reincarnated. But though in theory every living man and woman is merely an ancestor or ancestress born again and therefore should be his or her equal, in practice they appear to admit that their forefathers of the remote _alcheringa_ or dream time were endowed with many marvellous powers which their modern reincarnations cannot lay claim to, and that accordingly these ancestral spirits were more to be reverenced, were in fact more worshipful, than their living representatives. On this subject Messrs. Spencer and Gillen observe: "The Central Australian native is firmly convinced, as will be seen from the accounts relating to their _alcheringa_ ancestors, that the latter were endowed with powers such as no living man now possesses. They could travel underground or mount into the sky, and could make creeks and water-courses, mountain-ranges, sand-hills, and plains. In very many cases the actual names of these natives are preserved in their traditions, but, so far as we have been able to discover, there is no instance of any one of them being regarded in the light of a 'deity.' Amongst the Central Australian natives there is never any idea of appealing for assistance to any one of these Alcheringa ancestors in any way, nor is there any attempt made in the direction of propitiation, with one single exception in the case of the mythic creature called Wollunqua, amongst the Warramunga tribe, who, it may be remarked, is most distinctly regarded as a snake and not as a human being."[134] Thus far Messrs. Spencer and Gillen. From their testimony it appears that with a single possible exception, to which I will return immediately, the Central Australian aborigines are not known to worship any of their dead ancestors; they indeed believe their remote forefathers of the _alcheringa_ age to have been endowed with marvellous powers which they themselves do not possess; but they do not regard these ancestral spirits as deities, nor do they pray and sacrifice to them for help and protection. The single possible exception to this general rule known to Messrs. Spencer and Gillen is the case of the mythical water-snake called Wollunqua, who is in a sense revered and propitiated by the Warramunga tribe. The case is interesting and instructive as indicative of an advance from magic towards religion in the strict sense of the word. Accordingly I propose to consider it somewhat fully. [Sidenote: The Wollunqua, a mythical water-snake, one of the Warramunga totems.] The Wollunqua is one of the many totems of the Warramunga tribe. It is to be borne in mind that, though every Australian tribe has many totems which are most commonly animals or plants and more rarely other natural objects, all the totems are not respected by all the members of the tribe; each totem is respected only by a particular group of men and women in the tribe, who believe themselves to be descended from the same totemic ancestor. Thus the whole tribe is broken up into many groups or bodies of men and women, each group knit together by a belief in a common descent from the totem, by a common respect for the totemic species, whether it be a species of animals or plants, or what not, and finally by the possession of a common name derived from the totem. Thus, for example, we have a group of men and women who believe themselves descended from an ancestor who had the bandicoot for his totem; they all respect bandicoots; and they are all called bandicoot people. Similarly with all the other totemic groups within the tribe. It is convenient to have a name for these totemic groups or tribal subdivisions, and accordingly we may call them clans, provided we remember that a totemic clan in this sense is not an independent political community such as the Scottish Highland clans used to be; it is merely a subdivision of the tribe, and the members of it do not usually keep to themselves but live more or less interfused with members of all the other totemic clans which together compose the tribe. Now amongst the Warramunga the Wollunqua or mythical water-snake is the totem of such a clan or tribal subdivision, the members of which believe themselves to be descended from the creature and call themselves by its name. So far, therefore, the Wollunqua is merely a totem of the ordinary sort, an object of respect for a particular section of the tribe. Like other totemic ancestors the Wollunqua is supposed to have wandered about the country leaving supplies of spirit individuals at various points, individuals who are constantly undergoing reincarnation. But on the other hand the Wollunqua differs from almost all other Australian totems in this, that whereas they are real objects, such as animals, plants, water, wind, the sun and moon, and so on, the Wollunqua is a purely mythical creature, which exists only in the imagination of the natives; for they believe it to be a water-snake so huge that if it were to stand up on its tail, its head would reach far up into the sky. It now lives in a large pool called Thapauerlu, hidden away in a lonely valley of the Murchison Range; but the Warramunga fear that it may at any moment sally out and do some damage. They say that it actually killed a number of them on one of its excursions, though happily they at last succeeded in beating it off. So afraid are they of the creature, that in speaking of it amongst themselves they will not use its proper name of Wollunqua but call it instead _urkulu nappaurinnia_, because, as they told Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, if they were to name it too often by its real name they would lose control over the beast and it would rush forth and devour them.[135] Thus the natives do not distinguish the Wollunqua from the rest of their actually existing totems, as we do: they have never beheld him with their bodily eyes, yet to them he is just as real as the kangaroos which they see hopping along the sands, as the flies which buzz about their heads in the sunshine, or as the cockatoos which flap screaming past in the thickets. How real this belief in the mythical snake is with these savages, was brought vividly home to Messrs. Spencer and Gillen when they visited, in company with some natives, the deep and lonely pool among the rocky hills in which the awful being is supposed to reside. Before they approached the spot, the natives had been talking and laughing freely, but when they drew near the water their voices were hushed and their demeanour became solemn. When all stood silent on the brink of the deep still pool, enclosed by a sandy margin on one side and by a line of red rocks on the other, two old men, the leaders of the totemic group of the Wollunqua, went down to the edge of the water and, with bowed heads, addressed the Wollunqua in whispers, asking him to remain quiet and do them no harm, for they were mates of his, and had brought two great white men to see where he lived and to tell them all about him. "We could plainly see," add Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, "that it was all very real to them, and that they implicitly believed that the Wollunqua was indeed alive beneath the water, watching them, though they could not see him."[136] [Sidenote: Religious character of the belief in the Wollunqua.] I need hardly point out what a near approach all this is to religion in the proper sense of the word. Here we have a firm belief in a purely imaginary being who is necessarily visible to the eye of faith alone, since I think we may safely assume that a water-snake, supposed to be many miles long and capable of reaching up to the sky, has no real existence either on the earth or in the waters under the earth. Yet to these savages this invisible being is just as real as the actually existing animals and men whom they perceive with their bodily senses; they not only pray to him but they propitiate him with a solemn ritual; and no doubt they would spurn with scorn the feeble attempts of shallow sceptics to question the reality of his existence or the literal truth of the myths they tell about him. Certainly these savages are far on the road to religion, if they have not already passed the Rubicon which divides it from the common workaday world. If an unhesitating faith in the unseen is part of religion, the Warramunga people of the Wollunqua totem are unquestionably religious. [Footnote 108: On the zoological peculiarities of Australia regarded as effects of its geographical isolation, see Alfred Newton, _Dictionary of Birds_ (London, 1893-96), pp. 317-319. He observes (p. 318) that "the isolation of Australia is probably the next oldest in the world to that of New Zealand, having possibly existed since the time when no mammals higher than marsupials had appeared on the face of the earth."] [Footnote 109: For details see _Totemism and Exogamy_, i. 314 _sqq._] [Footnote 110: Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_ (London, 1904), p. 491.] [Footnote 111: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. xi.] [Footnote 112: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ p. 545.] [Footnote 113: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ p. 546.] [Footnote 114: Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_ (London, 1899), pp. 119-127, 335-338, 552; _id., Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 145-153, 162, 271, 330 _sq._, 448-451, 512-515. Compare _Totemism and Exogamy_, i. 188 _sqq._] [Footnote 115: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 147.] [Footnote 116: See _Totemism and Exogamy_, i. 155 _sqq._, iv. 40 _sqq._] [Footnote 117: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 123, 126.] [Footnote 118: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 119-127, 128 _sqq._, 513; _id., Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 145 _sqq._, 257 _sqq._] [Footnote 119: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 132-135; _id._, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 258, 268 _sqq._] [Footnote 120: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 128, 134.] [Footnote 121: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 134 _sq._] [Footnote 122: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 133, 135; _id._, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 269.] [Footnote 123: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 267.] [Footnote 124: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 139 _sq._] [Footnote 125: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 273.] [Footnote 126: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 141.] [Footnote 127: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ p. 140] [Footnote 128: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes_, pp. 144, 145.] [Footnote 129: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes_, pp. 164, _sq._; _id._, _Northern Tribes_, pp. 261, 264.] [Footnote 130: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes_, p. 145.] [Footnote 131: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes_, p. 136.] [Footnote 132: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes_, pp. 158 _sq._] [Footnote 133: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes_, pp. 271 _sq._] [Footnote 134: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 490 _sq._] [Footnote 135: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 226 _sq._ Another mythical being in which the Warramunga believe is _the pau-wa_, a fabulous animal, half human and somewhat resembling a dog. See Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ pp. 195, 197, 201, 210 _sq._ But the creature seems not to be a totem, for it is not included in the list of totems given by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen (_op. cit._ pp. 768-773).] [Footnote 136: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 252 _sq._] LECTURE V THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE ABORIGINES OF CENTRAL AUSTRALIA (_continued_) [Sidenote: Beliefs of the Central Australian aborigines concerning the reincarnation of the dead. The mythical water-snake Wollunqua.] In the last lecture we began our survey of the belief in immortality and the practices to which it has given rise among the aboriginal tribes of Central Australia. I shewed that these primitive savages hold a very remarkable theory of birth and death. They believe that the souls of the dead do not perish but are reborn in human form after a longer or shorter interval. During that interval the spirits of the departed are supposed to congregate in certain parts of the country, generally distinguished by some conspicuous natural feature, which accordingly the natives account sacred, believing them to be haunted by the souls of the dead. From time to time one of these disembodied spirits enters into a passing woman and is born as an infant into the world. Thus according to the Central Australian theory every living person without exception is the reincarnation of a dead man, woman, or child. At first sight the theory seems to exclude the possibility of any worship of the dead, since it appears to put the living on a footing of perfect equality with the dead by identifying the one with the other. But I pointed out that as a matter of fact these savages do admit, whether logically or not, the superiority of their remote ancestors to themselves: they acknowledge that these old forefathers of theirs did possess many marvellous powers to which they themselves can lay no claim. In this acknowledgment, accordingly, we may detect an opening or possibility for the development of a real worship of ancestors. Indeed, as I said at the close of last lecture, something closely approaching to ancestor worship has actually grown up in regard to the mythical ancestor of the Wollunqua clan in the Warramunga tribe. The Wollunqua is a purely fabulous water-snake, of gigantic dimensions, which is supposed to haunt the waters of a certain lonely pool called Thapauerlu, in the Murchison Range of mountains. Unlike the ancestors of the other totemic clans, this mythical serpent is never reborn in human form; he always lives in his solitary pool among the barren hills; but the natives think that he has it in his power to come forth and do them an injury, and accordingly they pray to him to remain quiet and not to harm them. Indeed so afraid of him are they that speaking of the creature among themselves they avoid using his proper name of Wollunqua and call him by a different name, lest hearing himself called by his true name he should rush forth and devour them. More than that they even endeavour to propitiate him by the performance of certain rites, which, however childish and absurd they may seem to us, are very solemn affairs for these simple folk. The rites were witnessed by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, whose description I will summarise. It offers an interesting and instructive example of a ritual observed by primitive savages, who are clearly standing on, if they have not already crossed, the threshold of religion. [Sidenote: Wanderings of the Wollunqua. Dramatic ceremonies in honour of the Wollunqua.] Like all other totemic ancestors the Wollunqua is said to have arisen at a particular spot, to have wandered about the country, and finally to have gone down into the ground. Starting from the deep rocky pool in the Murchison Range he travelled at first underground, coming up, however, at various points where he performed ceremonies and left many spirit children, who issued from his body and remained behind, forming local totemic centres when he had passed on. It is these spirit children who have formed the Wollunqua clan ever since, undergoing an endless series of reincarnations. Now the ceremonies which the clan perform in honour of their mythical ancestor the Wollunqua all refer to his wanderings about the country. Thus there is a particular water-hole called Pitingari where the great old water-snake is said to have emerged from the ground and looked about him. Here, accordingly, two men performed a ceremony. Each of them was decorated with a broad band of red down, which curved round both the front and the back of the performer and stood sharply out from the mass of white down with which all the rest of the upper part of his body was covered. These broad red bands represented the Wollunqua. Each man also wore a tall, conical helmet adorned with a curved band of red down, which, no doubt, likewise symbolised the mythical serpent. When the two actors in the little drama had been attired in this quaint costume of red and white down, they retired behind a bush, which served for the side scenes of a theatre. Then, when the orchestra, composed of adult men, struck up the music on the ceremonial ground by chanting and beating boomerangs and sticks together, the performers ran in, stopping every now and then to shake themselves in imitation of the snake. Finally, they sat down close together with their heads bowed down on a few green branches of gum-trees. A man then stepped up to them, knocked off their head-dresses, and the simple ceremony came to an end.[137] [Sidenote: Ceremony in honour of the Wollunqua.] The next ceremony was performed on the following day at another place called Antipataringa, where the mythical snake is said to have halted in his wanderings. The same two men acted as before, but this time one of them carried on his head a curious curved bundle shaped like an enormous boomerang. It was made of grass-stalks bound together with human hair-string and decorated with white down. This sacred object represented the Wollunqua himself.[138] From this spot the snake was believed to have travelled on to another place called Tjunguniari, where he popped up his head among the sand-hills, the greater part of his body remaining underground. Indeed, of such an enormous length was the serpent, that though his head had now travelled very many miles his tail still remained at the starting-point and had not yet begun to take part in the procession. Here accordingly the third ceremony, perhaps we may say the third act in the drama, was performed on the third day. In it one of the actors personated the snake himself, while the other stood for a sand-hill.[139] [Sidenote: Further ceremony in honour of the Wollunqua: the white mound with the red wavy band to represent the mythical snake.] After an interval of three days a fourth ceremony was performed of an entirely different kind. A keel-shaped mound was made of wet sand, about fifteen feet long by two feet high. The smooth surface of the mound was covered with a mass of little dots of white down, except for a long wavy band of red down which ran all along both sides of the mound. This wavy red band represented the Wollunqua, his head being indicated by a small round swelling at one end and his tail by a short prolongation at the other. The mound itself represented a sand-hill beside which the snake is said to have stood up and looked about. The preparation of this elaborate emblem of the Wollunqua occupied the greater part of the day, and it was late in the afternoon before it was completed. When darkness fell, fires were lighted on the ceremonial ground, and as the night grew late more fires were kindled, and all of the men sat round the mound singing songs which referred to the mythical water-snake. This went on for hours. At last, about three o'clock in the morning, a ring of fires was lit all round the ceremonial ground, in the light of which the white trunks of the gum-trees and the surrounding scrub stood out weird and ghastly against the blackness of darkness beyond. Amid the wildest excitement the men of the Wollunqua totem now ranged themselves in single file on their knees beside the mound which bore the red image of their great mythical forefather, and with their hands on their thighs surged round and round it, every man bending in unison first to one side and then to the other, each successive movement being accompanied by a loud and simultaneous shout, or rather yell, while the other men, who were not of the Wollunqua totem, stood by, clanging their boomerangs excitedly, and one old man, who acted as a sort of choregus, walked backwards at the end of the kneeling procession of Wollunqua men, swaying his body about and lifting high his knees at every step. In this way, with shouts and clangour, the men of the totem surged twice round the mound on their knees. After that, as the fires died down, the men rose from their knees, and for another hour every one sat round the mound singing incessantly. The last act in the drama was played at four o'clock in the morning at the moment when the first faint streaks of dawn glimmered in the east. At sight of them every man jumped to his feet, the smouldering fires were rekindled, and in their blaze the long white mound stood out in strong relief. The men of the totem, armed with spears, boomerangs, and clubs, ranged themselves round it, and encouraged by the men of the other totems attacked it fiercely with their weapons, until in a few minutes they had hacked it to pieces, and nothing was left of it but a rough heap of sandy earth. The fires again died down and for a short time silence reigned. Then, just as the sun rose above the eastern horizon, the painful ceremony of subincision was performed on three youths, who had recently passed through the earlier stages of initiation.[140] [Sidenote: The rite aims both at pleasing and at coercing the mythical snake.] This remarkable rite is supposed, we are informed, "in some way to be associated with the idea of persuading, or almost forcing, the Wollunqua to remain quietly in his home under the water-hole at Thapauerlu, and to do no harm to any of the natives. They say that when he sees the mound with his representation drawn upon it he is gratified, and wriggles about underneath with pleasure. The savage attack upon the mound is associated with the idea of driving him down, and, taken altogether, the ceremony indicates their belief that, at one and the same time, they can both please and coerce the mythic beast. It is necessary to do things to please him, or else he might grow sulky and come out and do them harm, but at the same time they occasionally use force to make him do what they want."[141] In fact the ritual of the mound with its red image of the snake combines the principles of religion and magic. So far as the rite is intended to please and propitiate the mythical beast, it is religious; so far as it is intended to constrain him, it is magical. The two principles are contradictory and the attempt to combine them is illogical; but the savage is heedless, or rather totally unaware, of the contradiction and illogicality: all that concerns him is to accomplish his ends: he has neither the wish nor the ability to analyse his motives. In this respect he is in substantial agreement with the vast majority of mankind. How many of us scrutinise the reasons of our conduct with the view of detecting and eliminating any latent inconsistencies in them? And how many, or rather how few of us, on such a scrutiny would be so fortunate as to discover that there were no such inconsistencies to detect? The logical pedant who imagines that men cannot possibly act on inconsistent and even contradictory motives only betrays his ignorance of life. It is not therefore for us to cast stones at the Warramunga men of the Wollunqua totem for attempting to propitiate and constrain their mythical serpent at the same time. Such contradictions meet us again and again in the history of religion: it is interesting but by no means surprising to find them in one of its rudimentary stages. [Sidenote: Thunder the voice of the Wollunqua.] On the evening of the day which succeeded the construction of the emblematic mound the old men who had made the emblem said they had heard the Wollunqua talking, and that he was pleased with what had been done and was sending them rain. What they took for the voice of the Wollunqua was thunder rumbling in the distance. No rain fell, but a few days later thunder was again heard rolling afar off and a heavy bank of clouds lay low on the western horizon. The old men now said that the Wollunqua was growling because the remains of the mound had been left uncovered; so they hastily cut down branches and covered up the ruins. After that the Wollunqua ceased to growl: there was no more thunder.[142] [Sidenote: Ground drawings of the Wollunqua.] On the four following days ceremonies of an entirely different kind from all the preceding were performed in honour of the Wollunqua. A space of sandy ground was smoothed down, sprinkled with water, and rubbed so as to form a compact surface. The smooth surface was then overlaid with a coat of red or yellow ochre, and on this coloured background a number of designs were traced, one after the other, by a series of white dots, which together made up a pattern of curved lines and concentric circles. These patterns represented the Wollunqua and some of his traditionary adventures. The snake himself was portrayed by a broad wavy band, but all the other designs were purely conventional; for example, trees, ant-hills, and wells were alike indicated by circles. Altogether there were eight such drawings on the earth, some of them very elaborate and entailing, each of them, not less than six or seven hours' labour: one of them was ten feet long. Each drawing was rubbed out before the next one was drawn. Moreover, the drawings were accompanied by little dramas acted by decorated men. In one of these dramas no fewer than eight actors took part, some of whom wore head-dresses adorned with a long wavy band to represent the Wollunqua. The last drawing of all was supposed to portray the mythical snake as he plunged into the earth and returned to his home in the rocky pool called Thapauerlu among the Murchison Ranges.[143] [Sidenote: Religious importance of the Wollunqua.] I have dwelt at some length on these ceremonies of the Wollunqua totem, because they furnish a remarkable and perhaps unique instance in Australia of a totemic ancestor in the act of developing into something like a god. In the Warramunga tribe there are other snake totems besides the Wollunqua; for example, there is the black snake totem and the deaf adder totem. But this purely mythical water-snake, the Wollunqua, is the most important of them all and is regarded as the great father of all the snakes. "It is not easy," say Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, "to express in words what is in reality rather a vague feeling amongst the natives, but after carefully watching the different series of ceremonies we were impressed with the feeling that the Wollunqua represented to the native mind the idea of a dominant totem."[144] Thus he is at once a fabulous animal and the mythical ancestor of a human clan, but his animal nature apparently predominates over his semi-human nature, as shewn by the drawings and effigies of him, all of which are in serpent form. The prayers offered to him at the pool which he is supposed to haunt, and the attempt to please him by drawing his likeness can only be regarded as propitiatory rites and therefore as rudimentary forms of worship. And the idea that thunder is his voice, and that the rain is a gift sent by him in return for the homage paid to him by the people, appears to prove that in course of time, if left to himself, he might easily have been elevated to the sky and have ranked as a celestial deity, who dwells aloft and sends down or withholds the refreshing showers at his good pleasure. Thus the Wollunqua, a rude creation of the savage Australian imagination, possesses a high interest for the historian of religion, since he combines elements of ancestor worship and totem worship with a germ of heaven worship; while on the purely material side his representation, both in plastic form by a curved bundle of grass-stalks and in graphic form by broad wavy bands of red down, may be said in a sense to stand at the starting-point of that long development of religious art, which in so many countries and so many ages has attempted to represent to the bodily eye the mysteries of the unseen and invisible, and which, whatever we may think of the success or failure of that attempt, has given to the world some of the noblest works of sculpture and painting. [Sidenote: Possible religious evolution of totemism.] I have already pointed out the difficulty of seeing how a belief in the reincarnation of the dead, such as prevails universally among the aborigines of Central Australia, could ever be reconciled with or develop into a worship of the dead; for by identifying the living with the dead, the theory of reincarnation seems to abolish that distinction between the worshipper and the worshipped which is essential to the existence of worship. But, as I also indicated, what seems a loophole or mode of escape from the dilemma may be furnished by the belief of these savages, that though they themselves are nothing but their ancestors come to life again, nevertheless in their earliest incarnations of the _alcheringa_ or dream times their ancestors possessed miraculous powers which they have admittedly lost in their later reincarnations; for this suggests an incipient discrimination or line of cleavage between the living and the dead; it hints that perhaps after all the first ancestors, with their marvellous endowments, may have been entirely different persons from their feebler descendants, and if this vague hint could only grow into a firm conviction of the essential difference between the two, then the course would be clear for the development of ancestor worship: the dead forefathers, viewed as beings perfectly distinct from and far superior to the living, might easily come to receive from the latter the homage of prayer and sacrifice, might be besought by their descendants to protect them in danger and to succour them in all the manifold ills of life, or at least to abstain from injuring them. Now, this important step in religious evolution appears to have been actually taken by the Wollunqua, the mythical water-snake, who is the totem of one of the Warramunga clans. Unlike all the other totems he is supposed to exist only in his invisible and animal form and never to be reincarnated in a man.[145] Hence, withdrawn as he is from the real world of sense, the imagination is free to play about him and to invest him more and more with those supernatural attributes which men ascribe to their deities. And what has actually happened to this particular totemic ancestor might under favourable circumstances happen to many others. Each of them might be gradually detached from the line of his descendants, might cease to be reincarnated in them, and might gradually attain to the lonely pre-eminence of godhead. Thus a system of pure totemism, such as prevails among the aborigines of Central Australia, might develop through a phase of ancestor worship into a pantheon of the ordinary type. [Sidenote: Conspicuous features of the landscape associated with ancestral spirits.] Although none of the other totemic ancestors of the Central Australian aborigines appears to have advanced so far on the road to religion as the Wollunqua, yet they all contain in germ the elements out of which a religion might have been developed. It is difficult for us civilised men to conceive the extent to which the thoughts and lives of these savages are dominated by the memories and traditions of the dead. Every conspicuous feature in the landscape is not only associated with the legendary doings of some ancestors but is commonly said to have arisen as a direct result of their actions. The mountains, the plains, the rivers, the seas, the islands of ancient Greece itself were not more thickly haunted by the phantoms of a fairy mythology than are the barren sun-scorched steppes and stony hills of the Australian wilderness; but great indeed is the gulf which divides the beautiful creations of Greek fancy from the crude imaginings of the Australian savage, whose legendary tales are for the most part a mere tissue of trivial absurdities unrelieved by a single touch of beauty or poetry. [Sidenote: A journey through the Warramunga country.] To illustrate at once the nature and the abundance of these legends I will quote a passage in which Messrs. Spencer and Gillen describe a journey they took in company with some Warramunga natives over part of their country:--"For the first two days our way lay across miserable plain country covered with poor scrub, with here and there low ranges rising. Every prominent feature of any kind was associated with some tradition of their past. A range some five miles away from Tennant Creek arose to mark the path traversed by the great ancestor of the Pittongu (bat) totem. Several miles further on a solitary upstanding column of rock represented an opossum man who rested here, looked about the country, and left spirit children behind him; a low range of remarkably white quartzite hills indicated a large number of white ant eggs thrown here in the _wingara_[146] by the Munga-munga women as they passed across the country. A solitary flat-topped hill arose to mark the spot where the Wongana (crow) ancestor paused for some time to pierce his nose; and on the second night we camped by the side of a waterhole where the same crow lived for some time in the _wingara_, and where now there are plenty of crow spirit children. All the time, as we travelled along, the old men were talking amongst themselves about the natural features associated in tradition with these and other totemic ancestors of the tribe, and pointing them out to us. On the third day we travelled, at first for some hours, by the side of a river-bed,--perfectly dry of course,--and passed the spot where two hawks first made fire by rubbing sticks together, two fine gum-trees on the banks now representing the place where they stood up. A few miles further on we came to a water-hole by the side of which the moon-man met a bandicoot woman, and while the two were talking together the fire made by the hawks crept upon them and burnt the woman, who was, however, restored to life again by the moon-man, with whom she then went up into the sky. Late in the afternoon we skirted the eastern base of the Murchison Range, the rugged quartzite hills in this part being associated partly with the crow ancestor and partly with the bat. Following up a valley leading into the hills we camped, just after sunset, by the side of a rather picturesque water-pool amongst the ranges. A short distance before reaching this the natives pointed out a curious red cliff, standing out amongst the low hills which were elsewhere covered with thin scrub. This, which is called Tjiti, represents the spot where an old woman spent a long time digging for yams, the latter being indicated by great heaps of stones lying all around. On the opposite side of the valley a column of stone marks the spot where the woman went into the earth. The water-hole by which we were camped was called Wiarminni. It was in reality a deep pool in the bed of a creek coming down from the hills. Behind it the rocks rose abruptly, and amongst them there was, or rather would have been if a stream had been flowing, a succession of cascades and rocky water-holes. Two of the latter, just above Wiarminni, are connected with a fish totem, and represent the spot where two fish men arose in the _alcheringa_, fought one another, left spirit children behind, and finally went down into the ground. We were now, so to speak, in the very midst of _mungai_ [i.e. of places associated with the totems], for the old totemic ancestors of the tribe, who showed a most commendable fondness for arising and walking about in the few picturesque spots which their country contained, had apparently selected these rocky gorges as their central home. All around us the water-holes, gorges, and rocky crags were peopled with spirit individuals left behind by one or other of the following totemic ancestors:--Wollunqua, Pittongu (bat), Wongana (crow), wild dog, emu, bandicoot, and fish, whose lines of travel in the _alcheringa_ formed a regular network over the whole countryside."[147] [Sidenote: Dramatic ceremonies to commemorate the doings of ancestors.] Similar evidence could be multiplied, but this may suffice to teach us how to the minds of these Central Australian savages the whole country is haunted, in the literal sense, not merely by the memories of their dead, but by the spirits which they left behind them and which are constantly undergoing reincarnation. And not only are the minds of the aborigines preoccupied by the thought of their ancestors, who are recalled to them by all the familiar features of the landscape, but they spend a considerable part of their time in dramatically representing the legendary doings of their rude forefathers of the remote past. It is astonishing, we are told, how large a part of a native's life is occupied with the performance of these dramatic ceremonies. The older he grows, the greater is the share he takes in them, until at last they actually absorb the greater part of his thoughts. The rites which seem so trivial to us are most serious matters to him. They are all connected with the great ancestors of the tribe, and he is firmly convinced that when he dies his spirit will rejoin theirs and live in communion with them until the time comes for him to be born again into the world. With such solemnity does he look on the celebration of these commemorative services, as we may call them, that none but initiated men are allowed to witness them; women and children are strictly excluded from the spectacle. These sacred dramas are often, though by no means always, associated with the rites of initiation which young men have to pass through before they are admitted to full membership of the tribe and to participation in its deepest mysteries. The rites of initiation are not all undergone by a youth at the same time; they succeed each other at longer or shorter intervals of time, and at each of them he is privileged to witness some of the solemn ceremonies in which the traditions of the tribal ancestors are dramatically set forth before him, until, when he has passed through the last of the rites and ordeals, he is free to behold and to take part in the whole series of mystery plays or professedly historical dramas. Sometimes the performance of these dramas extends over two or three months, during which one or more of them are acted daily.[148] For the most part, they are very short and simple, each of them generally lasting only a few minutes, though the costumes of the actors are often elaborate and may have taken hours to prepare. I will describe a few of them as samples. [Sidenote: Ceremony of the Hakea flower totem.] We will begin with a ceremony of the Hakea flower totem in the Arunta tribe, as to which it may be premised that a decoction of the Hakea flower is a favourite drink of the natives. The little drama was acted by two men, each of whom was decorated on his bare body by broad bands of pearly grey edged with white down, which passed round his waist and over his shoulders, contrasting well with the chocolate colour of his skin. On his head each of them wore a kind of helmet made of twigs, and from their ears hung tips of the tails of rabbit-bandicoots. The two sat on the ground facing each other with a shield between them. One of them held in his hand some twigs representing the Hakea flower in bloom; these he pretended to steep in water so as to brew the favourite beverage of the natives, and the man sitting opposite him made believe to suck it up with a little mop. Meantime the other men ran round and round them shouting _wha! wha!_ This was the substance of the play, which ended as usual by several men placing their hands on the shoulders of the performers as a signal to them to stop.[149] [Sidenote: Ceremony of a fish totem.] Again, to take another Arunta ceremony of a fish totem called _interpitna_. The fish is the bony bream (_Chatoessus horni_), which abounds in the water-holes of the country. The play was performed by a single actor, an old man, whose face was covered with a mass of white down contrasting strongly with a large bunch of black eagle-hawk feathers which he wore on his head. His body was decorated with bands of charcoal edged with white down. Squatting on the ground he moved his body and extended his arms from his sides, opening and closing them as he leaned forwards, so as to imitate a fish swelling itself out and opening and closing its gills. Then, holding twigs in his hands, he moved along mimicking the action of a man who drives fish before him with a branch in a pool, just as the natives do to catch the fish. Meantime an orchestra of four men squatted beside him singing and beating time with a stick on the ground.[150] [Sidenote: Ceremony of a plum-tree totem.] Again, another Arunta ceremony of the plum-tree totem was performed by four actors, who simply pretended to knock down and eat imaginary plums from an imaginary plum-tree.[151] An interesting point in this very simple drama is that in it the men of the plum-tree totem are represented eating freely of their totem, which is quite contrary to the practice of the present day, but taken along with many similar ceremonies it goes far to prove that in the ancient days, to which all these dramatic ceremonies refer, it was the regular practice for men and women of a totem to eat their totemic animals or plants. As another example of a drama in which the performers are represented eating their totem we may take a ceremony of the ant totem in the Warramunga tribe. The legendary personages who figure in it are two women of the ant totem, ancestresses of the ant clan, who are said to have devoted all their time to catching and eating ants, except when they were engaged in the performance of ceremonies. The two men who personated these women in the drama (for no woman is allowed to witness, much less to act in, these sacred dramas) had the whole of the upper parts of their bodies, including their faces and the cylindrical helmets which they wore on their heads, covered with a dense mass of little specks of red down. These specks stood for the ants, alive or dead, and also for the stones and trees on the spots where the two women encamped. In the drama the two actors thus arrayed walked about the ground as if they were searching for ants to eat. Each of them carried a wooden trough and stooping down from time to time he turned over the ground and picked up small stones which he placed in the trough till it was full. The stones represented the masses of ants which the women gathered for food. After carrying on this pantomime for a time the two actors pretended to discover each other with surprise and to embrace with joy, much to the amusement of the spectators.[152] [Sidenote: In these ceremonies the action is appropriate to the totem. Ceremony of the witchetty grub totem.] In all these ceremonies you will observe that the action of the drama is strictly appropriate to the totem. In the drama of the Hakea flower totem the actors pretend to make and drink the beverage brewed from Hakea flowers; in the ceremony of the fish totem the actor feigns to be a fish and also to catch fish; in the ceremony of the plum-tree totem the actors pretend to knock down and eat plums; and in the ceremony of the ant totem the actors make believe to gather ants for food. Similarly, to take a few more examples, in a ceremony of the witchetty grub totem of the Arunta tribe the body of the actor was decorated with lines of white and red down, and he had a shield adorned with a number of concentric circles of down. The smaller circles represented the bush on which the grub lives first of all, and the larger circles represented the bush on which the adult insect lays its eggs. When all was ready, the performer seated himself on the ground and imitated the grub, alternately doubling himself up and rising on his knees, while he extended his arms and made them quiver in imitation of the insect's wings; and every now and then he would bend over the shield and sway to and fro, and up and down, in imitation of the insect hovering over the bushes on which it lays its eggs.[153] In another ceremony of the witchetty grub totem, which followed immediately the one I have just described, the actor had two shields beside him. The smaller of the shields was ornamented with zigzag lines of white pipe-clay which were supposed to indicate the tracks of the grub; the larger shield was covered with larger and smaller series of concentric circles, the larger representing the seeds of a bush on which the insect feeds, while the smaller stood for the eggs of the adult insect. As before, the actor wriggled and flapped his arms in imitation of the fluttering of the insect when it first leaves its chrysalis case in the ground and attempts to fly. In acting thus he was supposed to represent a celebrated ancestor of the witchetty grub totem.[154] [Sidenote: Ceremony of the emu totem.] The last example of such ceremonies which I shall cite is one of the emu totem in the Arunta tribe. The body of the actor was decorated with perpendicular lines of white down reaching from his shoulders to his knees; and on his head he supported a towering head-piece tipped with a bunch of emu feathers in imitation of the neck and head of an emu. Thus arrayed he stalked backwards and forwards in the aimless fashion of the bird.[155] [Sidenote: These dramatic ceremonies were probably at first magical rites intended to supply the people with food and other necessaries.] What are we to think of the intention of these little dramas which the Central Australian aborigines regard as sacred and to the performance of which they devote so much time and labour? At first sight they are simply commemorative services, designed to represent the ancestors as they lived and moved in the far-past times, to recall their adventures, of which legend has preserved the memory, and to set them dramatically before the eyes of their living descendants. So far, therefore, the dramas might be described as purely historical in intention, if not in reality. But there are reasons for thinking that in all cases a deeper meaning underlies, or formerly underlay, the performance of all these apparently simple historical plays; in fact, we may suspect that originally they were all magical ceremonies observed for the practical purpose of supplying the people with food, water, sunshine, and everything else of which they stand in need. This conclusion is suggested first of all by the practice of the Arunta and other Central Australian tribes, who observe very similar ceremonies with the avowed intention of thereby multiplying the totemic animals and plants in order that they may be eaten by the tribe, though not by the particular clan which has these animals or plants for its totem. It is true that the Arunta distinguish these magical ceremonies for the multiplication of the totems from what we may call the more purely commemorative or historical performances, and they have a special name for the former, namely _intichiuma_, which they do not bestow on the latter. Yet these _intichiuma_ or magical ceremonies resemble the commemorative ceremonies so closely that it is difficult to suppose they can always have been wholly distinct. For example, in the magical ceremonies for the multiplication of witchetty grubs the performers pretend to be the insects emerging from their chrysalis cases,[156] just as the actors do in the similar commemorative ceremony which I have described; and again in a magical ceremony for the multiplication of emus the performers wear head-dresses to represent the long neck and small head of the bird, and they mimic its gait,[157] exactly as the actors do in the commemorative ceremony. It seems reasonable, therefore, to conjecture that the ceremonies which now are, or seem to be, purely commemorative or historical were originally magical in intention, being observed for the practical purpose of multiplying edible animals and plants or supplying other wants of the tribe. [Sidenote: Among the Warramunga these dramatic ceremonies are avowedly performed as magical rites.] Now this conjecture is strongly confirmed by the actual usage of the Warramunga tribe, amongst whom the commemorative or historical dramas are avowedly performed as magical rites: in other words, the Warramunga attribute a magical virtue to the simple performance of such dramas: they think that by merely acting the parts of their totemic ancestors they thereby magically multiply the edible animals or plants which these ancestors had for their totems. Hence in this tribe the magical ceremonies and the dramatic performances practically coincide: with them, as Messrs. Spencer and Gillen say, the _intichiuma_ or magical ceremonies (called by the Warramunga _thalamminta_) "for the most part simply consist in the performance of a complete series representing the _alcheringa_ history of the totemic ancestor. In this tribe each totemic group has usually one great ancestor, who arose in some special spot and walked across the country, making various natural features as he did so,--creeks, plains, ranges, and water-holes,--and leaving behind him spirit individuals who have since been reincarnated. The _intichiuma_ [or magical] ceremony of the totem really consists in tracking these ancestors' paths, and repeating, one after the other, ceremonies commemorative of what are called the _mungai_ spots, the equivalent of the _oknanikilla_ amongst the Arunta--that is, the places where he left the spirit children behind."[158] Apparently the Warramunga imagine that by imitating a totemic ancestor at the very place where he left spirit children of the same totem behind him, they thereby enable these spirit children to be born again and so increase the food supply, whenever their totem is an edible animal or plant; for we must always remember that in the mind of these savages the idea of a man or woman is inextricably confused with the idea of his or her totem; they seem unable to distinguish between the two, and therefore they believe that in multiplying human beings at their local totemic centres (_mungai_ or _oknanikilla_) they simultaneously multiply their totems; and as the totems are commonly edible animals and plants, it follows that in the opinion of the Warramunga the general effect of performing these ancestral plays is to increase the supply of food of the tribe. No wonder, therefore, that the dramas are sacred, and that the natives attribute the most serious significance to their performance: the neglect to perform them might, in their judgment, bring famine and ruin on the whole tribe. As Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, speaking of these ceremonies, justly observe: "Their proper performance is a matter of very great importance in the eyes of the natives, because, not only do they serve to keep alive and hand down from generation to generation the traditions of the tribe, but they are, at least amongst the Warramunga, intimately associated with the most important object of maintaining the food supply, as every totemic group is held responsible for the maintenance of the material object the name of which it bears."[159] [Sidenote: General view of the attitude of the Central Australian natives towards their dead.] To sum up the attitude of the Central Australian natives towards their dead. They believe that their dead are constantly undergoing reincarnation by being born again of women into the world, in fact that every living man, woman, and child is nothing but a dead person come to life again, that so it has been from the beginning and that so it will be to the end. Of a special world of the departed, remote and different from the material world in which they live and from the familiar scenes to which they have been accustomed from infancy, they have no conception; still less, if that is possible, have they any idea of a division of the world of the dead into a realm of bliss and a realm of woe, where the spirits of the good live ineffably happy and the spirits of the bad live unspeakably miserable. To their simple minds the spirits of the dead dwell all about them in the rocky gorges, the barren plains, the wooded dells, the rustling trees, the still waters of their native land, haunting in death the very spots where they last entered into their mothers' wombs to be born, and where in future they will again enter into the wombs of other women to be born again as other children into the world. And so, they think, it will go on for ever and ever. Such a creed seems at first sight, as I have pointed out, irreconcilable with a worship of the dead in the proper sense of the word; and so perhaps it would be, if these savages were strictly consistent and logical in their theories. But they are not. They admit that their remote ancestors, in other words, that they themselves in former incarnations, possessed certain marvellous powers to which in the present degenerate days they can lay no claim; and in this significant admission we may detect a rift, a real distinction of kind, between the living and the dead, which in time might widen out into an impassable gulf. In other words, we may suppose that the Central Australians, if left to themselves, might come to hold that the dead return no more to the land of the living, and that, acknowledging as they do the vast superiority of their remote ancestors to themselves, they might end by worshipping them, at first simply as powerful ancestral spirits, and afterwards as supernatural deities, whose original connexion with humanity had been totally forgotten. In point of fact we saw that among the Warramunga the mythical water-snake Wollunqua, who is regarded as an ancestor of a totemic clan, has made some progress towards deification; for while he is still regarded as the forefather of the clan which bears his name, it is no longer supposed that he is born again of women into the world, but that he lives eternal and invisible under the water of a haunted pool, and that he has it in his power both to help and to harm his people, who pray to him and perform ceremonies in his honour. This awful being, whose voice is heard in the peal of thunder and whose dreadful name may not be pronounced in common life, is not far from godhead; at least he is apparently the nearest approach to it which the imagination of these rude savages has been able to conceive. Lastly, as I have pointed out, the reverence which the Central Australians entertain for their dead ancestors is closely bound up with their totemism; they fail to distinguish clearly or at all between men and their totems, and accordingly the ceremonies which they perform to commemorate the dead are at the same time magical rites designed to ensure an abundant supply of food and of all the other necessaries and conveniences which savage life requires or admits of; indeed, we may with some probability conjecture that the magical intention of these ceremonies is the primary and original one, and that the commemorative intention is secondary and derivative. If that could be proved to be so (which is hardly to be expected), we should be obliged to conclude that in this as in so many enquiries into the remote human past we detect evidence of an Age of Magic preceding anything that deserves to be dignified with the name of religion. That ends what I have to say at present as to the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the Central Australian aborigines. In my next lecture I propose to pursue the enquiry among the other tribes of Australia. [Footnote 137: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 228 _sq._] [Footnote 138: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 229 _sq._] [Footnote 139: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ pp. 230 _sq._] [Footnote 140: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 231-238.] [Footnote 141: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ p. 238.] [Footnote 142: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ pp. 238 _sq._] [Footnote 143: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 239-247.] [Footnote 144: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ p. 248.] [Footnote 145: "On the other hand there is a great difference between the Wollunqua and any other totem, inasmuch as the particular animal is purely mythical, and except for the one great progenitor of the totemic group, is not supposed to exist at the present day" (Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 248).] [Footnote 146: The _wingara_ is the equivalent of the Arunta _alcheringa_, that is, the earliest legendary or mythical times of which the natives profess to have knowledge.] [Footnote 147: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 249 _sq._] [Footnote 148: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 33 _sq._, 177 _sq._] [Footnote 149: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 297 _sq._] [Footnote 150: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 316 _sq._] [Footnote 151: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ p. 320.] [Footnote 152: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 199-204.] [Footnote 153: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 179 _sq._] [Footnote 154: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 179 _sq._] [Footnote 155: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 358 _sq._, and p. 343, fig 73.] [Footnote 156: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 176.] [Footnote 157: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ pp. 182 _sq._] [Footnote 158: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 297.] [Footnote 159: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 197.] LECTURE VI THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE OTHER ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA [Sidenote: Customs and beliefs concerning the dead in the other tribes of Australia.] In the last lecture I concluded my account of the beliefs and practices of the Central Australian aborigines in regard to the dead. To-day I propose to consider the customs and beliefs concerning the dead which prevail among the native tribes in other parts of Australia. But at the outset I must warn you that our information as to these other tribes is far less full and precise than that which we possess as to the tribes of the centre, which have had the great advantage of being observed and described by two highly qualified scientific observers, Messrs. Spencer and Gillen. Our knowledge of all other Australian tribes is comparatively fragmentary, and accordingly it is impossible to give even an approximately complete view of their notions concerning the state of the human spirit after death, and of the rites which they observe for the purpose of disarming or propitiating the souls of the departed. We must therefore content ourselves with more or less partial glimpses of this side of native religion. [Sidenote: Belief in the reincarnation of the dead among the natives of Queensland. The _ngai_ spirits.] The first question we naturally ask is whether the belief in the reincarnation of the dead, which prevails universally among the Central tribes, reappears among tribes in other parts of the continent. It certainly does so, and although the evidence on this subject is very imperfect it suffices to raise presumption that a similar belief in the rebirth or reincarnation of the dead was formerly universal among the Australian aborigines. Unquestionably the belief is entertained by some of the natives of Queensland, who have been described for us by Mr. W. E. Roth. Thus, for example, the aborigines on the Pennefather River think that every person's spirit undergoes a series of reincarnations, and that in the interval between two reincarnations the spirit resides in one or other of the haunts of Anjea, a mythical being who causes conception in women by putting mud babies into their bodies. Such spots, haunted by the fabulous being Anjea and by the souls of the dead awaiting rebirth, may be a tree, a rock, or a pool of water; they clearly correspond to the local totem centres (_oknanikilla_ among the Arunta, _mungai_ among the Warramunga) of the Central Australian tribes which I described in former lectures. The natives of the Pennefather River observe a ceremony at the birth of a child in order to ascertain the exact spot where its spirit tarried in the interval since its last incarnation; and when they have discovered it they speak of the child as obtained from a tree, a rock, or a pool of water, according to the place from which its spirit is supposed to have passed into its mother.[160] Readers of the classics can hardly fail to be reminded of the Homeric phrase to be "born of an oak or a rock,"[161] which seems to point to a similar belief in the possibility of human souls awaiting reincarnation in the boughs of an oak-tree or in the cleft of a rock. In the opinion of the Pennefather natives all disembodied human spirits or _choi_, as they call them, are mischief-makers and evildoers, for they make people sick or crazy; but the medicine-men can sometimes control them for good or evil. They wander about in the bush, but there are certain hollow trees or clumps of trees with wide-spreading branches, which they most love to haunt, and they can be heard in the rustling of the leaves or the crackling of the boughs at night. Anjea himself, who puts babies into women, is never seen, but you may hear him laughing in the depths of the forest, among the rocks, in the lagoons, and along the mangrove swamps; and when you hear his laugh you may be sure that he has got a baby.[162] If a native happens to hurt himself near a tree, he imagines that the spirit of some dead person is lurking among the branches, and he will never cut that tree down lest a worse thing should befall him at the hands of the vengeful ghost.[163] A curious feature in the beliefs of these Pennefather natives is that apart from the spirit called _choi_, which lives in a disembodied state between two incarnations, every person is supposed to have a spirit of a different sort called _ngai_, which has its seat in the heart; they feel it beating within their breast; it talks to them in sleep and so is the cause of dreams. At death a man's _ngai_ spirit does not go away into the bush to await reincarnation like his _choi_ spirit; on the contrary, it passes at once into his children, boys and girls alike; for before their father's death children are supposed not to possess a _ngai_ spirit; if a child dies before its father, they think that it never had a _ngai_ spirit at all. And the _ngai_ spirit may leave a man in his lifetime as well as at death; for example, when a person faints, the natives think that he does so because his _ngai_ spirit has departed from him, and they will stamp on the ground to make it return. On the other hand the _choi_ spirit is supposed never to quit a man during life; it is thought to be in some undefined way related to the shadow, whereas the _ngai_ spirit, as we saw, manifests itself in the beating of the heart. When a woman dies, her _ngai_ spirit goes not into her children but into her sisters, one after the other; and when all the sisters are dead, the woman's _ngai_ spirit goes away among the mangroves and perishes altogether.[164] Thus these savages explain the phenomena of birth and death, of conscious and unconscious life, by a theory of a double human spirit, one associated with the heart and the other with the shadow. The psychology is rudimentary, still it is interesting as an attempt to solve problems which still puzzle civilised man. [Sidenote: Beliefs of the natives of Cape Bedford in Queensland.] Other Queensland aborigines associate the vital principle not with the heart but with the breath. For example, at Cape Bedford the natives call it _wau-wu_ and think that it never leaves the body sleeping or waking till death, when it haunts its place of burial for a time and may communicate with the living. Thus, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, it will often appear to a near kinsman or intimate friend, tell him the pitiful tale how he was done to death by an enemy, and urge him to revenge. Again, the soul of a man's dead father or friend may bear him company on a journey and, like the beryl-stone in Rossetti's poem _Rose Mary_, warn him of an ambuscade lurking for him in a spot where the man himself sees nothing. But the spirits of the dead do not always come with such friendly intent; they may drive the living distracted; a peculiar form of mental excitement and bewilderment is attributed to their action. Further, these aborigines at Cape Bedford, in Queensland, believe that all spirits of nature are in fact souls of the dead. Such spirits usually leave their haunts in the forests and caves at night. Stout-hearted old men can see and converse with them and receive from them warnings of danger; but women and children fear these spirits and never see them. But some spirits of the dead, when they have ceased to haunt their places of burial, go away eastward and are reincarnated in white people; hence these savages often look for a resemblance to some deceased tribesman among Europeans, and frequently wonder why it is that the white man, on whom their fancy has pitched, remembers nothing about his former life as a black man among blacks.[165] [Sidenote: Beliefs of the natives of the Tully River in Queensland.] The natives of the Tully River in Queensland associate the principle of life both with the breath and with the shadow. It departs from the body temporarily in sleep and fainting-fits and permanently in death, after which it may be heard at night tapping on the top of huts or creaking in the branches of trees. It is everlasting, so far as these savages have any idea of eternity, and further it is intangible; hence in its disembodied state it needs no food, and none is set out for it. The disposition of these disembodied spirits of the dead is good or bad, according to their disposition in life. Yet when a man is alone by himself, the spirit even of one of his own dead kinsfolk will sometimes come and do him a mischief. On the other hand it can do nothing to several people together; there is safety in numbers. They may all see and hear the ghost, but he will not attack them. Hence these savages have been taught from childhood to beware of going alone: solitary people are liable at any moment to be assailed by the spirits of the dead. The only means they know of warding off these ghostly assailants is by lighting good fires.[166] [Sidenote: Belief of the Australian aborigines that their dead are reborn in white people.] I have mentioned the belief of the Cape Bedford natives that the spirits of their dead are sometimes reincarnated in white people. A similar notion is reported from other and widely separated parts of Australia, and wherever it exists may be taken as evidence of a general belief as to the rebirth or reincarnation of the dead, even where such a belief is not expressly recorded. This superstition has sometimes proved of service to white people who have been cast among the blacks, for it has ensured them a hospitable and even affectionate welcome, where otherwise they might have encountered suspicion and hostility, if not open violence. Thus, for example, the convict Buckley, who escaped from the penal settlement on Port Phillip Bay in 1803, was found by some of the Wudthaurung tribe carrying a piece of a broken spear, which he had abstracted from the grave of one of their people. So they took him to be the dead man risen from the grave; he received the name of the deceased, was adopted by his relations, and lived with the tribe for thirty-two years without ever conversing with a white man; when at last he met one, he had forgotten the English language.[167] Again, a Mr. Naseby, who lived in the Kamilaroi country for fifty years, happened to have the marks of cupping on his back, and the natives could not be persuaded that he was not one of themselves come to life again with the family scars on his body,[168] for the Australian aborigines commonly raise scars on the bodies of young men at initiation. The late Sir George Grey was identified by an old Australian woman as her dead son come to life again. It may be worth while to quote his account of this unlooked-for meeting with his long-lost mother; for it will impress on you, better than any words of mine could do, the firmness of the faith which these savages repose in the resurrection of the body, or at all events in the reincarnation of the soul. Grey writes as follows:-- [Sidenote: Experience of Sir George Grey.] "After we had tethered the horses, and made ourselves tolerably comfortable, we heard loud voices from the hills above us: the effect was fine,--for they really almost appeared to float in the air; and as the wild cries of the women, who knew not our exact position, came by upon the wind, I thought it was well worth a little trouble to hear these savage sounds under such circumstances. Our guides shouted in return, and gradually the approaching cries came nearer and nearer. I was, however, wholly unprepared for the scene that was about to take place. A sort of procession came up, headed by two women, down whose cheeks tears were streaming. The eldest of these came up to me, and looking for a moment at me, said,--'_Gwa, gwa, bundo, bal_,'--'Yes, yes, in truth it is him'; and then throwing her arms round me, cried bitterly, her head resting on my breast; and although I was totally ignorant of what their meaning was, from mere motives of compassion, I offered no resistance to her caresses, however disagreeable they might be, for she was old, ugly, and filthily dirty; the other younger one knelt at my feet, also crying. At last the old lady, emboldened by my submission, deliberately kissed me on each cheek, just in the manner a Frenchwoman would have done; she then cried a little more, and at length relieving me, assured me that I was the ghost of her son, who had some time before been killed by a spear-wound in his breast. The younger female was my sister; but she, whether from motives of delicacy, or from any imagined backwardness on my part, did not think proper to kiss me. My new mother expressed almost as much delight at my return to my family, as my real mother would have done, had I been unexpectedly restored to her. As soon as she left me, my brothers, and father (the old man who had previously been so frightened), came up and embraced me after their manner,--that is, they threw their arms round my waist, placed their right knee against my right knee, and their breast against my breast, holding me in this way for several minutes. During the time that the ceremony lasted, I, according to the native custom, preserved a grave and mournful expression of countenance. This belief, that white people are the souls of departed blacks, is by no means an uncommon superstition amongst them; they themselves never having an idea of quitting their own land, cannot imagine others doing it;--and thus, when they see white people suddenly appear in their country, and settling themselves down in particular spots, they imagine that they must have formed an attachment for this land in some other state of existence; and hence conclude the settlers were at one period black men and their own relations. Likenesses, whether real or imagined, complete the delusion; and from the manner of the old woman I have just alluded to, from her many tears, and from her warm caresses, I feel firmly convinced that she really believed I was her son, whose first thought, upon his return to earth, had been to re-visit his old mother, and bring her a present."[169] [Sidenote: In South-eastern Australia the natives believed that the souls of the dead were not reborn but went up to the sky.] On the whole then we may conclude that a belief in the reincarnation of the dead has not been confined to the tribes of Central Australia, but has been held by the tribes in many, perhaps at one time in all, other parts of the continent. Yet, if we may judge from the imperfect records which we possess, this faith in the return of the dead to life in human form would seem to have given way and been replaced to some extent by a different creed among many tribes of South-eastern Australia. In this part of the continent it appears to have been often held by the natives that after death the soul is not born again among men, but goes away for ever to some distant country either in the sky or beyond the sea, where all the spirits of the dead congregate. Thus Lieutenant-Colonel Collins, who was Governor of New South Wales in the early days of the colony, at the end of the eighteenth century, reports that when the natives were often questioned "as to what became of them after their decease, some answered that they went either on or beyond the great water; but by far the greater number signified, that they went to the clouds."[170] Again, the Narrinyeri tribe of South Australia believed that all the dead went up to the sky and that some of them at least became stars. We possess an excellent description of the beliefs and customs of this tribe from the pen of a missionary, the Rev. George Taplin, who lived among them for many years. His account of their theory of the state of the dead is instructive. It runs thus:-- [Sidenote: Beliefs of the Narrinyeri concerning the dead.] "The Narrinyeri point out several stars, and say that they are deceased warriors who have gone to heaven (_Wyirrewarre_). There are Wyungare, and Nepalle, and the Manchingga, and several others. Every native expects to go to _Wyirrewarre_ after death. They also believe that the dead descend from thence, and walk the earth; and that they are able to injure those whom they dislike. Consequently, men who have been notorious in life for a domineering and revengeful disposition are very much dreaded after death. For instance, there is Karungpe, who comes in the dead of night, when the camp fire has burned low, and like a rushing wind scatters the dying embers, and then takes advantage of the darkness to rob some sleeper of life; and it is considered dangerous to whistle in the dark, for Karungpe is especially attracted by a whistle. There is another restless spirit--the deceased father of a boy whom I well know--who is said to rove about armed with a rope, with which he catches people. All the Narrinyeri, old and young, are dreadfully afraid of seeing ghosts, and none of them will venture into the scrub after dark, lest he should encounter the spirits which are supposed to roam there. I have heard some admirable specimens of ghost stories from them. In one case I remember the ghost was represented to have set fire to a _wurley_ [hut], and ascended to heaven in the flame. The Narrinyeri regard the disapprobation of the spirits of the dead as a thing to be dreaded; and if a serious quarrel takes place between near relatives, some of the friends are sure to interpose with entreaties to the contentious parties to be reconciled, lest the spirits of the dead should be offended at unseemly disputes between those who ought to be at peace. The name of the dead must not be mentioned until his body has decayed, lest a want of sorrow should seem to be indicated by the common and flippant use of his name. A native would have the deceased believe that he cannot hear or speak his name without weeping."[171] [Sidenote: Narrinyeri fear of the dead. Mourning customs.] From this account it would appear that the Narrinyeri have no belief in the reincarnation of the dead; they suppose that the souls of the departed live up aloft in the sky, from which they descend at night in the form of ghosts to haunt and trouble the living. On the whole the attitude of the Narrinyeri towards their dead kinsfolk seems to be dominated by fear; of affection there is apparently little or no trace. It is true that like most Australian tribes they indulge in extravagant demonstrations of grief at the death of their kinsfolk. A great lamentation and wailing is made by all the relations and friends of the deceased. They cut off their hair close to the head and besmudge themselves with oil and pounded charcoal. The women besmear themselves with the most disgusting filth. All beat and cut themselves and make a violent show of sorrow; and all the time that the corpse, rubbed over with grease and red ochre, is being dried over a slow fire in the hut, the women take it by turns to weep and wail before it, so that the lamentation never ceases for days. Yet Mr. Taplin was persuaded "that fear has more to do with most of these exhibitions than grief"; and he tells us that "for one minute a woman will appear in the deepest agony of grief and tears; a few minutes after, the conventional amount of weeping having been accomplished, they will laugh and talk with the merriest."[172] The principal motive, in fact, for all this excessive display of sorrow would seem to be a fear lest the jealous ghost should think himself slighted and should avenge the slight on the cold-hearted relatives who do not mourn sufficiently for the irreparable loss they have sustained by his death. We may conjecture that the same train of thought explains the ancient and widespread custom of hiring professional mourners to wail over the dead; the tears and lamentations of his kinsfolk are not enough to soothe the wounded feelings of the departed, they must be reinforced by noisier expressions of regret. [Sidenote: Deaths attributed by the Narrinyeri to sorcery.] But there is another powerful motive for all these violent demonstrations of grief, into the secret of which we are let by Mr. Taplin. He says that "all the relatives are careful to be present and not to be wanting in the proper signs of sorrow, lest they should be suspected of complicity in causing the death."[173] In fact the Narrinyeri, like many other savages, attribute all, or most, natural deaths to sorcery. When a person dies, they think that he or she has been killed by the evil magic of some ill-wisher, and one of the first things to be done is to discover the culprit in order that his life may be taken in revenge. For this purpose the Narrinyeri resort to a form of divination. On the first night after the death the nearest relation of the deceased sleeps with his head on the corpse, hoping thus to dream of the sorcerer who has done the mischief. Next day the corpse is placed on a sort of bier supported on men's shoulders. The friends of the deceased gather round and call out the names of suspected persons to see whether the corpse will give any sign. At last the next of kin calls out the name of the person of whom he has dreamed, and if at the sound the corpse makes a movement towards him, which the bearers say they cannot resist, it is regarded as a clear token that the man so named is the malefactor. It only remains for the kinsfolk of the dead to hunt down the culprit and kill him.[174] Thus not only the relations but everybody in the neighbourhood has the strongest motive for assuming at least an appearance of sorrow at a death, lest the suspicion of having caused it by sorcery should fall upon him. [Sidenote: Pretence made by the Narrinyeri of avenging the death of their friends on the guilty sorcerer.] It deserves to be noted, that while the Narrinyeri nominally acknowledged the duty of killing the sorcerer who in their opinion had caused the death of their friend, they by no means always discharged the duty, but sometimes contented themselves with little more than a pretence of revenge. Mr. Taplin's account of the proceedings observed on such an occasion is instructive. It runs thus: "The spirit of the dead is not considered to have been appeased until his relatives have avenged his death. They will kill the sorcerer who has caused it if they can catch him; but generally they cannot catch him, and often do not wish it. Most probably he belongs to some other tribe of the Narrinyeri. Messengers pass between the tribes relative to the affair, and the friends of the accused person at last formally curse the dead man and all his dead relatives. This constitutes a _casus belli_. Arrangements are forthwith made for a pitched battle, and the two tribes meet in company with their respective allies. The tribe to which the dead man belongs weep and make a great lamentation for him, and the opposing tribe sets some fellows to dance about and play antics in derision of their enemies. Then the whole tribe will set up a great laugh by way of further provocation. If there is any other cause of animosity between the tribes besides the matter of avenging the dead there will now be a pretty severe fight with spears. If, however, the tribes have nothing but the dead man to fight about, they will probably throw a few spears, indulge in considerable abuse of each other, perhaps one or two will get slightly wounded, and then some of the old men will declare that enough has been done. The dead man is considered to have been appeased by the efforts of his friends to avenge his death by fighting, and the two tribes are friendly again. In such a case the fight is a mere ceremony."[175] Thus among the Narrinyeri the duty of blood revenge was often supposed to be sufficiently discharged by a sham fight performed apparently for the satisfaction of the ghost, who was supposed to be looking on and to be gratified by the sight of his friends hurling spears at the author of his death. Merciful pretences of the same sort have been practised by other savages in order to satisfy the vengeful ghost without the effusion of blood. Examples of them will come before us later on.[176] [Sidenote: Magical virtue ascribed to the hair of the dead.] However, the attitude of the Narrinyeri towards their dead was not purely one of fear and aversion. They imagined that they could derive certain benefits from their departed kinsfolk, and the channel through which these benefits flowed was furnished by their hair. They cut off the hair of the dead and spun it into a cord, and this cord was commonly worn by the men as a head-band. They said that thereby they "smelled the dead," and that the smell made their eyes large and their sight keen, so that in a fight they could see the spears coming and could parry or avoid them.[177] Similar magical virtues are ascribed to the hair of the dead by the Arunta. Among them the hair of a dead man is cut off and made into a magic girdle, which is a valued possession and is only worn when a man is going out to engage in a tribal fight or to stalk a foe for the purpose of destroying him by witchcraft. The girdle is supposed to be endowed with magic power and to impart to its possessor all the warlike qualities of the dead man from whose hair it was made; in particular, it is thought to ensure accuracy of aim in the wearer, while at the same time it destroys that of his adversary.[178] Hence the girdle is worn by the man who takes the lead in avenging the death of the deceased on his supposed murderer; the mere sight of it, they think, so terrifies the victim that his legs tremble under him, he becomes incapable of fighting, and is easily speared.[179] [Sidenote: Belief that the souls of the dead go up to the sky.] Among the tribes of South-eastern Australia the Narrinyeri were not alone in holding the curious belief that the souls of the dead go up into the sky to live there for ever, but that their ghosts come down again from time to time, roam about their old haunts on earth, and communicate with the living. This, for example, was the belief of the Dieri, the Buandik, the Kurnai, and the Kulin tribes.[180] The Buandik thought that everything in skyland was better than on earth; a fat kangaroo, for example, was compared to a kangaroo of heaven, where, of course, the animals might be expected to abound.[181] The Kulin imagined that the spirits of the dead ascended to heaven by the bright rays of the setting sun.[182] The Wailwun natives in New South Wales used to bury their dead in hollow trees, and when they dropped the body into its place, the bearers and the bystanders joined in a loud whirring sound, like the rush of the wind. They said that this represented the upward flight of the soul to the sky.[183] [Sidenote: Appearance of the dead to the living, especially in dreams.] With regard to the ghosts on earth, some tribes of South-eastern Australia believe that they can be seen by the living, can partake of food, and can warm themselves at a fire. It is especially the graves, where their mouldering bodies are deposited, that these restless spirits are supposed to haunt; it is there that they shew themselves either to people generally or to such as have the second sight.[184] But it is most commonly in dreams that they appear to the living and hold communication with them. Often these communications are believed to be helpful. Thus the tribes of the Wotjobaluk nation thought that the ghosts of their dead relations could visit them in sleep to protect them. A Mukjarawaint man told Dr. Howitt that his father came to him in a dream and warned him to beware or he would be killed. This, the man believed, was the saving of his life; for he afterwards came to the place which he had seen in his dream; whereupon, instead of going on, he turned back, so that his enemies, who might have been waiting for him there, did not catch him.[185] Another man informed Dr. Howitt that his dead uncle appeared to him in sleep and taught him charms against sickness and other evils; and the Chepara tribe similarly believed that male ancestors visited sleepers and imparted to them charms to avert evil magic.[186] [Sidenote: Savage faith in the truth of dreams. Association of the stars with the souls of the dead.] Such notions follow naturally from the savage theory of dreams. Almost all savages appear to believe firmly in the truth of dreams; they fail to draw the distinction, which to us seems obvious, between the imaginary creations of the mind in sleep and the waking realities of the physical world. Whatever they dream of must, they think, be actually existing; for have they not seen it with their own eyes? To argue that the visions of sleep have no real existence is, therefore, in their opinion, to argue against the plain evidence of their senses; and they naturally treat such exaggerated scepticism with incredulity and contempt. Hence when they dream of their dead friends and relations they necessarily conclude that these persons are still alive somewhere and somehow, though they do not commonly appear by daylight to people in their waking hours. Unquestionably this savage faith in the reality of dreams has been one of the principal sources of the widespread, almost universal, belief in the survival of the human soul after death. It explains why ghosts are supposed to appear rather by night than by day, since it is chiefly by night that men sleep and dream dreams. Perhaps it may also partly account for the association of the stars with the souls of the dead. For if the dead appear to the living mainly in the hours of darkness, it seems not unnatural to imagine that the bright points of light which then bespangle the canopy of heaven are either the souls of the departed or fires kindled by them in their home aloft. For example, the Central Australian aborigines commonly suppose the stars to be the camp-fires of natives who live on the banks of the great river which we civilised men, by a survival of primitive mythology, call the Milky Way. However, these rude savages, we are told, as a general rule "appear to pay very little attention to the stars in detail, probably because they enter very little into anything which is connected with their daily life, and more especially with their food supply."[187] The same observation which Messrs. Spencer and Gillen here make as to the natives of Central Australia might be applied to most savages who have remained in the purely hunting stage of social development. Such men are not much addicted to star-gazing, since the stars have little or nothing to tell them that they wish to know. It is not till people have betaken themselves to sowing and reaping crops that they begin to scan the heavens more carefully in order to determine the season of sowing by observation of the great celestial time-keepers, the rising and setting of certain constellations, above all, apparently, of the Pleiades.[188] In short, the rise of agriculture favours the rise of astronomy. [Sidenote: Creed of the South-eastern Australians touching the dead.] But to return to the ideas of the Australian aborigines concerning the dead, we may say of the natives of the south-eastern part of the continent, in the words of Dr. Howitt, that "there is a universal belief in the existence of the human spirit after death, as a ghost, which is able to communicate with the living when they sleep. It finds its way to the sky-country, where it lives in a land like the earth, only more fertile, better watered, and plentifully supplied with game."[189] This belief is very different from that of the Central Australian natives, who think that the souls of the dead tarry on earth in their old familiar haunts until the time comes for them to be born again into the world. Of the two different creeds that of the south-eastern tribes may be regarded as the more advanced, since it admits that the dead do not return to life, and that their disembodied spirits do not haunt perpetually a multitude of spiritual parks or reservations dotted over the face of the country. [Sidenote: The creed seems to form part of a general advance of culture in this part of the continent.] But how are we to account for this marked difference of belief between the natives of the Centre and the natives of the South-east? Perhaps the most probable explanation is that the creed of the south-eastern tribes in this respect is part of a general advance of culture brought about by the more favourable natural conditions under which they live as compared with the forlorn state of the rude inhabitants of the Central deserts. That advance of culture manifests itself in a variety of ways. On the material side it is seen in more substantial and permanent dwellings and in warmer and better clothing. On the social side it is seen in an incipient tendency to the rise of a regular chieftainship, a thing which is quite unknown among the democratic or rather oligarchic savages of the Centre, who are mainly governed by the old men in council.[190] But the rise of chieftainship is a great step in political progress; since a monarchical government of some sort appears to be essential to the emergence of mankind from savagery. On the whole, then, the beliefs of the South-eastern Australian aborigines seem to mark a step on the upward road towards civilisation. [Sidenote: Possible influence of European teaching on native beliefs.] At the same time we must not forget that these beliefs may have been influenced by the lessons which they have learned from white settlers with whom in this part of Australia they have been so long in contact. The possibility of such a transfusion of the new wine of Europe into the old bottles of Australia did not escape the experienced Mr. James Dawson, an early settler in Victoria, who has given us a valuable account of the natives of that region in the old days when they were still comparatively little contaminated by intercourse with the whites. He describes as follows the views which prevailed as to the dead among the tribes of Western Victoria:--"After the disposal of the body of a good person, its shade walks about for three days; and although it appears to people, it holds no communication with them. Should it be seen and named by anyone during these three days, it instantly disappears. At the expiry of three days it goes off to a beautiful country above the clouds, abounding with kangaroo and other game, where life will be enjoyed for ever. Friends will meet and recognize each other there; but there will be no marrying, as the bodies have been left on earth. Children under four or five years have no souls and no future life. The shades of the wicked wander miserably about the earth for one year after death, frightening people, and then descend to Ummekulleen, never to return." After giving us this account of the native creed Mr. Dawson adds very justly: "Some of the ideas described above may possibly have originated with the white man, and been transmitted from Sydney by one tribe to another."[191] The probability of white influence on this particular doctrine of religion is increased by the frank confession which these same natives made of the religious deterioration (as they regarded it) which they had suffered in another direction through the teaching of the missionaries. On this subject, to quote again from Mr. Dawson, the savages are of opinion that "the good spirit, Pirnmeheeal, is a gigantic man, living above the clouds; and as he is of a kindly disposition, and harms no one, he is seldom mentioned, but always with respect. His voice, the thunder, is listened to with pleasure, as it does good to man and beast, by bringing rain, and making grass and roots grow for their benefit. But the aborigines say that the missionaries and government protectors have given them a dread of Pirnmeheeal; and they are sorry that the young people, and many of the old, are now afraid of a being who never did any harm to their forefathers."[192] [Sidenote: Vagueness and inconsistency of native beliefs as to the state of the dead. Custom or ritual as the interpreter of belief.] However, it is very difficult to ascertain the exact beliefs of savages as to the dead. The thought of the savage is apt to be vague and inconsistent; he neither represents his ideas clearly to his own mind nor can he express them lucidly to others, even if he wishes to do so. And his thought is not only vague and inconsistent; it is fluid and unstable, liable to shift and change under alien influence. For these and other reasons, such as the distrust of strangers and the difficulty of language, which often interposes a formidable barrier between savage man and the civilised enquirer, the domain of primitive beliefs is beset by so many snares and pitfalls that we might almost despair of arriving at the truth, were it not that we possess a clue to guide us on the dark and slippery way. That clue is action. While it is generally very difficult to ascertain what any man thinks, it is comparatively easy to ascertain what he does; and what a man does, not what he says, is the surest touchstone to his real belief. Hence when we attempt to study the religion of backward races, the ritual which they practise is generally a safer indication of their actual creed than the loudest profession of faith. In regard to the state of the human soul after death the beliefs of the Australian aborigines are clearly reflected in many of the customs which they observe at the death and burial of their friends and enemies, and it is accordingly with an account of some of these customs that I propose to conclude this part of my subject. [Sidenote: Burial customs of the Australian aborigines as evidence of their beliefs concerning the state of the soul after death. Food placed on the grave for the use of the ghost and fires kindled to warm him.] Now some of the burial customs observed by the Australian savages reveal in the clearest manner their belief that the human soul survives the death of the body, that in its disembodied state it retains consciousness and feeling, and can do a mischief to the living; in short, they shew that in the opinion of these people the departed live in the form of dangerous ghosts. Thus, for example, when the deceased is a person of importance, the Dieri place food for many days on the grave, and in winter they kindle a fire in order that the ghost may warm himself at it. If the food remains untouched on the grave, they think that the dead is not hungry.[193] The Blanch-water section of that tribe fear the spirits of the dead and accordingly take steps to prevent their resurrection. For that purpose they tie the toes of the corpse together and the thumbs behind the back, which must obviously make it difficult for the dead man to arise in his might and pursue them. Moreover, for a month after the death they sweep a clear space round the grave at dusk every evening, and inspect it every morning. If they find any tracks on it, they assume that they have been made by the restless ghost in his nocturnal peregrinations, and accordingly they dig up his mouldering remains and bury them in some other place, where they hope he will sleep sounder.[194] The Kukata tribe think that the ghost may be thirsty, so they obligingly leave a drinking vessel on the grave, that he may slake his thirst. Also they deposit spears and other weapons on the spot, together with a digging-stick, which is specially intended to ward off evil spirits who may be on the prowl.[195] The ghosts of the natives on the Maranoa river were also thirsty souls, so vessels full of water were sometimes suspended for their use over the grave.[196] A custom of lighting a fire on the grave to warm the poor shivering ghost seems to have been not uncommon among the aboriginal Australians. The Western Victorians, for example, kept up large fires all night for this purpose.[197] In the Wiimbaio tribe two fires were kept burning for a whole month on the grave, one to the right and the other to the left, in order that the ghost might come out and warm himself at them in the chill night air. If they found tracks near the grave, they inferred, like the Dieri, that the perturbed spirit had quitted his narrow bed to pace to and fro in the long hours of darkness; but if no footprints were visible they thought that he slept in peace.[198] In some parts of Western Australia the natives maintained fires on the grave for more than a month for the convenience of the ghost; and they clearly expected him to come to life again, for they detached the nails from the thumb and forefinger of the corpse and deposited them in a small hole beside the grave, in order that they might know their friend at his resurrection.[199] The length of time during which fires were maintained or kindled daily on the grave is said to have varied, according to the estimation in which the man was held, from a few days to three or four years.[200] We have seen that the Dieri laid food on the grave for the hungry ghost to partake of, and the same custom was observed by the Gournditch-mara tribe.[201] However, some intelligent old aborigines of Western Victoria derided the custom as "white fellow's gammon."[202] [Sidenote: Property of the dead buried with them.] Further, in some tribes of South-eastern Australia it was customary to deposit the scanty property of the deceased, usually consisting of a few rude weapons or implements, on the grave or to bury it with him. Thus the natives of Western Victoria buried all a dead man's ornaments, weapons, and property with him in the grave, only reserving his stone axes, which were too valuable to be thus sacrificed: these were inherited by the next of kin.[203] The Wurunjerri also interred the personal property of the dead with him; if the deceased was a man, his spear-thrower was stuck in the ground at the head of the grave; if the deceased was a woman, the same thing was done with her digging-stick. That these implements were intended for the use of the ghost and not merely as headstones to mark the situation of the tomb and the sex of the departed, is clear from a significant exception to the custom. When the departed brother was a man of violent temper, who had been quarrelsome and a brawler in his life, no weapons were buried with him, obviously lest in a fit of ill-temper he should sally from the grave and assault people with them.[204] Similarly the Turrbal tribe, who deposited their dead in the forks of trees, used to leave a spear and club near the corpse "that the spirit of the dead might have weapons wherewith to kill game for his sustenance in the future state. A yam-stick was placed in the ground at a woman's grave, so that she might go away at night and seek for roots."[205] The Wolgal tribe were very particular about burying everything that belonged to a dead man with him; spears and nets, though valuable articles of property, were thus sacrificed; even a canoe has been known to be cut up in order that the pieces of it might be deposited in the grave. In fact "everything belonging to a dead man was put out of sight."[206] Similarly in the Geawe-gal tribe all the implements and inanimate property of a warrior were interred with him.[207] In the Gringai country not only was all a man's property buried with him, but every native present at the burial contributed something, and these contributions were piled together at the head of the corpse before the grave was filled in.[208] Among the tribes of Southern Victoria, when the grave has been dug and lined with fresh leaves and twigs so as to make a soft bed, the dead man's property is brought in two bags, and the sorcerer shakes out the contents. They consist of such small articles as pieces of hard stone suitable for cutting or paring skins, bones for boring holes, twine made of opossum wool, and so forth. These are placed in the grave, and the bags and rugs of the deceased are torn up and thrown in likewise. Then the sorcerer asks whether the dead man had any other property, and if he had, it is brought forward and laid beside the torn fragments of the bags and rugs. Everything that a man owned in life must be laid beside him in death.[209] Again, among the tribes of the Lower Murray, Lachlan, and Darling rivers in New South Wales, all a dead man's property, including his weapons and nets, was buried with his body in the grave.[210] Further, we are told that among the natives of Western Australia the weapons and personal property of the deceased are placed on the grave, "so that when he rises from the dead they may be ready to his hand."[211] In the Boulia district of Queensland the things which belonged to a dead man, such as his boomerangs and spears, are either buried with him, destroyed by fire, or sometimes, though rarely, distributed among his tribal brothers, but never among his children.[212] [Sidenote: Intention of destroying the property of the dead. The property of the dead not destroyed in Central Australia.] Thus among certain tribes of Australia, especially in the south-eastern part of the continent, it appears that the custom of burying or destroying a dead man's property has been very common. That the intention of the custom in some cases is to supply the supposed needs of the ghost, seems to be fairly certain; but we may doubt whether this explanation would apply to the practice of burning or otherwise destroying the things which had belonged to the deceased. More probably such destruction springs from an overpowering dread of the ghost and a wish to sever all connexion with him, so that he may have no excuse for returning and haunting the survivors, as he might do if his property were either kept by them or deposited in the grave. Whatever the motive for the burial or destruction of a dead man's property may be, the custom appears not to prevail among the tribes of Central Australia. In the eastern Arunta tribe, indeed, it is said that sometimes a little wooden vessel used in camp for holding small objects may be buried with the man, but this is the only instance which Messrs. Spencer and Gillen could hear of in which any article of ordinary use is buried in the grave. Far from wasting property in that way, these economical savages preserve even a man's personal ornaments, such as his necklaces, armlets, and the fur string which he wore round his head; indeed, as we have seen, they go so far as to cut off the hair from the head of the deceased and to keep it for magical uses.[213] In the Warramunga tribe all the belongings of a dead man go to the tribal brothers of his mother.[214] [Sidenote: Property of the dead hung up on trees, then washed and distributed. Economic loss entailed by sacrifices to the dead.] The difference in this respect between the practice of the Central tribes and that of the tribes nearer the sea, especially in Victoria and New South Wales, is very notable. A custom intermediate between the two is observed by some tribes of the Darling River, who hang up the weapons, nets, and other property of the deceased on trees for about two months, then wash them, and distribute them among the relations.[215] The reason for hanging the things up and washing them is no doubt to rid them of the infection of death in order that they may be used with safety by the survivors. Such a custom points clearly to a growing fear of the dead; and that fear or reverence comes out still more clearly in the practice of either burying the property of the dead with them or destroying it altogether, which is observed by the aborigines of Victoria and other parts of Australia who live under more favourable conditions of life than the inhabitants of the Central deserts. This confirms the conclusion which we have reached on other grounds, that among the aboriginal population of Australia favourable natural conditions in respect of climate, food, and water have exercised a most important influence in stimulating social progress in many directions, and not least in the direction of religion. At the same time, while we recognise that the incipient tendency to a worship of the dead which may be detected in these regions marks a step forward in religious development, we must acknowledge that the practice of burying or destroying the property of the dead, which is one of the ways in which the tendency manifests itself, is, regarded from the side of economic progress, a decided step backward. It marks, in fact, the beginning of a melancholy aberration of the human mind, which has led mankind to sacrifice the real interests of the living to the imaginary interests of the dead. With the general advance of society and the accompanying accumulation of property these sacrifices have at certain stages of evolution become heavier and heavier, as the demands of the ghosts became more and more exacting. The economic waste which the belief in the immortality of the soul has entailed on the world is incalculable. When we contemplate that waste in its small beginnings among the rude savages of Australia it appears insignificant enough; the world is not much the poorer for the loss of a parcel of boomerangs, spears, fur string, and skin rugs. But when we pass from the custom in this its feeble source and follow it as it swells in volume through the nations of the world till it attains the dimensions of a mighty river of wasted labour, squandered treasure, and spilt blood, we cannot but wonder at the strange mixture of good and evil in the affairs of mankind, seeing in what we justly call progress so much hardly earned gain side by side with so much gratuitous loss, such immense additions to the substantial value of life to be set off against such enormous sacrifices to the shadow of a shade. [Footnote 160: W. E. Roth, _North Queensland Ethnography, Bulletin No. 5, Superstition, Magic, and Medicine_ (Brisbane, 1903), pp. 18, 23, §§ 68, 83.] [Footnote 161: Homer, _Odyssey_, xix. 163.] [Footnote 162: W. E. Roth, _ll. cc._] [Footnote 163: W. E. Roth, _North Queensland Ethnography, Bulletin No. 5_ (Brisbane, 1903), p. 29. § 116.] [Footnote 164: W. E. Roth. _op. cit._ p. 18, § 68.] [Footnote 165: W. E. Roth, _op. cit._ pp. 17, 29, §§ 65, 116.] [Footnote 166: W. E. Roth, _op. cit._ p. 17, § 65.] [Footnote 167: J. Dawson, _Australian Aborigines_ (Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide, 1881), pp. 110 _sq._; A. W. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_ (London, 1904), p. 442.] [Footnote 168: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 445.] [Footnote 169: (Sir) George Grey, _Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia_ (London, 1841), i. 301-303.] [Footnote 170: Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins, _An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales_, Second Edition (London, 1804), p. 354.] [Footnote 171: Rev. G. Taplin, "The Narrinyeri," in _Native Tribes of South Australia_ (Adelaide, 1879), pp. 18 _sq._] [Footnote 172: Rev. G. Taplin, "The Narrinyeri," _op. cit._ pp. 20 _sq._] [Footnote 173: Rev. G. Taplin, _op. cit._ p. 20.] [Footnote 174: Rev. G. Taplin, _op. cit._ pp. 19 _sq._, 21.] [Footnote 175: Rev. G. Taplin, _op. cit._ p. 21.] [Footnote 176: See below, pp. 235 _sqq._, 327 _sq._] [Footnote 177: Rev. G. Taplin, _op. cit._ p. 21.] [Footnote 178: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 538 _sq._] [Footnote 179: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 544 _sq._] [Footnote 180: A. W. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, pp. 434, 436, 437, 438. Compare E. J. Eyre, _Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia_ (London, 1845), ii. 357.] [Footnote 181: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 434.] [Footnote 182: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 438.] [Footnote 183: Rev. W. Ridley, _Kamilaroi_ (Sydney, 1875), p. 160.] [Footnote 184: A. W. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, pp. 434, 438, 439; J. Dawson, _Australian Aborigines_, p. 50.] [Footnote 185: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 435.] [Footnote 186: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 437.] [Footnote 187: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 628.] [Footnote 188: As to the place occupied by the Pleiades in primitive calendars, see _Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild_, i. 309-319.] [Footnote 189: A. W. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, pp. 439 _sq._] [Footnote 190: See _Totemism and Exogamy_, i. 314 _sqq._] [Footnote 191: J. Dawson, _Australian Aborigines_, p. 51. A man of the Ta-ta-thi tribe in New South Wales informed Mr. A. L. P. Cameron that the natives believed in a pit of fire where bad men were roasted after death. This reported belief, resting apparently on the testimony of a single informant, may without doubt be ascribed to the influence of Christian teaching. See A. L. P. Cameron, "Notes on some Tribes of New South Wales," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xiv. (1885) pp. 364 _sq._] [Footnote 192: J. Dawson, _Australian Aborigines_, p. 49.] [Footnote 193: A. W. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, p. 448.] [Footnote 194: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._. p. 449. Compare E. M. Curr, _The Australian Race_, i. 87: "The object sought in tying up the remains of the dead is to prevent the deceased from escaping from the tomb and frightening or injuring the survivors."] [Footnote 195: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 451.] [Footnote 196: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 467.] [Footnote 197: J. Dawson, _Australian Aborigines_, p. 50.] [Footnote 198: A. W. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, p. 452.] [Footnote 199: R. Salvado, _Mémoires historiques sur l' Australie_ (Paris, 1854), p. 261; _Missions Catholiques_, x. (1878) p. 247. For more evidence as to the lighting of fires for this purpose see A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ pp. 455, 470.] [Footnote 200: A. Oldfield, "The Aborigines of Australia," _Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London_, New Series, iii. (1865) p. 245.] [Footnote 201: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 455.] [Footnote 202: J. Dawson, _Australian Aborigines_, pp. 50 _sq._] [Footnote 203: J. Dawson, _op. cit._ p. 63.] [Footnote 204: A. W. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, p. 458.] [Footnote 205: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 470.] [Footnote 206: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ pp. 461 _sq._] [Footnote 207: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 464.] [Footnote 208: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 464.] [Footnote 209: R. Brough Smyth, _The Aborigines of Victoria_, i. 104.] [Footnote 210: P. Beveridge, "Of the Aborigines Inhabiting the Great Lacustrine and Riverine Depression of the Lower Murray, Lower Murrumbidgee, Lower Lachlan, and Lower Darling," _Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales_, xvii. (1883) p. 29.] [Footnote 211: A. Oldfield, "The Aborigines of Australia," _Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London_, New Series, iii. (1865) p. 245.] [Footnote 212: W. E. Roth, _Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines_ (Brisbane and London, 1897), p. 164.] [Footnote 213: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 466, 497 _sq._, 538 _sq._ See above, p. 138.] [Footnote 214: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 524.] [Footnote 215: F. Bonney, "On some Customs of the Aborigines of the River Darling, New South Wales," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xiii. (1884) p. 135.] LECTURE VII THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA (_concluded_) [Sidenote: Attention to the comfort of the dead. Huts erected on graves for the use of the ghosts.] In the last lecture I shewed that in the maritime regions of Australia, where the conditions of life are more favourable than in the Central deserts, we may detect the germs of a worship of the dead in certain attentions which the living pay to the spirits of the departed, for example by kindling fires on the grave for the ghost to warm himself at, by leaving food and water for him to eat and drink, and by depositing his weapons and other property in the tomb for his use in the life after death. Another mark of respect shewn to the dead is the custom of erecting a hut on the grave for the accommodation of the ghost. Thus among the tribes of South Australia we are told that "upon the mounds, or tumuli, over the graves, huts of bark, or boughs, are generally erected to shelter the dead from the rain; they are also frequently wound round with netting."[216] Again, in Western Australia a small hut of rushes, grass, and so forth is said to have been set up by the natives over the grave.[217] Among the tribes of the Lower Murray, Lower Lachlan, and Lower Darling rivers, when a person died who had been highly esteemed in life, a neat hut was erected over his grave so as to cover it entirely. The hut was of oval shape, about five feet high, and roofed with thatch, which was firmly tied to the framework by cord many hundreds of yards in length. Sometimes the whole hut was enveloped in a net. At the eastern end of the hut a small opening was left just large enough to allow a full-grown man to creep in, and the floor was covered with grass, which was renewed from time to time as it became withered. Each of these graves was enclosed by a fence of brushwood forming a diamond-shaped enclosure, within which the tomb stood exactly in the middle. All the grass within the fence was neatly shaved off and the ground swept quite clean. Sepulchres of this sort were kept up for two or three years, after which they were allowed to fall into disrepair, and when a few more years had gone by the very sites of them were forgotten.[218] The intention of erecting huts on graves is not mentioned in these cases, but on analogy we may conjecture that they are intended for the convenience and comfort of the ghost. This is confirmed by an account given of a native burial on the Vasse River in Western Australia. We are told that when the grave had been filled in, the natives piled logs on it to a considerable height and then constructed a hut upon the logs, after which one of the male relations went into the hut and said, "I sit in his house."[219] Thus it would seem that the hut on the grave is regarded as the house of the dead man. If only these sepulchral huts were kept up permanently, they might develop into something like temples, in which the spirits of the departed might be invoked and propitiated with prayer and sacrifice. It is thus that the great round huts, in which the remains of dead kings of Uganda are deposited, have grown into sanctuaries or shrines, where the spirits of the deceased monarchs are consulted as oracles through the medium of priests.[220] But in Australia this development is prevented by the simple forgetfulness of the savages. A few years suffice with them to wipe out the memory of the deceased and with it his chance of developing into an ancestral deity. Like most savages, the Australian aborigines seem to fear only the ghosts of the recently departed; one writer tells us that they have no fear of the ghost of a man who has been dead say forty years.[221] [Sidenote: Fear of the dead and precautions taken by the living against them.] The burial customs of the Australian aborigines which I have described betray not only a belief in the existence of the ghost, but also a certain regard for his comfort and convenience. However, we may suspect that in most, if not in all, cases the predominant motive of these attentions is fear rather than affection. The survivors imagine that any want of respect for the dead, any neglect of his personal comforts in the grave, would excite his resentment and draw down on them his vengeance. That these savages are really actuated by fear of the dead is expressly affirmed of some tribes. Thus we are told that the Yuin "were always afraid that the dead man might come out of the grave and follow them."[222] After burying a body the Ngarigo were wont to cross a river in order to prevent the ghost from pursuing them;[223] obviously they shared the common opinion that ghosts for some reason are unable to cross water. The Wakelbura took other measures to throw the poor ghost off the scent. They marked all the trees in a circle round the place where the dead man was buried; so that when he emerged from the grave and set off in pursuit of his retiring relations, he would follow the marks on the trees in a circle and always come back to the point from which he had started. And to make assurance doubly sure they put coals in the dead man's ears, which, by bunging up these apertures, were supposed to keep his ghost in the body till his friends had got a good start away from him. As a further precaution they lit fires and put bushes in the forks of trees, with the idea that the ghost would roost in the bushes and warm himself at the fires, while they were hastening away.[224] Here, therefore, we see that the real motive for kindling fires for the use of the dead is fear, not affection. In this respect the burial customs of the tribes at the Herbert River are still more significant. These savages buried with the dead man his weapons, his ornaments, and indeed everything he had used in life; moreover, they built a hut on the grave, put a drinking-vessel in the hut, and cleared a path from it down to the water for the use of the ghost; and often they placed food and water on the grave. So far, these measures might be interpreted as marks of pure and disinterested affection for the soul of the departed. But such an interpretation is totally excluded by the ferocious treatment which these savages meted out to the corpse. To frighten the spirit, lest he should haunt the camp, the father or brother of the deceased, or the husband, if it was a woman, took a club and mauled the body with such violence that he often smashed the bones; further, he generally broke both its legs in order to prevent it from wandering of nights; and as if that were not enough, he bored holes in the stomach, the shoulders, and the lungs, and filled the holes with stones, so that even if the poor ghost should succeed by a desperate effort in dragging his mangled body out of the grave, he would be so weighed down by this ballast of stones that he could not get very far. However, after roaming up and down in this pitiable condition for a time in their old haunts, the spirits were supposed at last to go up aloft to the Milky Way.[225] The Kwearriburra tribe, on the Lynd River, in Queensland, also took forcible measures to prevent the resurrection of the dead. Whenever a person died, they cut off his or her head, roasted it in a fire on the grave, and when it was thoroughly charred they smashed it in bits and left the fragments among the hot coals. They calculated that when the ghost rose from the grave with the view of following the tribe, he would miss his head and go groping blindly about for it till he scorched himself in the embers of the fire and was glad to shrink back into his narrow bed.[226] Thus even among those Australian tribes which have progressed furthest in the direction of religion, such approaches as they have made towards a worship of the dead appear to be determined far more by fear than by affection and reverence. And we are told that it is the nearest relations and the most influential men whose ghosts are most dreaded.[227] [Sidenote: Cuttings and brandings of the flesh of the living in honour of the dead.] There is another custom observed by the Australian aborigines in mourning which deserves to be mentioned. We all know that the Israelites were forbidden to make cuttings in their flesh for the dead.[228] The custom was probably practised by the heathen Canaanites, as it has been by savages in various parts of the world. Nowhere, perhaps, has the practice prevailed more generally or been carried out with greater severity than in aboriginal Australia. For example, with regard to the tribes in the central part of Victoria we are told that "the parents of the deceased lacerate themselves fearfully, especially if it be an only son whose loss they deplore. The father beats and cuts his head with a tomahawk until he utters bitter groans. The mother sits by the fire and burns her breasts and abdomen with a small fire-stick till she wails with pain; then she replaces the stick in the fire, to use again when the pain is less severe. This continues for hours daily, until the time of lamentation is completed; sometimes the burns thus inflicted are so severe as to cause death."[229] It is especially the women, and above all the widows, who torture themselves in this way. Speaking of the tribes of Victoria, a writer tells us that on the death of her husband a widow, "becoming frantic, seizes fire-sticks and burns her breasts, arms, legs, and thighs. Rushing from one place to another, and intent only on injuring herself, and seeming to delight in the self-inflicted torture, it would be rash and vain to interrupt her. She would fiercely turn on her nearest relative or friend and burn him with her brands. When exhausted, and when she can scarcely walk, she yet endeavours to kick the embers of the fire, and to throw them about. Sitting down, she takes the ashes in her hands, rubs them into her wounds, and then scratches her face (the only part not touched by the fire-sticks) until the blood mingles with the ashes which partly hide her cruel wounds."[230] Among the Kurnai of South-eastern Victoria the relations of the dead would cut and gash themselves with sharp stones and tomahawks until their heads and bodies streamed with blood.[231] In the Mukjarawaint tribe, when a man died, his kinsfolk wept over him and slashed themselves with tomahawks and other sharp instruments for about a week.[232] In the tribes of the Lower Murray and Lower Darling rivers mourners scored their backs and arms, sometimes even their faces, with red-hot brands, which raised hideous ulcers; afterwards they flung themselves prone on the grave, tore out their hair by handfuls, rubbed earth over their heads and bodies in great profusion, and ripped up their green ulcers till the mingled blood and grime presented a ghastly spectacle. These self-inflicted sores remained long unhealed.[233] Among the Kamilaroi, a large tribe of eastern New South Wales, the mourners, and especially the women, used to cut their heads with tomahawks and allow the blood to dry on them.[234] Speaking of a native burial on the Murray River, a writer says that "around the bier were many women, relations of the deceased, wailing and lamenting bitterly, and lacerating their thighs, backs, and breasts, with shells or flint, until the blood flowed copiously from the gashes."[235] In the Boulia district of Queensland women in mourning score their thighs, both inside and outside, with sharp stones or bits of glass, so as to make a series of parallel cuts; in neighbouring districts of Queensland the men make much deeper cross-shaped cuts on their thighs.[236] In the Arunta tribe of Central Australia a man is bound to cut himself on the shoulder in mourning for his father-in-law; if he does not do so, his wife may be given away to another man in order to appease the wrath of the ghost at his undutiful son-in-law. Arunta men regularly bear on their shoulders the raised scars which shew that they have done their duty by their dead fathers-in-law.[237] The female relations of a dead man in the Arunta tribe also cut and hack themselves in token of sorrow, working themselves up into a sort of frenzy as they do so; yet in all their apparent excitement they take care never to wound a vital part, but vent their fury on their scalps, their shoulders, and their legs.[238] [Sidenote: Cuttings for the dead among the Warramunga.] In the Warramunga tribe of Central Australia Messrs. Spencer and Gillen witnessed the mourning for a dead man. Even before the sufferer had breathed his last the lamentations and self-inflicted wounds began. When it was known that the end was near, all the native men ran at full speed to the spot, and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen followed them to see what was to be seen. What they saw, or part of what they saw, was this. Some of the women, who had gathered from all directions, were lying prostrate on the body of the dying man, while others were standing or kneeling around, digging the sharp ends of yam-sticks into the crown of their heads, from which the blood streamed down over their faces, while all the time they kept up a loud continuous wail. Many of the men, rushing up to the scene of action, flung themselves also higgledy-piggledy on the sufferer, the women rising and making way for them, till nothing was to be seen but a struggling mass of naked bodies all mixed up together. Presently up came a man yelling and brandishing a stone knife. On reaching the spot he suddenly gashed both his thighs with the knife, cutting right across the muscles, so that, unable to stand, he dropped down on the top of the struggling bodies, till his mother, wife, and sisters dragged him out of the scrimmage, and immediately applied their mouths to his gaping wounds, while he lay exhausted and helpless on the ground. Gradually the struggling mass of dusky bodies untwined itself, disclosing the unfortunate sick man, who was the object, or rather the victim, of this well-meant demonstration of affection and sorrow. If he had been ill before, he was much worse when his friends left him: indeed it was plain that he had not long to live. Still the weeping and wailing went on; the sun set, darkness fell on the camp, and later in the evening the man died. Then the wailing rose louder than before, and men and women, apparently frantic with grief, rushed about cutting themselves with knives and sharp-pointed sticks, while the women battered each other's heads with clubs, no one attempting to ward off either cuts or blows. An hour later a funeral procession set out by torchlight through the darkness, carrying the body to a wood about a mile off, where it was laid on a platform of boughs in a low gum-tree. When day broke next morning, not a sign of human habitation was to be seen in the camp where the man had died. All the people had removed their rude huts to some distance, leaving the place of death solitary; for nobody wished to meet the ghost of the deceased, who would certainly be hovering about, along with the spirit of the living man who had caused his death by evil magic, and who might be expected to come to the spot in the outward form of an animal to gloat over the scene of his crime. But in the new camp the ground was strewed with men lying prostrate, their thighs gashed with the wounds which they had inflicted on themselves with their own hands. They had done their duty by the dead and would bear to the end of their life the deep scars on their thighs as badges of honour. On one man Messrs. Spencer and Gillen counted the dints of no less than twenty-three wounds which he had inflicted on himself at various times. Meantime the women had resumed the duty of lamentation. Forty or fifty of them sat down in groups of five or six, weeping and wailing frantically with their arms round each other, while the actual and tribal wives, mothers, wives' mothers, daughters, sisters, mothers' mothers, sisters' husbands' mothers, and grand-daughters, according to custom, once more cut their scalps open with yam-sticks, and the widows afterwards in addition seared the scalp wounds with red-hot fire-sticks. [Sidenote: Cuttings for the dead strictly regulated by custom.] In these mourning customs, wild and extravagant as the expression of sorrow appears to be, everything is regulated by certain definite rules; and a woman who did not thus maul herself when she ought to do so would be severely punished, or even killed, by her brother. Similarly with the men, it is only those who stand in certain relationships to the deceased who must cut and hack themselves in his honour, and these relationships are determined by the particular exogamous class to which the dead man happened to belong. Of such classes there are eight in the Warramunga tribe. On the occasion described by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen it was a man of the Tjunguri class who died; and the men who gashed their thighs stood to him in one or other of the following relationships: grandfather on the mother's side, mother's brother, brother of the dead man's wife, and her mother's brother.[239] [Sidenote: The cuttings and brandings which mourners inflict on themselves may be intended to convince the ghost of the sincerity of their sorrow.] We naturally ask, What motive have these savages for inflicting all this voluntary and, as it seems to us, wholly superfluous suffering on themselves? It can hardly be that these wounds and burns are merely a natural and unfeigned expression of grief. We have seen that by experienced observers such extravagant demonstrations of sorrow are set down rather to fear than to affection. Similarly Messrs. Spencer and Gillen suggest that at least one motive is a fear entertained by the native lest, if he does not make a sufficient display of grief, the ghost of the dead man will be offended and do him a mischief.[240] In the Kaitish tribe of Central Australia it is believed that if a woman does not keep her body covered with ashes from the camp fire during the whole time of mourning, the spirit of her deceased husband, who constantly follows her about, will kill her and strip all the flesh from her bones.[241] Again, in the Arunta tribe mourners smear themselves with white pipeclay, and the motive for this custom is said to be to render themselves more conspicuous, so that the ghost may see and be satisfied that he is being properly mourned for.[242] Thus the fear of the ghost, who, at least among the Australian aborigines, is commonly of a jealous temper and stands very firmly on his supposed rights, may suffice to explain the practice of self-mutilation at mourning. [Sidenote: Custom of allowing the blood of mourners to drip on the corpse or into the grave.] But it is possible that another motive underlies the drawing of blood on these occasions. For it is to be observed that the blood of the mourners is often allowed to drop directly either on the dead body or into the grave. Thus, for example, among the tribes on the River Darling several men used to stand by the open grave and cut each other's heads with a boomerang; then they held their bleeding heads over the grave so that the blood dripped on the corpse lying in it. If the deceased was highly esteemed, the bleeding was repeated after some earth had been thrown on the body.[243] Among the Arunta it is customary for the women kinsfolk of the dead to cut their own and each other's heads so severely with clubs and digging-sticks that blood streams from them on the grave.[244] Again, at a burial on the Vasse River, in Western Australia, a writer describes how, when the grave was dug, the natives placed the corpse beside it, then "gashed their thighs, and at the flowing of the blood they all said, 'I have brought blood,' and they stamped the foot forcibly on the ground, sprinkling the blood around them; then wiping the wounds with a wisp of leaves, they threw it, bloody as it was, on the dead man."[245] With these Australian practices we may compare a custom observed by the civilised Greeks of antiquity. Every year the Peloponnesian lads lashed themselves on the grave of Pelops at Olympia, till the blood ran down their backs as a libation in honour of the dead man.[246] [Sidenote: The blood intended to strengthen the dead.] Now what is the intention of thus applying the blood of the living to the dead or pouring it into the grave? So far as the ancient Greeks are concerned the answer is not doubtful. We know from Homer that the ghosts of the dead were supposed to drink the blood that was offered to them and to be strengthened by the draught.[247] Similarly with the Australian savages, their object can hardly be any other than that of strengthening the spirit of the dead; for these aborigines are in the habit of giving human blood to the sick and the aged to drink for the purpose of restoring them to health and strength;[248] hence it would be natural for them to imagine that they could refresh and fortify the feeble ghost in like manner. Perhaps the blood was intended specially to strengthen the spirits of the dead for the new birth or reincarnation, to which so many of these savages look forward. [Sidenote: Custom of burying people in the place where they were born. The custom perhaps intended to facilitate the rebirth of the soul.] The same motive may possibly explain the custom observed by some Australian tribes of burying people, as far as possible, at the place where they were born. Thus in regard to the tribes of Western Victoria we are informed that "dying persons, especially those dying from old age, generally express an earnest desire to be taken to their birthplace, that they may die and be buried there. If possible, these wishes are always complied with by the relatives and friends. Parents will point out the spot where they were born, so that when they become old and infirm, their children may know where they wish their bodies to be disposed of."[249] Again, some tribes in the north and north-east of Victoria "are said to be more than ordinarily scrupulous in interring the dead. If practicable, they will bury the corpse near the spot where, as a child, it first drew breath. A mother will carry a dead infant for weeks, in the hope of being able to bury it near the place where it was born; and a dead man will be conveyed a long distance, in order that the last rites may be performed in a manner satisfactory to the tribe."[250] Another writer, speaking of the Australian aborigines in general, says: "By what I could learn, it is considered proper by many tribes that a black should be buried at or near the spot where he or she was born, and for this reason, when a black becomes seriously ill, the invalid is carried a long distance to these certain spots to die, as in this case. They apparently object to place a body in strange ground." The same writer mentions the case of a blackfellow, who began digging a grave close beside the kitchen door of a Mr. Campbell. When Mr. Campbell remonstrated with him, the native replied that he had no choice, for the dead man had been born on that very spot. With much difficulty Mr. Campbell persuaded him to bury his deceased friend a little further off from the kitchen door.[251] A practice of this sort would be intelligible on the theory of the Central Australians, who imagine that the spirits of all the dead return to the very spots where they entered into their mothers' wombs, and that they wait there until another opportunity presents itself to them of being born again into the world. For if people really believe, as do many Australian tribes, that when they die they will afterwards come to life again as infants, it is perfectly natural that they should take steps to ensure and facilitate the new birth. The Unmatjera and Kaitish tribes of Central Australia do this in the case of dead children. These savages draw a sharp distinction between young children and very old men and women. When very old people die, their bodies are at once buried in the ground, but the bodies of children are placed in wooden troughs and deposited on platforms of boughs in the branches of trees, and the motive for treating a dead child thus is, we are informed, the hope "that before very long its spirit may come back again and enter into the body of a woman--in all probability that of its former mother."[252] The reason for drawing this distinction between the young and the old by disposing of their bodies in different fashions, is explained with great probability by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen as follows: "In the Unmatjera and Kaitish tribes, while every old man has certain privileges denied to the younger men, yet if he be decidedly infirm and unable to take his part in the performance of ceremonies which are often closely concerned--or so at least the natives believe them to be--with the general welfare of the tribe, then the feeling undoubtedly is that there is no need to pay any very special respect to his remains. This feeling is probably vaguely associated with the idea that, as his body is infirm, so to a corresponding extent will his spirit part be, and therefore they have no special need to consider or propitiate this, as it can do them no harm. On the other hand they are decidedly afraid of hurting the feelings of any strong man who might be capable of doing them some mischief unless he saw that he was properly mourned for. Acting under much the same feeling they pay respect to the bodies of dead children and young women, in the hope that the spirit will soon return and undergo reincarnation. It is also worth noticing that they do not bury in trees any young man who has violated tribal law by taking as wife a woman who is forbidden to him; such an individual is always buried directly in the ground."[253] Apparently these law-abiding savages are not anxious that members of the criminal classes should be born again and should have the opportunity of troubling society once more. [Sidenote: Different modes of disposing of the dead adopted in the same tribe.] I would call your attention particularly to the different modes of burial thus accorded by these two tribes to different classes of persons. It is too commonly assumed that each tribe has one uniform way of disposing of all its dead, say either by burning or by burying, and on that assumption certain general theories have been built as to the different views taken of the state of the dead by different tribes. But in point of fact the assumption is incorrect. Not infrequently the same tribe disposes of different classes of dead people in quite different ways; for instance, it will bury some and burn others. Thus amongst the Angoni of British Central Africa the corpses of chiefs are burned with all their household belongings, but the bodies of commoners are buried with all their belongings in caves.[254] In various castes or tribes of India it is the custom to burn the bodies of married people but to bury the bodies of the unmarried.[255] With some peoples of India the distinction is made, not between the married and the unmarried, but between adults and children, especially children under two years old; in such cases the invariable practice appears to be to burn the old and bury the young. Thus among the Malayalis of Malabar the bodies of men and women are burned, but the bodies of children under two years are buried, and so are the bodies of all persons who have died of cholera or small-pox.[256] The same distinctions are observed by the Nayars, Kadupattans, and other castes or tribes of Cochin.[257] The old rule laid down in the ancient Hindoo law-book _The Grihya-Sutras_ was that children who died under the age of two should be buried, not burnt.[258] The Bhotias of the Himalayas bury all children who have not yet obtained their permanent teeth, but they burn all other people.[259] Among the Komars the young are buried, and the old cremated.[260] The Coorgs bury the bodies of women and of boys under sixteen years of age, but they burn the bodies of men.[261] The Chukchansi Indians of California are said to have burned only those who died a violent death or were bitten by snakes, but to have buried all others.[262] The Minnetaree Indians disposed of their dead differently according to their moral character. Bad and quarrelsome men they buried in the earth that the Master of Life might not see them; but the bodies of good men they laid on scaffolds, that the Master of Life might behold them.[263] The Kolosh or Tlingit Indians of Alaska burn their ordinary dead on a pyre, but deposit the bodies of shamans in large coffins, which are supported on four posts.[264] The ancient Mexicans thought that all persons who died of infectious diseases were killed by the rain-god Tlaloc; so they painted their bodies blue, which was the rain-god's colour, and buried instead of burning them.[265] [Sidenote: Special modes of burial adopted to prevent or facilitate the return of the spirit.] These examples may suffice to illustrate the different ways in which the same people may dispose of their dead according to the age, sex, social rank, or moral character of the deceased, or the manner of his death. In some cases the special mode of burial adopted seems clearly intended to guard against the return of the dead, whether in the form of ghosts or of children born again into the world. Such, for instance, was obviously the intention of the old English custom of burying a suicide at a cross-road with a stake driven through his body. And if some burial customs are plainly intended to pin down the dead in the earth, or at least to disable him from revisiting the survivors, so others appear to be planned with the opposite intention of facilitating the departure of the spirit from the grave, in order that he may repair to a more commodious lodging or be born again into the tribe. For example, the Arunta of Central Australia always bury their dead in the earth and raise a low mound over the grave; but they leave a depression in the mound on the side which faces towards the spot where the spirit of the deceased is supposed to have dwelt in the intervals between his successive reincarnations; and we are expressly told that the purpose of leaving this depression is to allow the spirit to go out and in easily; for until the final ceremony of mourning has been performed at the grave, the ghost is believed to spend his time partly in watching over his near relations and partly in the company of its _arumburinga_ or spiritual double, who lives at the old _nanja_ spot, that is, at the place where the disembodied soul tarries waiting to be born again.[266] Thus the Arunta imagine that for some time after death the spirit of the deceased is in a sort of intermediate state, partly hovering about the abode of the living, partly visiting his own proper spiritual home, to which on the completion of the mourning ceremonies he will retire to await the new birth. The final mourning ceremony, which marks the close of this intermediate state, takes place some twelve or eighteen months after the death. It consists mainly in nothing more or less than a ghost hunt; men armed with shields and spear-throwers assemble and with loud shouts beat the air, driving the invisible ghost before them from the spot where he died, while the women join in the shouts and buffet the air with the palms of their hands to chase away the dead man from the old camp which he loves to haunt. In this way the beaters gradually advance towards the grave till they have penned the ghost into it, when they immediately dance on the top of it, beating the air downwards as if to drive the spirit down, and stamping on the ground as if to trample him into the earth. After that, the women gather round the grave and cut each other's heads with clubs till the blood streams down on it. This brings the period of mourning to an end; and if the deceased was a man, his widow is now free to marry again. In token that the days of her sorrow are over, she wears at this final ceremony the gay feathers of the ring-neck parrot in her hair. The spirit of her dead husband, lying in the grave, is believed to know the sign and to bid her a last farewell. Even after he has thus been hunted into the grave and trampled down in it, his spirit may still watch over his friends, guard them from harm, and visit them in dreams.[267] [Sidenote: Departure of the ghost supposed to coincide with the disappearance of the flesh from his bones.] We may naturally ask, Why should the spirit of the dead be supposed at first to dwell more or less intermittently near the spot where he died, and afterwards to take up his abode permanently at his _nanja_ spot till the time comes for him to be born again? A good many years ago I conjectured[268] that this idea of a change in the abode of the ghost may be suggested by a corresponding change which takes place, or is supposed to take place, about the same time in the state of the body; in fact, that so long as the flesh adheres to the bones, so long the soul of the dead man may be thought to be detained in the neighbourhood of the body, but that when the flesh has quite decayed, the soul is completely liberated from its old tabernacle and is free to repair to its true spiritual home. In confirmation of this conjecture I pointed to the following facts. Some of the Indians of Guiana bring food and drink to their dead so long as the flesh remains on the bones; but when it has mouldered away, they conclude that the man himself has departed.[269] The Matacos Indians of the Gran Chaco in Argentina believe that the soul of a dead man does not pass down into the nether world until his body is decomposed or burnt. Further, the Alfoors of Central Celebes suppose that the spirits of the departed cannot enter the spirit-land until all the flesh has been removed from their bones; for until that has been done, the gods (_lamoa_) in the other world could not bear the stench of the corpse. Accordingly at a great festival the bodies of all who have died within a certain time are dug up and the decaying flesh scraped from the bones. Comparing these ideas, I suggested that they may explain the widespread custom of a second burial, that is, the practice of disinterring the dead after a certain time and disposing of their bones otherwise. [Sidenote: Second burial of the bones among the tribes of Central Australia. Final burial ceremony among the Warramunga.] Now so far as the tribes of Central Australia are concerned, my conjecture has been confirmed by the subsequent researches of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen in that region. For they have found that the tribes to the north of the Arunta regularly give their dead a second burial, that a change in the state of the ghosts is believed to coincide with the second burial, and apparently also, though this is not so definitely stated, that the time for the second burial is determined by the disappearance of the flesh from the bones. Amongst the tribes which practise a second burial the custom is first to deposit the dead on platforms among the branches of trees, till the flesh has quite mouldered away, and then to bury the bones in the earth: in short, they practise tree-burial first and earth-burial afterwards.[270] For example, in the Unmatjera and Kaitish tribes, when a man dies, his body is carried by his relations to a tree distant a mile or two from the camp. There it is laid on a platform by itself for some months. When the flesh has disappeared from the bones, a kinsman of the deceased, in strictness a younger brother (_itia_), climbs up into the tree, dislocates the bones, places them in a wooden vessel, and hands them down to a female relative. Then the bones are laid in the grave with the head facing in the direction in which his mother's brother is supposed to have camped in days of old. After the bones have been thus interred, the spirit of the dead man is believed to go away and to remain in his old _alcheringa_ home until such time as he once more undergoes reincarnation.[271] But in these tribes, as we saw, very old men and women receive only one burial, being at once laid in an earthy grave and never set up on a platform in a tree; and we have seen reason to think that this difference in the treatment of the aged springs from the indifference or contempt in which their ghosts are held by comparison with the ghosts of the young and vigorous. In the Warramunga tribe, who regularly deposit their dead in trees first and in the earth afterwards, so long as the corpse remains in the tree and the flesh has not completely disappeared from the bones, the mother of the deceased and the women who stand to him or her in the relation of tribal motherhood are obliged from time to time to go to the tree, and sitting under the platform to allow its putrid juices to drip down on their bodies, into which they rub them as a token of sorrow. This, no doubt, is intended to please the jealous ghost; for we are told that he is believed to haunt the tree and even to visit the camp, in order, if he was a man, to see for himself that his widows are mourning properly. The time during which the mouldering remains are left in the tree is at least a year and may be more.[272] The final ceremony which brings the period of mourning to an end is curious and entirely different from the one observed by the Arunta on the same occasion. When the bones have been taken down from the tree, an arm-bone is put carefully apart from the rest. Then the skull is smashed, and the fragments together with all the rest of the bones except the arm-bone, are buried in a hollow ant-hill near the tree. Afterwards the arm-bone is wrapt up in paper-bark and wound round with fur-string, so as to make a torpedo-shaped parcel, which is kept by a tribal mother of the deceased in her rude hovel of branches, till, after the lapse of some days or weeks, the time comes for the last ceremony of all. On that day a design emblematic of the totem of the deceased is drawn on the ground, and beside it a shallow trench is dug about a foot deep and fifteen feet long. Over this trench a number of men, elaborately decorated with down of various colours, stand straddle-legged, while a line of women, decorated with red and yellow ochre, crawl along the trench under the long bridge made by the straddling legs of the men. The last woman carries the arm-bone of the dead in its parcel, and as soon as she emerges from the trench, the bone is snatched from her by a kinsman of the deceased, who carries it to a man standing ready with an uplifted axe beside the totemic drawing. On receiving the bone, the man at once smashes it, hastily buries it in a small pit beside the totemic emblem of the departed, and closes the opening with a large flat stone, signifying thereby that the season of mourning is over and that the dead man or woman has been gathered to his or her totem. The totemic design, beside which the arm-bone is buried, represents the spot at which the totemic ancestor of the deceased finally went down into the earth. When once the arm-bone has thus been broken and laid in its last resting-place, the soul of the dead person, which they describe as being of about the size of a grain of sand, is supposed to go back to the place where it camped long ago in a previous incarnation, there to remain with the souls of other men and women of the same totem until the time comes for it to be born again.[273] [Sidenote: General conclusion as to the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the Australian aborigines.] This must conclude what I have to say as to the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the aborigines of Australia. The evidence I have adduced is sufficient to prove that these savages firmly believe both in the existence of the human soul after death and in the power which it can exert for good or evil over the survivors. On the whole the dominant motive in their treatment of the dead appears to be fear rather than affection. Yet the attention which many tribes pay to the comfort of the departed by providing them with huts, food, water, fire, clothing, implements and weapons, may not be dictated by purely selfish motives; in any case they are clearly intended to please and propitiate the ghosts, and therefore contain the germs of a regular worship of the dead. [Footnote 216: E. J. Eyre, _Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia_ (London, 1845), ii. 349.] [Footnote 217: A. Oldfield, "The Aborigines of Victoria," _Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London_, N.S. iii. (1865) p. 245.] [Footnote 218: P. Beveridge, in _Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales_, xvii. (1883) pp. 29 _sq._ Compare R. Brough Smyth, _Aborigines of Victoria_, i. 100 note.] [Footnote 219: (Sir) G. Grey, _Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery_, ii. 332 _sq._] [Footnote 220: Rev. J. Roscoe, _The Baganda_ (London, 1911), pp. 109 _sqq._] [Footnote 221: E. M. Curr, _The Australian Race_ (Melbourne and London, 1886-1887), i. 87.] [Footnote 222: A. W. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, p. 463.] [Footnote 223: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 461.] [Footnote 224: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 473.] [Footnote 225: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit._ p. 474.] [Footnote 226: F. C. Urquhart, "Legends of the Australian Aborigines," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xiv. (1885) p. 88.] [Footnote 227: E. M. Curr, _The Australian Race_, i. 87.] [Footnote 228: Leviticus xix. 28; Deuteronomy xiv. 1.] [Footnote 229: W. Stanbridge, "Tribes in the Central Part of Victoria," _Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London_, N.S. i. (1861) p. 298.] [Footnote 230: R. Brough Smyth, _Aborigines of Victoria_, i. 105.] [Footnote 231: A. W. Howitt, _Native Tribes of South-East Australia_, p. 459.] [Footnote 232: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit_. p. 453.] [Footnote 233: P. Beveridge, in _Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales_, xvii. (1883) pp. 28, 29.] [Footnote 234: A. W. Howitt, _op. cit_. p. 466.] [Footnote 235: E. J. Eyre, _Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia_ (London, 1845), ii. 347.] [Footnote 236: W. E. Roth, _Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines_ (Brisbane and London, 1897), p. 164; compare p. 165.] [Footnote 237: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 500.] [Footnote 238: Spencer and Gillen, _op. cit._ p. 510.] [Footnote 239: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 516-552.] [Footnote 240: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes_, p. 510.] [Footnote 241: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes_, p. 507.] [Footnote 242: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes_, p. 511.] [Footnote 243: F. Bonney, "On some Customs of the Aborigines of the River Darling," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xiii. (1884) pp. 134 _sq._] [Footnote 244: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 507, 509 _sq._] [Footnote 245: (Sir) G. Grey, _Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery_, ii. 332, quoting Mr. Bussel.] [Footnote 246: Scholiast on Pindar, _Olymp._ i. 146.] [Footnote 247: Homer, _Odyssey_, xi. 23 _sqq._] [Footnote 248: _The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings_, i. 91 _sq._] [Footnote 249: J. Dawson, _Australian Aborigines_, p. 62.] [Footnote 250: R. Brough Smyth, _Aborigines of Victoria_, i. 108.] [Footnote 251: J. F. Mann, "Notes on the Aborigines of Australia," _Proceedings of the Geographical Society of Australasia_, i. (Sydney, 1885) p. 48.] [Footnote 252: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 506.] [Footnote 253: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes_, p. 512.] [Footnote 254: R. Sutherland Rattray, _Some Folk-lore Stories and Songs in Chinyanja_ (London, 1907), pp. 99-101, 182.] [Footnote 255: F. Fawcett, "The Kondayamkottai Maravars, a Dravidian Tribe of Tinnevelly, Southern India," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxiii. (1903) p. 64; Captain Wolsley Haig, "Notes on the Rangari Caste in Barar," _Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal_, lxx. Part iii. (1901) p. 8; E. Thurston, _Castes and Tribes of Southern India_ (Madras, 1909), iv. 226 (as to the Lambadis), vi. 244 (as to the Raniyavas); compare _id._, _Ethnographic Notes in Southern India_ (Madras, 1906), p. 155.] [Footnote 256: E. Thurston, _Ethnographic Notes in Southern India_, p. 207.] [Footnote 257: L. K. Anantha Krishna Iyer, _The Cochin Tribes and Castes_ (Madras, 1909-1912), ii. 91, 112, 157, 360, 378.] [Footnote 258: _The Grihya Sutras_, translated by H. Oldenberg, Part i. p. 355 (_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xxix.). Compare W. Crooke, _Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India_ (Westminster, 1896), i. 245.] [Footnote 259: Ch. A. Sherring, _Western Tibet and the British Borderland_ (London, 1906), pp. 123 _sq._] [Footnote 260: P. N. Bose, "Chhattisgar," _Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal_, lix., Part i. (1891) p. 290.] [Footnote 261: E. Thurston, _Ethnographic Notes in Southern India_, p. 205.] [Footnote 262: S. Powers, _Tribes of California_ (Washington, 1877), p. 383.] [Footnote 263: Maximilian Prinz zu Wied, _Reise in das Innere Nord-America_ (Coblenz, 1839-1841), ii. 235.] [Footnote 264: T. de Pauly, _Description Ethnographique des Peuples de la Russie, Peuples de l'Amérique Russe_ (St. Petersburg, 1862), p. 13.] [Footnote 265: E. Seler, _Altmexikanische Studien_, ii. (Berlin, 1899) p. 42 (_Veröffentlichungen aus dem Königlichen Museum für Völkerkunde_, vi. 2/4).] [Footnote 266: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 497; _id._, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 506.] [Footnote 267: Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 503-508. The name of the final mourning ceremony among the Arunta is _urpmilchima_.] [Footnote 268: _The Golden Bough_, Second Edition (London, 1900), i. 434 _sq._] [Footnote 269: A. Biet, _Voyage de la France Equinoxiale en l'Isle de Cayenne_ (Paris, 1664), p. 392.] [Footnote 270: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 505 _sqq._] [Footnote 271: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 506-508.] [Footnote 272: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 530.] [Footnote 273: Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 530-543.] LECTURE VIII THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF THE TORRES STRAITS ISLANDS [Sidenote: The Islanders of Torres Straits. The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits.] In the last lecture I concluded my account of the belief in immortality and worship of the dead, or rather of the elements out of which such a worship might have grown, among the aborigines of Australia. To-day we pass to the consideration of a different people, the islanders of Torres Straits. As you may know, Torres Straits are the broad channel which divides Australia on the south from the great island of New Guinea on the north. The small islands which are scattered over the strait fall roughly into two groups, a Western and an Eastern, of which the eastern is at once the more isolated and the more fertile. In appearance, character, and customs the inhabitants of all these islands belong to the Papuan family, which inhabits the western half of New Guinea, but in respect of language there is a marked difference between the natives of the two groups; for while the speech of the Western Islanders is akin to that of the Australians, the speech of the Eastern Islanders is akin to that of the Papuans of New Guinea. The conclusion to be drawn from these facts appears to be that the Western Islands of Torres Straits were formerly inhabited by aborigines of the Australian family, and that at a later time they were occupied by immigrants from New Guinea, who adopted the language of the aboriginal inhabitants, but gradually extinguished the aboriginal type and character either by peaceful absorption or by conquest and extermination.[274] Hence the Western Islanders of Torres Straits form a transition both geographically and ethnographically between the aborigines of Australia on the one side and the aborigines of New Guinea on the other side. Accordingly in our survey of the belief in immortality among the lower races we may appropriately consider the Islanders of Torres Straits immediately after the aborigines of Australia and before we pass onward to other and more distant races. These Islanders have a special claim on the attention of a Cambridge lecturer, since almost all the exact knowledge we possess of them we owe to the exertions of Cambridge anthropologists and especially to Dr. A. C. Haddon, who on his first visit to the islands in 1888 perceived the urgent importance of procuring an accurate record of the old beliefs and customs of the natives before it was too late, and who never rested till that record was obtained, as it happily has been, first by his own unaided researches in the islands, and afterwards by the united researches of a band of competent enquirers. In the history of anthropology the Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits in 1898 will always hold an honourable place, to the credit of the University which promoted it and especially to that of the zealous and devoted investigator who planned, organised, and carried it to a successful conclusion. Practically all that I shall have to tell you as to the beliefs and practices of the Torres Straits Islanders is derived from the accurate and laborious researches of Dr. Haddon and his colleagues. [Sidenote: Social culture of the Torres Straits Islanders.] While the natives of Torres Straits are, or were at the time of their discovery, in the condition which we call savagery, they stand on a far higher level of social and intellectual culture than the rude aborigines of Australia. To indicate roughly the degree of advance we need only say that, whereas the Australians are nomadic hunters and fishers, entirely ignorant of agriculture, and destitute to a great extent not only of houses but even of clothes, the natives of Torres Straits live in settled villages and diligently till the soil, raising a variety of crops, such as yams, sweet potatoes, bananas, sugar-cane, and tobacco.[275] Of the two groups of islands the eastern is the more fertile and the inhabitants are more addicted to agriculture than are the natives of the western islands, who, as a consequence of the greater barrenness of the soil, have to eke out their subsistence to a considerable extent by fishing.[276] And there is other evidence to shew that the Eastern Islanders have attained to a somewhat higher stage of social evolution than their Western brethren;[277] the more favourable natural conditions under which they live may possibly have contributed to raise the general level of culture. One of the most marked distinctions in this respect between the inhabitants of the two groups is that, whereas a regular system of totemism with its characteristic features prevails among the Western Islanders, no such system nor even any very clear evidence of its former existence is to be found among the Eastern Islanders, whether it be that they never had it or, what is more likely, that they once had but have lost it.[278] [Sidenote: Belief of the Torres Straits Islanders in the existence of the human spirit after death.] On the other hand, so far as regards our immediate subject, the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead, a general resemblance may be traced between the creed and customs of the Eastern and Western tribes. Both of them, like the Australian aborigines, firmly believe in the existence of the human spirit after death, but unlike the Australians they seem to have no idea that the souls of the departed are ever born again into the world; the doctrine of reincarnation, so widespread among the natives of Australia, appears to have no place in the creed of their near neighbours the Torres Straits Islanders, whose dead, like our own, though they may haunt the living for a time, are thought to depart at last to a distant spirit-land and to return no more. At the same time neither in the one group nor in the other is there any clear evidence of what may be called a worship of the dead in the strict sense of the word, unless we except the cults of certain more or less mythical heroes. On this point the testimony of Dr. Haddon is definite as to the Western Islanders. He says: "In no case have I obtained in the Western Islands an indication of anything approaching a worship of deceased persons ancestral or otherwise, with the exception of the heroes shortly to be mentioned; neither is there any suggestion that their own ancestors have been in any way apotheosized."[279] [Sidenote: Fear of the ghosts of the recently departed.] But if these savages have not, with the possible exception of the cult of certain heroes, any regular worship of the dead, they certainly have the germ out of which such a worship might be developed, and that is a firm belief in ghosts and in the mischief which they may do to the living. The word for a ghost is _mari_ in the West and _mar_ in the East: it means also a shadow or reflection,[280] which seems to shew that these savages, like many others, have derived their notion of the human soul from the observation of shadows and reflections cast by the body on the earth or on water. Further, the Western Islanders appear to distinguish the ghosts of the recently departed (_mari_) from the spirits of those who have been longer dead, which they call _markai_;[281] and if we accept this distinction "we may assert," according to Dr. Haddon, "that the Torres Straits Islanders feared the ghosts but believed in the general friendly disposition of the spirits of the departed."[282] Similarly we saw that the Australian aborigines regard with fear the ghosts of those who have just died, while they are either indifferent to the spirits of those who have died many years ago or even look upon them as beings of higher powers than their descendants, whom they can benefit in various ways. This sharp distinction between the spirits of the dead, according to the date at which they died, is widespread, perhaps universal among mankind. However truly the dead were loved in their lifetime, however bitterly they were mourned at their death, no sooner have they passed beyond our ken than the thought of their ghosts seems to inspire the generality of mankind with an instinctive fear and horror, as if the character of even the best friends and nearest relations underwent a radical change for the worse as soon as they had shuffled off the mortal coil. But among savages this belief in the moral deterioration of ghosts is certainly much more marked than among civilised races. Ghosts are dreaded both by the Western and the Eastern tribes of Torres Straits. Thus in Mabuiag, one of the Western Islands, the corpse was carried out of camp feet foremost, else it was thought that the ghost would return and trouble the survivors. Further, when the body had been laid upon a stage or platform on clear level ground away from the dwelling, the remains of any food and water of which the deceased might have been partaking in his last moments were carried out and placed beside the corpse lest the ghost should come back to fetch them for himself, to the annoyance and terror of his relations. This is the reason actually alleged by the natives for what otherwise might have been interpreted as a delicate mark of affection and thoughtful care for the comfort of the departed. If next morning the food was found scattered, the people said that the ghost was angry and had thrown it about.[283] Further, on the day of the death the mourners went into the gardens, slashed at the taro, knocked down coco-nuts, pulled up sweet potatoes, and destroyed bananas. We are told that "the food was destroyed for the sake of the dead man, it was 'like good-bye.'"[284] We may suspect that the real motive for the destruction was the same as that for laying food and water beside the corpse, namely, a wish to give the ghost no excuse for returning to haunt and pester his surviving relatives. How could he have the heart to return to the desolated garden which in his lifetime it had been his pride and joy to cultivate? [Sidenote: Fear of the ghosts of the recently departed among the Murray Islanders.] In Murray Island, also, which belongs to the Eastern group, the ghost of a recently deceased person is much dreaded; it is supposed to haunt the neighbourhood for two or three months, and the elaborate funeral ceremonies which these savages perform appear to be based on this belief and to be intended, in fact, to dismiss the ghost from the land of the living, where he is a very unwelcome visitor, to his proper place in the land of the dead.[285] "The Murray Islanders," says Dr. Haddon, "perform as many as possible of the necessary ceremonies in order that the ghost of the deceased might not feel slighted, for otherwise it was sure to bring trouble on the relatives by causing strong winds to destroy their gardens and break down their houses."[286] These islanders still believe that a ghost may feel resentment when his children are neglected or wronged, or when his lands or goods are appropriated by persons who have no claim to them. And this fear of the wrath of the ghost, Dr. Haddon tells us, no doubt in past times acted as a wholesome deterrent on evil-doers and helped to keep the people from crime, though now-a-days they look rather to the law than to ghosts for the protection of their rights and the avenging of their wrongs.[287] Yet here, as in so many places, it would seem that superstition has proved a useful crutch on which morality can lean until it is strong enough to walk alone. In the absence of the police the guardianship of law and morality may be provisionally entrusted to ghosts, who, if they are too fickle and uncertain in their temper to make ideal constables, are at least better than nothing. With this exception it does not appear that the moral code of the Torres Straits Islanders derived any support or sanction from their religion. No appeal was made by them to totems, ancestors, or heroes; no punishment was looked for from these quarters for any infringement of the rules and restraints which hold society together.[288] [Sidenote: The island home of the dead.] The land of the dead to which the ghosts finally depart is, in the opinion of the Torres Straits Islanders, a mythical island in the far west or rather north-west. The Western Islanders name it Kibu; the Eastern Islanders call it Boigu. The name Kibu means "sundown." It is natural enough that islanders should place the home of the dead in some far island of the sea to which no canoe of living men has ever sailed, and it is equally natural that the fabulous island should lie to westward where the sun goes down; for it seems to be a common thought that the souls of the dead are attracted by the great luminary, like moths by a candle, and follow him when he sinks in radiant glory into the sea. To take a single example, in the Maram district of Assam it is forbidden to build houses facing westward, because that is the direction in which the spirits of the dead go to their long home.[289] But the Torres Straits Islanders have a special reason, as Dr. Haddon has well pointed out, for thinking that the home of the dead is away in the north-west; and the reason is that in these latitudes the trade wind blows steady and strong from the south-east for seven or eight months of the year; so that for the most part the spirits have only to let themselves go and the wind will sweep them away on its pinions to their place of rest. How could the poor fluttering things beat up to windward in the teeth of the blast?[290] [Sidenote: Elaborate funeral ceremonies observed by the Torres Straits Islanders.] The funeral ceremonies observed by the Torres Straits Islanders were numerous and elaborate, and they present some features of special interest. They succeeded each other at intervals, sometimes of months, and amongst the Eastern Islanders in particular there were so many of them that, were it not that the bodies of the very young and the very old were treated less ceremoniously, the living would have been perpetually occupied in celebrating the obsequies of the dead.[291] The obsequies differed somewhat from each other in the East and the West, but they had two characteristics in common: first, the skulls of the dead were commonly preserved apart from the bodies and were consulted as oracles; and, second, the ghosts of the recently deceased were represented in dramatic ceremonies by masked men, who mimicked the gait and gestures of the departed and were thought by the women and children to be the very ghosts themselves. But in details there were a good many variations between the practice of the Eastern and the Western Islanders. We will begin with the customs of the Western Islanders. [Sidenote: Funeral ceremonies observed by the Western Islanders. Removal and preservation of the skull. Skulls used in divination.] When a death had taken place, the corpse was carried out of the house and set on a staging supported by four forked posts and covered by a roof of mats. The office of attending to the body devolved properly on the brothers-in-law (_imi_) of the deceased, who, while they were engaged in the duties of the office, bore the special title of _mariget_ or "ghost-hand." It deserves to be noticed that these men were always of a different totem from the deceased; for if the dead person was a man, the _mariget_ were his wife's brothers and therefore had the same totem as the dead man's wife, which, on account of the law of exogamy, always differed from the totem of her husband. And if the dead person was a woman, the _mariget_ were her husband's brothers and therefore had his totem, which necessarily differed from hers. When they had discharged the preliminary duties to the corpse, the brothers-in-law went and informed the relations and friends. This they did not in words but by a prescribed pantomime. For example, if the deceased had had the crocodile for his totem, they imitated the ungainly gait of crocodiles waddling and resting, if the deceased had the snake for his totem, they in like manner mimicked the crawling of a snake. The relations then painted their bodies with white coral mud, cut their hair, plastered mud over their heads, and cut off their ear ornaments or severed the distended lobe of the ear as a sign of mourning. Then, armed with bows and arrows, they came out to the stage where the corpse was lying and let fly arrows at the men who were in attendance on it, that is, at the brothers-in-law of the deceased, who warded off the shafts as best they could.[292] The meaning of this sham attack on the men who were discharging the last offices of respect to the dead comes out clearly in another ceremony which was performed some time afterwards, as we shall see presently. For five or six days the corpse remained on the platform or bier watched by the brothers-in-law, who had to prevent certain large lizards from devouring it and to frighten away any prowling ghosts that might be lured to the spot by the stench. After the lapse of several days the relations returned to the body, mourned, and beat the roof of the bier, while they raised a shout to drive off any part of the dead man's spirit that might be lingering about his mouldering remains. The reason for doing so was, that the time had now arrived for cutting off the head of the corpse, and they thought that the head would not come off easily if the man's spirit were still in the body; he might reasonably be expected to hold on tight to it and not to resign, without a struggle, so valuable a part of his person. When the poor ghost had thus been chased away with shouts and blows, the principal brother-in-law came forward and performed the amputation by sawing off the head. Having done so, he usually placed it in a nest of termites or white ants in order that the insects might pick it clean; but sometimes for the same purpose he deposited it in a creek. When it was thoroughly clean, the grinning white skull was painted red all over and placed in a decorated basket. Then followed the ceremony of formally handing over this relic of the dead to the relations. The brothers-in-law, who had been in attendance on the body, painted themselves black all over, covered their heads with leaves, and walked in solemn procession, headed by the chief brother-in-law, who carried the skull in the basket. Meantime the male relatives were awaiting them, seated on a large mat in the ceremonial ground, while the women grouped themselves in the background. As the procession of men approached bearing the skull, the mourners shot arrows over their heads as a sign of anger at them for having decapitated their relation. But this was a mere pretence, probably intended to soothe and flatter the angry ghost: the arrows flew over the men without hurting them.[293] Similarly in ancient Egypt the man who cut open a corpse for embalmment had no sooner done his office than he fled precipitately, pursued by the relations with stones and curses, because he had wounded and mangled the body of their kinsman.[294] Sometimes the skull was made up to resemble the head of a living man: an artificial nose of wood and beeswax supplied the place of a nose of flesh; pearl-shells were inserted in the empty eye-balls; and any teeth that might be missing were represented by pieces of wood, while the lower jaw was lashed firmly to the cranium.[295] Whether thus decorated or not, the skulls of the dead were preserved and used in divination. Whenever a skull was to be thus consulted, it was first cleaned, repainted, and either anointed with certain plants or placed upon them. Then the enquirer enjoined the skull to speak the truth, and placing it on his pillow at night went to sleep. The dream which he dreamed that night was the answer of the skull, which spoke with a clappering noise like that of teeth chattering together. When people went on voyages, they used to take a divining skull with them in the stern of the canoe.[296] [Sidenote: Great death-dance of the Western Islanders. The dead personated by masked actors.] The great funeral ceremony, or rather death-dance, of the Western Islanders took place in the island of Pulu. When the time came for it, a few men would meet and make the necessary preparations. The ceremony was always performed on the sacred or ceremonial ground (_kwod_), and the first thing to do was to enclose this ground, for the sake of privacy, with a screen of mats hung on a framework of wood and bamboos. When the screen had been erected, the drums which were to be used by the orchestra were placed in position beside it. Then the relations were summoned to attend the performance. The ceremony might be performed for a number of recently deceased people at once, and it varied in importance and elaboration according to the importance and the number of the deceased whose obsequies were being celebrated. The chief differences were in the number of the performers and the greater or less display of scenic apparatus. The head-dresses or leafy masks worn by the actors in the sacred drama were made secretly in the bush; no woman or uninitiated man might witness the operation. When all was ready, and the people were assembled, the men being stationed in front and the women and children in the background, the disguised actors appeared on the scene and played the part of the dead, each one of them mimicking the gait and actions of the particular man or woman whom he personated; for all the parts were played by men, no woman might act in these ceremonies. The order in which the various ghosts were to appear on the scene was arranged beforehand; so that when the actors came forward from behind the screen, the spectators knew which of the dead they were supposed to have before them. The performers usually danced in pairs, and vanished behind the screen when their dance was finished. Thus one pair would follow another till the play was over. Besides the actors who played the serious and solemn part of the dead, there was usually a clown who skipped about and cut capers, tumbling down and getting up again, to make the spectators laugh and so to relieve the strain on their emotions, which were deeply stirred by this dance of death. The beat of the drums proclaimed that the sacred drama was at an end. Then followed a great feast, at which special portions of food were assigned by the relatives of the deceased to the actors who had personated them.[297] [Sidenote: Intention of the ceremonies.] As to the intention of these curious dramatic performances we have no very definite information. Dr. Haddon says: "The idea evidently was to convey to the mourners the assurance that the ghost was alive and that in the person of the dancer he visited his friends; the assurance of his life after death comforted the bereaved ones."[298] [Sidenote: Funeral ceremonies observed by the Eastern Islanders. The soul of the dead carried away by a masked actor.] In the Eastern Islands of Torres Straits the funeral ceremonies seem to have been even more numerous and elaborate. The body was at first laid on the ground on a mat outside the house, if the weather were fine. There friends wept and wailed over it, the nearest relations, such as the wife and mother, sitting at the head of the corpse. About an hour after the sun had set, the drummers and singers arrived. All night the drums beat and the people sang, but just as the dawn was breaking the wild music died away into silence. The wants of the living were now attended to: the assembled people breakfasted on green coco-nuts; and then, about an hour after sunrise, they withdrew from the body and took up a position a little further off to witness the next act of the drama of death. The drums now struck up again in quicker time to herald the approach of an actor, who could be heard, but not seen, shaking his rattle in the adjoining forest. Faster and faster beat the drums, louder and louder rose the singing, till the spectators were wound up to a pitch of excitement bordering on frenzy. Then at last a strange figure burst from the forest and came skipping and posturing towards the corpse. It was Terer, a spirit or mythical being who had come to fetch the soul of the departed and to bear it far away to its place of rest in the island beyond the sea. On his head he wore a wreath of leaves: a mask made of the mid-ribs of coco-nut leaves or of croton leaves hid his face: a long feather of the white tern nodded on his brow; and a mantle of green coco-nut leaves concealed his body from the shoulders to the knees. His arms were painted red: round his neck he wore a crescent of pearl-shell: in his left hand he carried a bow and arrows, and in his mouth a piece of wood, to which were affixed two rings of green coco-nut leaf. Thus attired he skipt forwards, rattling a bunch of nuts in his right hand, bending his head now to one side and now to another, swaying his body backwards and forwards, but always keeping time to the measured beat of the drums. At last, after a series of rapid jumps from one foot to the other, he ended his dance, and turning round fled away westward along the beach. He had taken the soul of the dead and was carrying it away to the spirit-land. The excitement of the women now rose to the highest pitch. They screamed and jumped from the ground raising their arms in air high above their heads. Shrieking and wailing all pursued the retreating figure along the beach, the mother or widow of the dead man casting herself again and again prostrate on the sand and throwing it in handfuls over her head. Among the pursuers was another masked man, who represented Aukem, the mother of Terer. She, or rather he, was dressed in dried banana leaves: long tufts of grass hung from her head over her face and shoulders; and in her mouth she carried a lighted bundle of dry coco-nut fibre, which emitted clouds of smoke. With an unsteady rickety gait the beldame hobbled after her rapidly retreating son, who turned round from time to time, skipping and posturing derisively as if to taunt her, and then hurrying away again westward. Thus the two quaint figures retreated further and further, he in front and she behind, till they were lost to view. But still the drums continued to beat and the singers to chant their wild song, when nothing was to be seen but the deserted beach with the sky and the drifting clouds above and the white waves breaking on the strand. Meantime the two actors in the sacred drama made their way westward till their progress was arrested by the sea. They plunged into it and swimming westward unloosed their leafy envelopes and let them float away to the spirit-land in the far island beyond the rolling waters. But the men themselves swam back to the beach, resumed the dress of ordinary mortals, and quietly mingled with the assembly of mourners.[299] [Sidenote: Personation of ghosts by masked men.] Such was the first act of the drama. The second followed immediately about ten o'clock in the morning. The actors in it were twenty or thirty men disguised as ghosts or spirits of the dead (_zera markai_). Their bodies were blackened from the neck to the ankles, but the lower part of their faces and their feet were dyed bright red, and a red triangle was painted on the front of their bodies. They wore head-dresses of grass with long projecting ribs of coco-nut leaves, and a long tail of grass behind reaching down to the level of the knees. In their hands they held long ribs of coco-nut leaf. They were preceded by a curious figure called _pager_, a man covered from head to foot with dry grass and dead banana leaves, who sidled along with an unsteady rolling gait in a zigzag course, keeping his head bowed, his red-painted hands clasped in front of his face, and his elbows sticking out from both sides of his body. In spite of his erratic course and curious mode of progression he drew away from the troop of ghosts behind him and came on towards the spectators, jerking his head from side to side, his hands shaking, and wailing as he went. Behind him marched the ghosts, with their hands crossed behind their backs and their faces looking out to sea. When they drew near to the orchestra, who were singing and drumming away, they halted and formed in two lines facing the spectators. They now all assumed the familiar attitude of a fencer on guard, one foot and arm advanced, the other foot and arm drawn back, and lunged to right and left as if they were stabbing something with the long ribs of the coco-nut leaves which they held in their hands. This manoeuvre they repeated several times, the orchestra playing all the time. Then they retreated into the forest, but only to march out again, form in line, stand on guard, and lunge again and again at the invisible foe. This appears to have been the whole of the second act of the drama. No explanation of it is given. We can only conjecture that the band of men, who seem from their name (_zera markai_) to have represented the ghosts or spirits of the dead, came to inform the living that the departed brother or sister had joined the majority, and that any attempt to rescue him or her would be vain. That perhaps was the meaning of the solemn pantomime of the lines of actors standing on guard and lunging again and again towards the spectators. But I must acknowledge that this is a mere conjecture of my own.[300] [Sidenote: Blood and hair offered to the dead.] Be that as it may, when this act of the drama was over, the mourners took up the body and with weeping and wailing laid it on a wooden framework resting on four posts at a little distance from the house of the deceased. Youths who had lately been initiated, and girls who had attained to puberty, now had the lobes of their ears cut. The blood streamed down over their faces and bodies and was allowed to drip on the feet of the corpse as a mark of pity or sorrow.[301] The other relatives cut their hair and left the shorn locks in a heap under the body. Blood and hair were probably regarded as offerings made to the departed kinsman or kinswoman. We saw that the Australian aborigines in like manner cut themselves and allow the blood to drip on the corpse; and they also offer their hair to the dead, cutting off parts of their beards, singeing them, and throwing them on the corpse.[302] Having placed the body on the stage and deposited their offerings of hair under it, the relatives took some large yams, cut them in pieces, and laid the pieces beside the body in order to serve as food for the ghost, who was supposed to eat it at night.[303] This notion seems inconsistent with the belief that the soul of the departed had already been carried off to Boigu, the island of the dead; but consistency in such matters is as little to be looked for among savages as among ourselves. [Sidenote: Mummification of the corpse.] When the body had remained a few days on the stage in the open air, steps were taken to convert it into a mummy. For this purpose it was laid in a small canoe manned by some young people of the same sex as the deceased. They paddled it across the lagoon to the reef and there rubbed off the skin, extracted the bowels from the abdomen and the brain from the skull, and having sewed up the hole in the abdomen and thrown the bowels into the sea, they brought the remains back to land and lashed them to the wooden framework with string, while they fixed a small stick to the lower jaw to keep it from drooping. The framework with its ghastly burden was fastened vertically to two posts behind the house, where it was concealed from public view by a screen of coco-nut leaves. Holes were pricked with an arrow between the fingers and toes to allow the juices of decomposition to escape, and a fire was kindled and kept burning under the stage to dry up the body.[304] [Sidenote: Garb of mourners. Cuttings for the dead.] About ten days after the death a feast of bananas, yams, and germinating coco-nuts was partaken of by the relations and friends, and portions were distributed to the assembled company, who carried them home in baskets. It was on this occasion that kinsfolk and friends assumed the garb of mourners. Their faces and bodies were smeared with a mixture of greyish earth and water: the ashes of a wood fire were strewn on their heads; and fringes of sago leaves were fastened on their arms and legs. A widow wore besides a special petticoat made of the inner bark of the fig-tree; the ends of it were passed between her legs and tucked up before and behind. She had to leave her hair unshorn during the whole period of her widowhood; and in time it grew into a huge mop of a light yellow colour in consequence of the ashes with which it was smeared. This coating of ashes, as well as the grey paint on her face and body, she was expected to renew from time to time.[305] It was also on the occasion of this feast, on or about the tenth day after death, that young kinsfolk of the deceased had certain patterns cut in their flesh by a sharp shell. The persons so operated on were young adults of both sexes nearly related to the dead man or woman. Women generally operated on women and men on men. The patients were held down during the operation, which was painful, and they sometimes fainted under it. The patterns were first drawn on the skin in red paint and then cut in with the shell. They varied a good deal in shape. Some consisted of arrangements of lines and scrolls; a favourite one, which was only carved on women, represented a centipede. The blood which flowed from the wounds was allowed to drip on the corpse, thus forming a sacrifice or tribute to the dead.[306] [Sidenote: The Dance of Death. The nocturnal dance.] When the body had remained some time, perhaps four or six months, on the scaffold, and the process of mummification was far advanced, a dance of death was held to celebrate the final departure of the spirit for its long home. Several men, seldom exceeding four in number, were chosen to act the part of ghosts, including the ghost of him or her in whose honour the performance was specially held. Further, about a dozen men were selected to form a sort of chorus; their business was to act as intermediaries between the living and the dead, summoning up the shades, serving as their messengers, and informing the people of their presence. The costume of the ghosts was simple, consisting of nothing but a head-dress and shoulder-band of leaves. The chorus, if we may call them so, wore girdles of leaves round their waists and wreaths of leaves on their heads. When darkness had fallen, the first act of the drama was played. The chorus stood in line opposite the mummy. Beyond them stood or sat the drummers, and beyond them again the audience was crowded on the beach, the women standing furthest from the mummy and nearest to the sea. The drummers now struck up, chanting at the same time to the beat of the drums. This was the overture. Then a shrill whistle in the forest announced the approach of a ghost. The subdued excitement among the spectators, especially among the women, was intense. Meantime the chorus, holding each other's hands, advanced sidelong towards the mummy with strange gestures, the hollow thud of their feet as they stamped on the ground being supposed to be the tread of the ghosts. Thus they advanced to the red-painted mummy with its grinning mouth. Behind it by this time stood one of the ghosts, and between him and the chorus a dialogue ensued. "Whose ghost is there?" called out the chorus; and a strident voice answered from the darkness, "The ghost of so and so is here." At that the chorus retreated in the same order as they had advanced, and again the hollow thud of their feet sounded in the ears of the excited spectators as the tramp of the dead. On reaching the drummers in their retreat the chorus called out some words of uncertain meaning, which have been interpreted, "Spirit of so-and-so, away at sea, loved little." At all events, the name of a dead person was pronounced, and at the sound the women, thrilled with excitement, leaped from the ground, holding their hands aloft; then hurled themselves prone on the sand, throwing it over their heads and wailing. The drums now beat faster and a wild weird chant rose into the air, then died away and all was silent, except perhaps for the lapping of the waves on the sand or the muffled thunder of the surf afar off on the barrier reef. Thus one ghost after another was summoned from the dusty dead and vanished again into the darkness. When all had come and gone, the leader of the chorus, who kept himself invisible behind the screen save for a moment when he was seen by the chorus to glide behind the mummy on its stage, blew a whistle and informed the spectators in a weird voice that all the ghosts that had been summoned that night would appear before them in broad day light on the morrow. With that the audience dispersed. But the men who had played the parts of the ghosts came forward and sat down with the chorus and the drummers on mats beside the body. There they remained singing to the beat of the drums till the first faint streaks of dawn glimmered in the east. [Sidenote: The noonday dance. The ghosts represented by masked actors.] Next morning the men assembled beside the body to inspect the actors who were to personate the ghosts, in order to make sure that they had learned their parts well and could mimick to the life the figure and gait of the particular dead persons whom they represented. By the time that these preparations were complete, the morning had worn on to noon. The audience was already assembled on the beach and on the long stretch of sand left by the ebbing tide; for the hour of the drama was always fixed at low water so as to allow ample space for the spectators to stand at a distance from the players, lest they should detect the features of the living under the masks of the dead. All being ready, the drummers marched in and took up their position just above the beach, facing the audience. The overture having been concluded, the first ghost was seen to glide from the forest and come dancing towards the beach. If he represented a woman, his costume was more elaborate than it had been under the shades of evening the night before. His whole body was painted red. A petticoat of leaves encircled his waist: a mask of leaves, surmounted by tufts of cassowary and pigeon feathers, concealed his head; and in his hands he carried brooms of coco-nut palm leaf. If he personated a man, he held a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other, and his costume was the usual dress of a dancer, with the addition of a head-dress of leaves and feathers and a diamond-shaped ornament of bamboo, which he held in his teeth and which entirely concealed his features. He approached dancing and mimicking the gestures of the person whom he represented. At the sight the women wailed, and the widow would cry out, "That's my husband," the mother would cry out, "That's my son." Then suddenly the drummers would call out, "Ah! Ah! Ai! Ai!" at which the women would fall to the ground, while the dancer retreated into the forest. In this way one ghost after the other would make his appearance, play his part, and vanish. Occasionally two of them would appear and dance together. The women and children, we are told, really believed that the actors were the ghosts of their dead kinsfolk. When the first dancer had thus danced before the people, he advanced with the drummers towards the framework on which the mummy was stretched, and there he repeated his dance before it. But the people were not allowed to witness this mystery; they remained wailing on the beach, for this was the moment at which the ghost of the dead man or woman was supposed to be departing for ever to the land of shades.[307] [Sidenote: Preservation of the mummy.] Some days afterwards the mummy was affixed to a new framework of bamboo and carried into the hut. In former times the huts were of a beehive shape, and the framework which supported the mummy was fastened to the central post on which the roof rested. The body thus stood erect within the house. Its dried skin had been painted red. The empty orbits of the eyes had been filled with pieces of pearl-shell of the nautilus to imitate eyes, two round spots of black beeswax standing for the pupils. The ears were decorated with shreds of the sago-palm or with grey seeds. A frontlet of pearl-shell nautilus adorned the head, and a crescent of pearl-shell the breast. In the darkness of the old-fashioned huts the body looked like a living person. In course of time it became almost completely mummified and as light as if it were made of paper. Swinging to and fro with every breath of wind, it turned its gleaming eyes at each movement of the head. The hut was now surrounded by posts and ropes to prevent the ghost from making his way into it and taking possession of his old body. Ghosts were supposed to appear only at night, and it was imagined that in the dark they would stumble against the posts and entangle themselves in the ropes, till in despair they desisted from the attempt to penetrate into the hut. In time the mummy mouldered away and fell to pieces. If the deceased was a male, the head was removed and a wax model of it made and given to the brother, whether blood or tribal brother, of the dead man. The head thus prepared or modelled in wax, with eyes of pearl-shell, was used in divination. The decaying remains of the body were taken to the beach and placed on a platform supported by four posts. That was their last resting-place.[308] [Sidenote: General summary. Dramas of the dead.] To sum up the foregoing evidence, we may say that if the beliefs and practices of the Torres Straits Islanders which I have described do not amount to a worship of the dead, they contain the elements out of which such a worship might easily have been developed. The preservation of the bodies of the dead, or at least their skulls, in the houses, and the consultation of them as oracles, prove that the spirits of the dead are supposed to possess knowledge which may be of great use to the living; and the custom suggests that in other countries the images of the gods may perhaps have been evolved out of the mummies of the dead. Further, the dramatic representation of the ghosts in a series of striking and impressive performances indicates how a sacred and in time a secular drama may elsewhere have grown out of a purely religious celebration concerned with the souls of the departed. In this connexion we are reminded of Professor Ridgeway's theory that ancient Greek tragedy originated in commemorative songs and dances performed at the tomb for the purpose of pleasing and propitiating the ghost of the mighty dead.[309] Yet the mortuary dramas of the Torres Straits Islanders can hardly be adduced to support that theory by analogy so long as we are ignorant of the precise significance which the natives themselves attached to these remarkable performances. There is no clear evidence that the dramas were acted for the amusement and gratification of the ghost rather than for the edification of the spectators. One important act certainly represented, and might well be intended to facilitate, the final departure of the spirit of the deceased to the land of souls. But the means taken to effect that departure might be adopted in the interests of the living quite as much as out of a tender regard for the welfare of the dead, since the ghost of the recently departed is commonly regarded with fear and aversion, and his surviving relations resort to many expedients for the purpose of ridding themselves of his unwelcome presence. [Footnote 274: S. H. Ray, in _Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, iii. (Cambridge, 1907) pp. 509-511; A. C. Haddon, "The Religion of the Torres Straits Islanders," _Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tyler_ (Oxford, 1907), p. 175.] [Footnote 275: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, iv. 92 _sqq._, 144 _sqq._, v. 346, vi. 207 _sqq._] [Footnote 276: A. C. Haddon, in _Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor_, p. 186.] [Footnote 277: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 254 _sq._] [Footnote 278: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 254 _sqq._] [Footnote 279: A. C. Haddon, in _Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor_, p. 181.] [Footnote 280: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, v. 355 _sq._, vi. 251; A. C. Haddon, in _Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor_, p. 179.] [Footnote 281: For authorities see the references in the preceding note.] [Footnote 282: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 253.] [Footnote 283: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, v. 248, 249.] [Footnote 284: _Id._, p. 250.] [Footnote 285: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 253; A. C. Haddon, in _Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor_, p. 180.] [Footnote 286: A. C. Haddon, _l.c._] [Footnote 287: A. C. Haddon, _op. cit._ pp. 182 _sq._; _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 127.] [Footnote 288: A. C. Haddon, _op. cit._ p. 183.] [Footnote 289: T. C. Hodson, _The Naga Tribes of Manipur_ (London, 1911), p. 43.] [Footnote 290: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, v. 355 _sq._, vi. 252. In the former passage Dr. Haddon seems to identify Boigu with the island of that name off the south coast of New Guinea; in the latter he prefers to regard it as mythical.] [Footnote 291: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 127.] [Footnote 292: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, v. 248 _sq._] [Footnote 293: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, v. 250 _sq._] [Footnote 294: Diodorus Siculus, i. 91.] [Footnote 295: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, v. 258.] [Footnote 296: _Id._, p. 362.] [Footnote 297: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, v. 252-256.] [Footnote 298: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, v. 256.] [Footnote 299: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 129-133.] [Footnote 300: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 133 _sq._] [Footnote 301: _Id._, pp. 135, 154.] [Footnote 302: (Sir) George Grey, _Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia_ (London, 1841), ii. 335.] [Footnote 303: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 135.] [Footnote 304: _Op. cit._ p. 136.] [Footnote 305: _Op. cit._ pp. 138, 153, 157 _sq._] [Footnote 306: _Op. cit._ pp. 154 _sq._] [Footnote 307: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 139-141.] [Footnote 308: _Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 148 _sq._ As to divination with skulls or waxen models, see _id._, pp. 266 _sqq._] [Footnote 309: W. Ridgeway, _The Origin of Tragedy, with special reference to the Greek Tragedians_ (Cambridge, 1910), pp. 26 _sqq._] LECTURE IX THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF BRITISH NEW GUINEA [Sidenote: The two races of New Guinea, the Papuan and the Melanesian.] In my last lecture I dealt with the islanders of Torres Straits, and shewed that these savages firmly believe in the existence of the human soul after death, and that if their beliefs and customs in this respect do not always amount to an actual worship of the departed, they contain at least the elements out of which such a worship might easily be developed. To-day we pass from the small islands of Torres Straits to the vast neighbouring island, almost continent, of New Guinea, the greater part of which is inhabited by a race related by physical type and language to the Torres Straits Islanders, and exhibiting approximately the same level of social and intellectual culture. New Guinea, roughly speaking, appears to be occupied by two different races, to which the names of Papuan and Melanesian are now given; and it is to the Papuan race, not to the Melanesian, that the Torres Straits Islanders are akin. The Papuans, a tall, dark-skinned, frizzly-haired race, inhabit apparently the greater part of New Guinea, including the whole of the western and central portions of the island. The Melanesians, a smaller, lighter-coloured, frizzly-haired race, inhabit the long eastern peninsula, including the southern coast from about Cape Possession eastward,[310] and tribes speaking a Melanesian language are also settled about Finsch Harbour and Huon Gulf in German New Guinea.[311] These Melanesians are most probably immigrants who have settled in New Guinea from the north and east, where the great chain of islands known as Melanesia stretches in an immense semicircle from New Ireland on the north to New Caledonia on the south-east. The natives of this chain of islands or series of archipelagoes are the true Melanesians; their kinsmen in New Guinea have undergone admixture with the Papuan aborigines, and accordingly should rather be called Papuo-Melanesians than Melanesians simply. Their country appears to be wholly comprised within the limits of British and German New Guinea; so far as I am aware, the vast area of Dutch New Guinea is inhabited solely by tribes of the Papuan race. In respect of material culture both races stand approximately on the same level: they live in settled villages, they practise agriculture, they engage in commerce, and they have a fairly developed barbaric art. Thus they have made some progress in the direction of civilisation; certainly they have far outstripped the wandering savages of Australia, who subsist entirely on the products of the chase and on the natural fruits of the earth. [Sidenote: Scantiness of our information as to the natives of New Guinea.] But although the natives of New Guinea have now been under the rule of European powers, Britain, Germany, and Holland, for many years, we unfortunately possess little detailed information as to their mental and social condition. It is true that the members of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits visited some parts of the southern coasts of British New Guinea, and several years later, in 1904, Dr. Seligmann was able to devote somewhat more time to the investigation of the same region and has given us the results of his enquiries in a valuable book. But the time at his disposal did not suffice for a thorough investigation of this large region; and accordingly his information, eked out though it is by that of Protestant and Catholic missionaries, still leaves us in the dark as to much which we should wish to know. Among the natives of British New Guinea our information is especially defective in regard to the Papuans, who occupy the greater part of the possession, including the whole of the western region; for Dr. Seligmann's book, which is the most detailed and systematic work yet published on the ethnology of British New Guinea, deals almost exclusively with the Melanesian portion of the population. Accordingly I shall begin what I have to say on this subject with the Melanesian or rather Papuo-Melanesian tribes of south-eastern New Guinea. [Sidenote: The Motu, their beliefs and customs concerning the dead.] Amongst these people the best known are the Motu, a tribe of fishermen and potters, who live in and about Port Moresby in the Central District of British New Guinea. Their language conforms to the Melanesian type. They are immigrants, but the country from which they came is unknown.[312] In their opinion the spirits of the dead dwell in a happy land where parted friends meet again and never suffer hunger. They fish, hunt, and plant, and are just like living men, except that they have no noses. When they first arrive in the mansions of the blest, they are laid out to dry on a sort of gridiron over a slow fire in order to purge away the grossness of the body and make them ethereal and light, as spirits should be. Yet, oddly enough, though they have no noses they cannot enter the realms of bliss unless their noses were pierced in their lifetime. For these savages bore holes in their noses and insert ornaments, or what they regard as such, in the holes. The operation is performed on children about the age of six years; and if children die before it has been performed on them, the parents will bore a hole in the nose of the corpse in order that the spirit of the child may go to the happy land. For if they omitted to do so, the poor ghost would have to herd with other whole-nosed ghosts in a bad place called Tageani, where there is little food to eat and no betelnuts to chew. The spirits of the dead are very powerful and visit bad people with their displeasure. Famine and scarcity of fish and game are attributed to the anger of the spirits. But they hearken to prayer and appear to their friends in dreams, sometimes condescending to give them directions for their guidance in time of trouble.[313] [Sidenote: The Koita or Koitapu.] Side by side with the Motu live the Koita or Koitapu, who appear to be the aboriginal inhabitants of the country and to belong to the Papuan stock. Their villages lie scattered for a distance of about forty miles along the coast, from a point about seven miles south-east of Port Moresby to a point on Redscar Bay to the north-west of that settlement. They live on friendly terms with the Motu and have intermarried with them for generations. The villages of the two tribes are usually built near to or even in direct continuity with each other. But while the Motu are mainly fishers and potters, the Koita are mainly tillers of the soil, though they have learned some arts or adopted some customs from their neighbours. They say to the Motu, "Yours is the sea, the canoes, the nets; ours the land and the wallaby. Give us fish for our flesh, and pottery for our yams and bananas." The Motu look down upon the Koita, but fear their power of sorcery, and apply to them for help in sickness and for the weather they happen to require; for they imagine that the Koita rule the elements and can make rain or sunshine, wind or calm by their magic. Thus, as in so many cases, the members of the immigrant race confess their inability to understand and manage the gods or spirits of the land, and have recourse in time of need to the magic of the aboriginal inhabitants. While the Koita belong to the Papuan stock and speak a Papuan language, most of the men understand the Motu tongue, which is one of the Melanesian family. Altogether these two tribes, the Koita and the Motu, may be regarded as typical representatives of the mixed race to which the name of Papuo-Melanesian is now given.[314] [Sidenote: Beliefs of the Koita concerning the human soul.] The Koita believe that the human spirit or ghost, which they call _sua_, leaves the body at death and goes away to live with other ghosts on a mountain called Idu. But they think that the spirit can quit the body and return to it during life; it goes away, for example, in dreams, and if a sleeper should unfortunately waken before his soul has had time to return, he will probably fall sick. Sneezing is a sign that the soul has returned to the body, and if a man does not sneeze for many weeks together, his friends look on it as a grave symptom; his soul, they imagine, must be a very long way off.[315] Moreover, a man's soul may be enticed from his body and detained by a demon or _tabu_, as the Koita call it. Thus, when a man who has been out in the forest returns home and shakes with fever, it is assumed that he has fallen down and been robbed of his soul by a demon. In order to recover that priceless possession, the sufferer and his friends repair to the exact spot in the forest where the supposed robbery was perpetrated. They take with them a long bamboo with some valuable ornaments tied to it, and two men support it horizontally over a pot which is filled with grass. A light is put to the grass, and as it crackles and blazes a number of men standing round the pot strike it with stones till it breaks, whereat they all groan. Then the company returns to the village, and the sick man lies down in his house with the bamboo and its ornaments hung over him. This is supposed to be all that is needed to effect a perfect cure; for the demon has kindly accepted the soul of the ornaments and released the soul of the sufferer, who ought to recover accordingly.[316] [Sidenote: Beliefs of the Koita concerning the state of the dead. Alleged communications with the dead by means of mediums.] However, at death the soul goes away for good and all; at least there appears to be no idea that it will ever return to life in the form of an infant, as the souls of the Central Australian aborigines are supposed to do. All Koita ghosts live together on Mount Idu, and their life is very like the one they led here on earth. There is no distinction between the good and the bad, the righteous and the wicked, the strong and the weak, the young and the old; they all fare alike in the spirit-land, with one exception. Like the Motu, the Koita are in the habit of boring holes in their noses and inserting ornaments in the holes; and they think that if any person were so unfortunate as to be buried with his nose whole and entire, his ghost would have to go about in the other world with a creature like a slow-worm depending from his nostrils on either side. Hence, when anybody dies before the operation of nose-boring has been performed on him or her, the friends take care to bore a hole in the nose of the corpse in order that the ghost may not appear disfigured among his fellows in dead man's land. There the ghosts dwell in houses, cultivate gardens, marry wives, and amuse themselves just as they did here on earth. They live a long time, but not for ever; for they grow weaker and weaker and at last die the second death, never to revive again, not even as ghosts. The exact length of time they live in the spirit-land has not been accurately ascertained; but there seems to be a notion that they survive only so long as their names and their memories survive among the living. When these are utterly forgotten, the poor ghosts cease to exist. If that is so, it is obvious that the dead depend for their continued existence upon the recollection of the living; their names are in a sense their souls, so that oblivion of the name involves extinction of the soul.[317] But though the spirits of the dead go away to live for a time on Mount Idu, they often return to their native villages and haunt the place of their death. On these visits they shew little benevolence or lovingkindness to their descendants. They punish any neglect in the performance of the funeral rites and any infringement of tribal customs, and the punishment takes the form of sickness or of bad luck in hunting or fishing. This dread of the ghost commonly leads the Koita to desert a house after a death and to let it fall into decay; but sometimes the widow, or in rare cases a brother or sister, will continue to inhabit the house of the deceased. Children who play near dwellings which have been deserted on account of death may fall sick; and if people who are not members of the family partake of food which has been hung up in such houses, they also may sicken. It is in dreams that the ghosts usually appear to the survivors; but occasionally they may be seen or at least felt by people in the waking state. Some years ago four Motuan girls persuaded many natives of Port Moresby that they could evoke the spirit of a youth named Tamasi, who had died three years before. The mother and other sorrowing relatives of the deceased paid a high price to the principal medium, a young woman named Mea, for an interview with the ghost. The meeting took place in a house by night. The relations and friends squatted on the ground in expectation; and sure enough the ghost presented himself in the darkness and went round shaking hands most affably with the assembled company. However, a sceptic who happened to assist at this spiritual sitting, had the temerity to hold on tight to the proffered hand of the ghost, while another infidel assisted him to obtain a sight as well as a touch of the vanished hand by striking a light. It then turned out that the supposed apparition was no spirit but the medium Mea herself. She was brought before a magistrate, who sentenced her to a short term of imprisonment and relieved her of the property which she had amassed by the exercise of her spiritual talents.[318] It is hardly for us, or at least for some of us, to cast stones at the efforts of ignorant savages to communicate by means of such intermediaries with their departed friends. Similar attempts have been made in our own country within our lifetime, and I believe that they are still being made, in perfect good faith, by educated ladies and gentlemen, who like their black brethren and sisters in the faith are sometimes made the dupes of designing knaves. If New Guinea has its Meas, Europe has its Eusapias. Human credulity and vulgar imposture are much the same all the world over. [Sidenote: Fear of the dead.] The fear of the dead is strongly marked in some funeral customs which are observed by the Roro-speaking tribes who occupy a territory at the mouth of the St. Joseph river in British New Guinea.[319] When a death takes place, the female relations of the deceased lacerate their skulls, faces, breasts, bellies, arms, and legs with sharp shells, till they stream with blood and fall down exhausted. Moreover, a fire is kindled on the grave and kept up almost continually for months for the purpose, we are told, of warming the ghost.[320] These attentions might be interpreted as marks of affection rather than of fear; but in other customs of these people the dread of the ghost is unmistakable. For when the corpse has been placed in the grave a near kinsman strokes it twice with a branch from head to foot in order to drive away the dead man's spirit; and in Yule Island, when the ghost has thus been brushed away from the body, he is pursued by two men brandishing sticks and torches from the village to the edge of the forest, where with a last curse they hurl the sticks and torches after him.[321] [Sidenote: Ghost of dead wife feared by widower.] Among these people the visits of ghosts, though frequent, are far from welcome, for all ghosts are supposed to be mischievous and to take no delight but in injuring the living. Hence, for example, a widower in mourning goes about everywhere armed with an axe to defend himself against the spirit of his dead wife, who might play him many an ill turn if she caught him defenceless and off his guard. And he is subject to many curious restrictions and has to lead the life of an outcast from society, apparently because people fear to come into contact with a man whose steps are dogged by so dangerous a spirit.[322] This account of the terrors of ghosts we owe to a Catholic missionary. But according to the information collected by Dr. Seligmann among these people the dread inspired by the souls of the dead is not so absolute. He tells us, indeed, that ghosts are thought to make people ill by stealing their souls; that the natives fear to go alone outside the village in the dark lest they should encounter a spectre; and that if too many quarrels occur among the women, the spirits of the dead may manifest their displeasure by visiting hunters and fishers with bad luck, so that it may be necessary to conjure their souls out of the village. On the other hand, it is said that if the ghosts abandoned a village altogether, the luck of the villagers would be gone, and if such a thing is supposed to have happened, measures are taken to bring back the spirits of the departed to the old home.[323] [Sidenote: Beliefs of the Mafulu concerning the dead.] Inland from the Roro-speaking tribes, among the mountains at the head of the St. Joseph River, there is a tribe known to their neighbours as the Mafulu, though they call themselves Mambule. They speak a Papuan language, but their physical characteristics are believed to indicate a strain of Negrito blood.[324] The Mafulu hold that at death the human spirit leaves the body and becomes a malevolent ghost. Accordingly they drive it away with shouts. It is supposed to go away to the tops of the mountains there to become, according to its age, either a shimmering light on the ground or a large sort of fungus, which is found only on the mountains. Hence natives who come across such a shimmering light or such a fungus are careful not to tread on it; much less would they eat the fungus. However, in spite of their transformation into these things, the ghosts come down from the mountains and prowl about the villages and gardens seeking what they may devour, and as their intentions are always evil their visits are dreaded by the people, who fill up the crevices and openings, except the doors, of their houses at night in order to prevent the incursions of these unquiet spirits. When a mission station was founded in their country, the Mafulu were amazed that the missionaries should sleep alone in rooms with open doors and windows, through which the ghosts might enter.[325] [Sidenote: Burial customs of the Mafulu.] Common people among the Mafulu are buried in shallow graves in the village, and pigs are killed at the funeral for the purpose of appeasing the ghost. Mourners wear necklaces of string and smear their faces, sometimes also their bodies, with black, which they renew from time to time. Instead of wearing a necklace, a widow, widower, or other near relative may abstain during the period of mourning from eating a favourite food of the deceased. A woman who has lost a child, especially a first-born or dearly loved child, will often amputate the first joint of one of her fingers with an adze; and she may repeat the amputation if she suffers another bereavement. A woman has been seen with three of her fingers mutilated in this fashion.[326] The corpses of chiefs, their wives, and other members of their families are not buried in graves but laid in rude coffins, which are then deposited either on rough platforms in the village or in the fork of a species of fig-tree. This sort of tree, called by the natives _gabi_, is specially used for such burials; one of them has been seen supporting no less than six coffins, one above the other. The Mafulu never cut down these trees, and in seeking a new site for a village they will often choose a place where one of them is growing. So long as the corpse of a chief is rotting and stinking on the platform or the tree, the village is deserted by the inhabitants; only two men, relatives of the deceased, remain behind exposed to the stench of the decaying body and the blood of the pigs which were slaughtered at the funeral feast. When decomposition is complete, the people return to the village. Should the coffin fall to the ground through the decay of the platform or the tree on which it rests, the people throw away all the bones except the skull and the larger bones of the arms and legs; these they bury in a shallow grave under the platform, or put in a box on a burial tree, or hang up in the chief's house.[327] [Sidenote: Use made of the skulls and bones at a great festival.] The skulls and leg and arm bones of chiefs, their wives, and other members of their families, which have thus been preserved, play a prominent part in the great feasts which the inhabitants of a Mafulu village celebrate at intervals of perhaps fifteen or twenty years. Great preparations are made for such a celebration. A series of tall posts, one for each household, is erected in the open space which intervenes between the two rows of the village houses. Yams and taro are fastened to the upper parts of the posts; and below them are hung in circles the skulls and arm and leg bones of dead chiefs, their wives, and kinsfolk, which have been preserved in the manner described. Any skulls and bones that remain over when all the posts have been thus decorated are placed on a platform, which has either served for the ordinary exposure of a chief's corpse or has been specially erected for the purpose of the festival. At a given moment of the ceremony the chief of the clan cuts down the props which support the platform, so that the skulls and bones roll on the ground. These are picked up and afterwards distributed, along with some of the skulls and bones from the posts, by the chief of the clan to the more important of the invited guests, who wear them as ornaments on their arms in a great dance. None but certain of the male guests take part in the dance; the villagers themselves merely look on. All the dancers are arrayed in full dancing costume, including heavy head-dresses of feathers, and they carry drums and spears, sometimes also clubs or adzes. The dance lasts the whole night. When it is over, the skulls and bones are hung up again on the tall posts. Afterwards the fruits and vegetables which have been collected in large quantities are divided among the guests. On a subsequent morning a large number of pigs are killed, and certain of the hosts take some of the human bones from the posts and dip them in the blood which flows from the mouths of the slaughtered pigs. With these blood-stained bones they next touch the skulls and all the other bones on the posts, which include all the skulls and arm and leg bones of all the chiefs and members of their families and other prominent persons who have been buried in the village or in any other village of the community since the last great feast was held. These relics of mortality may afterwards be kept in the chief's house, or hung on a tree, or simply thrown away in the forest; but in no case are they ever again used for purposes of ceremony. The slaughtered pigs are cut up and the portions distributed among the guests, who carry them away for consumption in their own villages.[328] [Sidenote: Trace of ancestor worship among the Mafulu.] This preservation of the skulls and bones of chiefs and other notables for years, and the dipping of them in the blood of pigs at a great festival, must apparently be designed to propitiate or influence in some way the ghosts of the persons to whom the skulls and bones belonged in their lifetime. But Mr. R. W. Williamson, to whom we are indebted for the description of this interesting ceremony, was not able to detect any other clear indications of ancestor worship among the people.[329] [Sidenote: Worship of the dead among the natives of the Aroma district.] However, a real worship of the dead, or something approaching to it, is reported to exist among some of the natives of the Aroma district in British New Guinea. Each family is said to have a sacred place, whither they carry offerings for the spirits of dead ancestors, whom they terribly fear. Sickness in the family, death, famine, scarcity of fish, and so forth, are all set down to the anger of these dreadful beings, who must accordingly be propitiated. On certain occasions the help of the spirits is especially invoked and their favour wooed by means of offerings. Thus, when a house is being built and the central post has been erected, sacrifices of wallaby, fish, and bananas are presented to the souls of the dead, and a prayer is put up that they will be pleased to keep the house always full of food and to prevent it from falling down in stormy weather. Again, when the natives begin to plant their gardens, they first take a bunch of bananas and sugar-cane and standing in the middle of the garden call over the names of dead members of the family, adding, "There is your food, your bananas and sugar-cane; let our food grow well, and let it be plentiful. If it does not grow well and plentifully, you all will be full of shame, and so shall we." Again, before the people set out on a trading expedition, they present food to the spirits at the central post of the house and pray them to go before the traders and prepare the people, so that the trade may be good. Once more, when there is sickness in the family, a pig is killed and its carcase carried to the sacred place, where the spirits are asked to accept it. Sins, also, are confessed, such as that people have gathered bananas or coco-nuts without offering any of them to their dead ancestors. In presenting the pig they say, "There is a pig; accept it, and remove the sickness." But if prayers and sacrifices are vain, and the patient dies, then, while the relatives all stand round the open grave, the chief's sister or cousin calls out in a loud voice: "You have been angry with us for the bananas or the coco-nuts which we have gathered, and in your anger you have taken away this child. Now let it suffice, and bury your anger." So saying they lower the body into the grave and shovel in the earth on the top of it. The spirits of the departed, on quitting their bodies, paddle in canoes across the lagoon and go away to the mountains, where they live in perfect bliss, with no work to do and no trouble to vex them, chewing betel, dancing all night and resting all day.[330] [Sidenote: The Hood Peninsula. The town of Kalo.] Between the Aroma District in the south-east and Port Moresby on the north-west is situated the Hood Peninsula in the Central District of British New Guinea. It is inhabited by the Bulaa, Babaka, Kamali, and Kalo tribes, which all speak dialects of one language.[331] The village or town of Kalo, built at the base of the peninsula, close to the mouth of the Vanigela or Kemp Welch River, is said to be the wealthiest village in British New Guinea. It includes some magnificent native houses, all built over the water on piles, some of which are thirty feet high. The sight of these great houses perched on such lofty and massive props is very impressive. In front of each house is a series of large platforms like gigantic steps. Some of the posts and under-surfaces of the houses are carved with figures of crocodiles and so forth. The labour of cutting the huge planks for the flooring of the houses and the platforms must be immense, and must have been still greater in the old days, when the natives had only stone tools to work with. Many of the planks are cut out of the slab-like buttresses of tall forest trees which grow inland. So hard is the wood that the boards are handed down as heirlooms from father to son, and the piles on which the houses are built last for generations. The inhabitants of Kalo possess gardens, where the rich alluvial soil produces a superabundance of coco-nuts, bananas, yams, sweet potatoes, and taro. Areca palms also flourish and produce the betel nuts, which are in great demand for chewing with quick-lime and so constitute a source of wealth. Commanding the mouth of the Vanigela River, the people of Kalo absorb the trade with the interior; and their material prosperity is said to have rendered them conceited and troublesome.[332] [Sidenote: Beliefs and customs concerning the dead among the natives of the Hood Peninsula. Seclusion of the widow or widower.] The tribes inhabiting the Hood Peninsula are reported to have no belief in any good spirit but an unlimited faith in bad spirits, amongst whom they include the souls of their dead ancestors. At death the ghosts join their forefathers in a subterranean region, where they have splendid gardens, houses, and so forth. Yet not content with their life in the underworld, they are always on the watch to deal out sickness and death to their surviving friends and relations, who may have the misfortune to incur their displeasure. So the natives are most careful to do nothing that might offend these touchy and dangerous spirits. Like many other savages, they do not believe that anybody dies a natural death; they think that all the deaths which we should call natural are brought about either by an ancestral ghost (_palagu_) or by a sorcerer or witch (_wara_). Even when a man dies of snake-bite, they detect in the discoloration of the body the wounds inflicted upon him by the fell art of the magician.[333] On the approach of death the house of the sick man is filled by anxious relatives and friends, who sit around watching for the end. When it comes, there is a tremendous outburst of grief. The men beat their faces with their clenched fists; the women tear their cheeks with their nails till the blood streams down. They usually bury their dead in graves, which among the inland tribes are commonly dug near the houses of the deceased. The maritime tribes, who live in houses built on piles over the water, sometimes inter the corpse in the forest. But at other times they place it in a canoe, which they anchor off the village. Then, when the body has dried up, they lay it on a platform in a tree. Finally, they collect and clean the bones, tie them in a bundle, and place them on the roof of the house. When the corpse is buried, a temporary hut is erected over the grave, and in it the widow or widower lives in seclusion for two or three months. During her seclusion the widow employs herself in fashioning her widow's weeds, which consist of a long grass petticoat reaching to the ankles. She wears a large head-dress made of shells; her head is shaved, and her body blackened. Further, she wears round her neck the waistband of her deceased husband with his lower jaw-bone attached to it. The costume of a widower is somewhat similar, though he does not wear a long grass petticoat. Instead of it he has a graceful fringe, which hangs from his waist half way to the knees. On his head he wears an elaborate head-dress made of shells, and on his arms he has armlets of the same material. His hair is cut off and his whole skin blackened. Round his neck is a string, from which depends his dead wife's petticoat. It is sewn up into small bulk and hangs under his right arm. While the widow or widower is living in seclusion on the grave, he or she is supplied with food by relations. At sundown on the day of the burial, a curious ceremony is performed. An old woman or man, supposed to be gifted with second-sight, is sent for. Seating herself at the foot of the grave she peers into the deepening shadows under the coco-nut palms. At first she remains perfectly still, while the relations of the deceased watch her with painful anxiety. Soon her look becomes more piercing, and lowering her head, while she still gazes into the depth of the forest, she says in low and solemn tones, "I see coming hither So-and-So's grandfather" (mentioning the name of the dead person). "He says he is glad to welcome his grandson to his abode. I see now his father and his own little son also, who died in infancy." Gradually, she grows more and more excited, waving her arms and swaying her body from side to side. "Now they come," she cries, "I can see all our forefathers in a fast-gathering crowd. They are coming closer and yet closer. Make room, make room for the spirits of our departed ancestors." By this time she has worked herself up into a frenzy. She throws herself on the ground, beating her head with her clenched fists. Foam flies from her lips, her eyes become fixed, and she rolls over insensible. But the fit lasts only a short time. She soon comes to herself; the vision is past, and the visionary is restored to common life.[334] [Sidenote: Application of the juices of the dead to the persons of the living.] Some of the inland tribes of this district have a peculiar way of disposing of their dead. A double platform about ten feet high is erected near the village. On the upper platform the corpse is placed, and immediately below it the widow or widower sleeps on the lower platform, allowing juices of the decaying body to stream down on her or him. This application of the decomposing juices of a corpse to the persons of the living is not uncommon among savages; it appears to be a form of communion with the dead, the survivors thus in a manner identifying themselves with their departed kinsfolk by absorbing a portion of their bodily substance. Among the tribes in question a widower marks his affection for his dead wife by never washing himself during the period of mourning; he would not rid himself of those products of decomposition which link him, however sadly, with her whom he has lost. Every day, too, reeking with these relics of mortality, he solemnly stalks through the village.[335] [Sidenote: Precautions taken by man-slayers against the ghosts of their victims.] But there is a distinction between ghosts. If all of them are feared, some are more dreadful than others, and amongst the latter may naturally be reckoned the ghosts of slain enemies. Accordingly the slayer has to observe special precautions to guard against the angry and vengeful spirit of his victim. Amongst these people, we are told, a man who has taken life is held to be impure until he has undergone certain ceremonies. As soon as possible after the deed is done, he cleanses himself and his weapon. Then he repairs to his village and seats himself on the logs of sacrificial staging. No one approaches him or takes any notice whatever of him. Meantime a house is made ready, in which he must live by himself for several days, waited on only by two or three small boys. He may eat nothing but toasted bananas, and only the central parts of them; the ends are thrown away. On the third day a small feast is prepared for him by his friends, who also provide him with some new waistbands. Next day, arrayed in all his finery and wearing the badges which mark him as a homicide, he sallies forth fully armed and parades the village. Next day a hunt takes place, and from the game captured a kangaroo is selected. It is cut open, and with its spleen and liver the back of the homicide is rubbed. Then he walks solemnly down to the nearest water and standing straddle-legs in it washes himself. All young untried warriors then swim between his legs, which is supposed to impart his courage and strength to them. Next day at early dawn he dashes out of his house fully armed and calls aloud the name of his victim. Having satisfied himself that he has thoroughly scared the ghost of the dead man, he returns to his house. Further, floors are beaten and fires kindled for the sake of driving away the ghost, lest he should still be lingering in the neighbourhood. A day later the purification of the homicide is complete and he is free to enter his wife's house, which he might not do before.[336] This account of the purification of a homicide suggests that the purificatory rites, which have been observed in similar cases by many peoples, including the ancient Greeks, are primarily intended to free the slayer from the dangerous ghost of his victim, which haunts him and seeks to take his life. Such rites in fact appear designed, not to restore the homicide to a state of moral innocence, but merely to guard him against a physical danger; they are protective, not reformatory, in character; they are exorcisms, not purifications in the sense which we attach to the word. This interpretation of the ceremonies observed by manslayers among many peoples might be supported by a large array of evidence; but to go into the matter fully would lead me into a long digression. I have collected some of the evidence elsewhere.[337] [Sidenote: Beliefs and customs concerning the dead among the Massim of south-eastern New Guinea. Hiyoyoa, the land of the dead. Mourners bathe and shave their heads. Food deposited in the grave. Dietary restrictions imposed on mourners.] We now pass to that branch of the Papuo-Melanesian race which occupies the extreme south-eastern part of British New Guinea, and to which Dr. Seligmann gives the name of Massim. These people have been observed more especially at three places, namely Bartle Bay, Wagawaga, and Tubetube, a small island of the Engineer group lying off the south-eastern extremity of New Guinea. Among them the old custom was to bury the dead on the outskirts of the hamlet and sometimes within a few yards of the houses, and apparently the remains were afterwards as a rule left undisturbed; there was no general practice of exhuming the bones and depositing them elsewhere.[338] At Wagawaga the name for the spirit or soul of a dead person is _arugo_, which also signifies a man's shadow or reflection in a glass or in water; and though animals and trees are not supposed to have spirits, their reflections bear the same name _arugo_.[339] The souls of the dead are believed to depart to the land of Hiyoyoa, which is under the sea, near Maivara, at the head of Milne Bay. The land of the dead, as usual, resembles in all respects the land of the living, except that it is day there when it is night at Wagawaga, and the dead speak of the upper world in the language of Milne Bay instead of in that of Wagawaga. A certain being called Tumudurere receives the ghosts on their arrival and directs them where to make their gardens. The souls of living men and women can journey to the land of the dead and return to earth; indeed this happens not unfrequently. There is a man at Wagawaga who has often gone thither and come back; whenever he wishes to make the journey, he has nothing to do but to smear himself with a magical stuff and to fall asleep, after which he soon wakes up in Hiyoyoa. At first the ghosts whom he met in the other world did not invite him to partake of their food, because they knew that if he did so he could not return to the land of the living; but apparently practice has rendered him immune to the usually fatal effects of the food of the dead.[340] Though Hiyoyoa, at the head of Milne Bay, lies to the west of Wagawaga, the dead are buried in a squatting posture with their faces turned to the east, in order that their souls may depart to the other world.[341] Immediately after the funeral the relations who have taken part in the burial go down to the sea and bathe, and so do the widow and children of the deceased because they supported the dying husband and father in his extremity. After bathing in the sea the widow and children shave their heads.[342] Both the bathing and the shaving are doubtless forms of ceremonial purification; in other words, they are designed to rid the survivors of the taint of death, or perhaps more definitely to remove the ghost from their persons, to which he may be supposed to cling like a burr. At Bartle Bay the dead are buried on their sides with their heads pointing in the direction from which the totem clan of the deceased is said to have come originally; and various kinds of food, of which the dead man had partaken in his last illness, are deposited, along with some paltry personal ornaments, in the grave. Apparently the food is intended to serve as provision for the ghost on his journey to the other world. Curiously enough, the widow is forbidden to eat of the same kinds of food of which her husband ate during his last illness, and the prohibition is strictly observed until after the last of the funeral feasts.[343] The motive of the prohibition is not obvious; perhaps it may be a fear of attracting the ghost back to earth through the savoury food which he loved in the body. At Wagawaga, after the relatives who took part in the burial have bathed in the sea, they cut down several of the coco-nut trees which belonged to the deceased, leaving both nuts and trees to rot on the ground. During the first two or three weeks after the funeral these same relatives may not eat boiled food, but only roast; they may not drink water, but only the milk of young coco-nuts made hot, and although they may eat yams they must abstain from bananas and sugar-cane.[344] A man may not eat coco-nuts grown in his dead father's hamlet, nor pigs and areca-nuts from it during the whole remainder of his life.[345] The reasons for these dietary restrictions are not mentioned, but no doubt the abstinences are based on a fear of the ghost, or at all events on a dread of the contagion of death, to which all who had a share in the burial are especially exposed. [Sidenote: Funeral customs at Tubetube. The fire on the grave. The happy land.] At Tubetube, in like manner, immediately after a funeral a brother of the deceased cuts down two or three of the dead man's coco-nut trees. There, also, the children of the deceased may not eat any coco-nuts from their father's trees nor even from any trees grown in his hamlet; nay, they may not partake of any garden produce grown in the vicinity of the hamlet; and similarly they must abstain from the pork of all pigs fattened in their dead father's village. But these prohibitions do not apply to the brothers, sisters, and other relatives of the departed. The relations who have assisted at the burial remain at the grave for five or six days, being fed by the brothers or other near kinsfolk of the deceased. They may not quit the spot even at night, and if it rains they huddle into a shelter built over the grave. During their vigil at the tomb they may not drink water, but are allowed a little heated coco-nut milk; they are supposed to eat only a little yam and other vegetable food.[346] On the day when the body is buried a fire is kindled at the grave and kept burning night and day until the feast of the dead has been held. "The reason for having the fire is that the spirit may be able to get warm when it rises from the grave. The natives regard the spirit as being very cold, even as the body is when the life has departed from it, and without this external warmth provided by the fire it would be unable to undertake the journey to its final home. The feast for the dead is celebrated when the flesh has decayed, and in some places the skull is taken from the grave, washed and placed in the house, being buried again when the feast is over. At Tubetube this custom of taking the skull from the grave is not regularly followed, in some instances it is, but the feast is always held, and on the night of the day on which the feast takes place, the fire, which has been in some cases kept burning for over a month, is allowed to burn out, as the spirit, being now safe and happy in the spirit-land, has no further need of it."[347] "In this spirit-land eternal youth prevails, there are no old men nor old women, but all are in the full vigour of the prime of life, or are attaining thereto, and having reached that stage never grow older. Old men and old women, who die as such on Tubetube, renew their youth in this happy place, where there are no more sickness, no evil spirits, and no death. Marriage, and giving in marriage, continue; if a man dies, his widow, though she may have married again, is at her death re-united to her first husband in the spirit-land, and the second husband when he arrives has to take one of the women already there who may be without a mate, unless he marries again before his death, in which case he would have to wait until his wife joins him. Children are born, and on arriving at maturity do not grow older. Houses are built, canoes are made but they are never launched, and gardens are planted and yield abundantly. The spirits of their animals, dogs, pigs, etc., which have died on Tubetube, precede and follow them to the spirit-land. Fighting and stealing are unknown, and all are united in a common brotherhood."[348] [Sidenote: The names of the dead not mentioned.] In the south-eastern part of New Guinea the fear of the dead is further manifested by the common custom of avoiding the mention of their names. If their names were those of common objects, the words are dropped from the language of the district so long as the memory of the departed persists, and new names are substituted for them. For example, when a man named Binama, which means the hornbill, died at Wagawaga, the name of the bird was changed to _ambadina_, which means "the plasterer."[349] In this way many words are either permanently lost or revived with modified or new meanings. Hence the fear of the dead is here, as in many other places, a fertile source of change in language. Another indication of the terror inspired by ghosts is the custom of abandoning or destroying the house in which a death has taken place; and this custom used to be observed in certain cases at Tubetube and Wagawaga.[350] [Sidenote: Beliefs and customs concerning the dead in the island of Kiwai.] Thus far I have dealt mainly with the beliefs and practices of the Papuo-Melanesians in the eastern part of British New Guinea. With regard to the pure Papuan population in the western part of the possession our information is much scantier. However, we learn that in Kiwai, a large island at the mouth of the Fly River, the dead are buried in the villages and the ghosts are supposed to live in the ground near their decaying bodies, but to emerge from time to time into the upper air and look about them, only, however, to return to their abode beneath the sod. Nothing is buried with the corpse; but a small platform is made over the grave, or sticks are planted in the ground along its sides, and on these are placed sago, yams, bananas, coco-nuts, and cooked crabs and fish, all for the spirit of the dead to eat. A fire is also kindled beside the grave and kept up by the friends for nine days in order that the poor ghost may not shiver with cold at night. These practices prove not merely a belief in the survival of the soul after death but a desire to make it comfortable. Further, when the deceased is a man, his bow and arrows are stuck at the head of the grave; when the deceased is a woman, her petticoat is hung upon a stick. No doubt the weapons and the garment are intended for the use of the ghost, when he or she revisits the upper air. On the ninth day after the burial a feast is prepared, the drum is beaten, the conch shell blown, and the chief mourner declares that no more fires need be lighted and no more food placed on the grave.[351] [Sidenote: Adiri, the land of the dead, and Sido, the first man who went thither. The fear of ghosts.] According to the natives of Kiwai the land of the dead is called Adiri or Woibu. The first man to go thither and to open up a road for others to follow him, was Sido, a popular hero about whom the people tell many tales. But whereas in his lifetime Sido was an admired and beneficent being, in his ghostly character he became a mischievous elf who played pranks on such as he fell in with. His adventures after death furnish the theme of many stories. However, it is much to his credit that, finding the land of the dead a barren region without vegetation of any sort, he, by an act of generation, converted it into a garden, where bananas, yams, taro, coco-nuts and other fruits and vegetables grew and ripened in a single night. Having thus fertilised the lower region, he announced to Adiri, the lord of the subterranean realm, that he was the precursor of many more men and women who would descend thereafter into the spirit world. His prediction has been amply fulfilled; for ever since then everybody has gone by the same road to the same place.[352] However, when a person dies, his or her spirit may linger for a few days in the neighbourhood of its old home before setting out for the far country. During that time the spirit may occasionally be seen by ordinary people, and accordingly the natives are careful not to go out in the dark for fear of coming bolt on the ghost; and they sometimes adopt other precautions against the prowling spectre, who might otherwise haunt them and carry them off with him to deadland. Some classes of ghosts are particularly dreaded on account of their malignity; such, for example, are the spirits of women who have died in childbed, and of people who have hanged themselves or been devoured by crocodiles. Such ghosts loiter for a long time about the places where they died, and they are very dangerous, because they are for ever luring other people to die the same death which they died themselves. Yet another troop of evil ghosts are the souls of those who were beheaded in battle; for they kill and devour people, and at night you may see the blood shining like fire as it gushes from the gaping gashes in their throats.[353] [Sidenote: The path of the ghosts to Adiri. Adiri, the land of the dead.] The road to Adiri or deadland is fairly well known, and the people can point to many landmarks on it. For example, in the island of Paho there is a tree called _dani_, under which the departing spirits sit down and weep. When they have cried their fill and rubbed their poor tear-bedraggled faces with mud, they make little pellets of clay and throw them at the tree, and anybody can see for himself the pellets sticking to the branches. It is true that the pellets resemble the nests of insects, but this resemblance is only fortuitous. Near the tree is a rocking stone, which the ghosts set in motion, and the sound that they make in so doing is like the muffled roll of a drum. And while the stone rocks to and fro with a hollow murmur, the ghosts dance, the men on one side of the stone and the women on the other. Again at Mabudavane, where the Mawata people have gardens, you may sometimes hear, in the stillness of night, the same weird murmur, which indicates the presence of a ghost. Then everybody keeps quiet, the children are hushed to silence, and all listen intently. The murmur continues for a time and then ends abruptly in a splash, which tells the listeners that the ghost has leaped over the muddy creek. Further on, the spirits come to Boigu, where they swim in the waterhole and often appear to people in their real shape. But after Boigu the track of the ghosts is lost, or at least has not been clearly ascertained. The spirit world lies somewhere away in the far west, but the living are not quite sure of the way to it, and they are somewhat vague in their accounts of it. There is no difference between the fate of the good and the fate of the bad in the far country; the dead meet the friends who died before them; and people who come from the same village probably live together in the same rooms of the long house of the ghosts. However, some native sceptics even doubt whether there is such a place as Adiri at all, and whether death may not be the end of consciousness to the individual.[354] [Sidenote: Appearance of the dead to the living in dreams.] The dead often appear to the living in dreams, warning them of danger or furnishing them with useful information with regard to the cultivation of their gardens, the practice of witchcraft, and so on. In order to obtain advice from his dead parents a man will sometimes dig up their skulls from the grave and sleep beside them; and to make sure of receiving their prompt attention he will not infrequently provide himself with a cudgel, with which he threatens to smash their skulls if they do not answer his questions. Some persons possess a special faculty of communicating with the departing spirit of a person who has just died. Should they desire to question it they will lurk beside the road which ghosts are known to take; and in order not to be betrayed by their smell, which is very perceptible to a ghost, they will chew the leaf or bark of a certain tree and spit the juice over their bodies. Then the ghost cannot detect them, or rather he takes them to be ghosts like himself, and accordingly he may in confidence impart to them most valuable information, such for example as full particulars with regard to the real cause of his death. This priceless intelligence the ghost-seer hastens to communicate to his fellow tribesmen.[355] [Sidenote: Offerings to the dead.] When a man has just died and been buried, his surviving relatives lay some of his weapons and ornaments, together with presents of food, upon his grave, no doubt for the use of the ghost; but some of these things they afterwards remove and bring back to the village, probably considering, with justice, that they will be more useful to the living than to the dead. But offerings to the dead may be presented to them at other places than their tombs. "The great power," says Dr. Landtman, "which the dead represent to the living has given rise to a sort of simple offering to them, almost the only kind of offering met with among the Kiwai Papuans. The natives occasionally lay down presents of food at places to which spirits come, and utter some request for assistance which the spirits are supposed to hear."[356] In such offerings and prayers we may detect the elements of a regular worship of the dead. [Sidenote: Dreams as a source of the belief in immortality.] With regard to the source of these beliefs among the Kiwai people Dr. Landtman observes that "undoubtedly dreams have largely contributed in supplying the natives with ideas about Adiri and life after death. A great number of dreams collected by me among the Kiwai people tell of wanderings to Adiri or of meetings with spirits of dead men, and as dreams are believed to describe the real things which the soul sees while roaming about outside the body, we understand that they must greatly influence the imagination of the people."[357] That concludes what I have to say as to the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the natives of British New Guinea. In the following lectures I shall deal with the same rudimentary aspect of religion as it is reported to exist among the aborigines of the vast regions of German and Dutch New Guinea. [Footnote 310: C. G. Seligmann, _The Melanesians of British New Guinea_ (Cambridge, 1910), pp. 1 _sq._] [Footnote 311: See below, pp. 242, 256, 261 _sq._, 291.] [Footnote 312: A. C. Haddon, _Headhunters, Black, White, and Brown_ (London, 1901), pp. 249 _sq._ As to the Motu and their Melanesian or Polynesian affinities, see Rev. W. Y. Turner, "The Ethnology of the Motu," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, vii. (1878) pp. 470 _sqq._] [Footnote 313: Rev. J. Chalmers, _Pioneering in New Guinea_ (London, 1887), pp. 168-170. Compare Rev. W. Y. Turner, "The Ethnology of the Motu," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, vii. (1878) pp. 484 _sqq._; Rev. W. G. Lawes, "Ethnological Notes on the Motu, Koitapu and Koiari Tribes of New Guinea," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, viii. (1879) pp. 370 _sq._] [Footnote 314: A. C. Haddon, _Headhunters, Black, White, and Brown_, pp. 249 _sq._; C. G. Seligmann, _The Melanesians of British New Guinea_, pp. 16, 41. As to the Koita (or Koitapu) and the Motu, see further the Rev. W. Y. Turner, "The Ethnology of the Motu," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, vii. (1878) pp. 470 _sqq._; Rev. W. G. Lawes, "Ethnological Notes on the Motu, Koitapu and Koiari Tribes of New Guinea," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, viii. (1879) pp. 369 _sq._] [Footnote 315: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ pp. 189-191.] [Footnote 316: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ pp. 185 _sq._] [Footnote 317: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ p. 192.] [Footnote 318: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ pp. 190-192. As to the desertion of the house after death, see _id._, pp. 89 _sq._] [Footnote 319: The territory of the Roro-speaking tribes extends from Kevori, east of Waimatuma (Cape Possession), to Hiziu in the neighbourhood of Galley Reach. Inland of these tribes lies a region called by them Mekeo, which is inhabited by two closely related tribes, the Biofa and Vee. Off the coast lies Yule Island, which is commonly called Roro. See C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ p. 195.] [Footnote 320: V. Jouet, _La Société des Missionaires du Sacré Coeur dans les Vicariats Apostoliques de la Mélanésie et de la Micronésie_ (Issoudun, 1887), p. 30; Father Guis, "Les Canaques: Mort-deuil," _Missions Catholiques_, xxxiv. (1902) pp. 186, 200.] [Footnote 321: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ pp. 274 _sq._] [Footnote 322: Father Guis, "Les Canaques: Mort-deuil," _Missions Catholiques_, xxxiv. (1902) pp. 208 _sq._ See _Psyche's Task_, pp. 75 _sq._] [Footnote 323: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ p. 310.] [Footnote 324: R. W. Williamson, _The Mafulu Mountain People of British New Guinea_ (London, 1912), pp. 2 _sq._, 297 _sqq._] [Footnote 325: R. W. Williamson, _op. cit._ pp. 243 _sq._, 246, 266-269.] [Footnote 326: R. W. Williamson, _op. cit._ pp. 245-250.] [Footnote 327: R. W. Williamson, _op. cit._ pp. 256-258, 261-263.] [Footnote 328: R. W. Williamson, _op. cit._ pp. 125-152.] [Footnote 329: R. W. Williamson, _op. cit._ pp. 270 _sq._] [Footnote 330: J. Chalmers and W. Wyatt Gill, _Work and Adventure in New Guinea_ (London, 1885), pp. 84-86.] [Footnote 331: R. E. Guise, "On the Tribes inhabiting the Mouth of the Wanigela River, New Guinea," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxviii. (1899) p. 205.] [Footnote 332: A. C. Haddon, _Headhunters, Black, White, and Brown_, p. 213.] [Footnote 333: R. E. Guise, _op. cit._ pp. 216 _sq._] [Footnote 334: R. E. Guise, _op. cit._ pp. 210 _sq._] [Footnote 335: R. E. Guise, _op. cit._ p. 211.] [Footnote 336: R. E. Guise, _op. cit._ pp. 213 _sq._] [Footnote 337: _Psyche's Task_, pp. 52 _sqq._; _Taboo and the Perils of the Soul_, pp. 167 _sqq._] [Footnote 338: C. G. Seligmann, _The Melanesians of British New Guinea_, p. 607.] [Footnote 339: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ p. 655.] [Footnote 340: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ pp. 655 _sq._] [Footnote 341: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ p. 610.] [Footnote 342: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ p. 611.] [Footnote 343: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ pp. 616 _sq._] [Footnote 344: C. G. Seligmann. _op. cit._ p. 611.] [Footnote 345: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ pp. 618 _sq._] [Footnote 346: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ pp. 613 _sq._] [Footnote 347: The Rev. J. T. Field of Tubetube (Slade Island), quoted by George Brown, D.D., _Melanesians and Polynesians_ (London, 1910), pp. 442 _sq._] [Footnote 348: Rev. J. T. Field, _op. cit._ pp. 443 _sq._] [Footnote 349: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ pp. 629-631. Dr. Seligmann seems to think that the custom is at present dictated by courtesy and a reluctance to grieve the relatives of the deceased; but the original motive can hardly have been any other than a fear of the ghost.] [Footnote 350: C. G. Seligmann, _op. cit._ pp. 631 _sq._] [Footnote 351: Rev. J. Chalmers, "Notes on the Natives of Kiwai Island, Fly River, British New Guinea," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxiii. (1903) pp. 119, 120.] [Footnote 352: G. Landtman, "Wanderings of the Dead in the Folk-lore of the Kiwai-speaking Papuans," _Festskrift tillägnad Edvard Westermarck_ (Helsingfors, 1912), pp. 59-66.] [Footnote 353: G. Landtman, _op. cit._ pp. 67 _sq._] [Footnote 354: G. Landtman, _op. cit._ pp. 68-71.] [Footnote 355: G. Landtman, _op. cit._ pp. 77 _sq._] [Footnote 356: G. Landtman, _op. cit._ pp. 78 _sq._] [Footnote 357: G. Landtman, _op. cit._ p. 71.] LECTURE X THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF GERMAN NEW GUINEA [Sidenote: Andrew Lang.] I feel that I cannot begin my second course of lectures without referring to the loss which the study of primitive religion has lately sustained by the death of one of my predecessors in this chair, one who was a familiar and an honoured figure in this place, Mr. Andrew Lang. Whatever may be the judgment of posterity on his theories--and all our theories on these subjects are as yet more or less tentative and provisional--there can be no question but that by the charm of his writings, the wide range of his knowledge, the freshness and vigour of his mind, and the contagious enthusiasm which he brought to bear on whatever he touched, he was a great power in promoting the study of primitive man not in this country only, but wherever the English language is spoken, and that he won for himself a permanent place in the history of the science to which he devoted so much of his remarkable gifts and abilities. As he spent a part of every winter in St. Andrews, I had thought that in the course on which I enter to-day I might perhaps be honoured by his presence at some of my lectures. But it was not to be. Yet a fancy strikes me to which I will venture to give utterance. You may condemn, but I am sure you will not smile at it. It has been said of Macaulay that if his spirit ever revisited the earth, it might be expected to haunt the flagged walk beside the chapel in the great court of Trinity College, Cambridge, the walk which in his lifetime he loved to pace book in hand. And if Andrew Lang's spirit could be seen flitting pensively anywhere, would it not be just here, in "the college of the scarlet gown," in the "little city worn and grey," looking out on the cold North Sea, the city which he knew and loved so well? Be that as it may, his memory will always be associated with St. Andrews; and if the students who shall in future go forth from this ancient university to carry St. Andrew's Cross, if I may say so, on their banner in the eternal warfare with falsehood and error,--if they cannot imitate Andrew Lang in the versatility of his genius, in the variety of his accomplishments, in the manifold graces of his literary art, it is to be hoped that they will strive to imitate him in qualities which are more within the reach of us all, in his passionate devotion to knowledge, in his ardent and unflagging pursuit of truth. * * * * * [Sidenote: Review of preceding lectures.] In my last course of lectures I explained that I proposed to treat of the belief in immortality from a purely historical point of view. My intention is not to discuss the truth of the belief or to criticise the grounds on which it has been maintained. To do so would be to trench on the province of the theologian and the philosopher. I limit myself to the far humbler task of describing, first, the belief as it has been held by some savage races, and, second, some of the practical consequences which these primitive peoples have deduced from it for the conduct of life, whether these consequences take the shape of religious rites or moral precepts. Now in such a survey of savage creed and practice it is convenient to begin with the lowest races of men about whom we have accurate information and to pass from them gradually to higher and higher races, because we thus start with the simplest forms of religion and advance by regular gradations to more complex forms, and we may hope in this way to render the course of religious evolution more intelligible than if we were to start from the most highly developed religions and to work our way down from them to the most embryonic. In pursuance of this plan I commenced my survey with the aborigines of Australia, because among the races of man about whom we are well informed these savages are commonly and, I believe, justly supposed to stand at the foot of the human scale. Having given you some account of their beliefs and practices concerning the dead I attempted to do the same for the islanders of Torres Straits and next for the natives of British New Guinea. There I broke off, and to-day I shall resume the thread of my discourse at the broken end by describing the beliefs and practices concerning the dead, as these beliefs are entertained and these practices observed by the natives of German New Guinea. [Sidenote: German New Guinea.] As you are aware, the German territory of New Guinea skirts the British territory on the north throughout its entire length and comprises roughly a quarter of the whole island, the British and German possessions making up together the eastern half of New Guinea, while the western half belongs to Holland. [Sidenote: Information as to the natives of German New Guinea.] Our information as to the natives of German New Guinea is very fragmentary, and is confined almost entirely to the tribes of the coast. As to the inhabitants of the interior we know as yet very little. However, German missionaries and others have described more or less fully the customs and beliefs of the natives at various points of this long coast, and I shall extract from their descriptions some notices of that particular aspect of the native religion with which in these lectures we are specially concerned. The points on the coast as to which a certain amount of ethnographical information is forthcoming are, to take them in the order from west to east, Berlin Harbour, Potsdam Harbour, Astrolabe Bay, the Maclay Coast, Cape King William, Finsch Harbour, and the Tami Islands in Huon Gulf. I propose to say something as to the natives at each of these points, beginning with Berlin Harbour, the most westerly of them. [Sidenote: The island of Tumleo.] Berlin Harbour is formed by a group of four small islands, which here lie off the coast. One of the islands bears the name of Tumleo or Tamara, and we possess an excellent account of the natives of this island from the pen of a Catholic missionary, Father Mathias Josef Erdweg,[358] which I shall draw upon in what follows. We have also a paper by a German ethnologist, the late Mr. R. Parkinson, on the same subject,[359] but his information is in part derived from Father Erdweg and he appears to have erred by applying too generally the statements which Father Erdweg strictly limited to the inhabitants of Tumleo.[360] [Sidenote: The natives of Tumleo, their material and artistic culture.] The island of Tumleo lies in 142° 25" of East Longitude and 3° 15" of South Latitude, and is distant about sixty sea-miles from the westernmost point of German New Guinea. It is a coral island, surrounded by a barrier reef and rising for the most part only a few feet above the sea.[361] In stature the natives fall below the average European height; but they are well fed and strongly built. Their colour varies from black to light brown. Their hair is very frizzly. Women and children wear it cut short; men wear it done up into wigs. They number less than three hundred, divided into four villages. The population seems to have declined through wars, disease, and infanticide.[362] Like the Papuans generally, they live in settled villages and engage in fishing, agriculture, and commerce. The houses are solidly built of wood and are raised above the ground upon piles, which consist of a hard and durable timber, sometimes iron-wood.[363] The staple food of the people is sago, which they obtain from the sago-palm. These stately palms, with their fan-like foliage, are rare on the coral island of Tumleo, but grow abundantly in the swampy lowlands of the neighbouring mainland. Accordingly in the months of May and June, when the sea is calm, the natives cross over to the mainland in their canoes and obtain a supply of sago in exchange for the products of their island. The sago is eaten in the form both of porridge and of bread.[364] Other vegetable foods are furnished by sweet potatoes, taro, yams, bananas, sugar-cane, and coco-nuts, all of which the natives cultivate.[365] Fishing is a principal industry of the people; it is plied by both sexes and by old and young, with nets, spears, and bows and arrows.[366] Pottery is another flourishing industry. As among many other savages, it is practised only by women, but the men take the pots to market; for these islanders do a good business in pots with the neighbouring tribes.[367] They build large outrigger canoes, which sail well before the wind, but can hardly beat up against it, being heavy to row. In these canoes the natives of Tumleo make long voyages along the coast; but as the craft are not very seaworthy they never stand out to sea, if they can help it, but hug the shore in order to run for safety to the beach in stormy weather.[368] In regard to art the natives display some taste and skill in wood-carving. For example, the projecting house-beams are sometimes carved in the shape of crocodiles, birds, and grotesque human figures; and their canoes, paddles, head-rests, drums, drum-sticks, and vessels are also decorated with carving. Birds, fish, crocodiles, foliage, and scroll-work are the usual patterns.[369] [Sidenote: The temples (_paraks_) of Tumleo.] A remarkable feature in the villages of Tumleo and the neighbouring islands and mainland consists of the _paraks_ or temples, the high gables of which may be seen rising above the bushes in all the villages of this part of the coast. No such buildings exist elsewhere in this region. They are set apart for the worship of certain guardian spirits, and on them the native lavishes all the resources of his elementary arts of sculpture and painting. They are built of wood in two storeys and raised on piles besides. The approach to one of them is always by one or two ladders provided on both sides with hand-rails or banisters. These banisters are elaborately decorated with carving, which is always of the same pattern. One banister is invariably carved in the shape of a crocodile holding a grotesque human figure in its jaws, while on the other hand the animal's tail is grasped by one or more human figures. The other banister regularly exhibits a row of human or rather ape-like effigies seated one behind the other, each of them resting his arms on the shoulders of the figure in front. Often there are seven such figures in a row. The natives are so shy in speaking of these temples that it is difficult to ascertain the meaning of the curious carvings by which they are adorned. Mr. Parkinson supposed that they represent spirits, not apes. He tells us that there are no apes in New Guinea. The interior of the temple (_parak_) is generally empty. The only things to be seen in its two rooms, the upper and lower, are bamboo flutes and drums made out of the hollow trunks of trees. On these instruments men concealed in the temple discourse music in order to signify the presence of the spirit.[370] [Sidenote: The bachelors' houses (_alols_) of Tumleo.] Different from these _paraks_ or temples are the _alols_, which are bachelors' houses and council-houses in one. Like the temples, they are raised above the ground and approached by a ladder, but unlike the temples they have only one storey. In them the unmarried men live and the married men meet to take counsel and to speak of things which may not be mentioned before women. On a small stand or table in each of these _alols_ or men's clubhouses are kept the skulls of dead men. And as the temple (_parak_) is devoted to the worship of spirits, so the men's clubhouse (_alol_) is the place where the dead ancestors are worshipped. Women and children may not enter it, but it is not regarded with such superstitious fear as the temple. The dead are buried in their houses or beside them. Afterwards the bones are dug up and the skulls of grown men are deposited, along with one of the leg bones, on the stand or table in the men's clubhouse (_alol_). The skulls of youths, women, and children are kept in the houses where they died. When the table in the clubhouse is quite full of grinning trophies of mortality, the old skulls are removed to make room for the new ones and are thrown away in a sort of charnel-house, where the other bones are deposited after they have been dug up from the graves. Such a charnel-house is called a _tjoll páru_. There is one such place for the bones of grown men and another for the bones of women and children. Some bones, however, are kept and used as ornaments or as means to work magic with. For the dead are often invoked, for example, to lay the wind or for other useful purposes; and at such invocations the bones play a part.[371] [Sidenote: Spirits of the dead thought to be the causes of sickness and disease.] But while the spirits of the dead are thus invited to help their living relations and friends, they are also feared as the causes of sickness and disease. Any serious ailment is usually attributed to magic or witchcraft, and the treatment which is resorted to aims rather at breaking the spell which has been cast on the sick man than at curing his malady by the application of physical remedies. In short the remedy is exorcism rather than physic. Now the enchantment under which the patient is supposed to be labouring is often, though not always, ascribed to the malignant arts of the spirits of the dead, or the _mõs_, as the natives of Tumleo call them. In such a case the ghosts are thought to be clinging to the body of the sufferer, and the object of the medical treatment is to detach them from him and send them far away. With this kindly intention some men will go into the forest and collect a number of herbs, including a kind of peppermint. These are tied into one or more bundles according to the number of the patients and then taken to the men's clubhouse (_alol_), where they are heated over a fire. Then the patient is brought, and two men strike him lightly with the packet of herbs on his body and legs, while they utter an incantation, inviting the ancestral spirits who are plaguing him to leave his body and go away, in order that he may be made whole. One such incantation, freely translated, runs thus: "Spirit of the great-grandfather, of the father, come out! We give thee coco-nuts, sago-porridge, fish. Go away (from the sick man). Let him be well. Do no harm here and there. Tell the people of Leming (O spirit) to give us tobacco. When the waves are still, we push off from the land, sailing northward (to Tumleo). It is the time of the north-west wind (when the surf is heavy). May the billows calm down in the south, O in the south, on the coast of Leming, that we may sail to the south, to Leming! Out there may the sea be calm, that we may push off from the land for home!" In this incantation a prayer to the spirit of the dead to relax his hold on the sufferer appears to be curiously combined with a prayer or spell to calm the sea when the people sail across to the coast of Leming to fetch a cargo of tobacco. When the incantation has been recited and the patient stroked with the bundle of herbs, one of his ears and both his arm-pits are moistened with a blood-red spittle produced by the chewing of betel-nut, pepper, and lime. Then they take hold of his fingers and make each of them crack, one after the other, while they recite some of the words of the preceding incantation. Next three men take each of them a branch of the _volju_ tree, bend it into a bow, and stroke the sick man from head to foot, while they recite another incantation, in which they command the spirit to let the sick man alone and to go away into the water or the mud. Often when a man is seriously ill he will remove from his own house to the house of a relation or friend, hoping that the spirit who has been tormenting him will not be able to discover him at his new address.[372] [Sidenote: Burial and mourning customs in Tumleo.] If despite of all these precautions the patient should die, he or she is placed in a wooden coffin and buried with little delay in a grave, which is dug either in the house or close beside it. The body is smeared all over with clay and decked with many rings or ornaments, most of which, however, are removed in a spirit of economy before the lid of the coffin is shut down. Sometimes arrows, sometimes a rudder, sometimes the bones of dead relations are buried with the corpse in the grave. When the grave is dug outside of the house, a small hut is erected over it, and a fire is kept burning on it for a time. In the house of mourning the wife, sister, or other female relative of the deceased must remain strictly secluded for a period which varies from a few weeks to three months. In token of mourning the widow's body is smeared with clay, and from time to time she is heard to chant a dirge in a whining, melancholy tone. This seclusion lasts so long as the ghost is supposed to be still on his way to the other world. When he has reached his destination, the fire is suffered to die down on the grave, and his widow or other female relative is free to quit the house and resume her ordinary occupations. Through her long seclusion in the shade her swarthy complexion assumes a lighter tint, but it soon deepens again when she is exposed once more to the strong tropical sunshine.[373] [Sidenote: Beliefs of the Tumleo people as to the fate of the human soul after death.] The people of Tumleo firmly believe in the existence of the human soul after death, though their notions of the disembodied soul or _mõs_, as they call it, are vague. They think that on its departure from the body the soul goes to a place deep under ground, where there is a great water. Over that water every soul must pass on a ladder to reach the abode of bliss. The ladder is in the keeping of a spirit called _Su asin tjakin_ or "the Great Evil," who takes toll of the ghosts before he lets them use his ladder. Hence an ear-ring and a bracelet are deposited with every corpse in the grave in order that the dead man may have wherewithal to pay the toll to the spirit at the great water. When the ghost arrives at the place of passage and begs for the use of the ladder, the spirit asks him, "Shall I get my bracelet if I let you pass?" If he receives it and happens to be in a good humour, he will let the ghost scramble across the ladder to the further shore. But woe to the stingy ghost, who should try to sneak across the ladder without paying toll. The ghostly tollkeeper detects the fraud in an instant and roars out, "So you would cheat me of my dues? You shall pay for that." So saying he tips the ladder up, and down falls the ghost plump into the deep water and is drowned. But the honest ghost, who has paid his way like a man and arrived on the further shore, is met by two other ghosts who ferry him in a canoe across to Sisano, which is a place on the mainland a good many miles to the north of Tumleo. A great river flows there and in the river are three cities of the dead, in one of which the newly arrived ghost takes up his abode. Then it is that the fire on his grave is allowed to go out and his widow may mingle with her fellows again. However, the ghosts are not strictly confined to the spirit-land. They can come back to earth and roam about working good or evil for the living and especially for their friends and relations.[374] [Sidenote: Monuments to the dead in Tumleo. Disinterment of the bones.] It is perhaps this belief not only in the existence but in the return of the spirits of the dead which induces the survivors to erect monuments or memorials to them. In Tumleo these monuments consist for the most part of young trees, which are cut down, stripped of their leaves, and set up in the ground beside the house of the deceased. The branches of such a memorial tree are hung with fruits, coco-nuts, loin-cloths, pots, and personal ornaments, all of which we may suppose are intended for the comfort and convenience of the ghost when he returns from deadland to pay his friends a visit.[375] But the remains of the dead are not allowed to rest quietly in the grave for ever. After two or three years they are dug up with much ceremony at the point of noon, when the sun is high overhead. The skull of the deceased, if he was a man, is then deposited, as we saw, with one of the thigh bones in the men's clubhouse, while of the remaining bones some are kept by the relations and the others thrown away in a charnel-house. Among the relics which the relations preserve are the lower arm bones, the shoulder-blades, the ribs, and the vertebra. The vertebra is often fastened to a bracelet; a couple of ribs are converted into a necklace; and the shoulder-blades are used to decorate baskets. The lower arm bones are generally strung on a cord, which is worn on solemn occasions round the neck so that the bones hang down behind. They are especially worn thus in war, and they are made use of also when their owner desires to obtain a favourable wind for a voyage. No doubt, though this is not expressly affirmed, the spirit of the departed is supposed to remain attached in some fashion to his bones and so to help the possessor of these relics in time of need. When the bones have been dug up and disposed of with all due ceremony, several men who were friends or relations of the deceased must keep watch and ward for some days in the men's clubhouse, where his grinning skull now stands amid similar trophies of mortality on a table or shelf. They may not quit the building except in case of necessity, and they must always speak in a whisper for fear of disturbing the ghost, who is very naturally lurking in the neighbourhood of his skull. However, in spite of these restrictions the watchers enjoy themselves; for baskets of sago and fish are provided abundantly for their consumption, and if their tongues are idle their jaws are very busy.[376] [Sidenote: Propitiation of the souls of the dead and other spirits.] The people think that if they stand on a good footing with the souls of the departed and with other spirits, these powerful beings will bring them good luck in trade and on their voyages. Now the time when trade is lively and the calm sea is dotted with canoes plying from island to island or from island to mainland, is the season when the gentle south-east monsoon is blowing. On the other hand, when the waves run high under the blast of the strong north-west monsoon, the sea is almost deserted and the people stay at home;[377] the season is to these tropical islanders what winter is to the inhabitants of northern latitudes. Accordingly it is when the wind is shifting round from the stormy north-west to the balmy south-east that the natives set themselves particularly to win the favour of ghosts and spirits, and this they do by repairing the temples and clubhouses in which the spirits and ghosts are believed to dwell, and by cleaning and tidying up the open spaces around them. These repairs are the occasion of a festival accompanied by dances and games. Early in the morning of the festive day the shrill notes of the flutes and the hollow rub-a-dub of the drums are heard to proceed from the interior of the temple, proclaiming the arrival of the guardian spirit and his desire to partake of fish and sago. So the men assemble and the feast is held in the evening. Festivals are also held both in the temples and in the men's clubhouses on the occasion of a successful hunt or fishing. Out of gratitude for the help vouchsafed them by the ancestral spirits, the hunters or fishers bring the larger game or fish to the temples or clubhouses and eat them there; and then hang up some parts of the animals or fish, such as the skeletons, the jawbones of pigs, or the shells of turtles, in the clubhouses as a further mark of homage to the spirits of the dead.[378] [Sidenote: Guardian spirits (_tapum_) in Tumleo.] So far as appears, the spirits who dwell in the temples are not supposed to be ancestors. Father Erdweg describes them as guardian spirits or goddesses, for they are all of the female sex. Every village has several of them; indeed in the village of Sapi almost every family has its own guardian spirit. The name for these guardian spirits is _tapum_, which seems to be clearly connected with the now familiar word _tapu_ or taboo, in the sense of sacred, which is universally understood in the islands of the Pacific. On the whole the _tapum_ are kindly and beneficent spirits, who bring good luck to such as honour them. A hunter or a fisherman ascribes his success in the chase or in fishing to the protection of his guardian spirit; and when he is away from home trading for sago and other necessaries of life, it is his guardian spirit who gives him favour in the eyes of the foreigners with whom he is dealing. Curiously enough, though these guardian spirits are all female, they have no liking for women and children. Indeed, no woman or child may set foot in a temple, or even loiter in the open space in front of it. And at the chief festivals, when the temples are being repaired, all the women and children must quit the village till the evening shadows have fallen and the banquet of their husbands, fathers, and brothers at the temple is over.[379] On the whole, then, we conclude that a belief in the continued existence of the spirits of the dead, and in their power to help or harm their descendants, plays a considerable part in the life of the Papuans of Tumleo. Whether the guardian spirits or goddesses, who are worshipped in the temples, were originally conceived as ancestral spirits or not, must be left an open question for the present. [Sidenote: The Monumbo of Potsdam Harbour.] Passing eastward from Tumleo along the northern coast of German New Guinea we come to Monumbo or Potsdam Harbour, situated about the 145th degree of East Longitude. The Monumbo are a Papuan tribe numbering about four hundred souls, who inhabit twelve small villages close to the seashore. Their territory is a narrow but fertile strip of country, well watered and covered with luxuriant vegetation, lying between the sea and a range of hills. The bay is sheltered by an island from the open sea, and the natives can paddle their canoes on its calm water in almost any weather. The villages, embowered on the landward side in groves of trees of many useful sorts and screened in front by rows of stately coco-nut palms, are composed of large houses solidly built of timber and are kept very clean and tidy. The Monumbo are a strongly-built people, of the average European height, with what is described as a remarkably Semitic type of features. The men wear their hair plaited about a long tube, decorated with shells and dogs' teeth, which sticks out stiffly from the head. The women wear their hair in a sort of mop, composed of countless plaits, which hang down in tangle. In disposition the Monumbo are cheerful and contented, proud of themselves and their country; they think they are the cleverest and most fortunate people on earth, and look down with pity and contempt on Europeans. According to them the business of the foreign settlers in their country is folly, and the teaching of the missionaries is nonsense. They subsist by agriculture, hunting, and fishing. Their well-kept plantations occupy the level ground and in some places extend up the hill-sides. Among the plants which they cultivate are taro, yams, sweet potatoes, bananas, various kinds of vegetables, and sugar-cane. Among their fruit-trees are the sago-palm, the coco-nut palm, and the bread-fruit tree. They make use both of earthenware and of wooden vessels. Their dances, especially their masked dances, which are celebrated at intervals of four or five years, have excited the warm admiration of the despised European.[380] [Sidenote: Beliefs of the Monumbo concerning the spirits of the dead. Dread of ghosts.] With regard to their religion and morality I will quote the evidence of a Catholic missionary who has laboured among them. "The Monumbo are acquainted with no Supreme Being, no moral good or evil, no rewards, no place of punishment or joy after death, no permanent immortality.... When people die, their souls go to the land of spirits, a place where they dwell without work or suffering, but which they can also quit. Betel-chewing, smoking, dancing, sleeping, all the occupations that they loved on earth, are continued without interruption in the other world. They converse with men in dreams, but play them many a shabby trick, take possession of them and even, it may be, kill them. Yet they also help men in all manner of ways in war and the chase. Men invoke them, pray to them, make statues in their memory, which are called _dva_ (plural _dvaka_), and bring them offerings of food, in order to obtain their assistance. But if the spirits of the dead do not help, they are rated in the plainest language. Death makes no great separation. The living converse with the dead very much as they converse with each other. Time alone brings with it a gradual oblivion of the departed. Falling stars and lightning are nothing but the souls of the dead, who stick dry banana leaves in their girdles, set them on fire, and then fly through the air. At last when the souls are old they die, but are not annihilated, for they are changed into animals and plants. Such animals are, for example, the white ants and a rare kind of wild pig, which is said not to allow itself to be killed. Such a tree, for example, is the _barimbar_. That, apparently, is the whole religion of the Monumbo. Yet they are ghost-seers of the most arrant sort. An anxious superstitious fear pursues them at every step. Superstitious views are the motives that determine almost everything that they do or leave undone."[381] Their dread of ghosts is displayed in their custom of doing no work in the plantations for three days after a death, lest the ghost, touched to the quick by their heartless indifference, should send wild boars to ravage the plantations. And when a man has slain an enemy in war, he has to remain a long time secluded in the men's clubhouse, touching nobody, not even his wife and children, while the villagers celebrate his victory with song and dance. He is believed to be in a state of ceremonial impurity (_bolobolo_) such that, if he were to touch his wife and children, they would be covered with sores. At the end of his seclusion he is purified by washings and other purgations and is clean once more.[382] The reason of this uncleanness of a victorious warrior is not mentioned, but analogy makes it nearly certain that it is a dread of the vengeful ghost of the man whom he has slain. A similar fear probably underlies the rule that a widower must abstain from certain foods, such as fish and sauces, and from bathing for a certain time after the death of his wife.[383] [Sidenote: The Tamos of Astrolabe Bay. Mistake of attempting to combine descriptive with comparative anthropology.] Leaving Potsdam Harbour and the Monumbo, and moving still eastward along the coast of German New Guinea, we come to a large indentation known as Astrolabe Bay. The natives of this part of the coast call themselves Tamos. The largest village on the bay bears the name of Bogadyim and in 1894 numbered about three hundred inhabitants.[384] Our principal authority on the natives is a German ethnologist, Dr. B. Hagen, who spent about eighteen months at Stefansort on Astrolabe Bay. Unfortunately he has mixed up his personal observations of these particular people not merely with second-hand accounts of natives of other parts of New Guinea but with discussions of general theories of the origin and migrations of races and of the development of social institutions; so that it is not altogether easy to disentangle the facts for which he is a first-hand witness, from those which he reports at second, third, or fourth hand. Scarcely anything, I may observe in passing, more impairs the value and impedes the usefulness of personal observations of savage races than this deplorable habit of attempting to combine the work of description with the work of comparison and generalisation. The two kinds of work are entirely distinct in their nature, and require very different mental qualities for their proper performance; the one should never be confused with the other. The task of descriptive anthropology is to record observations, without any admixture of theory; the task of comparative anthropology is to compare the observations made in all parts of the world, and from the comparison to deduce theories, more or less provisional, of the origin and growth of beliefs and institutions, always subject to modification and correction by facts which may afterwards be brought to light. There is no harm, indeed there is great positive advantage, in the descriptive anthropologist making himself acquainted with the theories of the comparative anthropologist, for by so doing his attention will probably be called to many facts which he might otherwise have overlooked and which, when recorded, may either confirm or refute the theories in question. But if he knows these theories, he should keep his knowledge strictly in the background and never interlard his descriptions of facts with digressions into an alien province. In this way descriptive anthropology and comparative anthropology will best work hand in hand for the furtherance of their common aim, the understanding of the nature and development of man. [Sidenote: The religion of the Tamos. Beliefs of the Tamos as to the souls of the dead.] Like the Papuans in general, the Tamos of Astrolabe Bay are a settled agricultural people, who dwell in fixed villages, subsist mainly by the produce of the ground which they cultivate, and engage in a commerce of barter with their neighbours.[385] Their material culture thus does not differ essentially from that of the other Papuans, and I need not give particulars of it. With regard to their religious views Dr. Hagen tells us candidly that he has great hesitation in expressing an opinion. "Nothing," he says very justly, "is more difficult for a European than to form an approximately correct conception of the religious views of a savage people, and the difficulty is infinitely increased when the enquirer has little or no knowledge of their language." Dr. Hagen had, indeed, an excellent interpreter and intelligent assistant in the person of a missionary, Mr. Hoffmann; but Mr. Hoffmann himself admitted that he had no clear ideas as to the religious views of the Tamos; however, in his opinion they are entirely destitute of the conception of God and of a Creator. Yet among the Tamos of Bogadyim, Dr. Hagen tells us, a belief in the existence of the soul after death is proved by their assertion that after death the soul (_gunung_) goes to _buka kure_, which seems to mean the village of ghosts. This abode of the dead appears to be situated somewhere in the earth, and the Tamos speak of it with a shudder. They tell of a man in the village of Bogadyim who died and went away to the village of the ghosts. But as he drew near to the village, he met the ghost of his dead brother who had come forth with bow and arrows and spear to hunt a wild boar. This boar-hunting ghost was very angry at meeting his brother, who had just died, and drove him back to the land of the living. From this narrative it would seem that in the other world the ghosts are thought to pursue the same occupations which they followed in life. The natives are in great fear of ghosts (_buka_). Travelling alone with them in the forest at nightfall you may mark their timidity and hear them cry anxiously, "Come, let us be going! The ghost is roaming about." The ghosts of those who have perished in battle do not go to the Village of Ghosts (_buka kure_); they repair to another place called _bopa kure_. But this abode of the slain does not seem to be a happy land or Valhalla; the natives are even more afraid of it than of the Village of Ghosts (_buka kure_). They will hardly venture at night to pass a spot where any one has been slain. Sometimes fires are kindled by night on such spots; and the sight of the flames flickering in the distance inspires all the beholders with horror, and nothing in the world would induce them to approach such a fire. The souls of men who have been killed, but whose death has not been avenged, are supposed to haunt the village. For some time after death the ghost is believed to linger in the neighbourhood of his deserted body. When Mr. Hoffmann went with some Tamos to another village to bring back the body of a fellow missionary, who had died there, and darkness had fallen on them in the forest, his native companions started with fear every moment, imagining that they saw the missionary's ghost popping out from behind a tree.[386] [Sidenote: Treatment of the corpse. Secret Society called _Asa_.] When death has taken place, the corpse is first exposed on a scaffold in front of the house, where it is decked with ornaments and surrounded with flowers. If the deceased was rich, a dog is hung on each side of the scaffold, and the souls of the animals are believed to accompany the ghost to the spirit-land. Taros, yams, and coco-nuts are also suspended from the scaffold, no doubt for the refreshment of the ghost. Then the melancholy notes of a horn are heard in the distance, at the sound of which all the women rush away. Soon the horn-blower appears, paints the corpse white and red, crowns it with great red hibiscus roses, then blows his horn, and vanishes.[387] He is a member of a secret society, called _Asa_, which has its lodge standing alone in the forest. Only men belong to the society; women and children are excluded from it and look upon it with fear and awe. If any one raises a cry, "_Asa_ is coming," or the sound of the musical instruments of the society is heard in the distance, all the women and children scamper away. The natives are very unwilling to let any stranger enter one of the lodges of the society. The interior of such a building is usually somewhat bare, but it contains the wooden masks which are worn in the ceremonial dances of the society, and the horns and flutes on which the members discourse their awe-inspiring music. In construction it scarcely differs from the ordinary huts of the village; if anything it is worse built and more primitive. The secrets of the society are well kept; at least very little seems to have been divulged to Europeans. The most important of its ceremonies is that of the initiation of the young men, who on this occasion are circumcised before they are recognised as full-grown men and members of the secret society. At such times the men encamp and feast for weeks or even months together on the open space in front of the society's lodge, and masked dances are danced to the accompaniment of the instrumental music. These initiatory ceremonies are held at intervals of about ten or fifteen years, when there are a considerable number of young men to be initiated together.[388] Although we are still in the dark as to the real meaning of this and indeed of almost all similar secret societies among savages, the solemn part played by a member of the society at the funeral rites seems very significant. Why should he come mysteriously to the melancholy music of the horn, paint the corpse red and white, crown it with red roses, and then vanish again to music as he had come? It is scarcely rash to suppose that this ceremony has some reference to the state of the dead man's soul, and we may conjecture that just as the fruits hung on the scaffold are doubtless intended for the consumption of the ghost, and the souls of the dogs are expressly said to accompany him to the spirit-land, so the painting of the corpse and the crown of red roses may be designed in some way to speed the parting spirit on the way to its long home. In the absence of exact information as to the beliefs of these savages touching the state of the dead we can only guess at the meaning which they attach to these symbols. Perhaps they think that only ghosts who are painted red and white and who wear wreaths of red roses on their heads are admitted to the Village of the Ghosts, and that such as knock at the gate with no paint on their bodies and no wreath of roses on their brows are refused admittance and must turn sorrowfully away, to haunt their undutiful friends on earth who had omitted to pay the last marks of respect and honour to the dead. [Sidenote: Burial customs of the Tamos. Removal of the lower jawbone.] When the corpse has lain in all its glory, with its ornaments, its paint and its flowers, for a short time on the scaffold, it is removed and buried. The exposure never lasts more than a day. If the man died in the morning, he is buried at night. The grave is dug in the house itself. It is only about three feet deep and four feet long. If the corpse is too long for the grave, as usually happens, the legs are remorselessly doubled up and trampled in. It is the relations on the mother's side who dig the grave and lower the body, shrouded in mats or leaves, into its narrow bed. Before doing so they take care to strip it of its ornaments, its rings, necklaces, boar's teeth, and so forth, which no doubt are regarded as too valuable to be sacrificed. Yet a regard for the comfort of the dead is shewn by the custom of covering the open grave with wood and then heaping the mould on the top, in order, we are told, that the earth may not press heavy on him who sleeps below. _Sit tibi terra levis!_ After some months the grave is opened and the lower jaw removed from the corpse and preserved. This removal of the jaw is the occasion of solemnities and ceremonial washings, in which the whole male population of the village takes part. But as to the meaning of these ceremonies, and as to what is done with the jawbone, we have no exact information.[389] According to the Russian traveller, Baron N. von Miklucho-Maclay, who has also given us an account of the Papuans of Astrolabe Bay,[390] though not apparently of the villages described by Dr. Hagen, the whole skull is dug up and separated from the corpse after the lapse of about a year, but only the lower jawbone is carefully kept by the nearest kinsman as a memorial of the deceased. Baron Miklucho-Maclay had great difficulty in inducing a native to part with one of these memorials of a dead relation.[391] In any case the preservation of this portion of the deceased may be supposed to have for its object the maintenance of friendly relations between the living and the dead. Similarly in Uganda the jawbone is the only part of the body of a deceased king which, along with his navel-string, is carefully preserved in his temple-tomb and consulted oracularly.[392] We may conjecture that the reason for preserving this part of the human frame rather than any other is that the jawbone is an organ of speech, and that therefore it appears to the primitive mind well fitted to maintain intercourse with the dead man's spirit and to obtain oracular communications from him. [Sidenote: Sham fight as a funeral ceremony at Astrolabe Bay.] The Russian traveller, Baron Miklucho-Maclay, has described a curious funeral ceremony which is observed by some of the Papuans of Astrolabe Bay. I will give the first part of his description in his own words, which I translate from the German. He says: "The death of a man is announced to the neighbouring villages by a definite series of beats on the drum. On the same day or the next morning the whole male population assembles in the vicinity of the village of the deceased. All the men are in full warlike array. To the beat of drum the guests march into the village, where a crowd of men, also armed for war, await the new-comers beside the dead man's hut. After a short parley the men divide into two opposite camps, and thereupon a sham fight takes place. However, the combatants go to work very gingerly and make no use of their spears. But dozens of arrows are continually discharged, and not a few are wounded in the sham fight, though not seriously. The nearest relations and friends of the deceased appear especially excited and behave as if they were frantic. When all are hot and tired and all arrows have been shot away, the pretended enemies seat themselves in a circle and in what follows most of them act as simple spectators." Thereupon the nearest relations bring out the corpse and deposit it in a crouching position, with the knees drawn up to the chin, on some mats and leaves of the sago-palm, which had previously been spread out in the middle of the open space. Beside the corpse are laid his things, some presents from neighbours, and some freshly cooked food. While the men sit round in a circle, the women, even the nearest relatives of the deceased, may only look on from a distance. When all is ready, some men step out from the circle to help the nearest of kin in the next proceedings, which consist in tying the corpse up tightly into a bundle by means of rattans and creepers. Then the bundle is attached to a stout stick and carried back into the house. There the corpse in its bundle is fastened under the roof by means of the stick, and the dead man's property, together with the presents of the neighbours and the food, are left beside it. After that the house is abandoned, and the guests return to their own villages. A few days later, when decomposition is far advanced, the corpse is taken down and buried in a grave in the house, which continues to be inhabited by the family. After the lapse of about a year, the body is dug up, the skull separated from it, and the lower jawbone preserved by the nearest relation, as I have already mentioned.[393] [Sidenote: The sham fight perhaps intended to deceive the ghost.] What is the meaning of this curious sham fight which among these people seems to be regularly enacted after a death? The writer who reports the custom offers no explanation of it. I would conjecture with all due caution that it may possibly be intended as a satisfaction to the ghost in order to make him suppose that his death has been properly avenged. In a former lecture I shewed that natural deaths are regularly imagined by many savages to be brought about by the magical practices of enemies, and that accordingly the relations of the deceased take vengeance on some innocent person whom for one reason or another they regard as the culprit. It is possible that these Papuans of Astrolabe Bay, instead of actually putting the supposed sorcerer to death, have advanced so far as to abandon that cruel and unjust practice and content themselves with throwing dust in the eyes of the ghost by a sham instead of a real fight. But that is only a conjecture of my own, which I merely suggest for what it is worth. Altogether, looking over the scanty notices of the beliefs and practices of these Papuans of Astrolabe Bay concerning the departed, we may say in general that while the fear of ghosts is conspicuous enough among them, there is but little evidence of anything that deserves to be called a regular worship of the dead. [Footnote 358: P. Mathias Josef Erdweg, "Die Bewohner der Insel Tumleo, Berlin-hafen, Deutsch-Neu-Guinea," _Mittheilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien_, xxxii. (1902) pp. 274-310, 317-399.] [Footnote 359: R. Parkinson, "Die Berlinhafen Section, ein Beitrag zur Ethnographie der Neu-Guinea-Küste," _Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie_, xiii. (1900) pp. 18-54.] [Footnote 360: See the note of Father P. W. Schmidt on Father Erdweg's paper, _op. cit._ p. 274.] [Footnote 361: Erdweg, _op. cit._ p. 274.] [Footnote 362: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 277 _sq_. The frizzly character of the hair is mentioned by Mr. R. Parkinson, _op. cit._] [Footnote 363: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 355 _sqq._] [Footnote 364: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 342-346.] [Footnote 365: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 335 _sqq._] [Footnote 366: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 330 _sqq._] [Footnote 367: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 350 _sqq._] [Footnote 368: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 363 _sqq._] [Footnote 369: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 374.] [Footnote 370: R. Parkinson, "Die Berlinhafen Section, ein Beitrag zur Ethnographie der Neu-Guinea-Küste," _Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie_, xiii. (1900) pp. 33-35. Father Erdweg speaks of the _parak_ as a spirit-temple or spirit-house in which the deities of the Tumleo dwell (_op. cit._ p. 377): he tells us that as a rule each village has only one _parak_. As to the spirits which dwell in these temples, see below, pp. 226 _sq._] [Footnote 371: R. Parkinson, _op. cit._ pp. 35, 42 _sq._; Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 292 _sq._, 306.] [Footnote 372: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 284-287.] [Footnote 373: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 288-291.] [Footnote 374: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 297 _sq._] [Footnote 375: Erdweg, _op. cit._ p. 291.] [Footnote 376: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 291-293.] [Footnote 377: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 298, 371.] [Footnote 378: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 295 _sqq._, 299 _sq._, 334 _sq._] [Footnote 379: Erdweg, _op. cit._ pp. 295-297.] [Footnote 380: P. Franz Vormann, "Dorf und Hausanlage beiden Monumbo, Deutsch-Neuguinea," _Anthropos_, iv. (1909) pp. 660 _sqq._; _id._, "Zur Psychologie, Religion, Soziologie und Geschichte der Monumbo-Papua, Deutsch-Neuguinea," _Anthropos_, v. (1910) pp. 407-409.] [Footnote 381: P. Franz Vormann, in _Anthropos_, v. (1910) pp. 409 _sq._] [Footnote 382: P. Franz Vormann, in _Anthropos_, v. (1910) pp. 410, 411.] [Footnote 383: P. Franz Vormann, _ibid._, p. 412.] [Footnote 384: B. Hagen, _Unter den Papua's_ (Wiesbaden, 1899), pp. 143, 221.] [Footnote 385: For the evidence see B. Hagen, _op. cit._ pp. 193 _sqq._ As to barter he tells us (p. 216) that all articles in use at Bogadyim are imported, nothing is made on the spot.] [Footnote 386: B. Hagen, _Unter den Papua's_ (Wiesbaden, 1899), pp. 264-266.] [Footnote 387: B. Hagen, _op. cit._ pp. 258 _sq._] [Footnote 388: B. Hagen, _op. cit._ pp. 270 _sq._ As to the period and details of the circumcision ceremonies see _id._, pp. 234-238.] [Footnote 389: B. Hagen, _op. cit._ p. 260.] [Footnote 390: N. von Miklucho-Maclay, "Ethnologische Bemerkungen über die Papuas der Maclay-Küste in Neu-Guinea," _Natuurkundig Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indie_, xxxv. (1875) pp. 66-93; _id._, xxxvi. (1876) pp. 294-333.] [Footnote 391: N. von Miklucho-Maclay, _op. cit._ xxxvi. (1876) p. 302.] [Footnote 392: Rev. J. Roscoe, _The Baganda_ (London, 1911), pp. 109 _sqq._; _Totemism and Exogamy_, ii. 470.] [Footnote 393: N. von Miklucho-Maclay, _op. cit._ xxxvi. (1876) pp. 300-302.] LECTURE XI THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF GERMAN NEW GUINEA (_continued_) [Sidenote: The Papuans of Cape King William.] In my last lecture I gave you some account of the beliefs and practices concerning the dead which have been recorded among the Papuans of German New Guinea. To-day I resume the subject and shall first speak of the natives on the coast about Cape King William, at the foot of Mount Cromwell. We possess an account of their religion and customs from the pen of a German missionary, Mr. Stolz, who has lived three years among them and studied their language.[394] His description applies to the inhabitants of two villages only, namely Lamatkebolo and Quambu, or Sialum and Kwamkwam, as they are generally called on the maps, who together number about five hundred souls. They belong to the Papuan stock and subsist chiefly by the cultivation of yams, which they plant in April or May and reap in January or February. But they also cultivate sweet potatoes and make some use of bananas and coco-nuts. They clear the land for cultivation by burning down the grass and afterwards turning up the earth with digging-sticks, a labour which is performed chiefly by the men. The land is not common property; each family tills its own fields, though sometimes one family will aid another in the laborious task of breaking up the soil. Moreover they trade with the natives of the interior, who, inhabiting a more fertile and better-watered country, are able to export a portion of their superfluities, especially taro, sweet potatoes, betel-nuts, and tobacco, to the less favoured dwellers on the sea-coast, receiving mostly dried fish in return. Curiously enough the traffic is chiefly in the hands of old women.[395] [Sidenote: Propitiation of ghosts and spirits. The spirit Mate. Spirits called _Nai_.] With regard to the religion of these people Mr. Stolz tells us that they know nothing of a deity who should receive the homage of his worshippers; they recognise only spirits and the souls of the dead. To these last they bring offerings, not because they feel any need to do them reverence, but simply out of fear and a desire to win their favour. The offerings are presented at burials and when they begin to cultivate the fields. Their purpose is to persuade the souls of the dead to ward off all the evil influences that might thwart the growth of the yams, their staple food. The ghosts are also expected to guard the fields against the incursions of wild pigs and the ravages of locusts. At a burial the aim of the sacrifice is to induce the soul of the departed brother or sister to keep far away from the village and to do no harm to the people. Sacrifices are even offered to the souls of animals, such as dogs and pigs, to prevent them from coming back and working mischief. However, the ghosts of these creatures are not very exacting; a few pieces of sugar-cane, a coco-nut shell, or a taro shoot suffice to content their simple tastes and to keep them quiet. Amongst the spirits to whom the people pay a sort of worship there is one named Mate, who seems to be closely akin to Balum, a spirit about whom we shall hear more among the Yabim further to the east. However, not very much is known about Mate; his worship, if it can be called so, flourishes chiefly among the inland tribes, of whom the coast people stand so much in awe that they dare not speak freely on the subject of this mysterious being. Some of them indeed are bold enough to whisper that there is no such being as Mate at all, and that the whole thing is a cheat devised by sly rogues for the purpose of appropriating a larger share of roast pork at their religious feasts, from which women are excluded. Whatever may be thought of these sceptical views, it appears to be certain that the name of Mate is also bestowed on a number of spirits who disport themselves by day in open grassy places, while they retire by night to the deep shades of the forest; and the majority of these spirits are thought to be the souls of ancestors or of the recently departed. Again, there is another class of spirits called _Nai_, who unlike all other spirits are on friendly terms with men. These are the souls of dead villagers, who died far away from home. They warn people of danger and very obligingly notify them of the coming of trading steamers. When a man dies in a foreign land, his soul appears as a _Nai_ to his sorrowing relatives and announces his sad fate to them. He does so always at night. When the men are gathered round the fire on the open square of the village, the ghost climbs the platform which usually serves for public meetings and banquets, and from this coin of vantage, plunged in the deep shadow, he lifts up his voice and delivers his message of warning, news, or prediction, as the case may be.[396] [Sidenote: The creator Nemunemu. Sickness and death often regarded as the effects of sorcery.] However, ghosts of the dead are not the only spiritual beings with whom these people are acquainted. They know of a much higher being, of the name of Nemunemu, endowed with superhuman power, who made the heaven and the earth with the assistance of two brothers; the elder brother constructed the mainland of New Guinea, while the younger fashioned the islands and the sea. When the natives first saw a steamer on the horizon they thought it was Nemunemu's ship, and the smoke at the funnel they took to be the tobacco-smoke which he puffed to beguile the tedium of the voyage.[397] They are also great believers in magic and witchcraft, and cases of sickness and death, which are not attributed to the malignity of ghosts and spirits, are almost invariably set down to the machinations of sorcerers. Only the deaths of decrepit old folks are regarded as natural. When a man has died, and his death is believed to have been caused by magic, the people resort to divination in order to discover the wicked magician who has perpetrated the crime. For this purpose they place the corpse on a bier, cover it with a mat, and set it on the shoulders of four men, while a fifth man taps lightly with an arrow on the mat and enquires of the departed whether such and such a village has bewitched him to death. If the bier remains still, it means "No"; but if it rocks backward and forward, it means "Yes," and the avengers of blood must seek their victim, the guilty sorcerer, in that village. The answer is believed to be given by the dead man's ghost, who stirs his body at the moment when his murderer's village is named. It is useless for the inhabitants of that village to disclaim all knowledge of the sickness and death of the deceased. The people repose implicit faith in this form of divination. "His soul itself told us," they say, and surely he ought to know. Another form of divination which they employ for the same purpose is to put the question to the ghost, while two men hold a bow which belonged to him and to which some personal articles of his are attached. The answer is again yes or no according as the bow moves or is still.[398] [Sidenote: Funeral and mourning customs.] When the author of the death has been discovered in one way or another, the corpse is decked with all the ornaments that can be collected from the relatives and prepared for burial. A shallow grave is dug under the house and lined with mats. Then the body is lowered into the grave: one of the sextons strikes up a lament, and the shrill voices of the women in the house join in the melancholy strain. When he lies in his narrow bed, the ornaments are removed from his person, but some of his tools, weapons, and other belongings are buried with him, no doubt for his use in the life hereafter. The funeral celebration, in which the whole village commonly takes part, lasts several days and consists in the bringing of offerings to the dead and the abstinence from all labour in the fields. Yams are brought from the field of the departed and cooked. A small pot filled with yams and a vessel of water are placed on the grave; the rest of the provisions is consumed by the mourners. The next of kin, especially the widow or widower, remain for about a week at the grave, watching day and night, lest the body should be dug up and devoured by a certain foul fiend with huge wings and long claws, who battens on corpses. The mourning costume of men consists in smearing the face with black and wearing a cord round the neck and a netted cap on the head. Instead of such a cap a woman in mourning wraps herself in a large net and a great apron of grass. While the other ensigns of woe are soon discarded or disappear, the cord about the neck is worn for a longer time, generally till next harvest. The sacrifice of a pig brings the period of mourning to an end and after it the cord may be laid aside. If any one were so hard-hearted as not to wear that badge of sorrow, the people believe that the angry ghost would come back and fetch him away. He would die.[399] Thus among these savages the mourning costume is regarded as a protection against the dangerous ghost of the departed; it soothes his wounded feelings and prevents him from making raids on the living. [Sidenote: Fate of the souls of the dead.] As to the place to which the souls of the dead repair and the fate that awaits them there, very vague and contradictory ideas prevail among the natives of this district. Some say that the ghosts go eastward to Bukaua on Huon Gulf and there lead a shadowy life very like their life on earth. Others think that the spirits hover near the village where they lived in the flesh. Others again are of opinion that they transmigrate into animals and prolong their life in one or other of the bodies of the lower creatures.[400] [Sidenote: The Yabim and Bukaua tribes.] Leaving Cape King William we pass eastward along the coast of German New Guinea and come to Finsch Harbour. From a point some miles to the north of Finsch Harbour as far as Samoa Harbour on Huon Gulf the coast is inhabited by two kindred tribes, the Yabim and the Bukaua, who speak a Melanesian language. I shall deal first with the Yabim tribe, whose customs and beliefs have been described for us with a fair degree of fulness by two German missionaries, Mr. Konrad Vetter and Mr. Heinrich Zahn.[401] The following account is based chiefly on the writings of Mr. Vetter, whose mission station is at the village of Simbang. [Sidenote: Material and artistic culture of the Yabim.] Like the other natives of New Guinea the Yabim build permanent houses, live in settled villages, and till the ground. Every year they make a fresh clearing in the forest by cutting down the trees, burning the fallen timber, and planting taro, bananas, sugar-cane, and tobacco in the open glade. When the crops have been reaped, the place is abandoned, and is soon overgrown again by the rank tropical vegetation, while the natives move on to another patch, which they clear and cultivate in like manner. This rude mode of tillage is commonly practised by many savages, especially within the tropics. Cultivation of this sort is migratory, and in some places, though apparently not in New Guinea, the people shift their habitations with their fields as they move on from one part of the forest to another. Among the Yabim the labour of clearing a patch for cultivation is performed by all the men of a village in common, but when the great trees have fallen with a crash to the ground, and the trunks, branches, foliage and underwood have been burnt, with a roar of flames and a crackling like a rolling fire of musketry, each family appropriates a portion of the clearing for its own use and marks off its boundaries with sticks. But they also subsist in part by fishing, and for this purpose they build outrigger canoes. They display considerable skill and taste in wood-carving, and are fond of ornamenting their houses, canoes, paddles, tools, spears, and drums with figures of crocodiles, fish, and other patterns.[402] [Sidenote: Men's clubhouses (_lum_).] The villages are divided into wards, and every ward contains its clubhouse for men, called a _lum_, in which young men and lads are obliged to pass the night. It consists of a bedroom above and a parlour with fireplaces below. In the parlour the grown men pass their leisure hours during the day, and here the councils are held. The wives cook the food at home and bring it for their husbands to the clubhouse. The bull-roarers which are used at the initiatory ceremonies are kept in the principal clubhouse of the village. Such a clubhouse serves as an asylum; men fleeing from the avenger of blood who escape into it are safe. It is said that the spirit (_balum_) has swallowed or concealed them. But if they steal out of it and attempt to make their way to another village, they carry their life in their hand.[403] Among the Yabim, according to Mr. Zahn, religion in the proper sense does not exist, but on the other hand the whole people is dominated by the fear of witchcraft and of the spirits of the dead.[404] The following is the account which Mr. Vetter gives of the beliefs and customs of these people concerning the departed. [Sidenote: Beliefs of the Yabim concerning the state of the dead. The ghostly ferry.] They do not believe that death is the end of all things for the individual; they think that his soul survives and becomes a spirit or ghost, which they call a _balum_. The life of human spirits in the other world is a shadowy continuation of the life on earth, and as such it has little attraction for the mind of the Papuan. Of heaven and hell, a place of reward and a place of punishment for the souls of the good and bad respectively, he has no idea. However, his world of the dead is to some extent divided into compartments. In one of them reside the ghosts of people who have been slain, in another the ghosts of people who have been hanged, and in a third the ghosts of people who have been devoured by a shark or a crocodile. How many more compartments there may be for the accommodation of the souls, we are not told. The place is in one of the islands of Siasi. No living man has ever set foot in the island, for smoke and mist hang over it perpetually; but from out the mist you may hear the sound of the barking of dogs, the grunting of swine, and the crowing of cocks, which seems to shew that in the opinion of these people animals have immortal souls as well as men. The natives of the Siasi islands say that the newly arrived ghosts may often be seen strolling on the beach; sometimes the people can even recognise the familiar features of friends with whom they did business in the flesh. The mode in which the spirits of the dead arrive at their destination from the mainland is naturally by a ferry: indeed, the prow of the ghostly ferry-boat may be seen to this day in the village of Bogiseng. The way in which it came to be found there was this. A man of the village lay dying, and on his deathbed he promised to give his friends a sign of his continued existence after death by appearing as a ghost in their midst. Only he stipulated that in order to enable him to do so they would place a stone club in the hand of his corpse. This was done. He died, the club was placed in his cold hand, and his sorrowing but hopeful relations awaited results. They had not very long to wait. For no sooner had the ghost, armed with the stone club, stepped down to the sea-shore than he called imperiously for the ferry-boat. It soon hove in sight, with the ghostly ferryman in it paddling to the beach to receive the passenger. But when the prow grated on the pebbles, the artful ghost, instead of stepping into it as he should have done, lunged out at it with the stone club so forcibly that he broke the prow clean off. In a rage the ferryman roared out to him, "I won't put you across! You and your people shall be kangaroos." The ghost had gained his point. He turned back from the ferry and brought to his friends as a trophy the prow of the ghostly canoe, which is treasured in the village to this day. I should add that the prow in question bears a suspicious resemblance to a powder-horn which has been floating about for some time in the water; but no doubt this resemblance is purely fortuitous and without any deep significance. [Sidenote: Transmigration of human souls into animals.] From this veracious narrative we gather that sometimes the souls of the dead, instead of going away to the spirit-land, transmigrate into the bodies of animals. The case of the kangaroos is not singular. In the village of Simbang Mr. Vetter knows two families, of whom the ghosts pass at death into the carcases of crocodiles and a species of fabulous pigs respectively. Hence members of the one family are careful not to injure crocodiles, lest the souls of their dead should chance to be lodged in the reptiles; and the members of the other family would be equally careful not to hurt the fabulous pigs if ever they fell in with them. However, the crocodile people, not to be behind their neighbours, assert that after death their spirits can also roam about the wood as ghosts and go to the spirit-land. In explanation they say that every human being has two souls; one of them is his reflection on the water, the other is his shadow on the land. No doubt it is the water-soul which goes to the island of Siasi, while the land-soul is free to occupy the body of a crocodile, a kangaroo, or some other animal.[405] [Sidenote: Return of the ghosts.] But even when the ghosts have departed to their island home, they are by no means strictly confined to it. They can return, especially at night, to roam about the woods and the villages, and the living are very much afraid of them, for the ghosts delight in doing mischief. It is especially in the first few days after a death that the ghost is an object of terror, for he is then still loitering about the village. During these days everybody is afraid to go alone into the forest for fear of meeting him, and if a dog or a pig strays in the wood and is lost, the people make sure that the ghost has made off with the animal, and the aggrieved owners roundly abuse the sorrowing family, telling them that their old father or mother, as the case may be, is no better than a thief. They are also very unwilling to mention the names of dead persons, imagining that were the ghost to hear his name pronounced he might fancy he was being called for and might accordingly suspend his habitual occupation of munching sour fruits in the forest to come and trouble the living. [Sidenote: Offerings to ghosts.] Hence in order to keep the short-tempered ghost in good humour by satisfying his wants, lest he should think himself neglected and wreak his vexation on the survivors, the people go a-fishing after a death, or they kill a pig or a dog; sometimes also they cut down a fruit-tree. But it is only the souls of the animals which are destined for the consumption of the ghost; their bodies are roasted and eaten by the living. On a grave you may sometimes see a small basket suspended from a stick; but if you look into it you will find nothing but a little soot and some fish scales, which is all that remains of the fried fish. [Sidenote: Ghosts provided with fire.] The Yabim also imagine that the ghost has need of fire to guide him to the door of the man who has done him to death by sorcery. Accordingly they provide the spirit with this necessary as follows. On the evening of the day on which the body has been buried, they kindle a fire on a potsherd and heap dry leaves on it. As they do so they mention the names of all the sorcerers they can think of, and he at whose name the smouldering leaves burst into a bright flame is the one who has done the deed. Having thus ascertained the true cause of death, beyond reach of cavil, they proceed to light up the ghost to the door of his murderer. For this purpose a procession is formed. A man, holding the smouldering fire in the potsherd with one hand and a bundle of straw with the other, leads the way. He is followed by another who draws droning notes from a water-bottle of the deceased, which he finally smashes. After these two march a number of young fellows who make a plumping sound by smacking their thighs with the hollow of their hands. This solemn procession wends its way to a path in the neighbouring forest. By this time the shades of night have fallen. The firebearer now sets the fire on the ground and calls on the ghost to come and take it. They firmly believe that he does so and that having got it he hies away to cast the glowing embers down at the door of the man who has done him to death. They even fancy they see the flickering light carried by the invisible hand retreating through the shadows into the depth of the forest; and in order to follow it with their eyes they will sometimes climb tall trees or launch a canoe and put out to sea, gazing intently at the glimmering ray till it vanishes from their sight in the darkness. Perhaps the gleam of fire-flies, which abound in these tropical forests, or the flashing of a meteor, as it silently drops from the starry heaven into the sea, may serve to feed this superstitious fancy.[406] [Sidenote: Ghosts thought to help in the cultivation of the land.] But the spirits of the dead are supposed to be able to help as well as harm the living. Good crops and a successful hunt are attributed to their influence. It is especially the spirits of the ancient owners of the land who are credited with the power of promoting the growth of the crops. Hence when a clearing has been made in the forest and planted with taro, and the plants are shewing a good head of leaves, preparations are made to feast the ghosts of the people to whom the land belonged in days gone by. For this purpose a sago-palm is cut down, sago-porridge made, and a wild boar killed. Then the men arrayed in all their finery march out in solemn procession by day to the taro field; and the leader invites the spirits in a loud voice to come to the village and partake of the sago-porridge and pork that have been made ready for them. But the invisible guests content themselves as usual with snuffing up the fragrant smell of the roast pork and the steam of the porridge; the substance of these dainties is consumed by the living. Yet the help which the ghosts give in the cultivation of the land would seem to be conceived as a purely negative one; the offerings are made to them for the purpose of inducing them to keep away and not injure the growing crops. It is also believed that the ghosts of the dead make communications to the living in dreams or by whistling, and even that they can bring things to their friends and relations. But on the whole, Mr. Vetter tells us, the dominant attitude of the living to the dead is one of fear; the power of the ghosts is oftener exerted for evil than for good.[407] The ghost of a murdered man in particular is dreaded, because he is believed to haunt his murderer and to do him a mischief. Hence they drive away such a dangerous ghost with shouts and the beating of drums; and by way of facilitating his departure they launch a model of a canoe, laden with taro and tobacco, in order to transport him with all comfort to the land of souls.[408] [Sidenote: Burial and mourning customs among the Yabim.] Among the Yabim the dead are usually buried in shallow graves close to the houses where they died. Some trifles are laid with the body in the grave, in order that the dead man or woman may have the use of them in the other world. But any valuables that may be deposited with the corpse are afterwards dug up and appropriated by the survivors. If the deceased was the householder himself or his wife, the house is almost always deserted, however solidly it may be built. The reason for thus abandoning so valuable a piece of property is not mentioned; but we may assume that the motive is a fear of the ghost, who is supposed to haunt his old home. A temporary hut is built on the grave, and in it the family of the deceased take up their abode for six weeks or more; here they cook, eat, and sleep. A widower sits in a secluded corner by himself, invisible to all and unwashed; during the period of full mourning he may not shew himself in the village. When he does come forth again, he wears a mourning hat made of bark in the shape of a cylinder without crown or brim; a widow wears a great ugly net, which wraps her up almost completely from the head to the knees. Sometimes in memory of the deceased they wear a lock of his hair or a bracelet. Other relations wear cords round their necks in sign of mourning. The period of mourning varies greatly; it may last for months or even years. Sometimes the bodies of beloved children or persons who have been much respected are not buried but tied up in bundles and set up in a house until the flesh has quite mouldered away; then the skull and the bones of the arms and legs are anointed, painted red, and preserved for a time. Mr. Vetter records the case of a chief whose corpse was thus preserved in the assembly-house of the village, after it had been dried over a fire. When it had been reduced to a mummy, the skull and the arm-bones and leg-bones were detached, oiled, and reddened, and then kept for some years in the house of the chief's eldest son, till finally they were deposited in the grave of a kinsman. In some of the inland villages of this part of New Guinea the widow is sometimes throttled by her relations at the death of her husband, in order that she may accompany him to the other world.[409] [Sidenote: Deaths attributed by the Yabim to sorcery.] The Yabim believe that except in the case of very old people every death is caused by sorcery; hence when anybody has departed this life, his relations make haste to discover the wicked sorcerer who has killed their kinsman. For that purpose they have recourse to various forms of divination. One of them has been already described, but they have others. For example, they put a powder like sulphur in a piece of bamboo tube and kindle a fire under it. Then an old man takes a bull-roarer and taps with it on the bamboo tube, naming all the sorcerers in the neighbouring villages. He at the mention of whose name the fire catches the powder and blazes up is the guilty man. Another way of detecting the culprit is to attach the feather of a bird of paradise to a staff and give the staff to two men to hold upright between the palms of their right hands. Then somebody names the sorcerers, and he at whose name the staff turns round and the feather points downwards is the one who caused the death. When the avengers of blood, wrought up to a high pitch of fury, fall in with the family of the imaginary criminal, they may put the whole of them to death lest the sons should afterwards avenge their father's murder by the black art. Sometimes a dangerous and dreaded sorcerer will be put out of the way with the connivance of the chief of his own village; and after a few days the murderers will boldly shew themselves in the village where the crime was perpetrated and will reassure the rest of the people, saying, "Be still. The wicked man has been taken off. No harm will befall you."[410] [Sidenote: Bull-roarers (_balum_). Initiation of young men.] It is very significant that the word _balum_, which means a ghost, is applied by the Yabim to the instrument now generally known among anthropologists as a bull-roarer. It is a small fish-shaped piece of wood which, being tied to a string and whirled rapidly round, produces a humming or booming sound like the roaring of a bull or the muttering of distant thunder. Instruments of this sort are employed by savages in many parts of the world at their mysteries; the weird sound which the implement makes when swung is supposed by the ignorant and uninitiated to be the voice of a spirit and serves to impress them with a sense of awe and mystery. So it is with the Papuans about Finsch Harbour, with whom we are at present concerned. At least one such bull-roarer is kept in the _lum_ or bachelors' clubhouse of every village, and the women and uninitiated boys are forbidden to see it under pain of death. The instrument plays a great part in the initiation of young men, which takes place at intervals of several years, when there are a number of youths ready to be initiated, and enough pigs can be procured to furnish forth the feasts which form an indispensable part of the ceremony. The principal initiatory rite consists of circumcision, which is performed on all youths before they are admitted to the rank of full-grown men. The age of the candidates varies considerably, from four years up to twenty. Many are married before they are initiated. The operation is performed in the forest, and the procession of the youths to the place appointed is attended by a number of men swinging bull-roarers. As the procession sets out, the women look on from a distance, weeping and howling, for they are taught to believe that the lads, their sons and brothers, are about to be swallowed up by a monster called a _balum_ or ghost, who will only release them from his belly on condition of receiving a sufficient number of roast pigs. How, then, can the poor women be sure that they will ever see their dear ones again? So amid the noise of weeping and wailing the procession passes into the forest, and the booming sound of the bull-roarers dies away in the distance. [Sidenote: The rite of circumcision; the lads supposed to be swallowed by a monster (_balum_). The sacred flutes.] The place where the operation is performed on the lads is a long hut, about a hundred feet in length, which diminishes in height towards the rear. This represents the belly of the monster which is to swallow up the candidates. To keep up the delusion a pair of great eyes are painted over the entrance, and above them the projecting roots of a betel-palm represent the monster's hair, while the trunk of the tree passes for his backbone. As the awe-struck lads approach this imposing creature, he is heard from time to time to utter a growl. The growl is in fact no other than the humming note of bull-roarers swung by men, who are concealed within the edifice. When the procession has come to a halt in front of the artificial monster, a loud defiant blast blown on shell-trumpets summons him to stand forth. The reply follows in the shape of another muffled roar of the bull-roarers from within the building. At the sound the men say that "Balum is coming up," and they raise a shrill song like a scream and sacrifice pigs to the monster in order to induce him to spare the lives of the candidates. When the operation has been performed on the lads, they must remain in strict seclusion for three or four months, avoiding all contact with women and even the sight of them. They live in the long hut, which represents the monster's belly, and their food is brought them by elder men. Their leisure time is spent in weaving baskets and playing on certain sacred flutes, which are never used except at such seasons. The instruments are of two patterns. One is called the male and the other the female, and they are supposed to be married to each other. No woman may see these mysterious flutes; if she did she would die. Even if she hears their shrill note in the distance, she will hasten to hide herself in a thicket. When the initiatory ceremonies are over, the flutes are carefully kept in the men's clubhouse of the village till the next time they are wanted for a similar occasion. On the other hand, if the women are obliged to go near the place where the lads are living in seclusion, they beat on certain bamboo drums in order to warn them to keep out of the way. Sometimes, though perhaps rarely, one of the lads dies under the operation; in that case the men explain his disappearance to the women by saying that the monster has a pig's stomach as well as a human stomach, and that unfortunately the deceased young man slipped by mistake into the wrong stomach and so perished miserably. But as a rule the candidates pass into the right stomach and after a sufficient period has been allowed for digestion, they come forth safe and sound, the monster having kindly consented to let them go free in consideration of the roast pigs which have been offered to him by the men. Indeed he is not very exacting, for he contents himself with devouring the souls of the pigs, while he leaves their bodies to be consumed by his worshippers. This is a kindly and considerate way of dealing with sacrifice, which our New Guinea ghost or monster shares with many deities of much higher social pretensions. However, lest he should prove refractory and perhaps run away with the poor young men in his inside, or possibly make a dart at any women or children who might be passing, the men take the precaution of tying him down tight with ropes. When the time of seclusion is up, one of the last acts in the long series of ceremonies is to cast off the ropes and let the monster go free. He avails himself of his liberty to return to his subterranean abode, and the young men are brought back to the village with much solemnity. [Sidenote: The return of the novices to the village.] An eye-witness has described the ceremony. The lads, now ranking as full-grown men, were first bathed in the sea and then elaborately decorated with paint and so forth. In marching back to the village they had to keep their eyes tightly shut, and each of them was led by a man who acted as a kind of god-father. As the procession moved on, an old bald-headed man touched each boy solemnly on the chin and brow with a bull-roarer. In the village preparations for a banquet had meanwhile been made, and the women and girls were waiting in festal attire. The women were much moved at the return of the lads; they sobbed and tears of joy ran down their cheeks. Arrived in the village the newly-initiated lads were drawn up in a row and fresh palm leaves were spread in front of them. Here they stood with closed eyes, motionless as statues. Then a man passed behind them, touching each of them in the hams with the handle of an axe and saying, "O circumcised one, sit down." But still the lads remained standing, stiff and motionless. Not till another man had knocked repeatedly on the ground with the stalk of a palm-leaf, crying, "O circumcised ones, open your eyes!" did the youths, one after another, open their eyes as if awaking from a profound stupor. Then they sat down on the mats and partook of the food brought them by the men. Young and old now ate in the open air. Next morning the circumcised lads were bathed in the sea and painted red instead of white. After that they might talk to women. This was the end of the ceremony.[411] [Sidenote: The essence of the initiatory rites seems to be a simulation of death and resurrection; the novice is supposed to be killed and to come to life or be born again. The new birth among the Akikuyu of British East Africa.] The meaning of these curious ceremonies observed on the return of the lads to the village is not explained by the writer who describes them; but the analogy of similar ceremonies observed at initiation by many other races allows us to divine it with a fair degree of probability. As I have already observed in a former lecture, the ceremony of initiation at puberty is very often regarded as a process of death and resurrection; the candidate is supposed to die or to be killed and to come to life again or be born again; and the pretence of a new birth is not uncommonly kept up by the novices feigning to have forgotten all the most common actions of life and having accordingly to learn them all over again like newborn babes. We may conjecture that this is why the young circumcised Papuans, with whom we are at present concerned, march back to their village with closed eyes; this is why, when bidden to sit down, they remain standing stiffly, as if they understood neither the command nor the action; and this, too, we may surmise, is why their mothers and sisters receive them with a burst of emotion, as if their dead had come back to them from the grave. This interpretation of the ceremony is confirmed by a curious rite which is observed by the Akikuyu of British East Africa. Amongst them every boy or girl at or about the age of ten years has solemnly to pretend to be born again, not in a moral or religious, but in a physical sense. The mother of the child, or, if she is dead, some other woman, goes through an actual pantomime of bringing forth the boy or girl. I will spare you the details of the pantomime, which is very graphic, and will merely mention that the bouncing infant squalls like a newborn babe. Now this ceremony of the new birth was formerly enacted among the Akikuyu at the rite of circumcision, though the two ceremonies are now kept distinct.[412] Hence it is not very rash to conjecture that the ceremony performed by the young Papuans of Finsch Harbour on their return to the village after undergoing circumcision is merely a way of keeping up the pretence of being born again and of being therefore as ignorant and helpless as babes. [Sidenote: The mock death of the novices as a preliminary to the mock birth.] But if the end of the initiation is a mock resurrection, or rather new birth, as it certainly seems to be, we may infer with some confidence that the first part of it, namely the act of circumcision, is a mock death. This is borne out by the explicit statement of a very good authority, Mr. Vetter, that "the circumcision is designated as a process of being swallowed by the spirit, out of whose stomach (represented by a long hut) the release must take place by means of a sacrifice of pigs."[413] And it is further confirmed by the observation that both the spirit which is supposed to operate on the lads, and the bull-roarer, which apparently represents his voice, are known by the name of _balum_, which means the ghost or spirit of a dead person. Similarly, among the Tugeri or Kaya-Kaya, a large Papuan tribe on the south coast of Dutch New Guinea, the name of the bull-roarer, which they call _sosom_, is given to a mythical giant, who is supposed to appear every year with the south-east monsoon. When he comes, a festival is held in his honour and bull-roarers are swung. Boys are presented to the giant, and he kills them, but brings them to life again.[414] Thus the initiatory rite of circumcision, to which all lads have to submit among the Yabim, seems to be closely bound up with their conception of death and with their belief in a life after death; since the whole ceremony apparently consists in a simulation of dying and coming to life again. That is why I have touched upon these initiatory rites, which at first sight might appear to have no connexion with our immediate subject, the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead. [Sidenote: General summary as to the Yabim.] On the whole we may say that the Yabim have a very firm and practical belief in a life after death, and that while their attitude to the spirits of the departed is generally one of fear, they nevertheless look to these spirits also for information and help on various occasions. Thus their beliefs and practices contain at least in germ the elements of a worship of the dead. [Footnote 394: Stolz, "Die Umgebung von Kap König Wilhelm," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch New-Guinea_ (Berlin, 1911), iii. 243-286.] [Footnote 395: Stolz, _op. cit._ pp. 252-254.] [Footnote 396: Stolz, _op. cit._ pp. 245-247.] [Footnote 397: Stolz, _op. cit._ pp. 247 _sq._] [Footnote 398: Stolz, _op. cit._ pp. 248-250.] [Footnote 399: Stolz, _op. cit._ p. 258.] [Footnote 400: Stolz, _op. cit._ p. 259.] [Footnote 401: K. Vetter, in _Komm herüber und hilf uns! oder die Arbeit der Neuen-Dettelsauer Mission_, Nos. 1-4 (Barmen, 1898); _id._, in _Nachrichten über Kaiser Wilhelms-Land_, 1897, pp. 86-102; _id._, in _Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena_, xi. (Jena, 1892) pp. 102-106; _id._, in _Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena_, xii. (Jena, 1893) pp. 95-97; H. Zahn, "Die Jabim," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii (Berlin, 1911) pp. 287-394.] [Footnote 402: K. Vetter, _Komm herüber und hilf uns!_ ii. (Barmen, 1898) pp. 6-12.] [Footnote 403: K. Vetter, _op. cit._ ii. 8; H. Zahn, "Die Jabim," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. 291, 308, 311.] [Footnote 404: H. Zahn, _op. cit._ iii. 291.] [Footnote 405: K. Vetter, _Komm herüber und hilf uns!_ iii. 21 _sq._ According to Mr. H. Zahn (_op. cit._ p. 324) every village has its own entrance into the spirit-land.] [Footnote 406: K. Vetter, _Komm herüber und hilf uns!_ iii. 19-24; _id._, in _Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena_, xii. (1893) pp. 96 _sq._] [Footnote 407: K. Vetter, _Komm herüber und hilf uns!_ ii. 7, iii. 24; _id._, in _Nachrichten über Kaiser Wilhelms-Land und den Bismarck-Archipel_, 1897, p. 94.] [Footnote 408: K. Vetter, in _Nachrichten über Kaiser Wilhelms-Land_, 1897, p. 94.] [Footnote 409: K. Vetter, in _Nachrichten über Kaiser Wilhelms-Land_, 1897, pp. 94 _sq._; _id._, _Komm herüber und hilf uns!_ iii. 15-19. Compare H. Zahn, "Die Jabim," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. 320 _sq._] [Footnote 410: H. Zahn, "Die Jabim," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. 318-320.] [Footnote 411: K. Vetter, in _Nachrichten über Kaiser Wilhelms-Land und den Bismarck-Archipel_, 1897, pp. 92 _sq._; _id._, in _Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena_, xi. (1892) p. 105; _id._, _Komm herüber und hilf uns!_ ii. (1898) p. 18; _id._, cited by M. Krieger, _Neu-Guinea_, pp. 167-170; O. Schellong, "Das Barlum (_sic_)-fest der Gegend Finsch-hafens (Kaiserwilhelmsland), ein Beitrag zur Kenntniss der Beschneidung der Melanesier," _Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie_, ii. (1889) pp. 145-162; H. Zahn, "Die Jabim," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. 296-298.] [Footnote 412: W. S. Routledge and K. Routledge, _With a Prehistoric People, the Akikuyu of British East Africa_ (London, 1910), pp. 151 _sq._ Compare _Totemism and Exogamy_, iv. 228; C. W. Hobley, "Kikuyu Customs and Beliefs," _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_, xl. (1910) pp. 440 _sq._] [Footnote 413: K. Vetter, in _Nachrichten über Kaiser Wilhelmsland und den Bismarck-Archipel_, 1897, p. 93.] [Footnote 414: R. Pöch, "Vierter Bericht über meine Reise nach Neu-Guinea," _Sitzungsberichte der mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Klasse der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften_ (Vienna), cxv. (1906) Abteilung 1, pp. 901, 902.] LECTURE XII THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF GERMAN NEW GUINEA (_continued_) [Sidenote: The Bukaua of German New Guinea.] In the last lecture I described the beliefs and practices concerning the dead as they are to be found among the Yabim of German New Guinea. To-day we begin with the Bukaua, a kindred and neighbouring tribe, which occupies the coast lands of the northern portion of Huon Gulf from Schollenbruch Point to Samoa Harbour. The language which the Bukaua speak belongs, like the language of the Yabim, to the Melanesian, not to the Papuan family. Their customs and beliefs have been reported by a German missionary, Mr. Stefan Lehner, whose account I follow.[415] In many respects they closely resemble those of their neighbours the Yabim. [Sidenote: Means of subsistence of the Bukaua. Men's clubhouses.] The Bukaua are an agricultural people who subsist mainly on the crops of taro which they raise. But they also cultivate many kinds of bananas and vegetables, together with sugar-cane, sago, and tobacco. From time to time they cut down and burn the forest in order to obtain fresh fields for cultivation. The land is not held in common. Each family has its own fields and patches of forest, and would resent the intrusion of others on their hereditary domain. Hunting and fishing supply them with animal food to eke out the vegetable nourishment which they draw from their fields and plantations.[416] Every village contains one or more of the men's clubhouses which are a common feature in the social life of the tribes on this coast. In these clubhouses the young men are obliged to sleep, and on the platforms in front of them the older men hold their councils. Such a clubhouse is called a _lum_.[417] [Sidenote: Beliefs of the Bukaua concerning the souls of the dead. Sickness and disease attributed to ghostly agency.] The Bukaua have a firm belief in the existence of the human soul after death. They think that a man's soul can even quit his body temporarily in his lifetime during sleep or a swoon, and that in its disembodied state it can appear to people at a distance; but such apparitions are regarded as omens of approaching death, when the soul will depart for good and all. The soul of a dead man is called a _balum_. The spirits of the departed are believed to be generally mischievous and spiteful to the living, but they can be appeased by sacrifice, and other measures can be taken to avert their dangerous influence.[418] They are very touchy, and if they imagine that they are not honoured enough by their kinsfolk, and that the offerings made to them are insufficient, they will avenge the slight by visiting their disrespectful and stingy relatives with sickness and disease. Among the maladies which the natives ascribe to the anger of ghosts are epilepsy, fainting fits, and wasting decline.[419] When a man suffers from a sore which he believes to have been inflicted on him by a ghost, he will take a stone from the fence of the grave and heat it in the fire, saying: "Father, see, thou hast gone, I am left, I must till the land in thy stead and care for my brothers and sisters. Do me good again." Then he dips the hot stone in a puddle on the grave, and holds his sore in the steam which rises from it. His pain is eased thereby and he explains the alleviation which he feels by saying, "The spirit of the dead man has eaten up the wound."[420] [Sidenote: Sickness and death often ascribed by the Bukaua to sorcery.] But like most savages the Bukaua attribute many illnesses and many deaths not to the wrath of ghosts but to the malignant arts of sorcerers; and in such cases they usually endeavour by means of divination to ascertain the culprit and to avenge the death of their friend by taking the life of his imaginary murderer.[421] If they fail to exact vengeance, the ghost is believed to be very angry, and they must be on their guard against him. He may meet them anywhere, but is especially apt to dog the footsteps of the sorcerer who killed him. Hence when on the occasion of a great feast the sorcerer comes to the village of his victim, the surviving relatives of the dead man are at particular pains to protect themselves and their property against the insidious attacks of the prowling ghost. For this purpose they bury a creeper with white blossoms in the path leading to the village; the ghost is thought to be filled with fear at the sight of it and to turn back, leaving his kinsfolk, their dogs, and pigs in peace.[422] [Sidenote: Fear of the ghosts of the slain.] Another class of ghosts who are much dreaded are the spirits of slain foes. They are believed to pursue their slayers to the village and to blind them so that sooner or later they fall an easy prey to their enemies. Hence when a party of warriors has returned home from a successful attack on a village, in which they have butchered all on whom they could lay their hands, they kindle a great fire, dance wildly about it, and hurl burning brands in the direction of the battlefield in order to keep the ghosts of their slaughtered foes at bay. Phosphorescent lights seen under the houses throw the inmates into great alarm, for they are thought to be the souls of the slain. Sometimes the vanquished in battle resort to a curious ruse for the purpose of avenging themselves on the victors by means of a ghost. They take the sleeping-mat of one of the slain, roll it up in a bundle along with his loin-cloth, apron, netted bag, or head-rest, and give the bundle to two cripples to carry. Then they steal quietly to the landing-place of their foes, peering warily about lest they should be observed. The bundle represents the dead man, and the cripples who carry it reel to and fro, and finally sink to the ground with their burden. In this way the ghost of the victim, whose things are carried in the bundle, is supposed to make their enemies weak and tottery. Strong young men are not given the bundle to carry, lest the ghost should spoil their manly figures; whereas if he should wound or maim a couple of poor cripples, no great harm is done.[423] [Sidenote: Ghosts of ancestors appealed to for help, especially in the cultivation of the ground. First-fruits offered to the spirits of the dead.] However, the Bukaua also look on the ghosts of their ancestors in a more amiable light as beings who, if properly appealed to, can and will help them in the affairs of life, especially by procuring for them good crops. Hence when they are planting their fields, which are formed in clearings of the forest, they take particular care to insert shoots of all their crops in the ground near the tree stumps which remain standing, because the souls of their dead grandfathers and great-grandfathers are believed to be sitting on the stumps watching their descendants at their work. Accordingly in the act of planting they call out the names of these forefathers and pray them to guard the field in order that their living children may have food and not suffer from hunger. And at harvest, when the first-fruits of the taro, bananas, sugar-cane, and so forth have been brought back from the fields, a portion of them is offered in a bowl to the spirits of the forefathers in the house of the landowner, and the spirits are addressed in prayer as follows: "O ye who have guarded our field as we prayed you to do, there is something for you; now and henceforth behold us with favour." While the family are feasting on the rest of the first-fruits, the householder will surreptitiously stir the offerings in the bowl with his finger, and will then shew the bowl to the others as a proof that the souls of the dead have really partaken of the good things provided for them.[424] A hunter will also pray to his dead father to drive the wild pigs into his net.[425] [Sidenote: Burial and mourning customs of the Bukaua.] The Bukaua bury their dead in shallow graves, which are sometimes dug under the houses but more usually in front of or beside them. Along with the corpses are deposited bags of taro, nuts, drinking-vessels, and other articles of daily use. Only the stone axes are too valuable to be thus sacrificed. Over the grave is erected a rude hut in which the widower, if the deceased was a married woman, remains for a time in seclusion. A widow on the death of her husband remains in the house. Widow and widower may not shew themselves in public until they have prepared their mourning costume. The widower wears a black hat made of bark, cords round his neck, wicker work on his arms and feet, and a torn old bracelet of his wife in a bag on his breast. A widow is completely swathed in nets, one over the other, and she carries about with her the loincloth of her deceased husband. The souls of the dead dwell in a subterranean region called _lamboam_, and their life there seems to resemble life here on earth; but the ideas of the people on the subject are very vague.[426] [Sidenote: Initiation of young men among the Bukaua. Lads at circumcision supposed to be swallowed by a monster.] The customs and beliefs of the Bukaua in regard to the initiation of young men are practically identical with those of their neighbours the Yabim. Indeed the initiatory ceremonies are performed by the tribes jointly, now in the territory of the Bukaua, now in the territory of the Yabim, or in the land of the Kai, a tribe of mountaineers, or again in the neighbouring Tami islands. The intervals between the ceremonies vary from ten to eighteen years.[427] The central feature of the initiatory rites is the circumcision of the novices. It is given out that the lads are swallowed by a ferocious monster called a _balum_, who, however, is induced by the sacrifice of many pigs to vomit them up again. In spewing them out of his maw he bites or scratches them, and the wound so inflicted is circumcision. This explanation of the rite is fobbed off on the women, who more or less believe it and weep accordingly when their sons are led away to be committed to the monster's jaws. And when the time for the ceremony is approaching, the fond mothers busy themselves with rearing and fattening young pigs, so that they may be able with them to redeem their loved ones from the belly of the ravenous beast; for he must have a pig for every boy. When a lad bleeds to death from the effect of the operation, he is secretly buried, and his sorrowful mother is told that the monster swallowed him and refused to bring him up again. What really happens is that the youths are shut up for several months in a house specially built for the purpose in the village. During their seclusion they are under the charge of guardians, usually two young men, and must observe strictly a rule of fasting and chastity. When they are judged to be ready to undergo the rite, they are led forth and circumcised in front of the house amid a prodigious uproar made by the swinging of bull-roarers. The noise is supposed to be the voice of the monster who swallows and vomits up the novice at circumcision. The bull-roarer as well as the monster bears the name of _balum_, and the building in which the novices are lodged before and after the operation is called the monster's house (_balumslum_). After they have been circumcised the lads remain in the house for several months till their wounds are healed; then, painted and bedizened with all the ornaments that can be collected, they are brought back and restored to their joyful mothers. Women must vacate the village for a long time while the initiatory ceremonies are being performed.[428] [Sidenote: Novices at circumcision supposed to be killed and then restored to a new and higher life.] The meaning of the whole rite, as I pointed out in dealing with the similar initiatory rite of the Yabim, appears to be that the novices are killed and then restored to a new and better life; for after their initiation they rank no longer as boys but as full-grown men, entitled to all the privileges of manhood and citizenship, if we can speak of such a thing as citizenship among the savages of New Guinea. This interpretation of the rite is supported by the notable fact that the Bukaua, like the Yabim, give the name of _balum_ to the souls of the dead as well as to the mythical monster and to the bull-roarer; this shews how intimately the three things are associated in their minds. Indeed not only is the bull-roarer in general associated with the souls of the dead by a community of name, but among the Bukaua each particular bull-roarer bears in addition the name of a particular dead man and varies in dignity and importance with the dignity and importance of the deceased person whom it represents. The most venerated of all are curiously carved and have been handed down for generations; they bear the names of famous warriors or magicians of old and are supposed to reproduce the personal peculiarities of the celebrated originals in their shape and tones. And there are smaller bull-roarers which emit shriller notes and are thought to represent the shrill-voiced wives of the ancient heroes.[429] [Sidenote: The Kai tribe of Saddle Mountain in German New Guinea. The land of the Kai. Their mode of cultivation. Their villages.] The Bukaua and the Yabim, the two tribes with which I have been dealing in this and the last lecture, inhabit, as I have said, the coast about Finsch Harbour and speak a Melanesian language. We now pass from them to the consideration of another people, belonging to a different stock and speaking a different language, who inhabit the rugged and densely wooded mountains inland from Finsch Harbour. Their neighbours on the coast call these mountaineers by the name of Kai, a word which signifies forest or inland in opposition to the seashore; and this name of the tribe we may adopt, following the example of a German missionary, Mr. Ch. Keysser, who has laboured among them for more than eleven years and has given us an excellent description of their customs and beliefs. His account applies particularly to the natives of what is called Saddle Mountain, the part of the range which advances nearest to the coast and rises to the height of about three thousand feet. It is a rough, broken country, cleft by many ravines and covered with forest, bush, or bamboo thickets; though here and there at rare intervals some brown patches mark the clearings which the sparse inhabitants have made for the purpose of cultivation. Water is plentiful. Springs gush forth everywhere in the glens and valleys, and rushing streams of crystal-clear water pour down the mountain sides, and in the clefts of the hills are lonely tarns, the undisturbed haunts of wild ducks and other water fowl. During the wet season, which extends from June to August, the rain descends in sheets and the mountains are sometimes covered for weeks together with so thick a mist that all prospect is cut off at the distance of a hundred yards. The natives are then loth to leave their huts and will spend the day crouching over a fire. They are a shorter and sturdier race than the tribes on the coast; the expression of their face is less frank and agreeable, and their persons are very much dirtier. They belong to the aboriginal Papuan stock, whereas the Yabim and Bukaua on the coast are probably immigrants from beyond the sea, who have driven the indigenous population back into the mountains.[430] Their staple foods are taro and yams, which they grow in their fields. A field is cultivated for only one year at a time; it is then allowed to lie fallow and is soon overgrown with rank underwood. Six or eight years may elapse before it is again cleared and brought under cultivation. Game and fish abound in the woods and waters, and the Kai make free use of these natural resources. They keep pigs and dogs, and eat the flesh of both. Pork is indeed a favourite viand, figuring largely in the banquets which are held at the circumcision festivals.[431] The people live in small villages, each village comprising from two to six houses. The houses are raised on piles and the walls are usually constructed of pandanus leaves, though many natives now make them of boards. After eighteen months or two years the houses are so rotten and tumble-down that the village is deserted and a new one built on another site. Assembly-houses are erected only for the circumcision ceremonies, and the bull-roarers used on these occasions are kept in them. Husband and wife live together, often two couples in one hut; but each family has its own side of the house and its own fireplace. In times of insecurity the Kai used to build their huts for safety among the spreading boughs of great trees. A whole village, consisting of three or four huts, might thus be quartered on a single tree. Of late years, with the peace and protection for life introduced by German rule, these tree-houses have gone out of fashion.[432] [Sidenote: Observations of a German missionary on the animistic beliefs of the Kai.] After describing the manners and customs of the Kai people at some length, the German missionary, who knows them intimately, proceeds to give us a very valuable account of their old native religion or superstition. He prefaces his account with some observations, the fruit of long experience, which deserve to be laid to heart by all who attempt to penetrate into the inner life, the thoughts, the feelings, the motives of savages. As his remarks are very germane to the subject of these lectures, I will translate them. He says: "In the preceding chapters I have sketched the daily life of the Kai people. But I have not attempted to set forth the reasons for their conduct, which is often very peculiar and unintelligible. The explanation of that conduct lies in the animistic view which the Papuan takes of the world. It must be most emphatically affirmed that nobody can judge the native aright who has not gained an insight into what we may call his religious opinions. The native must be described as very religious, although his ideas do not coincide with ours. His feelings, thoughts, and will are most intimately connected with his belief in souls. With that belief he is born, he has sucked it in with his mother's milk, and from the standpoint of that belief he regards the things and occurrences that meet him in life; by that belief he regulates his behaviour. An objective way of looking at events is unknown to him; everything is brought by him into relation to his belief, and by it he seeks to explain everything that to him seems strange and rare."[433] "The labyrinth of animistic customs at first sight presents an appearance of wild confusion to him who seeks to penetrate into them and reduce them to order; but on closer inspection he will soon recognise certain guiding lines. These guiding lines are the laws of animism, which have passed into the flesh and blood of the Papuan and influence his thought and speech, his acts and his omissions, his love and hate, in short his whole life and death. When once we have discovered these laws, the whole of the superstitious nonsense falls into an orderly system which compels us to regard it with a certain respect that increases in proportion to the contempt in which we had previously held the people. We need not wonder, moreover, that the laws of animism partially correspond to general laws of nature."[434] [Sidenote: The essential rationality of the savage.] Thus according to Mr. Keysser, who has no theory to maintain and merely gives us in this passage the result of long personal observation, the Kai savages are thinking, reasoning men, whose conduct, however strange and at first sight unintelligible it may appear to us, is really based on a definite religious or if you please superstitious view of the world. It is true that their theory as well as their practice differs widely from ours; but it would be false and unjust to deny that they have a theory and that on the whole their practice squares with it. Similar testimony is borne to other savage races by men who have lived long among them and observed them closely;[435] and on the strength of such testimony I think we may lay it down as a well-established truth that savages in general, so far as they are known to us, have certain more or less definite theories, whether we call them religious or philosophical, by which they regulate their conduct, and judged by which their acts, however absurd they may seem to the civilised man, are really both rational and intelligible. Hence it is, in my opinion, a profound mistake hastily to conclude that because the behaviour of the savage does not agree with our notions of what is reasonable, natural, and proper, it must therefore necessarily be illogical, the result of blind impulse rather than of deliberate thought and calculation. No doubt the savage like the civilised man does often act purely on impulse; his passions overmaster his reason, and sweep it away before them. He is probably indeed much more impulsive, much more liable to be whirled about by gusts of emotion than we are; yet it would be unfair to judge his life as a whole by these occasional outbursts rather than by its general tenour, which to those who know him from long observation reveals a groundwork of logic and reason resembling our own in its operations, though differing from ours in the premises from which it sets out. I think it desirable to emphasise the rational basis of savage life because it has been the fashion of late years with some writers to question or rather deny it. According to them, if I understand them aright, the savage acts first and invents his reasons, generally very absurd reasons, for so doing afterwards. Significantly enough, the writers who argue in favour of the essential irrationality of savage conduct have none of them, I believe, any personal acquaintance with savages. Their conclusions are based not on observation but on purely theoretical deductions, a most precarious foundation on which to erect a science of man or indeed of anything. As such, they cannot be weighed in the balance against the positive testimony of many witnesses who have lived for years with the savage and affirm emphatically the logical basis which underlies and explains his seeming vagaries. At all events I for one have no hesitation in accepting the evidence of such men to matters of fact with which they are acquainted, and I unhesitatingly reject all theories which directly contradict that evidence. If there ever has been any race of men who invariably acted first and thought afterwards, I can only say that in the course of my reading and observation I have never met with any trace of them, and I am apt to suppose that, if they ever existed anywhere but in the imagination of bookish dreamers, their career must have been an exceedingly short one, since in the struggle for existence they would surely succumb to adversaries who tempered and directed the blind fury of combat with at least a modicum of reason and sense. The myth of the illogical or prelogical savage may safely be relegated to that museum of learned absurdities and abortions which speculative anthropology is constantly enriching with fresh specimens of misapplied ingenuity and wasted industry. But enough of these fantasies. Let us return to facts. [Sidenote: The Kai theory of the soul.] The life of the Kai people, according to Mr. Keysser, is dominated by their conception of the soul. That conception differs greatly from and is very much more extensive than ours. The Kai regards his reflection and his shadow as his soul or parts of it; hence you should not tread on a man's shadow for fear of injuring his soul. The soul likewise dwells in his heart, for he feels it beating. Hence if you give a native a friendly poke in the ribs, he protests, saying, "Don't poke me so; you might drive my soul out of my body, and then I should die." The soul moreover resides in the eye, where you may see it twinkling; when it departs, the eye grows dim and vacant. Moreover, the soul is in the foot as much as in the head; it lurks even in the spittle and the other bodily excretions. The soul in fact pervades the body just as warmth does; everything that a man touches he infects, so to say, with his soul; that mysterious entity exists in the very sound of his voice. The sorcerer catches a man's soul by his magic, shuts it up tight, and destroys it. Then the man dies. He dies because the sorcerer has killed his soul. Yet the Kai believes, whether consistently or not, that the soul of the dead man continues to live. He talks to it, he makes offerings to it, he seeks to win its favour in order that he may have luck in the chase; he fears its ill-will and anger; he gives it food to eat, liquor to drink, tobacco to smoke, and betel to chew. What could a reasonable ghost ask for more?[436] [Sidenote: Two kinds of human souls.] Thus, according to Mr. Keysser, whose exposition I am simply reproducing, the Kai believes not in one nor yet in many souls belonging to each individual; he implicitly assumes that there are two different kinds of souls. One of these is the soul which survives the body at death; in all respects it resembles the man himself as he lived on earth, except that it has no body. It is not indeed absolutely incorporeal, but it is greatly shrunken and attenuated by death. That is why the souls of the dead are so angry with the living; they repine at their own degraded condition; they envy the full-blooded life which the living enjoy and which the dead have lost. The second kind of soul is distinguished by Mr. Keysser from the former as a spiritual essence or soul-stuff, which pervades the body as sap pervades the tree, and which diffuses itself like corporeal warmth over everything with which the body is brought into contact.[437] In these lectures we are concerned chiefly with the former kind of soul, which is believed to survive the death of the body, and which answers much more nearly than the second to the popular European conception of the soul. Accordingly in what follows we shall confine our attention mainly to it. [Sidenote: Death thought by the Kai to be commonly caused by sorcery.] Like many other savages, the Kai do not believe in the possibility of a natural death; they think that everybody dies through the maleficent arts of sorcerers or ghosts. Even in the case of old people, we are told, they assume the cause of death to be sorcery, and to sorcery all misfortunes are ascribed. If a man falls on the path and wounds himself to death, as often happens, on the jagged stump of a bamboo, the natives conclude that he was bewitched. The way in which the sorcerer brought about the catastrophe was this. He obtained some object which was infected with the soul-stuff or spiritual essence of his victim; he stuck a pile in the ground, he spread the soul-stuff on the pile; then he pretended to wound himself on the pile and to groan with pain. Anybody can see for himself that by a natural and necessary concatenation of causes this compelled the poor fellow to stumble over that jagged bamboo stump and to perish miserably. Again, take the case of a hunter in the forest who is charged and ripped up by a wild boar. On a superficial view of the circumstances it might perhaps occur to you that the cause of death was the boar. But you would assuredly be mistaken. The real cause of death was again a sorcerer, who pounded up the soul-stuff of his victim with a boar's tooth. Again, suppose that a man is bitten by a serpent and dies. A shallow rationalist might say that the man died of the bite; but the Kai knows better. He is aware that what really killed him was the sorcerer who took a pinch of his victim's soul and bunged it up tight in a tube along with the sting of a snake. Similarly, if a woman dies in childbed, or if a man hangs himself, the cause of death is still a sorcerer operating with the appropriate means and gestures. Thus to make a man hang himself all that the sorcerer has to do is to get a scrap of his victim's soul--and the smallest scrap is quite enough for his purpose, it may be a mere shred or speck of soul adhering to a hair of the man's head, to a drop of his sweat, or to a crumb of his food,--I say that the sorcerer need only obtain a tiny little bit of his victim's soul, clap it in a tube, set the tube dangling at the end of a string, and go through a pantomime of gurgling, goggling and so forth, like a man in the last stage of strangulation, and his victim is thereby physically compelled to put his neck in the noose and hang himself in good earnest.[438] [Sidenote: Danger incurred by the sorcerer.] Where these views of sorcery prevail, it is no wonder that the sorcerer is an unpopular character. He naturally therefore shrinks from publicity and hides his somewhat lurid light under a bushel. Not to put too fine a point on it, he carries his life in his hand and may be knocked on the head at any moment without the tedious formality of a trial. Once his professional reputation is established, all the deaths in the neighbourhood may be set down at his door. If he gets wind of a plot to assassinate him, he may stave off his doom for a while by soothing the angry passions of his enemies with presents, but sooner or later his fate is sealed.[439] [Sidenote: Many hurts and maladies attributed by the Kai to the action of ghosts. In other cases the sickness is traced to witchcraft. Capturing a lost soul.] However, the Kai savage is far from attributing all deaths without distinction to sorcerers.[440] In many hurts and maladies he detects the cold clammy hand of a ghost. If a man, for example, wounds himself in the forest, perhaps in the pursuit of a wild beast, he may imagine that he has been speared or clubbed by a malignant ghost. And when a person falls ill, the first thing to do is naturally to ascertain the cause of the illness in order that it may be treated properly. In all such enquiries, Mr. Keysser tells us, suspicion first falls on the ghosts; they are looked upon as even worse than the sorcerers.[441] So when a doctor is called in to see a patient, the only question with him is whether the sickness is caused by a sorcerer or a ghost. To decide this nice point he takes a boiled taro over which he has pronounced a charm. This he bites, and if he finds a small stone in the fruit, he decides that ghosts are the cause of the malady; but if on the other hand he detects a minute roll of leaves, he knows that the sufferer is bewitched. In the latter case the obvious remedy is to discover the sorcerer and to induce him, for an adequate consideration, to give up the magic tube in which he has bottled up a portion of the sick man's soul. If, however, the magician turns a deaf ear alike to the voice of pity and the allurement of gain, the resources of the physician are not yet exhausted. He now produces his whip or scourge for souls. This valuable instrument consists, like a common whip, of a handle with a lash attached to it, but what gives it the peculiar qualities which distinguish it from all other whips is a small packet tied to the end of the lash. The packet contains a certain herb, and the sick man and his friends must all touch it in order to impregnate it with the volatile essence of their souls. Armed with this potent implement the doctor goes by night into the depth of the forest; for the darkness of night and the solitude of the woods are necessary for the success of the delicate operation which this good physician of souls has now to perform. Finding himself alone he whistles for the lost soul of the sufferer, and if only the sorcerer by his infernal craft has not yet brought it to death's door, the soul appears at the sound of the whistle; for it is strongly attracted by the soul-stuff of its friends in the packet. But the doctor has still to catch it, a feat which is not so easily accomplished as might be supposed. It is now that the whip of souls comes into play. Suddenly the doctor heaves up his arm and lashes out at the truant soul with all his might. If only he hits it, the business is done, the soul is captured, the doctor carries it back to the house in triumph, and restores it to the body of the poor sick man, who necessarily recovers.[442] [Sidenote: Extracting ghosts from a sick man.] But suppose that the result of the diagnosis is different, and that on mature consideration the doctor should decide that a ghost and not a sorcerer is at the bottom of the mischief. The question then naturally arises whether the sick man has not of late been straying on haunted ground and infected himself with the very dangerous soul-stuff or spiritual essence of the dead. If he remembers to have done so, some leaves are fetched from the place in the forest where the mishap occurred, and with them the whole body of the sufferer or the wound, as the case may be, is stroked or brushed down. The healing virtue of this procedure is obvious. The ghosts who are vexing the patient are attracted by the familiar smell of the leaves which come from their old home; and yielding in a moment of weakness to the soft emotions excited by the perfume they creep out of the body of the sick man and into the leaves. Quick as thought the doctor now whisks the leaves away with the ghosts in them; he belabours them with a cudgel, he hangs them up in the smoke, or he throws them into the fire. Such powerful disinfectants have their natural results; if the ghosts are not absolutely destroyed they are at least disarmed, and the sick is made whole. [Sidenote: Scraping ghosts from the patient's body.] Another equally effective cure for sickness caused by ghosts is this. You take a stout stick, cleave it down the middle so that the two ends remain entire, and give it to two men to hold. Then the sick man pokes his head through the cleft; after that you rub him with the stick from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. In this way you obviously scrape off the bloodsucking ghosts who are clinging like flies or mosquitoes to his person, and having thus transferred them to the cleft stick you throw it away or otherwise destroy it. The cure is now complete, and if the patient does not recover, he cannot reasonably blame the doctor, who has done all that humanly speaking could be done to bring back the bloom of health to the poor sick man.[443] [Sidenote: Extravagant demonstrations of grief at the death of a sick man.] If, however, the sick man obstinately persists in dying, there is a great uproar in the village. For the fear of his ghost has now fallen like a thunderclap on all the people. His disembodied spirit is believed to be hovering in the air, seeing everything that is done, hearing every word that is spoken, and woe to the unlucky wight who does not display a proper degree of sorrow for the irreparable loss that has just befallen the community. Accordingly shrieks of despair begin to resound, and crocodile tears to flow in cataracts. The whole population assemble and give themselves up to the most frantic demonstrations of grief. Cries are raised on all sides, "Why must he die?" "Wherefore did they bewitch him?" "Those wicked, wicked men!" "I'll do for them!" "I'll hew them in pieces!" "I'll destroy their crops!" "I'll fell all their palm-trees!" "I'll stick all their pigs!" "O brother, why did you leave me?" "O friend, how can I live without you?" To make good these threats one man will be seen prancing wildly about and stabbing with a spear at the invisible sorcerers; another catches up a cudgel and at one blow shivers a water-pot of the deceased into atoms, or rushes out like one demented and lays a palm-tree level with the ground. Some fling themselves prostrate beside the corpse and sob as if their very hearts would break. They take the dead man by the hand, they stroke him, they straighten out the poor feet which are already growing cold. They coo to him softly, they lift up the languid head, and then lay it gently down. Then in a frenzy of grief one of them will leap to his feet, shriek, bellow, stamp on the floor, grapple with the roof beams, shake the walls, as if he would pull the house down, and finally hurl himself on the ground and roll over and over howling as if his distress was more than he could endure. Another looks wildly about him. He sees a knife. He grasps it. His teeth are set, his mind is made up. "Why need he die?" he cries, "he, my friend, with whom I had all things in common, with whom I ate out of the same dish?" Then there is a quick movement of the knife, and down he falls. But he is not dead. He has only slit the flap of one of his ears, and the trickling blood bedabbles his body. Meantime with the hoarse cries of the men are mingled the weeping and wailing, the shrill screams and lamentations of the women; while above all the din and uproar rises the booming sound of the shell trumpets blown to carry the tidings of death to all the villages in the neighbourhood. But gradually the wild tumult dies away into silence. Grief or the simulation of it has exhausted itself: the people grow calm; they sit down, they smoke or chew betel, while some engage in the last offices of attention to the dead.[444] [Sidenote: Hypocritical character of these demonstrations, which are intended to deceive the ghost.] A civilised observer who witnessed such a scene of boisterous lamentation, but did not know the natives well, might naturally set down all these frantic outbursts to genuine sorrow, and might enlarge accordingly on the affectionate nature of savages, who are thus cut to the heart by the death of any one of their acquaintance. But the missionary who knows them better assures us that most of these expressions of mourning and despair are a mere blind to deceive and soothe the dreaded ghost of the deceased into a comfortable persuasion that he is fondly loved and sadly missed by his surviving relatives and friends. This view of the essential hypocrisy of the lamentations is strongly confirmed by the threats which sick people will sometimes utter to their attendants. "If you don't take better care of me," a man will sometimes say, "and if you don't do everything you possibly can to preserve my valuable life, my ghost will serve you out." That is why friends and relations are so punctilious in paying visits of respect and condolence to the sick. Sometimes the last request which a dying man addresses to his kinsfolk is that they will kill this or that sorcerer who has killed him; and he enforces the injunction by threats of the terrible things he will do to them in his disembodied state if they fail to avenge his death on his imaginary murderer. As all the relatives of a dead man stand in fear of his ghost, the body may not be buried until all of them have had an opportunity of paying their respects to it. If, as sometimes happens, a corpse is interred before a relative can arrive from a distance, he will on arrival break out into reproaches and upbraidings against the grave-diggers for exposing him to the wrath of the departed spirit.[445] [Sidenote: Burial and mourning customs of the Kai. Preservation of the lower jawbone.] When all the relations and friends have assembled and testified their sorrow, the body is buried on the second or third day after death. The grave is usually dug under the house and is so shallow that even when it has been closed the stench is often very perceptible. The ornaments which were placed on the body when it was laid out are removed before it is lowered into the grave, and the dead takes his last rest wrapt in a simple leaf-mat. Often a dying man expresses a wish not to be buried. In that case his corpse, tightly bandaged, is deposited in a corner of the house, and the products of decomposition are allowed to drain through a tube into the ground. When they have ceased to run, the bundle is opened and the bones taken out and buried, except the lower jawbone, which is preserved, sometimes along with one of the lower arm bones. The lower jawbone reminds the possessor of the duty of blood revenge which he owes to the deceased, and which the dying man may have inculcated on him with his last breath. The lower arm bone brings luck in the chase, especially if the departed relative was a mighty hunter. However, if the hunters have a long run of bad luck, they conclude that the ghost has departed to the under world and accordingly bury the lower arm bone and the lower jawbone with the rest of the skeleton. The length of the period of mourning is similarly determined by the good or bad fortune of the huntsmen. If the ghost provides them with game in abundance for a long time after his death, the days of mourning are proportionately extended; but when the game grows scarce or fails altogether, the mourning comes to an end and the memory of the deceased soon fades away.[446] The savage is a thoroughly practical man and is not such a fool as to waste his sorrow over a ghost who gives him nothing in return. Nothing for nothing is his principle. His relations to the dead stand on a strictly commercial basis. [Sidenote: Mourning costume. Widows strangled to accompany their dead husbands.] The mourning costume consists of strings round the neck, bracelets of reed on the arms, and a cylindrical hat of bark on the head. A widow is swathed in nets. The intention of the costume is to signify to the ghost the sympathy which the mourner feels for him in his disembodied state. If the man in his lifetime was wont to crouch shivering over the fire, a little fire will be kept up for a time at the foot of the grave in order to warm his homeless spirit.[447] The widow or widower has to discharge the disagreeable duty of living day and night for several weeks in a hovel built directly over the grave. Not unfrequently the lot of a widow is much harder. At her own request she is sometimes strangled and buried with her husband in the grave, in order that her soul may accompany his on the journey to the other world. The other relations have no interest in encouraging the woman to sacrifice herself, rather the contrary; but if she insists they fear to balk her, lest they should offend the ghost of her husband, who would punish them in many ways for keeping his wife from him. But even such voluntary sacrifices, if we may believe Mr. Ch. Keysser, are dictated rather by a selfish calculation than by an impulse of disinterested affection. He mentions the case of a man named Jabu, both of whose wives chose thus to attend their husband in death. The deceased was an industrious man, a skilful hunter and farmer, who provided his wives with abundance of food. As such men are believed to work hard also in the other world, tilling fields and killing game just as here, the widows thought they could not do better than follow him as fast as possible to the spirit land, since they had no prospect of getting such another husband here on earth. "How firmly convinced," adds the missionary admiringly, "must these people be of the reality of another world when they sacrifice their earthly existence, not for the sake of a better life hereafter, but merely in order to be no worse off there than they have been on earth." And he adds that this consideration explains why no man ever chooses to be strangled at the death of his wife. The labour market in the better land is apparently not recruited from the ranks of women.[448] [Sidenote: House or village deserted after a death.] The house in which anybody has died is deserted, because the ghost of the dead is believed to haunt it and make it unsafe at night. If the deceased was a chief or a man of importance, the whole village is abandoned and a new one built on another site.[449] [Footnote 415: Stefan Lehner, "Bukaua," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. (Berlin, 1911) pp. 395-485.] [Footnote 416: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 399, 433 _sq._, 437 _sqq._] [Footnote 417: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 399.] [Footnote 418: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 414.] [Footnote 419: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 466, 468.] [Footnote 420: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 469.] [Footnote 421: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 462 _sqq._, 466, 467, 471 _sqq._] [Footnote 422: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 462.] [Footnote 423: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 444 _sq._] [Footnote 424: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 434 _sqq._; compare _id._, pp. 478 _sq._] [Footnote 425: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 462.] [Footnote 426: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 430, 470, 472 _sq._, 474 _sq._] [Footnote 427: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ p. 403.] [Footnote 428: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 402-410.] [Footnote 429: S. Lehner, _op. cit._ pp. 410-414.] [Footnote 430: Ch. Keysser, "Aus dem Leben der Kaileute," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. 3-6.] [Footnote 431: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 12 _sq._, 17-20.] [Footnote 432: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 9-12.] [Footnote 433: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 111.] [Footnote 434: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 113.] [Footnote 435: Compare Ch. Hose and W. McDougall, _The Pagan Tribes of Borneo_ (London, 1912), ii. 221 _sq._: "It has often been attempted to exhibit the mental life of savage peoples as profoundly different from our own; to assert that they act from motives, and reach conclusions by means of mental processes, so utterly different from our own motives and processes that we cannot hope to interpret or understand their behaviour unless we can first, by some impossible or at least by some hitherto undiscovered method, learn the nature of these mysterious motives and processes. These attempts have recently been renewed in influential quarters. If these views were applied to the savage peoples of the interior of Borneo, we should characterise them as fanciful delusions natural to the anthropologist who has spent all the days of his life in a stiff collar and a black coat upon the well-paved ways of civilised society. We have no hesitation in saying that, the more intimately one becomes acquainted with these pagan tribes, the more fully one realises the close similarity of their mental processes to one's own. Their primary impulses and emotions seem to be in all respects like our own. It is true that they are very unlike the typical civilised man of some of the older philosophers, whose every action proceeded from a nice and logical calculation of the algebraic sum of pleasures and pains to be derived from alternative lines of conduct; but we ourselves are equally unlike that purely mythical personage. The Kayan or the Iban often acts impulsively in ways which by no means conduce to further his best interests or deeper purposes; but so do we also. He often reaches conclusions by processes that cannot be logically justified; but so do we also. He often holds, and upon successive occasions acts upon, beliefs that are logically inconsistent with one another; but so do we also." For further testimonies to the reasoning powers of savages, which it would be superfluous to affirm if it were not at present a fashion with some theorists to deny, see _Taboo and the Perils of the Soul_, pp. 420 _sqq._ And on the tendency of the human mind in general, not of the savage mind in particular, calmly to acquiesce in inconsistent and even contradictory conclusions, I may refer to a note in _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, Second Edition, p. 4. But indeed to observe such contradictions in practice the philosopher need not quit his own study.] [Footnote 436: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 111 _sq._] [Footnote 437: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 112.] [Footnote 438: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 140. As to the magical tubes in which the sorcerer seals up some part of his victim's soul, see _id._, p. 135.] [Footnote 439: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 140 _sq._] [Footnote 440: Mr. Keysser indeed affirms that in the mind of the Kai sorcery "is regarded as the cause of all deaths" (_op. cit._ p. 102), and again that "all men without exception die in consequence of the baneful acts of these sorcerers and their accomplices" (p. 134); and again that "even in the case of old people they assume sorcery to be the cause of death; to sorcery, too, all misfortunes whatever are ascribed" (p. 140). But that these statements are exaggerations seems to follow from Mr. Keysser's own account of the wounds, sicknesses, and deaths which these savages attribute to ghosts and not to sorcerers.] [Footnote 441: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 141.] [Footnote 442: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 133 _sq._] [Footnote 443: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 141 _sq._] [Footnote 444: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 80 _sq._, 142.] [Footnote 445: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 142.] [Footnote 446: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 82, 83.] [Footnote 447: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 82, 142 _sq._] [Footnote 448: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 83 _sq._, 143.] [Footnote 449: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 83.] LECTURE XIII THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF GERMAN NEW GUINEA (_continued_) [Sidenote: Offerings to appease ghosts.] In the last lecture I gave you some account of the fear and awe which the Kai of German New Guinea entertain for the spirits of the dead. Believing that the ghost is endowed with all the qualities and faculties which distinguished the man in his lifetime, they naturally dread most the ghosts of warlike, cruel, violent, and passionate men, and take the greatest pains to soothe their anger and win their favour. For that purpose they give the departed spirit all sorts of things to take with him to the far country. And in order that he may have the use of them it is necessary to smash or otherwise spoil them. Thus the spear that is given him must be broken, the pot must be shivered, the bag must be torn, the palm-tree must be cut down. Fruits are offered to the ghost by dashing them in pieces or hanging a bunch of them over the grave. Objects of value, such as boars' tusks or dogs' teeth, are made over to him by being laid on the corpse; but the economical savage removes these precious things from the body at burial. All such offerings and sacrifices, we are told, are made simply out of fear of the ghost. It is no pleasure to a man to cut down a valuable palm-tree, which might have helped to nourish himself and his family for years; he does it only lest a worse thing should befall him at the hands of the departed spirit.[450] [Sidenote: Mode of discovering the sorcerer who caused a death.] But the greatest service that the Kai can render to a dead man is to take vengeance on the sorcerer who caused his death by witchcraft. The first thing is to discover the villain, and in the search for him the ghost obligingly assists his surviving kinsfolk. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to resort to a stratagem in order to secure his help. Thus, for example, one day while the ghost, blinded by the strong sunlight, is cowering in a dark corner or reposing at full length in the grave, his relatives will set up a low scaffold in a field, cover it with leaves, and pile up over it a mass of the field fruits which belonged to the dead man, so that the whole erection may appear to the eye of the unsuspecting ghost a heap of taro, yams, and so forth, and nothing more. But before the sun goes down, two or three men steal out from the house, and ensconce themselves under the scaffold, where they are completely concealed by the piled-up fruits. When darkness has fallen, out comes the ghost and prowling about espies the heap of yams and taro. At sight of the devastation wrought in his field he flies into a passion, and curses and swears in the feeble wheezy whisper in which ghosts always speak. In the course of his fluent imprecations he expresses a wish that the miscreants who have wasted his substance may suffer so and so at the hands of the sorcerer. That is just what the men in hiding have been waiting for. No sooner do they hear the name of the sorcerer than they jump up with a great shout; the startled ghost takes to his heels; and all the people in the village come pouring out of the houses. Very glad they are to know that the murderer has been found out, and sooner or later they will have his blood.[451] [Sidenote: Another way of detecting the sorcerer.] Another mode of eliciting the requisite information from the ghost is this. In order to allow him to communicate freely with his mouldering body, his relations insert a tube through the earth of the grave down to the corpse; then they sprinkle powdered lime on the grave. At night the ghost comes along, picks up the powdered lime, and makes off in a bee line for the village where the sorcerer who bewitched him resides. On the way he drops some of the powder here and there, so that next morning, on the principle of the paper-chase, his relatives can trace his footsteps to the very door of his murderer. In many districts the people tie a packet of lime to the knee of a corpse so that his ghost may have it to hand when he wants it.[452] [Sidenote: Cross-questioning the ghost by means of fire.] But the favourite way of cross-questioning the ghost on subject of his decease is by means of fire. A few men go out before nightfall from the village and sit down in a row, one behind the other, on the path. The man in front has a leaf-mat drawn like a hood over his head and back in order that the ghost may not touch him from behind unawares. In his hand he holds a glowing coal and some tinder, and as he puts the one to the other he calls to the ghost, "Come, take, take, take; come, take, take, take," and so on. Meantime his mates behind him are reckoning up the names of all the men near and far who are suspected of sorcery, and a portion of the village youth have clambered up trees and are on the look-out for the ghost. If they do not see his body they certainly see his eye twinkling in the gloom, though the uninstructed European might easily mistake it for a glow-worm. No sooner do they catch sight of it than they bawl out, "Come hither, fetch the fire, and burn him who burnt thee." If the tinder blazes up at the name of a sorcerer, it is flung towards the village where the man in question dwells. And if at the same time a glow-worm is seen to move in the same direction, the people entertain no doubt that the ghost has appeared and fetched the soul of the fire.[453] [Sidenote: Necessity of destroying the sorcerer who caused a death.] In whichever way the author of the death may be detected, the avengers of blood set out for the village of the miscreant and seek to take his life. Almost all the wars between villages or tribes spring from such expeditions. The sorcerer or sorcerers must be extirpated, nay all their kith and kin must be destroyed root and branch, if the people are to live in peace and quiet. The ghost of the dead calls, nay clamours for vengeance, and if he does not get it, he will wreak his spite on his negligent relations. Not only will he give them no luck in the chase, but he will drive the wild swine into the fields to trample down and root up the crops, and he will do them every mischief in his power. If rain does not fall, so that the freshly planted root crops wither; or if sickness is rife, the people recognise in the calamity the wrath of the ghost, who can only be appeased by the slaughter of the wicked magician or of somebody else. Hence the avengers of blood often do not set out until a fresh death, an outbreak of sickness, failure in the chase, or some other misfortune reminds the living of the duty they owe to the dead. The Kai is not by nature warlike, and he might never go to war if it were not that he dreads the vengeance of ghosts more than the wrath of men.[454] [Sidenote: Slayers dread the ghosts of the slain.] If the expedition has been successful, if the enemy's village has been surprised and stormed, the men and old women butchered, and the young women taken prisoners, the warriors beat a hasty retreat with their booty in order to be safe at home, or at least in the shelter of a friendly village, before nightfall. Their reason for haste is the fear of being overtaken in the darkness by the ghosts of their slaughtered foes, who, powerless by day, are very dangerous and terrible by night. Restlessly through the hours of darkness these unquiet spirits follow like sleuth-hounds in the tracks of their retreating enemies, eager to come up with them and by contact with the bloodstained weapons of their slayers to recover the spiritual substance which they have lost. Not till they have done so can they find rest and peace. That is why the victors are careful not at first to bring back their weapons into the village but to hide them somewhere in the bushes at a safe distance. There they leave them for some days until the baffled ghosts may be supposed to have given up the chase and returned, sad and angry, to their mangled bodies in the charred ruins of their old home. The first night after the return of the warriors is always the most anxious time; all the villagers are then on the alert for fear of the ghosts; but if the night passes quietly, their terror gradually subsides and gives place to the dread of their surviving enemies.[455] [Sidenote: Seclusion of man-slayers from fear of their victims' ghosts.] As the victors in a raid are supposed to have more or less of the soul-stuff or spiritual essence of their slain foes adhering to their persons, none of their friends will venture to touch them for some time after their return to the village. Everybody avoids them and goes carefully out of their way. If during this time any of the villagers suffers from a pain in his stomach, he thinks that he must have inadvertently sat down where one of the warriors had sat before him. If somebody endures the pangs of toothache, he makes sure that he must have eaten a fruit which had been touched by one of the slayers. All the refuse of the meals of these gallant men must be most carefully put away lest a pig should devour it; for if it did do so, the animal would certainly die, which would be a serious loss to the owner. Hence when the warriors have satisfied their hunger, any food that remains over is burnt or buried. The fighting men themselves are not very seriously incommoded, or at all events endangered, by the ghosts of their victims; for they have taken the precaution to disinfect themselves by the sap of a certain creeper, which, if it does not render them absolutely immune to ghostly influence, at least fortifies their constitution to a very considerable extent.[456] [Sidenote: Feigned indignation of a man who has connived at the murder of a relative.] Sometimes, instead of sending forth a band of warriors to ravage, burn, and slaughter the whole male population of the village in which the wicked sorcerer resides, the people of one village will come to a secret understanding with the people of the sorcerer's village to have the miscreant quietly put out of the way. A hint is given to the scoundrel's next of kin, it may be his brother, son, or nephew, that if he will only wink at the slaughter of his obnoxious relative, he will receive a handsome compensation from the slayers. Should he privately accept the offer, he is most careful to conceal his connivance at the deed of blood, lest he should draw down on his head the wrath of his murdered kinsman's ghost. So, when the deed is done and the murder is out, he works himself up into a state of virtuous sorrow and indignation, covers his head with the leaves of a certain plant, and chanting a dirge in tones of heart-rending grief, marches straight to the village of the murderers. There, on the public square, surrounded by an attentive audience, he opens the floodgates of his eloquence and pours forth the torrent of an aching heart. "You have slain my kinsman," says he, "you are wicked men! How could you kill so good a man, who conferred so many benefits on me in his lifetime? I knew nothing of the plot. Had I had an inkling of it, I would have foiled it. How can I now avenge his death? I have no property with which to hire men of war to go and punish his murderers. Yet in spite of everything my murdered kinsman will not believe in my innocence! He will be angry with me, he will pay me out, he will do me all the harm he can. Therefore do you declare openly whether I had any share whatever in his death, and come and strew lime on my head in order that he may convince himself of my innocence." This appeal of injured innocence meets with a ready response. The people dust the leaves on his head with powdered lime; and so, decorated with the white badge of spotless virtue, and enriched with a boar's tusk or other valuable object as the price of his compliance, he returns to his village with a conscience at peace with all the world, reflecting with satisfaction on the profitable transaction he has just concluded, and laughing in his sleeve at the poor deluded ghost of his murdered relative.[457] [Sidenote: Comedy acted to deceive the ghost of a murdered kinsman.] Sometimes the worthy soul who thus for a valuable consideration consents to waive all his personal feelings, will even carry his self-abnegation so far as to be present and look on at the murder of his kinsman. But true to his principles he will see to it that the thing is done decently and humanely. When the struggle is nearly over and the man is down, writhing on the ground with the murderers busy about him, his loving kinsman will not suffer them to take an unfair advantage of their superior numbers to cut him up alive with their knives, to chop him with their axes, or to smash him with their clubs. He will only allow them to stab him with their spears, repeating of course the stabs again and again till the victim ceases to writhe and quiver, and lies there dead as a stone. Then begins the real time of peril for the virtuous kinsman who has been a spectator and director of the scene; for the ghost of the murdered man has now deserted its mangled body, and, still blinded with blood and smarting with pain, might easily and even excusably misunderstand the situation. It is essential, therefore, in order to prevent a painful misapprehension, that the kinsman should at once and emphatically disclaim any part or parcel in the murder. This he accordingly does in language which leaves no room for doubt or ambiguity. He falls into a passion: he rails at the murderers: he proclaims his horror at their deed. All the way home he refuses to be comforted. He upbraids the assassins, he utters the most frightful threats against them; he rushes at them to snatch their weapons from them and dash them in pieces. But they easily wrench the weapons from his unresisting hands. For the whole thing is only a piece of acting. His sole intention is that the ghost may see and hear it all, and being convinced of the innocence of his dear kinsman may not punish him with bad crops, wounds, sickness, and other misfortunes. Even when he has reached the village, he keeps up the comedy for a time, raging, fretting and fuming at the irreparable loss he has sustained by the death of his lamented relative.[458] [Sidenote: Pretence of avenging the ghost of a murdered sorcerer.] Similarly when a chief has among his subjects a particular sorcerer whom he fears but with whom he is professedly on terms of friendship, he will sometimes engage a man to murder him. No sooner, however, is the murder perpetrated than the chief who bespoke it hastens in seeming indignation with a band of followers to the murderer's village. The assassin, of course, has got a hint of what is coming, and he and his friends take care not to be at home when the chief arrives on his mission of vengeance. Balked by the absence of their victim the avengers of blood breathe out fire and slaughter, but content themselves in fact with smashing an old pot or two, knocking down a deserted hut, and perhaps felling a banana-tree or a betel-palm. Having thus given the ghost of the murdered man an unequivocal proof of the sincerity of their friendship, they return quietly home.[459] [Sidenote: The Kai afraid of ghosts.] The habits of Kai ghosts are to some extent just the contrary of those of living men. They sleep by day and go about their business by night, when they frighten people and play them all kinds of tricks. Usually they appear in the form of animals. As light has the effect of blinding or at least dazzling them, they avoid everything bright, and hence it is easy to scare them away by means of fire. That is why no native will go even a short way in the dark without a bamboo torch. If it is absolutely necessary to go out by night, which he is very loth to do, he will hum and haw loudly before quitting the house so as to give notice to any lurking ghost that he is coming with a light, which allows the ghost to scuttle out of his way in good time. The people of a village live in terror above all so long as a corpse remains unburied in it; after nightfall nobody would then venture out of sight of the houses. When a troop of people go by night to a neighbouring village with flaring torches in their hands, nobody is willing to walk last on the path; they all huddle together for safety in the middle, till one man braver than the rest consents to act as rearguard. The rustling of a bush in the evening twilight startles them with the dread of some ghastly apparition; the sight of a pig in the gloaming is converted by their fears into the vision of a horrible spectre. If a man stumbles, it is because a ghost has pushed him, and he fancies he perceives the frightful thing in a tree-stump or any chance object. No wonder a Kai man fears ghosts, since he believes that the mere touch of one of them may be fatal. People who fall down in fits or in faints are supposed to have been touched by ghosts; and on coming to themselves they will tell their friends with the most solemn assurance how they felt the death-cold hand of the ghost on their body, and how a shudder ran through their whole frame at contact with the uncanny being.[460] [Sidenote: Services rendered to the living by ghosts of the dead.] But it would be a mistake to imagine that the ghosts of the dead are a source of danger, annoyance, and discomfort, and nothing more. That is not so. They may and do render the Kai the most material services in everyday life, particularly by promoting the supply of food both vegetable and animal. I have said that these practical savages stand towards their departed kinsfolk on a strictly commercial footing; and I will now illustrate the benefits which the Kai hope to receive from the ghosts in return for all the respect and attention lavished on them. In the first place, then, so long as a ghost remains in the neighbourhood of the village, it is expected of him that he shall make the crops thrive and neither tread them down himself nor allow wild pigs to do so. The expectation is reasonable, yet the conduct of the ghost does not always answer to it. Occasionally, whether out of sheer perverseness or simple absence of mind, he will sit down in a field; and wherever he does so, he makes a hollow where the fruits will not grow. Indeed any fruit that he even touches with his foot in passing, shrivels up. Where these things have happened, the people offer boiled taro and a few crabs to the ghosts to induce them to keep clear of the crops and to repose their weary limbs elsewhere than in the tilled fields.[461] [Sidenote: Ghosts help Kai hunters to kill game.] But the most important service which the dead render to the living is the good luck which they vouchsafe to hunters. Hence in order to assure himself of the favour of the dead the hunter hangs his nets on a grave before he uses them. If a man was a good and successful hunter in his lifetime, his ghost will naturally be more than usually able to assist his brethren in the craft after his death. For that reason when such a man has just died, the people, to adopt a familiar proverb, hasten to make hay while the sun shines by hunting very frequently, in the confident expectation of receiving ghostly help from the deceased hunter. In the evening, when they return from the chase, they lay a small portion of their bag near his grave, scatter a powder which possesses the special virtue of attracting ghosts, and call out, "So-and-so, come and eat; here I set down food for you, it is a part of all we have." If after such an offering and invocation the night wind rustles the tops of the trees or shakes the thatch of leaves on the roofs, they know that the ghost is in the village. The twinkle of a glow-worm near his grave is the glitter of his eye. In the morning, too, before they sally forth to the woods, one of the next of kin to the dead huntsman will go betimes to his grave, stamp on it to waken the sleeper below, and call out, "So-and-so, come! we are now about to go out hunting. Help us to a good bag!" If they have luck, they praise the deceased as a good spirit and in the evening supply his wants again with food, tobacco, and betel. The sacrifice, as usually happens in such cases, does not call for any great exercise of self-denial; since the spirit consumes only the spiritual essence of the good things, while he leaves their material substance to be enjoyed by the living.[462] [Sidenote: Ill-treatment of a ghost who fails to help hunters.] However, it sometimes happens that the ghost disappoints them, and that the hunters return in the evening hungry and empty-handed. This may even be repeated day after day, and still the people will not lose hope. They think that the ghost is perhaps busy working in his field, or that he has gone on a visit and will soon come home. To give him time to do his business or see his friends at leisure, they will remain in the village for several days. Then, when they imagine that he must surely have returned, they go out into the woods and try their luck again. But should there still be no ghost and no game, they begin to be seriously alarmed. They think that some evil must have befallen him. But if time goes on and still he gives no sign and the game continues scarce and shy, their feelings towards the ghost undergo a radical alteration. Passion getting the better of prudence, they will even reproach him with ingratitude, taunt him with his uselessness, and leave him to starve. Should he after that still remain deaf to their railing and regardless of the short commons to which they have reduced him, they will discharge a volley of abuse at his grave and trouble themselves about him no more. However, if, not content with refusing his valuable assistance in the chase, the ghost should actually blight the crops or send wild boars into the fields to trample them down, the patience of the long-suffering people is quite exhausted: the vials of their wrath overflow; and snatching up their cudgels in a fury they belabour his grave till his bones ache, or even drive him with blows and curses altogether from the village.[463] [Sidenote: The journey of ghosts to the spirit land.] Such an outcast ghost, if he does not seek his revenge by prowling in the neighbourhood and preying on society at large, will naturally bethink himself of repairing to his long home in the under world. For sooner or later the spirits of the dead congregate there. It is especially when the flesh has quite mouldered away from his bones that the ghost packs up his little traps and sets out for the better land. The entrance to the abode of bliss is a cave to the west of Saddle Mountain. Here in the gully there is a projecting tree-stump on which the ghosts perch waiting for a favourable moment to jump into the mouth of the cavern. When a slight earthquake is felt, a Kai man will often say, "A ghost has just leaped from the tree into the cave; that is why the earth is shaking." Down below the ghosts are received by Tulmeng, lord of the nether world. Often he appears in a canoe to ferry them over to the further shore. "Blood or wax?" is the laconic question which he puts to the ghost on the bank. He means to say, "Were you killed or were you done to death by magic?" For it is with wax that the sorcerer stops up the fatal little tubes in which he encloses the souls of his enemies. And the reason why the lord of the dead puts the question to the newcomer is that the ghosts of the slain and the ghosts of the bewitched dwell in separate places. Right in front of the land of souls rises a high steep wall, which cannot be climbed even by ghosts. The spirits have accordingly to make their way through it and thereupon find themselves in their new abode. According to some Kai, before the ghosts are admitted to ghost land they must swing to and fro on a rope and then drop into water, where they are washed clean of bloodstains and all impurity; after which they ascend, spick and span, the last slope to the village of ghosts. [Sidenote: Life of ghosts in the other world.] Tulmeng has the reputation of being a very stern ruler in his weird realm, but the Kai really know very little about him. He beats refractory souls, and it is essential that every ghost should have his ears and nose bored. The operation is very painful, and to escape it most people take the precaution of having their ears and noses bored in their lifetime. Life in the other world goes on just like life in this one. Houses are built exactly like houses on earth, and there as here pigs swarm in the streets. Fields are tilled and crops are got in; ghostly men marry ghostly women, who give birth to ghostly children. The same old round of love and hate, of quarrelling and fighting, of battle, murder and sudden death goes on in the shadowy realm below ground just as in the more solid world above ground. Sorcerers are there also, and they breed just as bad blood among the dead as among the living. All things indeed are the same except for their shadowy unsubstantial texture.[464] [Sidenote: Ghosts die and turn into animals.] But the ghosts do not live for ever in the nether world. They die the second death and turn into animals, generally into cuscuses. In the shape of animals they haunt the wildest, deepest, darkest glens of the rugged mountains. No one but the owner has the right to set foot on such haunted ground. He may even kill the ghostly animals. Any one else who dared to disturb them in their haunts would do so at the peril of his life. But even the owner of the land who has killed one of the ghostly creatures is bound to appease the spirit of the dead beast. He may not cut up the carcase at once, but must leave it for a time, perhaps for a whole night, after laying on it presents which are intended to mollify and soothe the injured spirit. In placing the gifts on the body he says, "Take the gifts and leave us that which was a game animal, that we may eat it." When the animal's ghost has appropriated the spiritual essence of the offerings, the hunter and his family may eat the carcase. Should one of these ghostly creatures die or be killed, its spirit turns either into an insect or into an ant-hill. Children who would destroy such an ant-hill or throw little darts at it, are warned by their elders not to indulge in such sacrilegious sport. When the insect also dies, the series of spiritual transformations is at an end.[465] [Sidenote: Ghosts of persons eminent for good or evil in their lives are remembered and appealed to for help long after their deaths. Prayers to ghosts for rain, a good crop of yams, and so forth.] The ghosts whose help is invoked by hunters and farmers are commonly the spirits of persons who have lately died, since such spirits linger for a time in the neighbourhood, or rather in the memory of the people. But besides these spirits of the recent dead there are certain older ghosts who may be regarded as permanent patrons of hunting and other departments of life and nature, because their fame has survived long after the men or women themselves were gathered to their fathers. For example, men who were bold and resolute in battle during their life will be invoked long after their death, whenever a stout heart is needed for some feat of daring. And men who were notorious thieves and villains in the flesh will be invited, long after their bodies have mouldered in the grave, to lend their help when a deed of villainy is to be done. The names of men or women who were eminent for good or evil in their lives survive indefinitely in the memory of the tribe. Thus before a battle many a Kai warrior will throw something over the enemy's village and as he does so he will softly call on two ghosts, "We and Gunang, ye two heroes, come and guard me and keep the foes from me, that they may not be able to hurt me! But stand by me that I may be able to riddle them with spears!" Again, when a magician wishes to cause an earthquake, he will take a handful of ashes, wrap them in certain leaves, and pronounce the following spell over the packet: "Thou man Sâiong, throw about everything that exists; houses, villages, paths, fields, bushes and tall forest trees, yams, and taro, throw them all hither and thither; break and smash everything, but leave me in peace!" While he utters this incantation or prayer, the sorcerer's body itself twitches and quivers more and more violently, till the hut creaks and cracks and his strength is exhausted. Then he throws the packet of ashes out of the hut, and after that the earthquake is sure to follow sooner or later. So when they want rain, the Kai call upon two ghostly men named Balong and Batu, or Dinding and Bojang, to drive away a certain woman named Yondimi, so that the rain which she is holding up may fall upon the earth. The prayer for rain addressed to the ghosts is combined with a magical spell pronounced over a stone. And when rain has fallen in abundance and the Kai wish to make it cease, they strew hot ashes on the stone or lay it in a wood fire. On the principle of homoeopathic magic the heat of the ashes or of the fire is supposed to dry up the rain. Thus in these ceremonies for the production or cessation of rain we see that religion, represented by the invocation of the ghosts, goes hand in hand with magic, represented by the hocus-pocus with the stone. Again, certain celebrated ghosts are invoked to promote the growth of taro and yams. Thus to ensure a good crop of taro, the suppliant will hold a bud of taro in his hand and pray, "O Mrs. Zewanong, may my taro leaves unfold till they are as broad as the petticoat which covers thy loins!" When they are planting yams, they pray to two women named Tendung and Molewa that they would cause the yams to put forth as long suckers as the strings which the women twist to make into carrying-nets. Before they dig up the yams, they take a branch and drive with it the evil spirits or ghosts from the house in which the yams are to be stored. Having effected this clearance they stick the branch in the roof of the house and appoint a certain ghostly man named Ehang to act as warden. Again, fowlers invoke a married pair of ghosts called Mânze and Tâmingoka to frighten the birds from the trees and drive them on the limed twigs. Or they pray to a ghostly woman named Lâne, saying, "In all places of the neighbourhood shake the betel-nuts from the palms, that they may fall down to me on this fruit-tree and knock the berries from the boughs!" But by the betel-nuts the fowler in veiled language means the birds, which are to come in flocks to the fruit-tree and be caught fast by the lime on the branches. Again, when a fisherman wishes to catch eels, he prays to two ghosts called Yambi and Ngigwâli, saying: "Come, ye two men, and go down into the holes of the pool; smite the eels in them, and draw them out on the bank, that I may kill them!" Once more, when a child suffers from enlarged spleen, which shews as a swelling on its body, the parent will pray to a ghost named Aidolo for help in these words: "Come and help this child! It is big with a ball of sickness. Cut it up and squeeze and squash it, that the blood and pus may drain away and my child may be made whole!" To give point to the prayer the petitioner simultaneously pretends to cut a cross on the swelling with a knife.[466] [Sidenote: Possible development of departmental gods out of ghosts.] From this it appears that men and women who impressed their contemporaries by their talents, their virtues, or their vices in their lifetime, are sometimes remembered long after their death and continue to be invoked by their descendants for help in the particular department in which they had formerly rendered themselves eminent either for good or for evil. Such powerful and admired or dreaded ghosts might easily grow in time into gods and goddesses, who are worshipped as presiding over the various departments of nature and of human life. There is good reason to think that among many tribes and nations of the world the history of a god, if it could be recovered, would be found to be the history of a spirit who served his apprenticeship as a ghost before he was promoted to the rank of deity. [Sidenote: Kai lads at circumcision supposed to be swallowed by a monster. Bull-roarers.] Before quitting the Kai tribe I will mention that they, like the other tribes on this coast, practise circumcision and appear to associate the custom more or less vaguely with the spirits of the dead. Like their neighbours, they impress women with the belief that at circumcision the lads are swallowed by a monster, who can only be induced to disgorge them by the bribe of much food and especially of pigs, which are accordingly bred and kept nominally for this purpose, but really to furnish a banquet for the men alone. The ceremony is performed at irregular intervals of several years. A long hut, entered through a high door at one end and tapering away at the other, is built in a lonely part of the forest. It represents the monster which is to swallow the novices in its capacious jaws. The process of deglutition is represented as follows. In front of the entrance to the hut a scaffold is erected and a man mounts it. The novices are then led up one by one and passed under the scaffold. As each comes up, the man overhead makes a gesture of swallowing, while at the same time he takes a great gulp of water from a coco-nut flask. The trembling novice is now supposed to be in the maw of the monster; but a pig is offered for his redemption, the man on the scaffold, as representative of the beast, accepts the offering, a gurgling sound is heard, and the water which he had just gulped descends in a jet on the novice, who now goes free. The actual circumcision follows immediately on this impressive pantomime. The monster who swallows the lads is named Ngosa, which means "Grandfather"; and the same name is given to the bull-roarers which are swung at the festival. The Kai bull-roarer is a lance-shaped piece of palm-wood, more or less elaborately carved, which being swung at the end of a string emits the usual droning, booming sound. When they are not in use, the instruments are kept, carefully wrapt up, in the men's house, which no woman may enter. Only the old men have the right to undo these precious bundles and take out the sacred bull-roarers. Women, too, are strictly excluded from the neighbourhood of the circumcision ground; any who intrude on it are put to death. The mythical monster who is supposed to haunt the ground is said to be very dangerous to the female sex. When the novices go forth to be swallowed by him in the forest, the women who remain in the village weep and wail; and they rejoice greatly when the lads come back safe and sound.[467] [Sidenote: The Tami Islanders of Huon Gulf.] The last tribe of German New Guinea to which I shall invite your attention are the Tami. Most of them live not on the mainland but in a group of islands in Huon Gulf, to the south-east of Yabim. They are of a purer Melanesian stock than most of the tribes on the neighbouring coast of New Guinea. The German missionary Mr. G. Bamler, who lived amongst them for ten years and knows the people and their language intimately, thinks that they may even contain a strong infusion of Polynesian blood.[468] They are a seafaring folk, who extend their voyages all along the coast for the purpose of trade, bartering mats, pearls, fish, coco-nuts, and other tree-fruits which grow on their islands for taro, bananas, sugar-cane, and sago, which grow on the mainland.[469] [Sidenote: The long soul and the short soul.] In the opinion of these people every man has two souls, a long one and a short one. The long soul is identified with the shadow. It is only loosely attached to its owner, wandering away from his body in sleep and returning to it when he wakes with a start. The seat of the long soul is in the stomach. When the man dies, the long soul quits his body and appears to his relations at a distance, who thus obtain the first intimation of his decease. Having conveyed the sad intelligence to them, the long soul departs by way of Maligep, on the west coast of New Britain, to a village on the north coast, the inhabitants of which recognise the Tami ghosts as they flit past.[470] [Sidenote: Departure of the short soul to Lamboam, the nether world.] The short soul, on the other hand, never leaves the body in life but only after death. Even then it tarries for a time in the neighbourhood of the body before it takes its departure for Lamboam, which is the abode of the dead in the nether world. The Tami bury their dead in shallow graves under or near the houses. They collect in a coco-nut shell the maggots which swarm from the decaying corpse; and when the insects cease to swarm, they know that the short soul has gone away to its long home. It is the short soul which receives and carries away with it the offerings that are made to the deceased. These offerings serve a double purpose; they form the nucleus of the dead man's property in the far country, and they ensure him a friendly reception on his arrival. For example, the soul shivers with cold, when it first reaches the subterranean realm, and the other ghosts, the old stagers, obligingly heat stones to warm it up.[471] [Sidenote: Dilemma of the Tami.] However, the restless spirit returns from time to time to haunt and terrify the sorcerer, who was the cause of its death. But its threats are idle; it can really do him very little harm. Yet it keeps its ghostly eye on its surviving relatives to see that they do not stand on a friendly footing with the wicked sorcerer. Strictly speaking the Tami ought to avenge his death, but as a matter of fact they do not. The truth of it is that the Tami do a very good business with the people on the mainland, among whom the sorcerer is usually to be found; and the amicable relations which are essential to the maintenance of commerce would unquestionably suffer if a merchant were to indulge his resentment so far as to take his customer's head instead of his sago and bananas. These considerations reduce the Tami to a painful dilemma. If they gratify the ghost they lose a customer; if they keep the customer they must bitterly offend the ghost, who will punish them for their disrespect to his memory. In this delicate position the Tami endeavour to make the best of both worlds. On the one hand, by loudly professing their wrath and indignation against the guilty sorcerer they endeavour to appease the ghost; and on the other hand, by leaving the villain unmolested they do nothing to alienate their customers.[472] [Sidenote: Funeral and mourning customs of the Tami.] But if they do not gratify the desire for vengeance of the blood-thirsty ghost, they are at great pains to testify their respect for him in all other ways. The whole village takes part in the mourning and lamentation for a death. The women dance death dances, the men lend a hand in the preparations for the burial. All festivities are stopped: the drums are silent. As the people believe that when anybody has died, the ghosts of his dead kinsfolk gather in the village and are joined by other ghosts, they are careful not to leave the mourners alone, exposed to the too pressing attentions of the spectral visitors; they keep the bereaved family company, especially at night; indeed, if the weather be fine, the whole population of the village will encamp round the temporary hut which is built on the grave. This watch at the grave lasts about eight days. The watchers are supported and comforted in the discharge of their pious duty by a liberal allowance of food and drink. Nor are the wants of the ghost himself forgotten. Many families offer him taro broth at this time. The period of mourning lasts two or three years. During the first year the observances prescribed by custom are strictly followed, and the nearest relations must avoid publicity. After a year they are allowed more freedom; for example, the widow may lay aside the heavy net, which is her costume in full mourning, and may replace it by a lighter one; moreover, she may quit the house. At the end of the long period of mourning, dances are danced in honour of the deceased. They begin in the evening and last all night till daybreak. The mourners on these occasions smear their heads, necks, and breasts with black earth. A great quantity of food, particularly of pigs and taro broth, has been made ready; for the whole village, and perhaps a neighbouring village also, has been invited to share in the festivity, which may last eight or ten days, if the provisions suffice. The dances begin with a gravity and solemnity appropriate to a memorial of the dead; but towards the close the performers indulge in a lighter vein and act comic pieces, which so tickle the fancy of the spectators, that many of them roll on the ground with laughter. Finally, the temporary hut erected on the grave is taken down and the materials burned. As the other ghosts of the village are believed to be present in attendance on the one who is the guest of honour, all the villagers bring offerings and throw them into the fire. However, persons who are not related to the ghosts may snatch the offerings from the flames and convert them to their own use. Precious objects, such as boars' tusks and dogs' teeth, are not committed to the fire but merely swung over it in a bag, while the name of the person who offers the valuables in this economical fashion is proclaimed aloud for the satisfaction of the ghost. With these dances, pantomimes, and offerings the living have discharged the last duties of respect and affection to the dead. Yet for a while his ghost is thought to linger as a domestic or household spirit; but the time comes when he is wholly forgotten.[473] [Sidenote: Bones of the dead dug up and kept in the house for a time.] Many families, however, not content with the observance of these ordinary ceremonies, dig up the bodies of their dead when the flesh has mouldered away, redden the bones with ochre, and keep them bundled up in the house for two or three years, when these relics of mortality are finally committed to the earth. The intention of thus preserving the bones for years in the house is not mentioned, but no doubt it is to maintain a closer intimacy with the departed spirit than seems possible if his skeleton is left to rot in the grave. When he is at last laid in the ground, the tomb is enclosed by a strong wooden fence and planted with ornamental shrubs. Yet in the course of years, as the memory of the deceased fades away, his grave is neglected, the fence decays, the shrubs run wild; another generation, which knew him not, will build a house on the spot, and if in digging the foundations they turn up his bleached and mouldering bones, it is nothing to them: why should they trouble themselves about the spirit of a man or woman whose very name is forgotten?[474] [Footnote 450: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 142 _sq._] [Footnote 451: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 143.] [Footnote 452: Ch. Keysser, _l.c._] [Footnote 453: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 143 _sq._] [Footnote 454: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 62 _sq._] [Footnote 455: Ch. Keysser, pp. 64 _sqq._, 147 _sq._] [Footnote 456: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 132.] [Footnote 457: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 148.] [Footnote 458: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 148 _sq._] [Footnote 459: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 149.] [Footnote 460: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 147.] [Footnote 461: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 145.] [Footnote 462: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ p. 145.] [Footnote 463: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 145 _sq._] [Footnote 464: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 149 _sq._] [Footnote 465: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 112, 150 _sq._] [Footnote 466: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 151-154. In this passage the ghosts are spoken of simply as spirits (_Geister_); but the context proves that the spirits in question are those of the dead.] [Footnote 467: Ch. Keysser, _op. cit._ pp. 34-40.] [Footnote 468: G. Bamler, "Tami," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. (Berlin, 1911) p. 489; compare _ib._ p. vii.] [Footnote 469: H. Zahn, "Die Jabim," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. 315 _sq._] [Footnote 470: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ p. 518.] [Footnote 471: G. Bamler, _l.c._] [Footnote 472: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ pp. 518 _sq._] [Footnote 473: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ pp. 519-522.] [Footnote 474: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ p. 518.] LECTURE XIV THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF GERMAN AND DUTCH NEW GUINEA [Sidenote: The Tami doctrine of souls and gods. The Tago spirits, represented by masked men.] At the close of the last lecture I dealt with the Tami, a people of Melanesian stock who inhabit a group of islands off the mainland of New Guinea. I explained their theory of the human soul. According to them, every man has two distinct souls, a long one and a short one, both of which survive his death, but depart in different directions, one of them repairing to the lower world, and the other being last sighted off the coast of New Britain. But the knowledge which these savages possess of the spiritual world is not limited to the souls of men; they are acquainted with several deities (_buwun_), who live in the otherwise uninhabited island of Djan. They are beings of an amorous disposition, and though their real shape is that of a fish's body with a human head, they can take on the form of men in order to seduce women. They also cause epidemics and earthquakes; yet the people shew them no respect, for they believe them to be dull-witted as well as lecherous. At most, if a fearful epidemic is raging, they will offer the gods a lean little pig or a mangy cur; and should an earthquake last longer than usual they will rap on the ground, saying, "Hullo, you down there! easy a little! We men are still here." They also profess acquaintance with a god named Anuto, who created the heaven and the earth together with the first man and woman. He is a good being; nobody need be afraid of him. At festivals and meat markets the Tami offer him the first portion in a little basket, which a lad carries away into the wood and leaves there. As usual, the deity consumes only the soul of the offering; the bearer eats the material substance.[475] The Tami further believe in certain spirits called Tago which are very old, having been created at the same time as the village. Every family or clan possesses its own familiar spirits of this class. They are represented by men who disguise their bodies in dense masses of sago leaves and their faces in grotesque masks with long hooked noses. In this costume the maskers jig it as well as the heavy unwieldy disguise allows them to do. But the dance consists in little more than running round and round in a circle, with an occasional hop; the orchestra stands in the middle, singing and thumping drums. Sometimes two or three of the masked men will make a round of the village, pelting the men with pebbles or hard fruits, while the women and children scurry out of their way. When they are not in use the masks are hidden away in a hut in the forest, which women and children may not approach. Their secret is sternly kept: any betrayal of it is punished with death. The season for the exhibition of these masked dances recurs only once in ten or twelve years, but it extends over a year or thereabout. During the whole of the dancing-season, curiously enough, coco-nuts are strictly tabooed; no person may eat them, so that the unused nuts accumulate in thousands. As coco-nuts ordinarily form a daily article of diet with the Tami, their prohibition for a year is felt by the people as a privation. The meaning of the prohibition and also of the masquerades remains obscure.[476] [Sidenote: The superhuman beings with whom the Tami are chiefly concerned are the souls of the dead. Offerings to the dead.] But while the Tami believe in gods and spirits of various sorts, the superhuman beings with whom they chiefly concern themselves are the souls of the dead. On this subject Mr. Bamler writes: "All the spirits whom we have thus far described are of little importance in the life and thought of the Tami; they are remembered only on special occasions. The spirits who fill the thoughts and attract the attention of the Tami are the _kani_, that is, the souls of the departed. The Tami therefore practise the worship of ancestors. Yet the memory of ancestors does not reach far back; people occupy themselves only with the souls of those relatives whom they have personally known. Hence the worship seldom extends beyond the grandfather, even when a knowledge of more remote progenitors survives. An offering to the ancestors takes the form of a little dish of boiled taro, a cigar, betel-nuts, and the like; but the spirits partake only of the image or soul of the things offered, while the material substance falls to the share of mankind. There is no fixed rule as to the manner or time of the offering. It is left to the caprice or childlike affection of the individual to decide how he will make it. With most natives it is a simple matter of business, the throwing of a sprat to catch a salmon; the man brings his offering only when he needs the help of the spirits. There is very little ceremony about it. The offerer will say, for example, 'There, I lay a cigar for you; smoke it and hereafter drive fish towards me'; or, 'Accompany me on the journey, and see to it that I do good business.' The place where the food is presented is the shelf for pots and dishes under the roof. Thus they imagine that the spirits exert a tolerably far-reaching influence over all created things, and it is their notion that the spirits take possession of the objects. In like manner the spirits can injure a man by thwarting his plans, for example, by frightening away the fish, blighting the fruits of the fields, and so forth. If the native is forced to conclude that the spirits are against him, he has no hesitation about deceiving them in the grossest manner. Should the requisite sacrifices be inconvenient to him, he flatly refuses them, or gives the shabbiest things he can find. In all this the native displays the same craft and cunning which he is apt to practise in his dealings with the whites. He fears the power which the spirit has over him, yet he tries whether he cannot outwit the spirit like an arrant block-head."[477] [Sidenote: Crude motives for sacrifice.] This account of the crude but quite intelligible motives which lead these savages to sacrifice to the spirits of their dead may be commended to the attention of writers on the history of religion who read into primitive sacrifice certain subtle and complex ideas which it never entered into the mind of primitive man to conceive and which, even if they were explained to him, he would in all probability be totally unable to understand. [Sidenote: Lamboam, the land of the dead.] According to the Tami, the souls of the dead live in the nether world. The spirit-land is called Lamboam; the entrance to it is by a cleft in a rock. The natives of the mainland also call Hades by the name of Lamboam; but whereas according to them every village has its own little Lamboam, the Tami hold that there is only one big Lamboam for everybody, though it is subdivided into many mansions, of which every village has one to itself. In Lamboam everything is fairer and more perfect than on earth. The fruits are so plentiful that the blessed spirits can, if they choose, give themselves up to the delights of idleness; the villages are full of ornamental plants. Yet on the other hand we are informed that life beneath the ground is very like life above it: people work and marry, they squabble and wrangle, they fall sick and even die, just as people do on earth. Souls which die the second death in Lamboam are changed into vermin, such as ants and worms; however, others say that they turn into wood-spirits, who do men a mischief in the fields. It is not so easy as is commonly supposed to effect an entrance into the spirit-land. You must pass a river, and even when you have crossed it you will be very likely to suffer from the practical jokes which the merry old ghosts play on a raw newcomer. A very favourite trick of theirs is to send him up a pandanus tree to look for fruit. If he is simple enough to comply, they catch him by the legs as he is swarming up the trunk and drag him down, so that his whole body is fearfully scratched, if not quite ripped up, by the rough bark. That is why people put valuable things with the dead in the grave, in order that their ghosts on arrival in Lamboam may have the wherewithal to purchase the good graces of the facetious old stagers.[478] [Sidenote: Return of the ghosts to earth, sometimes in the form of serpents.] However, even when the ghosts have succeeded in effecting a lodgment in Lamboam, they are not strictly confined to it. They can break bounds at any moment and return to the upper air. This they do particularly when any of their surviving relations is at the point of death. Ghosts of deceased kinsfolk and of others gather round the parting soul and attend it to the far country. Yet sometimes, apparently, the soul sets out alone, for the anxious relatives will call out to it, "Miss not the way." But ghosts visit their surviving friends at other times than at the moment of death. For example, some families possess the power of calling up spirits in the form of serpents from the vasty deep. The spirits whom they evoke are usually those of persons who have died quite lately; for such ghosts cannot return to earth except in the guise of serpents. In this novel shape they naturally feel shy and hide under a mat. They come out only in the dusk of the evening or the darkness of night and sit on the shelf for pots and dishes under the roof. They have lost the faculty of speech and can express themselves only in whistles. These whistles the seer, who is generally a woman, understands perfectly and interprets to his or her less gifted fellows. In this way a considerable body of information, more or less accurate in detail, is collected as to life in the other world. More than that, it is even possible for men, and especially for women, to go down alive into the nether world and prosecute their enquiries at first hand among the ghosts. Women who possess this remarkable faculty transmit it to their daughters, so that the profession is hereditary. When anybody wishes to ascertain how it fares with one of his dead kinsfolk in Lamboam, he has nothing to do but to engage the services of one of these professional mediums, giving her something which belonged to his departed friend. The medium rubs her forehead with ginger, muttering an incantation, lies down on the dead man's property, and falls asleep. Her soul then goes down in a dream to deadland and elicits from the ghosts the required information, which on waking from sleep she imparts to the anxious enquirer.[479] [Sidenote: Sickness caused by a spirit.] Sickness accompanied by fainting fits is ascribed to the action of a spirit, it may be the ghost of a near relation, who has carried off the "long soul" of the sufferer. The truant soul is recalled by a blast blown on a triton-shell, in which some chewed ginger or _massoi_ bark has been inserted. The booming sound attracts the attention of the vagrant spirit, while the smell of the bark or of the ginger drives away the ghost.[480] [Sidenote: Tami lads supposed to be swallowed by a monster at circumcision; the monster and the bull-roarer are both called _kani_.] The name which the Tami give to the spirits of the dead is _kani_; but like other tribes in this part of New Guinea they apply the same term to the bull-roarer and also to the mythical monster who is supposed to swallow the lads at circumcision. The identity of the name for the three things seems to prove that in the mind of the Tami the initiatory rites, of which circumcision is the principal feature, are closely associated with their conception of the state of the human soul after death, though what the precise nature of the association may be still remains obscure. Like their neighbours on the mainland of New Guinea, the Tami give out that the novices at initiation are swallowed by a monster or dragon, who only consents to disgorge his prey in consideration of a tribute of pigs, the rate of the tribute being one novice one pig. In the act of disgorging the lad the dragon bites him, and the bite is visible to all in the cut called circumcision. The voice of the monster is heard in the hum of the bull-roarers, which are swung at the ceremony in such numbers and with such force that in still weather the booming sound may be heard across the sea for many miles. To impress women and children with an idea of the superhuman strength of the dragon deep grooves are cut in the trunks of trees and afterwards exhibited to the uninitiated as the marks made by the monster in tugging at the ropes which bound him to the trees. However, the whole thing is an open secret to the married women, though they keep their knowledge to themselves, fearing to incur the penalty of death which is denounced upon all who betray the mystery. [Sidenote: The rite of circumcision. Seclusion and return of the newly circumcised lads.] The initiatory rites are now celebrated only at intervals of many years. When the time is come for the ceremony, women are banished from the village and special quarters prepared for them elsewhere; for they are strictly forbidden to set foot in the village while the monster or spirit who swallows the lads has his abode in it. A special hut is then built for the accommodation of the novices during the many months which they spend in seclusion before and after the operation of circumcision. The hut represents the monster; it consists of a framework of thin poles covered with palm-leaf mats and tapering down at one end. Looked at from a distance it resembles a whale. The backbone is composed of a betel-nut palm, which has been grubbed up with its roots. The root with its fibres represents the monster's head and hair, and under it are painted a pair of eyes and a great mouth in red, white, and black. The passage of the novices into the monster's belly is represented by causing them to defile past a row of men who hold bull-roarers aloft over the heads of the candidates. Before this march past takes place, each of the candidates is struck by the chief with a bull-roarer on his chin and brow. The operation of circumcising the lads is afterwards performed behind a screen set up near the monster-shaped house. It is followed by a great feast on swine's flesh. After their wounds are healed the circumcised lads have still to remain in seclusion for three or four months. Finally, they are brought back to the village with great pomp. For this solemn ceremony their faces, necks, and breasts are whitened with a thick layer of chalk, while red stripes, painted round their mouths and eyes and prolonged to the ears, add to the grotesqueness of their appearance. Their eyes are closed with a plaster of chalk, and thus curiously arrayed and blindfolded they are led back to the village square, where leave is formally given them to open their eyes. At the entrance to the village they are received by the women, who weep for joy and strew boiled field-fruits on the way. Next morning the newly initiated lads wash off the crust of chalk, and have their hair, faces, necks, and breasts painted bright red. This ends their time of seclusion, which has lasted five or six months; they now rank as full-grown men.[481] [Sidenote: Simulation of death and resurrection.] In these initiatory rites, as in the similar rites of the neighbouring tribes on the mainland of New Guinea, we may perhaps detect a simulation of death and of resurrection to a new and higher life. But why circumcision should form the central feature of such a drama is a question to which as yet no certain or even very probable answer can be given. The bodily mutilations of various sorts, which in many savage tribes mark the transition from boyhood to manhood, remain one of the obscurest features in the life of uncultured races. That they are in most cases connected with the great change which takes place in the sexes at puberty seems fairly certain; but we are far from understanding the ideas which primitive man has formed on this mysterious subject. [Sidenote: The natives of Dutch New Guinea.] That ends what I have to say as to the notions of death and a life hereafter which are entertained by the natives of German New Guinea. We now turn to the natives of Dutch New Guinea, who occupy roughly speaking the western half of the great island. Our information as to their customs and beliefs on this subject is much scantier, and accordingly my account of them will be much briefer. [Sidenote: Geelvink Bay and Doreh Bay. The Noofoor or Noomfor people. Their material culture and arts of life.] Towards the western end of the Dutch possession there is on the northern coast a deep and wide indentation known as Geelvink Bay, which in its north-west corner includes a very much smaller indentation known as Doreh Bay. Scattered about in the waters of the great Geelvink Bay are many islands of various sizes, such as Biak or Wiak, Jappen or Jobi, Run or Ron, Noomfor, and many more. It is in regard to the natives who inhabit the coasts or islands of Geelvink Bay that our information is perhaps least imperfect, and it is accordingly with them that I shall begin. In physical appearance, expression of the face, mode of wearing the hair, and still more in manners and customs these natives of the coast and islands differ from the natives of the mountains in the interior. The name given to them by Dutch and German writers is Noofoor or Noomfor. Their original home is believed to be the island of Biak or Wiak, which lies at the northern entrance of the bay, and from which they are supposed to have spread southwards and south-westwards to the other islands and to the mainland of New Guinea.[482] They are a handsomely built race. Their colour is usually dark brown, but in some individuals it shades off to light-brown, while in others it deepens into black-brown. The forehead is high and narrow; the eye is dark brown or black with a lively expression; the nose broad and flat, the lips thick and projecting. The cheekbones are not very high. The facial angle agrees with that of Europeans. The hair is abundant and frizzly. The people live in settled villages and subsist by agriculture, hunting, and fishing. Their large communal houses are raised above the ground on piles; on the coast they are built over the water. Each house has a long gallery, one in front and one behind, and a long passage running down the middle of the dwelling, with the rooms arranged on either side of it. Each room has its own fireplace and is occupied by a single family. One such communal house may contain from ten to twenty families with a hundred or more men, women, and children, besides dogs, fowls, parrots, and other creatures. When the house is built over the water, it is commonly connected with the shore by a bridge; but in some places no such bridge exists, and at high water the inmates can only communicate with the shore by means of their canoes. The staple food of the people is sago, which they extract from the sago-palm; but they also make use of bread-fruit, together with millet, rice, and maize, whenever they can obtain these cereals. Their flesh diet includes wild pigs, birds, fish, and trepang. While some of them subsist mainly by fishing and commerce, others devote themselves almost exclusively to the cultivation of their gardens, which they lay out in clearings of the dense tropical forest, employing chiefly axes and chopping-knives as their instruments of tillage. Of ploughs they, like most savages, seem to know nothing. The rice and other plants which they raise in these gardens are produced by the dry method of cultivation. In hunting birds they employ chiefly bows and arrows, but sometimes also snares. The arrows with which they shoot the birds of paradise are blunted so as not to injure the splendid plumage of the birds. Turtle-shells, feathers of the birds of paradise, and trepang are among the principal articles which they barter with traders for cotton-goods, knives, swords, axes, beads and so forth. They display some skill and taste in wood-carving. The art of working in iron has been introduced among them from abroad and is now extensively practised by the men. They make large dug-out canoes with outriggers, which seem to be very seaworthy, for they accomplish long voyages even in stormy weather. The making of pottery, basket-work, and weaving, together with pounding rice and cooking food, are the special business of women. The men wear waistbands or loin-cloths made of bark, which is beaten till it becomes as supple as leather. The women wear petticoats or strips of blue cotton round their loins, and as ornaments they have rings of silver, copper, or shell on their arms and legs.[483] Thus the people have attained to a fair degree of barbaric culture. [Sidenote: Fear of ghosts. Ideas of the spirit-world.] Now it is significant that among these comparatively advanced savages the fear of ghosts and the reverence entertained for them have developed into something which might almost be called a systematic worship of the dead. As to their fear of ghosts I will quote the evidence of a Dutch missionary, Mr. J. L. van Hasselt, who lived for many years among them and is the author of a grammar and dictionary of their language. He says: "That a great fear of ghosts prevails among the Papuans is intelligible. Even by day they are reluctant to pass a grave, but nothing would induce them to do so by night. For the dead are then roaming about in their search for gambier and tobacco, and they may also sail out to sea in a canoe. Some of the departed, above all the so-called _Mambrie_ or heroes, inspire them with especial fear. In such cases for some days after the burial you may hear about sunset a simultaneous and horrible din in all the houses of all the villages, a yelling, screaming, beating and throwing of sticks; happily the uproar does not last long: its intention is to compel the ghost to take himself off: they have given him all that befits him, namely, a grave, a funeral banquet, and funeral ornaments; and now they beseech him not to thrust himself on their observation any more, not to breathe any sickness upon the survivors, and not to kill them or 'fetch' them, as the Papuans put it. Their ideas of the spirit-world are very vague. Their usual answer to such questions is, 'We know not.' If you press them, they will commonly say that the spirit realm is under the earth or under the bottom of the sea. Everything there is as it is in the upper world, only the vegetation down below is more luxuriant, and all plants grow faster. Their fear of death and their helpless wailing over the dead indicate that the misty kingdom of the shades offers but little that is consolatory to the Papuan at his departure from this world."[484] [Sidenote: Fear of ghosts in general and of the ghosts of the slain in particular.] Again, speaking of the natives of Doreh, a Dutch official observes that "superstition and magic play a principal part in the life of the Papuan. Occasions for such absurdities he discovers at every step. Thus he cherishes a great fear of the ghosts of slain persons, for which reason their bodies remain unburied on the spot where they were murdered. When a murder has taken place in the village, the inhabitants assemble for several evenings in succession and raise a fearful outcry in order to chase away the soul, in case it should be minded to return to the village. They set up miniature wooden houses here and there on trees in the forest for the ghosts of persons who die of disease or through accidents, believing that the souls take up their abode in them."[485] The same writer remarks that these savages have no priests, but that they have magicians (_kokinsor_), who practise exorcisms, work magic, and heal the sick, for which they receive a small payment in articles of barter or food.[486] Speaking of the Papuans of Dutch New Guinea in general another writer informs us that "they honour the memory of the dead in every way, because they ascribe to the spirits of the departed a great influence on the life of the survivors.... Whereas in life all good and evil comes from the soul, after death, on the other hand, the spirit works for the most part only evil. It loves especially to haunt by night the neighbourhood of its old dwelling and the grave; so the people particularly avoid the neighbourhood of graves at night, and when darkness has fallen they will not go out except with a burning brand.... According to the belief of the Papuans the ghosts cause sickness, bad harvests, war, and in general every misfortune. From fear of such evils and in order to keep them in good humour, the people make provision for the spirits of the departed after death. Also they sacrifice to them before every important undertaking and never fail to ask their advice."[487] [Sidenote: Papuan ideas as to the state of the dead.] A Dutch writer, who has given us a comparatively full account of the natives of Geelvink Bay, describes as follows their views in regard to the state of the dead: "According to the Papuans the soul, which they imagine to have its seat in the blood, continues to exist at the bottom of the sea, and every one who dies goes thither. They imagine the state of things there to be much the same as that in which they lived on earth. Hence at his burial the dead man is given an equipment suitable to his rank and position in life. He is provided with a bow and arrow, armlets and body-ornaments, pots and pans, everything that may stand him in good stead in the life hereafter. This provision must not be neglected, for it is a prevalent opinion that the dead continue always to maintain relations with the world and with the living, that they possess superhuman power, exercise great influence over the affairs of life on earth, and are able to protect in danger, to stand by in war, to guard against shipwreck at sea, and to grant success in fishing and hunting. For such weighty reasons the Papuans do all in their power to win the favour of their dead. On undertaking a journey they are said never to forget to hang amulets about themselves in the belief that their dead will then surely help them; hence, too, when they are at sea in rough weather, they call upon the souls of the departed, asking them for better weather or a favourable breeze, in case the wind happens to be contrary."[488] [Sidenote: Wooden images of the dead (_korwar_).] In order to communicate with these powerful spirits and to obtain their advice and help in time of need, the Papuans of Geelvink Bay make wooden images of their dead, which they keep in their houses and consult from time to time. Every family has at least one such ancestral image, which forms the medium whereby the soul of the deceased communicates with his or her surviving relatives. These images or Penates, as we may call them, are carved of wood, about a foot high, and represent the deceased person in a standing, sitting, or crouching attitude, but commonly with the hands folded in front. The head is disproportionately large, the nose long and projecting, the mouth wide and well furnished with teeth; the eyes are formed of large green or blue beads with black dots to indicate the pupils. Sometimes the male figures carry a shield in the left hand and brandish a sword in the right; while the female figures are represented grasping with both hands a serpent which stands on its coiled tail. Rags of many colours adorn these figures, and the hair of the deceased, whom they represent, is placed between their legs. Such an ancestral image is called a _korwar_ or _karwar_. The natives identify these effigies with the deceased persons whom they portray, and accordingly they will speak of one as their father or mother or other relation. Tobacco and food are offered to the images, and the natives greet them reverentially by bowing to the earth before them with the two hands joined and raised to the forehead. [Sidenote: Such images carried on voyages and consulted as oracles. The images consulted in sickness.] Such images are kept in the houses and carried in canoes on voyages, in order that they may be at hand to help and advise their kinsfolk and worshippers. They are consulted on many occasions, for example, when the people are going on a journey, or about to fish for turtles or trepang, or when a member of the family is sick, and his relations wish to know whether he will recover. At these consultations the enquirer may either take the image in his hands or crouch before it on the ground, on which he places his offerings of tobacco, cotton, beads, and so forth. The spirit of the dead is thought to be in the image and to pass from it into the enquirer, who thus becomes inspired by the soul of the deceased and acquires his superhuman knowledge. As a sign of his inspiration the medium shivers and shakes. According to some accounts, however, this shivering and shaking of the medium is an evil omen; whereas if he remains tranquil, the omen is good. It is especially in cases of sickness that the images are consulted. The mode of consultation has been described as follows by a Dutch writer: "When any one is sick and wishes to know the means of cure, or when any one desires to avert misfortune or to discover something unknown, then in presence of the whole family one of the members is stupefied by the fumes of incense or by other means of producing a state of trance. The image of the deceased person whose advice is sought is then placed on the lap or shoulder of the medium in order to cause the soul to pass out of the image into his body. At the moment when that happens, he begins to shiver; and, encouraged by the bystanders, the soul speaks through the mouth of the medium and names the means of cure or of averting the calamity. When he comes to himself, the medium knows nothing of what he has been saying. This they call _kor karwar_, that is, 'invoking the soul;' and they say _karwar iwos_, 'the soul speaks.'" The writer adds: "It is sometimes reported that the souls go to the underworld, but that is not true. The Papuans think that after death the soul abides by the corpse and is buried with it in the grave; hence before an image is made, if it is necessary to consult the soul, the enquirer must betake himself to the grave in order to do so. But when the image is made, the soul enters into it and is supposed to remain in it so long as satisfactory answers are obtained from it in consultation. But should the answers prove disappointing, the people think that the soul has deserted the image, on which they throw the image away as useless. Where the soul has gone, nobody knows, and they do not trouble their heads about it, since it has lost its power."[489] The person who acts as medium in consulting the spirit may be either the house-father himself or a magician (_konoor_).[490] [Sidenote: Example of the consultation of an ancestral image.] As an example of these consultations we may take the case of a man who was suffering from a painful sore on his finger and wished to ascertain the cause of the trouble. So he set one of the ancestral images before him and questioned it closely. At first the image made no reply; but at last the man remembered that he had neglected his duty to his dead brother by failing to marry his widow, as, according to native custom, he should have done. Now the natives believe that the dead can punish them for any breach of customary law; so it occurred to our enquirer that the ghost of his dead brother might have afflicted him with the sore on his finger for not marrying his widow. Accordingly he put the question to the image, and in doing so the compunction of a guilty conscience caused him to tremble. This trembling he took for an answer of the image in the affirmative, wherefore he went off and took the widow to wife and provided for her maintenance.[491] [Sidenote: Ancestral images consulted as to the cause of death. Offerings to the images.] Again, the ancestral images are often consulted to ascertain the cause of a death; and if the image attributes the death to the evil magic of a member of another tribe, an expedition will be sent to avenge the wrong by slaying the supposed culprit. For the souls of the dead take it very ill and wreak their spite on the survivors, if their death is not avenged on their enemies. Not uncommonly the consultation of the images merely furnishes a pretext for satisfying a grudge against an individual or a tribe.[492] The mere presence of these images appears to be supposed to benefit the sick; a woman who was seriously ill has been seen to lie with four or five ancestral figures fastened at the head of her bed. On enquiry she explained that they did not all belong to her, but that some of them had been kindly lent to her by relations and friends.[493] Again, the images are taken by the natives with them to war, because they hope thereby to secure the help of the spirits whom the images represent. Also they make offerings from time to time to the effigies and hold feasts in their honour.[494] They observe, indeed, that the food which they present to these household idols remains unconsumed, but they explain this by saying that the spirits are content to snuff up the savour of the viands, and to leave their gross material substance alone.[495] [Sidenote: Images of persons who have died away from home.] In general, images are only made of persons who have died at home. But in the island of Ron or Run they are also made of persons who have died away from home or have fallen in battle. In such cases the difficulty is to compel the soul to quit its mortal remains far away and come to animate the image. However, the natives of Ron have found means to overcome this difficulty. They first carve the wooden image of the dead person and then call his soul back to the village by setting a great tree on fire, while the family assemble round it and one of them, holding the image in his hand, acts the part of a medium, shivering and shaking and falling into a trance after the approved fashion of mediums in many lands. After this ceremony the image is supposed to be animated by the soul of the deceased, and it is kept in the house with as much confidence as any other.[496] [Sidenote: Sometimes the head of the image is composed of the skull of the deceased.] Sometimes the head of the image consists of the skull of the deceased, which has been detached from the skeleton and inserted in a hole at the top of the effigy. In such cases the body of the image is of wood and the head of bone. It is especially men who have distinguished themselves by their bravery or have earned a name for themselves in other ways who are thus represented. Apparently the notion is that as a personal relic of the departed the skull is better fitted to retain his soul than a mere head of wood. But in the island of Ron or Run, and perhaps elsewhere, skull-topped images of this sort are made for all firstborn children, whether male or female, young or old, at least for all who die from the age of twelve years and upward. These images have a special name, _bemar boo_, which means "head of a corpse." They are kept in the room of the parents who have lost the child.[497] [Sidenote: Mode of preparing such skull-headed images.] The mode in which such images are prepared is as follows. The body of the firstborn child, who dies at the age of years or upwards, is laid in a small canoe, which is deposited in a hut erected behind the dwelling-house. Here the mother is obliged to keep watch night and day beside the corpse and to maintain a blazing fire till the head drops off the body, which it generally does about twenty days after the death. Then the trunk is wrapped in leaves and buried, but the head is brought into the house and carefully preserved. Above the spot where it is deposited a small opening is made in the roof, through which a stick is thrust bearing some rags or flags to indicate that the remains of a dead body are in the house. When, after the lapse of three or four months, the nose and ears of the head have dropped off, and the eyes have mouldered away, the relations and friends assemble in the house of mourning. In the middle of the assembly the father of the child crouches on his hams with downcast look in an attitude of grief, while one of the persons present begins to carve a new nose and a new pair of ears for the skull out of a piece of wood. The kind of wood varies according as the deceased was a male or a female. All the time that the artist is at work, the rest of the company chant a melancholy dirge. When the nose and ears are finished and have been attached to the skull, and small round fruits have been inserted in the hollow sockets of the eyes to represent the missing orbs, a banquet follows in honour of the deceased, who is now represented by his decorated skull set up on a block of wood on the table. Thus he receives his share of the food and of the cigars, and is raised to the rank of a domestic idol or _korwar_. Henceforth the skull is carefully kept in a corner of the chamber to be consulted as an oracle in time of need. The bodies of fathers and mothers are treated in the same way as those of firstborn children. On the other hand the bodies of children who die under the age of two years are never buried. The remains are packed in baskets of rushes covered with lids and tightly corded, and the baskets are then hung on the branches of tall trees, where no more notice is taken of them. Four or five such baskets containing the mouldering bodies of infants may sometimes be seen hanging on a single tree.[498] The reason for thus disposing of the remains of young children is said to be as follows. A thick mist hangs at evening over the top of the dense tropical forest, and in the mist dwell two spirits called Narwur and Imgier, one male and the other female, who kill little children, not out of malice but out of love, because they wish to have the children with them. So when a child dies, the parents fasten its little body to the branches of a tall tree in the forest, hoping that the spirit pair will take it and be satisfied, and will spare its small brothers and sisters.[499] [Sidenote: Mummification of the dead.] In some parts of Geelvink Bay, however, the bodies of the dead are treated differently. For example, on the south coast of the island of Jobi or Jappen and elsewhere the corpses are reduced to mummies by being dried on a bamboo stage over a slow fire; after which the mummies, wrapt in cloth, are kept in the house, being either laid along the wall or hung from the ceiling. When the number of these relics begins to incommode the living inmates of the house, the older mummies are removed and deposited in the hollow trunks of ancient trees. In some tribes who thus mummify their dead the juices of corruption which drip from the rotting corpse are caught in a vessel and given to the widow to drink, who is forced to gulp them down under the threat of decapitation if she were to reject the loathsome beverage.[500] [Sidenote: Restrictions observed by mourners. Tattooing in honour of the dead. Teeth of the dead worn by relatives.] The family in which a death has taken place is subject for a time to certain burdensome restrictions, which are probably dictated by a fear of the ghost. Thus all the time till the effigy of the deceased has been made and a feast given in his honour, they are obliged to remain in the house without going out for any purpose, not even to bathe or to fetch food and drink. Moreover they must abstain from the ordinary articles of diet and confine themselves to half-baked cakes of sago and other unpalatable viands. As these restrictions may last for months they are not only irksome but onerous, especially to people who have no slaves to fetch and carry for them. However, in that case the neighbours come to the rescue and supply the mourners with wood, water, and the other necessaries of life, until custom allows them to go out and help themselves. After the effigy of the dead has been made, the family go in state to a sacred place to purify themselves by bathing. If the journey is made by sea, no other canoe may meet or sail past the canoe of the mourners under pain of being confiscated to them and redeemed at a heavy price. On their return from the holy place, the period of mourning is over, and the family is free to resume their ordinary mode of life and their ordinary victuals.[501] That the seclusion of the mourners in the house for some time after the death springs from a fear of the ghost is not only probable on general grounds but is directly suggested by a custom which is observed at the burial of the body. When it has been laid in the earth along with various articles of daily use, which the ghost is supposed to require for his comfort, the mourners gather round the grave and each of them picks up a leaf, which he folds in the shape of a spoon and holds several times over his head as if he would pour out the contents upon it. As they do so, they all murmur, "_Rur i rama_," that is, "The spirit comes." This exclamation or incantation is supposed to prevent the ghost from troubling them. The gravediggers may not enter their houses till they have bathed and so removed from their persons the contagion of death, in order that the soul of the deceased may have no power over them.[502] Mourners sometimes tattoo themselves in honour of the dead. For a father, the marks are tattooed on the cheeks and under the eyes; for a grandfather, on the breast; for a mother, on the shoulders and arms; for a brother, on the back. On the death of a father or mother, the eldest son or, if there is none such, the eldest daughter wears the teeth and hair of the deceased. When the teeth of old people drop out, they are kept on purpose to be thus strung on a string and worn by their sons or daughters after their death. Similarly, a mother wears as a permanent mark of mourning the teeth of her dead child strung on a cord round her neck, and as a temporary mark of mourning a little bag on her throat containing a lock of the child's hair.[503] The intention of these customs is not mentioned. Probably they are not purely commemorative but designed in some way either to influence for good the spirit of the departed or to obtain its help and protection for the living. [Sidenote: Rebirth of parents in their children.] Thus far we have found no evidence among the natives of New Guinea of a belief that the dead are permanently reincarnated in their human descendants. However, the inhabitants of Ayambori, an inland village about an hour distant to the east of Doreh, are reported to believe that the soul of a dead man returns in his eldest son, and that the soul of a dead woman returns in her eldest daughter.[504] So stated the belief is hardly clear and intelligible; for if a man has several sons, he must evidently be alive and not dead when the eldest of them is born, and similarly with a woman and her eldest daughter. On the analogy of similar beliefs elsewhere we may conjecture that these Papuans imagine every firstborn son to be animated by the soul of his father, whether his father be alive or dead, and every firstborn daughter to be animated by the soul of her mother, whether her mother be alive or dead. [Sidenote: Customs concerning the dead observed in the islands off the western end of New Guinea.] Beliefs and customs concerning the dead like those which we have found among the natives of Geelvink Bay are reported to prevail in other parts of Dutch New Guinea, but our information about them is much less full. Thus, off the western extremity of New Guinea there is a group of small islands (Waaigeoo, Salawati, Misol, Waigama, and so on), the inhabitants of which make _karwar_ or wooden images of their dead ancestors. These they keep in separate rooms of their houses and take with them as talismans to war. In these inner rooms are also kept miniature wooden houses in which their ancestors are believed to reside, and in which even Mohammedans (for some of the natives profess Islam) burn incense on Fridays in honour of the souls of the dead. These souls are treated like living beings, for in the morning some finely pounded sago is placed in the shrines; at noon it is taken away, but may not be eaten by the inmates of the house. Curiously enough, women are forbidden to set food for the dead in the shrines: if they did so, it is believed that they would be childless. Further, in the chief's house there are shrines for the souls of all the persons who have died in the whole village. Such a house might almost be described as a temple of the dead. Among the inhabitants of the Negen Negorijen or "Nine Villages" the abodes of the ancestral spirits are often merely frameworks of houses decorated with coloured rags. These frameworks are called _roem seram_. On festal occasions they are brought forth and the people dance round them to music. The mountain tribes of these islands to the west of New Guinea seldom have any such little houses for the souls of the dead. They think that the spirits of the departed dwell among the branches of trees, to which accordingly the living attach strips of red and white cotton, always to the number of seven or a multiple of seven. Also they place food on the branches or hang it in baskets on the boughs,[505] no doubt in order to feed the hungry ghosts. But among the tribes on the coast, who make miniature houses for the use of their dead, these little shrines form a central feature of the religious life of the people. At festivals, especially on the occasion of a marriage or a death, the shrines are brought out from the side chamber and are set down in the central room of the house, where the people dance round them, singing and making music for days together with no interruption except for meals.[506] [Sidenote: Wooden images of the dead.] According to the Dutch writer, Mr. de Clercq, whose account I am reproducing, this worship of the dead, represented by wooden images (_karwar_) and lodged in miniature houses, is, together with a belief in good and bad spirits, the only thing deserving the name of religion that can be detected among these people. It is certain that the wooden images represent members of the family who died a natural death at home; they are never, as in Ansoes and Waropen, images of persons who have been murdered or slain in battle. Hence they form a kind of Penates, who are supposed to lead an invisible life in the family circle. The natives of the Negen Negorijen, for example, believe that these wooden images (_karwar_), which are both male and female, contain the souls of their ancestors, who protect the house and household and are honoured at festivals by having portions of food set beside their images.[507] The Seget Sélé, who occupy the extreme westerly point of New Guinea, bury their dead in the island of Lago and set up little houses in the forest for the use of the spirits of their ancestors. But these little houses may never be entered or even approached by members of the family.[508] A traveller, who visited a hut occupied by members of the Seget tribe in Princess Island, or Kararaboe, found a sick man in it and observed that before the front and back door were set up double rows of roughly hewn images painted with red and black stripes. He was told that these images were intended to keep off the sickness; for the natives thought that it would not dare to run the gauntlet between the double rows of figures into the house.[509] We may conjecture that these rude images represented ancestral spirits who were doing sentinel duty over the sick man. [Sidenote: Customs concerning the dead among the natives of the Macluer Gulf.] Among the natives of the Macluer Gulf, which penetrates deep into the western part of Dutch New Guinea, the souls of dead men who have distinguished themselves by bravery or in other ways are honoured in the shape of wooden images, which are sometimes wrapt in cloth and decorated with shells about the neck. In Sekar, a village on the south side of the gulf, small bowls, called _kararasa_ after the spirits of ancestors who are believed to lodge in them, are hung up in the houses; on special occasions food is placed in them. In some of the islands of the Macluer Gulf the dead are laid in hollows of the rocks, which are then adorned with drawings of birds, hands, and so forth. The hands are always painted white or yellowish on a red ground. The other figures are drawn with chalk on the weathered surface of the rock. But the natives either cannot or will not give any explanation of the custom.[510] [Sidenote: Burial and mourning customs in the Mimika district.] The Papuans of the Mimika district, on the southern coast of Dutch New Guinea, sometimes bury their dead in shallow graves near the huts; sometimes they place them in coffins on rough trestles and leave them there till decomposition is complete, when they remove the skull and preserve it in the house, either burying it in the sand of the floor or hanging it in a sort of basket from the roof, where it becomes brown with smoke and polished with frequent handling. The people do not appear to be particularly attached to these relics of their kinsfolk and they sell them readily to Europeans. Mourners plaster themselves all over with mud, and sometimes they bathe in the river, probably as a mode of ceremonial purification. They believe in ghosts, which they call _niniki_; but beyond that elementary fact we have no information as to their beliefs concerning the state of the dead.[511] [Sidenote: Burial customs at Windessi.] The natives of Windessi in Dutch New Guinea generally bury their dead the day after the decease. As a rule the corpse is wrapt in mats and a piece of blue cloth and laid on a scaffold; few are coffined. All the possessions of the dead, including weapons, fishing-nets, wooden bowls, pots, and so forth, according as the deceased was a man or a woman, are placed beside him or her. If the death is attributed to the influence of an evil spirit, they take hold of a lock of hair of the corpse and mention various places. At the mention of each place, they tug the hair; and if it comes out, they conclude that the death was caused by somebody at the place which was mentioned at the moment. But if the hair does not come out, they infer that evil spirits had no hand in the affair. Before the body is carried away, the family bathes, no doubt to purify themselves from the contagion of death. Among the people of Windessi it is a common custom to bury the dead in an island. At such a burial the bystanders pick up a fallen leaf, tear it in two, and stroke the corpse with it, in order that the ghost of the departed may not kill them. When the body has been disposed of either in a grave or on a scaffold, they embark in the canoe and sit listening for omens. One of the men in a loud voice bids the birds and the flies to be silent; and all the others sit as still as death in an attitude of devotion. At last, after an interval of silence, the man who called out tells his fellows what he has heard. If it was the buzz of the blue flies that he heard, some one else will die. If it was the booming sound of a triton shell blown in the distance, a raid must be made in that direction to rob and murder. Why it must be so, is not said, but we may suppose that the note of the triton shell is believed to betray the place of the enemy who has wrought the death by magic, and that accordingly an expedition must be sent to avenge the supposed crime on the supposed murderer. If the note of a bird called _kohwi_ is heard, then the fruit-trees will bear fruit. Though all the men sit listening in the canoe, the ominous sounds are heard only by the man who called out.[512] [Sidenote: Mourning customs at Windessi.] When the omens have thus been taken, the paddles again dip in the water, and the canoe returns to the house of mourning. Arrived at it, the men disembark, climb up the ladder (for the houses seem to be built on piles over the water) and run the whole length of the long house with their paddles on their shoulders. Curiously enough, they never do this at any other time, because they imagine that it would cause the death of somebody. Meantime the women have gone into the forest to get bark, which they beat into bark-cloth and make into mourning caps for themselves. The men busy themselves with plaiting armlets and leglets of rattan, in which some red rags are stuck. Large blue and white beads are strung on a red cord and worn round the neck. Further, the hair is shorn in sign of mourning. Mourners are forbidden to eat anything cooked in a pot. Sago-porridge, which is a staple food with some of the natives of New Guinea, is also forbidden to mourners at Windessi. If they would eat rice, it must be cooked in a bamboo. The doors and windows of the house are closed with planks or mats, just as with us the blinds are lowered in a house after a death. The surviving relatives make as many long sago-cakes as there are houses in the village and send them to the inmates; they also prepare a few for themselves. All who do not belong to the family now leave the house of mourning. Then the eldest brother or his representative gets up and all follow him to the back verandah, where a woman stands holding a bow and arrows, an axe, a paddle, and so forth. Every one touches these implements. Since the death, there has been no working in the house, but this time of inactivity is now over and every one is free to resume his usual occupations. This ends the preliminary ceremonies of mourning, which go by the name of _djawarra_. A month afterwards round cakes of sago are baked on the fire, and all the members of the family, their friends, and the persons who assisted at the burial receive three such cakes each. Only very young children are now allowed to eat sago-porridge. This ceremony is called _djawarra baba_. [Sidenote: Festival of the dead. Wooden images of the dead.] When a year or more has elapsed, the so-called festival of the dead takes place. Often the festival is held for several dead at the same time, and in that case the cost is borne in common. From far and near the people have collected sago, coco-nuts, and other food. For two nights and a day they dance and sing, but without the accompaniment of drums (_tifa_) and gongs. The first night, the signs of mourning are still worn, hence no sago-porridge may be eaten; only friends who are not in mourning are allowed to partake of it. The night is spent in eating, drinking, smoking, singing and dancing. Next day many people make _korwars_ of their dead, that is, grotesque wooden images carved in human form, which are regarded as the representatives of the departed. Some people fetch the head of the deceased person, and having made a wooden image with a large head and a hole in the back of it, they insert the skull into the wooden head from behind. After that friends feed the mourners with sago-porridge, putting it into their mouths with the help of the chopsticks which are commonly used in eating sago. When that is done, the period of mourning is at an end, and the signs of mourning are thrown away. A dance on the beach follows, at which the new wooden images of the dead make their appearance. But still the drums and gongs are silent. Dancing and singing go on till the next morning, when the whole of the ceremonies come to an end.[513] [Sidenote: Fear of the ghost.] The exact meaning of all these ceremonies is not clear, but we may conjecture that they are based in large measure on the fear of the ghost. That fear comes out plainly in the ceremony of stroking the corpse with leaves in order to prevent the ghost from killing the survivors. The writer to whom we are indebted for an account of these customs tells us in explanation of them that among these people death is ascribed to the influence of evil spirits called _manoam_, who are supposed to be incarnate in some human beings. Hence they often seek to avenge a death by murdering somebody who has the reputation of being an evil spirit incarnate. If they succeed in doing so, they celebrate the preliminary mourning ceremonies called _djawarra_ and _djawarra baba_, but the festival of the dead is changed into a memorial festival, at which the people dance and sing to the accompaniment of drums (_tifa_), gongs, and triton shells; and instead of carving a wooden image of the deceased, they make marks on the fleshless skull of the murdered man.[514] [Sidenote: Beliefs of the natives of Windessi as to the life after death. Medicine-men inspired by the spirits of the dead.] The natives of Windessi are said to have the following belief as to the life after death, though we are told that the creed is now known to very few of them; for their old beliefs and customs are fading away under the influence of a mission station which is established among them. According to their ancient creed, every man and every woman has two spirits, and in the nether world, called _sarooka_, is a large house where there is room for all the people of Windessi. When a woman dies, both her spirits always go down to the nether world, where they are clothed with flesh and bones, need do no work, and live for ever. But when a man dies, only one of his spirits must go to the under world; the other may pass or transmigrate into a living man or, in rare cases, into a living woman; the person so inspired by a dead man's spirit becomes an _inderri_, that is, a medicine-man or medicine-woman and has power to heal the sick. When a person wishes to become a medicine-man or medicine-woman, he or she acts as follows. If a man has died, and his friends are sitting about the corpse lamenting, the would-be medicine-man suddenly begins to shiver and to rub his knee with his folded hands, while he utters a monotonous sound. Gradually he falls into an ecstasy, and if his whole body shakes convulsively, the spirit of the dead man is supposed to have entered into him, and he becomes a medicine-man. Next day or the day after he is taken into the forest; some hocus-pocus is performed over him, and the spirits of lunatics, who dwell in certain thick trees, are invoked to take possession of him. He is now himself called a lunatic, and on returning home behaves as if he were half-crazed. This completes his training as a medicine-man, and he is now fully qualified to kill or cure the sick. His mode of cure depends on the native theory of sickness. These savages think that sickness is caused by a malicious or angry spirit, apparently the spirit of a dead person; for a patient will say, "The _korwar_" (that is, the wooden image which represents a particular dead person) "is murdering me, or is making me sick." So the medicine-man is called in, and sets to work on the sufferer, while the _korwar_, or wooden image of the spirit who is supposed to be doing all the mischief, stands beside him. The principal method of cure employed by the doctor is massage. He chews a certain fruit fine and rubs the patient with it; also he pinches him all over the body as if to drive out the spirit. Often he professes to extract a stone, a bone, or a stick from the body of the sufferer. At last he gives out that he has ascertained the cause of the sickness; the sick man has done or has omitted to do something which has excited the anger of the spirit.[515] [Sidenote: Ghosts of slain enemies dreaded.] From all this it would seem that the souls of the dead are more feared than loved and reverenced by the Papuans of Windessi. Naturally the ghosts of enemies who have perished at their hands are particularly dreaded by them. That dread explains some of the ceremonies which are observed in the village at the return of a successful party of head-hunters. As they draw near the village, they announce their approach and success by blowing on triton shells. Their canoes also are decked with branches. The faces of the men who have taken a head are blackened with charcoal; and if several have joined in killing one man, his skull is divided between them. They always time their arrival so as to reach home in the early morning. They come paddling to the village with a great noise, and the women stand ready to dance in the verandahs of the houses. The canoes row past the _roem sram_ or clubhouse where the young men live; and as they pass, the grimy-faced slayers fling as many pointed sticks or bamboos at the house as they have killed enemies. The rest of the day is spent very quietly. But now and then they drum or blow on the conch, and at other times they beat on the walls of the houses with sticks, shouting loudly at the same time, to drive away the ghosts of their victims.[516] That concludes what I have to say as to the fear and worship of the dead in Dutch New Guinea. [Footnote 475: G. Bamler, "Tami," in R. Neuhauss's _Deutsch Neu-Guinea_, iii. (Berlin, 1911) pp. 489-492.] [Footnote 476: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ pp. 507-512.] [Footnote 477: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ pp. 513 _sq._] [Footnote 478: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ pp. 514 _sq._] [Footnote 479: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ pp. 515 _sq._] [Footnote 480: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ p. 516.] [Footnote 481: G. Bamler, _op. cit._ pp. 493-507.] [Footnote 482: J. L. van Hasselt, "Die Papuastämme an der Geelvinkbai (Neu-guinea)," _Mitteilungen der geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena_, ix. (1890) p. 1; F. S. A. de Clercq, "De West en Noordkust van Nederlandsch Nieuw-Guinea," _Tijdschrift van het Kon. Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap_, Tweede Serie, x. (1893) pp. 587 _sq._] [Footnote 483: J. L. van Hasselt, _op. cit._ pp. 2, 3, 5 _sq._; A. Goudswaard, _De Papoewa's van de Geelvinksbaai_ (Schiedam, 1863), pp. 28 _sqq._, 33 _sqq._, 42 _sq._, 47 _sqq._] [Footnote 484: J. L. van Hasselt, "Die Papuastämme an der Geelvinkbai (Neu-guinea)," _Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena_, ix. (1891) p. 101.] [Footnote 485: H. van Rosenberg, _Der Malayische Archipel_ (Leipsic, 1878), p. 461.] [Footnote 486: H. van Rosenberg, _op. cit._ p. 462.] [Footnote 487: M. Krieger, _Neu-Guinea_ (Berlin, N.D., preface dated 1899), pp. 401, 402.] [Footnote 488: A. Goudswaard, _De Papoewa's van de Geelvinksbaai_ (Schiedam, 1863), p. 77. Compare O. Finsch, _Neu-Guinea und seine Bewohner_ (Bremen, 1865), p. 105.] [Footnote 489: F. S. A. de Clercq, "De West- en Noordkust van Nederlandsch Nieuw-Guinea," _Tijdschrift van het Kon. Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap_, Tweede Serie, x. (1893) p. 631. On these _korwar_ or _karwar_ (images of the dead) see further A. Goudswaard, _De Papoewa's van de Geelvinksbaai_, pp. 72 _sq._, 77-79; O. Finsch, _Neu-Guinea und seine Bewohner_, pp. 104-106; H. von Rosenberg, _Der Malayische Archipel_, pp. 460 _sq._; J. L. van Hasselt, "Die Papuastämme an der Geelvinkbaai (Neu-Guinea)" _Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena_, ix. (1891) p. 100; M. Krieger, _Neu-Guinea_, pp. 400 _sq._, 402 _sq._, 498 _sqq._ In the text I have drawn on these various accounts.] [Footnote 490: J. L. van Hasselt, _l.c._] [Footnote 491: A. Goudswaard, _De Papoewa's van de Geelvinksbaai_, pp. 78 _sq._; O. Finsch, _Neu-Guinea und seine Bewohner_, pp. 105 _sq._] [Footnote 492: A. Goudswaard, _op. cit._ p. 79; O. Finsch, _op. cit._ p. 106.] [Footnote 493: J. L. van Hasselt, _op. cit._ p. 100.] [Footnote 494: A. Goudswaard, _op. cit._ p. 78.] [Footnote 495: F. S. A. de Clercq, _op. cit._ p. 632.] [Footnote 496: F. S. A. de Clercq, _op. cit._ p. 632.] [Footnote 497: F. S. A. de Clercq, _op. cit._ p. 632.] [Footnote 498: A. Goudswaard, _De Papoewa's van de Geelvinksbaai_, pp. 70-73; O. Finsch, _Neu-Guinea und seine Bewohner_ pp. 104 _sq._; M. Krieger, _Neu-Guinea_, p. 398.] [Footnote 499: J. L. van Hasselt, in _Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena_, iv. (1886) pp. 118 _sq._ As to the spirit or spirits who dwell in tree tops and draw away the souls of the living to themselves, see further "Eenige bijzonderheden betreffende de Papoeas van de Geelvinksbaai van Nieuw-Guinea," _Bijdragen tot de Taal- Landen Volkenkunde van Neêrlandsch-Indië_, ii. (1854) pp. 375 _sq._] [Footnote 500: A. Goudswaard, _De Papoewa's van de Geelvinksbaai_, p. 73; J. L. van Hasselt, in _Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena_, iv. (1886) p. 118; M. Krieger, _Neu-Guinea_, pp. 398. _sq._] [Footnote 501: A. Goudswaard, _De Papoewa's van de Geelvinksbaai_, pp. 75 _sq._] [Footnote 502: J. L. van Hasselt, in _Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Jena_, iv. (1886) 117 _sq._; M. Krieger, _op. cit._ pp. 397 _sq._] [Footnote 503: A. Goudswaard, _op. cit._ pp. 74 _sq._] [Footnote 504: _Nieuw Guinea ethnographisch en natuurkundig onderzocht en beschreven_ (Amsterdam, 1862), p. 162.] [Footnote 505: F. S. A. de Clercq, "De West- en Noordkust van Nederlandsch Nieuw-Guinea," _Tijdschrift van het Kon. Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap_, Tweede Serie, x. (1893) pp. 198 _sq._] [Footnote 506: F. S. A. de Clercq, _op. cit._ p. 201.] [Footnote 507: F. S. A. de Clercq, _op. cit._ pp. 202, 205.] [Footnote 508: F. S. A. de Clercq, _op. cit._ p. 211.] [Footnote 509: J. W. van Hille, "Reizen in West-Nieuw-Guinea," _Tijdschrift van het Kon. Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap_, Tweede Serie, xxiii. (1906) p. 463.] [Footnote 510: F. S. A. de Clercq, _op. cit._ pp. 459 _sq._, 461 _sq._ A German traveller, Mr. H. Kühn, spent some time at Sekar and purchased a couple of what he calls "old heathen idols," which are now in the ethnological Museum at Leipsic. One of them, about a foot high, represents a human head and bust; the other, about two feet high, represents a squat sitting figure. They are probably ancestral images (_korwar_ or _karwar_). The natives are said to have such confidence in the protection of these "idols" that they leave their jewellery and other possessions unguarded beside them, in the full belief that nobody would dare to steal anything from spots protected by such mighty beings. See H. Kühn, "Mein Aufenthalt in Neu-Guinea," _Festschrift des 25jährigen Bestehens des Vereins für Erdkunde zu Dresden_ (Dresden, 1888), pp. 143 _sq._] [Footnote 511: A. F. R. Wollaston, _Pygmies and Papuans_ (London, 1912), pp. 132 _sq._, 136-140.] [Footnote 512: J. L. D. van der Roest, "Uit the leven der bevolking van Windessi," _Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal- Landen Volkenkunde_, xl. (1898) pp. 159 _sq._] [Footnote 513: J. L. D. van der Roest, _op. cit._ pp. 161 _sq._] [Footnote 514: J. L. D. van der Roest, _op. cit._ p. 162.] [Footnote 515: J. L. D. van der Roest, _op. cit._ pp. 164-166.] [Footnote 516: J. L. D. van der Roest, _op. cit._ pp. 157 _sq._] LECTURE XV THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF SOUTHERN MELANESIA (NEW CALEDONIA) [Sidenote: Melanesia and the Melanesians.] In the last lecture I concluded our survey of the beliefs and practices concerning death and the dead which are reported to prevail among the natives of New Guinea. We now pass to the natives of Melanesia, the great archipelago or rather chain of archipelagoes, which stretches round the north-eastern and eastern ends of New Guinea and southward, parallel to the coast of Queensland, till it almost touches the tropic of Capricorn. Thus the islands lie wholly within the tropics and are for the most part characterised by tropical heat and tropical luxuriance of vegetation. Only New Caledonia, the most southerly of the larger islands, differs somewhat from the rest in its comparatively cool climate and scanty flora.[517] The natives of the islands belong to the Melanesian race. They are dark-skinned and woolly-haired and speak a language which is akin to the Polynesian language. In material culture they stand roughly on the same level as the natives of New Guinea, a considerable part of whom in the south-eastern part of the island, as I pointed out before, are either pure Melanesians or at all events exhibit a strong infusion of Melanesian blood. They cultivate the ground, live in settled villages, build substantial houses, construct outrigger-canoes, display some aptitude for art, possess strong commercial instincts, and even employ various mediums of exchange, of which shell-money is the most notable.[518] [Sidenote: The New Caledonians.] We shall begin our survey of these islands with New Caledonia in the south, and from it shall pass northwards through the New Hebrides and Solomon Islands to the Bismarck Archipelago, which consists chiefly of the two great islands of New Britain and New Ireland with the group of the Admiralty Islands terminating it to the westward. For our knowledge of the customs and religion of the New Caledonians we depend chiefly on the evidence of a Catholic missionary, Father Lambert, who has worked among them since 1856 and has published a valuable book on the subject.[519] To be exact, his information applies not to the natives of New Caledonia itself, but to the inhabitants of a group of small islands, which lie immediately off the northern extremity of the island and are known as the Belep group. Father Lambert began to labour among the Belep at a time when no white man had as yet resided among them. At a later time circumstances led him to transfer his ministry to the Isle of Pines, which lies off the opposite or southern end of New Caledonia. A comparative study of the natives at the two extremities of New Caledonia revealed to him an essential similarity in their beliefs and customs; so that it is not perhaps very rash to assume that similar customs prevail among the aborigines of New Caledonia itself, which lies intermediate between the two points observed by Father Lambert.[520] The assumption is confirmed by evidence which was collected by Dr. George Turner from the mainland of New Caledonia so long ago as 1845.[521] Accordingly in what follows I shall commonly speak of the New Caledonians in general, though the statements for the most part apply in particular to the Belep tribe. [Sidenote: Beliefs of the New Calendonians as to the land of the dead.] The souls of the New Caledonians, like those of most savages, are supposed to be immortal, at least to survive death for an indefinite period. They all go, good and bad alike, to dwell in a very rich and beautiful country situated at the bottom of the sea, to the north-east of the island of Pott. The name of the land of souls is Tsiabiloum. But before they reach this happy land they must run the gauntlet of a grim spirit called Kiemoua, who has his abode on a rock in the island of Pott. He is a fisherman of souls; for he catches them as they pass in a net and after venting his fury on them he releases them, and they pursue their journey to Tsiabiloum, the land of the dead. It is a country more fair and fertile than tongue can tell. Yams, taros, sugar-canes, bananas all grow there in profusion and without cultivation. There are forests of wild orange-trees, also, and the golden fruits serve the blessed spirits as playthings. You can tell roughly how long it is since a spirit quitted the upper world by the colour of the orange which he plays with; for the oranges of those who have just arrived are green; the oranges of those who have been longer dead are ripe; and the oranges of those who died long ago are dry and wizened. There is no night in that blessed land, and no sleep; for the eyes of the spirits are never weighed down with slumber. Sorrow and sickness, decrepitude and death never enter; even boredom is unknown. But it is only the nights, or rather the hours corresponding to nights on earth, which the spirits pass in these realms of bliss. At daybreak they revisit their old home on earth and take up their posts in the cemeteries where they are honoured; then at nightfall they flit away back to the spirit-land beneath the sea, there to resume their sport with oranges, green, golden, or withered, till dawn of day. On these repeated journeys to and fro they have nothing to fear from the grim fisherman and his net; it is only on their first passage to the nether world that he catches and trounces them.[522] [Sidenote: Burial customs of the New Calendonians.] The bodies of the dead are buried in shallow graves, which are dug in a sacred grove. The corpse is placed in a crouching attitude with the head at or above the surface of the ground, in order to allow of the skull being easily detached from the trunk, at a subsequent time. In token of sorrow the nearest relations of the deceased tear the lobes of their ears and inflict large burns on their arms and breasts. The houses, nets, and other implements of the dead are burnt; his plantations are ravaged, his coco-nut palms felled with the axe. The motive for this destruction of the property of the deceased is not mentioned, but the custom points to a fear of the ghost; the people probably make his old home as unattractive as possible in order to offer him no temptation to return and haunt them. The same fear of the ghost, or at all events of the infection of death, is revealed by the stringent seclusion and ceremonial pollution of the grave-diggers. They are two in number; no other persons may handle the corpse. After they have discharged their office they must remain near the corpse for four or five days, observing a rigorous fast and keeping apart from their wives. They may not shave or cut their hair, and they are obliged to wear a tall pyramidal and very cumbersome head-dress. They may not touch food with their hands. If they help themselves to it, they must pick it up with their mouths alone or with a stick, not with their fingers. Oftener they are fed by an attendant, who puts the victuals into their mouths as he might do if they were palsied. On the other hand they are treated by the people with great respect; common folk will not pass near them without stooping.[523] [Sidenote: Sham fight as a mourning ceremony.] A curious ceremony which the New Caledonians observe at a certain period of mourning for the dead is a sham fight. Father Lambert describes one such combat which he witnessed. A number of men were divided into two parties; one party was posted on the beach, the other and much larger party was stationed in the adjoining cemetery, where food and property had been collected. From time to time a long piercing yell would be heard; then a number of men would break from the crowd in the cemetery and rush furiously down to the beach with their slings and stones ready to assail their adversaries. These, answering yell with yell, would then plunge into the sea, armed with battle-axes and clubs, while they made a feint of parrying the stones hurled at them by the other side. But neither the shots nor the parries appeared to be very seriously meant. Then when the assailants retired, the fugitives pretended to pursue them, till both parties had regained their original position. The same scene of alternate attack and retreat was repeated hour after hour, till at last, the pretence of enmity being laid aside, the two parties joined in a dance, their heads crowned with leafy garlands. Father Lambert, who describes this ceremony as an eye-witness, offers no explanation of it. But as he tells us that all deaths are believed by these savages to be an effect of sorcery, we may conjecture that the sham fight is intended to delude the ghost into thinking that his death is being avenged on the sorcerer who killed him.[524] In former lectures I shewed that similar pretences are made, apparently for a similar purpose, by some of the natives of Australia and New Guinea.[525] If the explanation is correct, we can hardly help applauding the ingenuity which among these savages has discovered a bloodless mode of satisfying the ghost's craving for blood. [Sidenote: Preservation of the skulls of the dead.] About a year after the death, when the flesh of the corpse is entirely decayed, the skull is removed and placed solemnly in another burying-ground, or rather charnel-house, where all the skulls of the family are deposited. Every family has such a charnel-house, which is commonly situated near the dwelling. It appears to be simply an open space in the forest, where the skulls are set in a row on the ground.[526] Yet in a sense it may be called a temple for the worship of ancestors; for recourse is had to the skulls on various occasions in order to obtain the help of the spirits of the dead. "The true worship of the New Caledonians," says Father Lambert, "is the worship of ancestors. Each family has its own; it religiously preserves their name; it is proud of them and has confidence in them. Hence it has its burial-place and its pious hearth for the sacrifices to be offered to their ghosts. It is the most inviolable piece of property; an encroachment on such a spot by a neighbour is a thing unheard of."[527] [Sidenote: Examples of ancestor-worship among the New Caledonians.] A few examples may serve to illustrate the ancestor-worship of the New Caledonians. When a person is sick, a member of the family, never a stranger, is appointed to heal him by means of certain magical insufflations. To enable him to do so with effect the healer first repairs to the family charnel-house and lays some sugar-cane leaves beside the skulls, saying, "I lay these leaves on you that I may go and breathe upon our sick relative, to the end that he may live." Then he goes to a tree belonging to the family and lays other sugar-cane leaves at its foot, saying, "I lay these leaves beside the tree of my father and of my grandfather, in order that my breath may have healing virtue." Next he takes some leaves of the tree or a piece of its bark, chews it into a mash, and then goes and breathes on the patient, his breath being moistened with spittle which is charged with particles of the leaves or the bark.[528] Thus the healing virtue of his breath would seem to be drawn from the spirits of the dead as represented partly by their skulls and partly by the leaves and bark of the tree which belonged to them in life, and to which their souls appear in some manner to be attached in death. [Sidenote: Prayers for fish.] Again, when a shoal of fish has made its appearance on the reef, a number of superstitious ceremonies have to be performed before the people may go and spear them in the water. On the eve of the fishing-day the medicine-man of the tribe causes a quantity of leaves of certain specified plants to be collected and roasted in the native ovens. Next day the leaves are taken from the ovens and deposited beside the ancestral skulls, which have been arranged and decorated for the ceremony. All the fishermen, armed with their fishing-spears, repair to the holy ground or sacred grove where the skulls are kept, and there they draw themselves up in two rows, while the medicine-man chants an invocation or prayer for a good catch. At every verse the crowd raises a cry of approval and assent. At its conclusion the medicine-man sets an example by thrusting with his spear at a fish, and all the men immediately plunge into the water and engage in fishing.[529] [Sidenote: Prayers for sugar-cane.] Again, in order that a sugar plantation may flourish, the medicine-man will lay a sugar-cane beside the ancestral skulls, saying, "This is for you. We beg of you to ward off all curses, all tricks of wicked people, in order that our plantations may prosper."[530] [Sidenote: Prayers for yams.] Again, when the store of yams is running short and famine is beginning to be felt, the New Caledonians celebrate a festival called _moulim_ in which the worship of their ancestors is the principal feature. A staff is wreathed with branches, apparently to represent a yam, and a hedge of coco-nut leaves is made near the ancestral skulls. The decorated staff is then set up there, and prayers for the prosperity of the crops are offered over and over again. After that nobody may enter a yam-field or a cemetery or touch sea-water for three days. On the third day a man stationed on a mound chants an invocation or incantation in a loud voice. Next all the men go down to the shore, each of them with a firebrand in his hand, and separating into two parties engage in a sham fight. Afterwards they bathe and repairing to the charnel-house deposit coco-nut leaves beside the skulls of their ancestors. They are then free to partake of the feast which has been prepared by the women.[531] [Sidenote: Caverns used by the natives as charnel-houses in the Isle of Pines.] While the beliefs and customs of the New Caledonians in regard to the dead bear a general resemblance to each other, whether they belong to the north or to the south of the principal island, a special feature is introduced into the mortuary customs of the natives of the Isle of Pines by the natural caves and grottoes with which the outer rim of the island, to the distance of several miles from the shore, is riddled; for in these caverns the natives in the old heathen days were wont to deposit the bones and skulls of their dead and to use the caves as sanctuaries or chapels for the worship of the spirits of the departed. Some of the caves are remarkable both in themselves and in their situation. Most of those which the natives turned into charnel-houses are hidden away, sometimes at great distances, in the rank luxuriance of the tropical forests. Some of them open straight from the level of the ground; to reach others you must clamber up the rocks; to explore others you must descend into the bowels of the earth. A glimmering twilight illumines some; thick darkness veils others, and it is only by torchlight that you can explore their mysterious depths. Penetrating into the interior by the flickering gleam of flambeaus held aloft by the guides, and picking your steps among loose stones and pools of water, you might fancy yourself now in the great hall of a ruined castle, now in the vast nave of a gothic cathedral with its chapels opening off it into the darkness on either hand. The illusion is strengthened by the multitude of stalactites which hang from the roof of the cavern and, glittering in the fitful glow of the torches, might be taken for burning cressets kindled to light up the revels in a baronial hall, or for holy lamps twinkling in the gloom of a dim cathedral aisle before holy images, where solitary worshippers kneel in silent devotion. In the shifting play of the light and shadow cast by the torches the fantastic shapes of the incrustations which line the sides or rise from the floor of the grotto appear to the imagination of the observer now as the gnarled trunks of huge trees, now as statues or torsos of statues, now as altars, on which perhaps a nearer approach reveals a row of blanched and grinning skulls. No wonder if such places, chosen for the last resting-places of the relics of mortality, have fed the imagination of the natives with weird notions of a life after death, a life very different from that which the living lead in the glowing sunshine and amid the rich tropical verdure a few paces outside of these gloomy caverns. It is with a shiver and a sense of relief that the visitor escapes from them to the warm outer air and sees again the ferns and creepers hanging over the mouth of the cave like a green fringe against the intense blue of the sky.[532] [Sidenote: Sea-caves.] While this is the general character of the caves which are to be found hidden away in the forests, many of those near the shore consist simply of apertures hollowed out in the face of the cliffs by the slow but continuous action of the waves in the course of ages. On the beach itself sea-caves are found in which the rising tide precipitates itself with a hollow roar as of subterranean thunder; and at a point, some way back from the strand, where the roof of one of these caves has fallen in, the salt water is projected into the air in the form of intermittent jets of spray, which vary in height with the force of the wind and tide.[533] [Sidenote: Prayers and sacrifices offered to the dead by the New Caledonians.] With regard to the use which the natives make of these caves as charnel-houses and mortuary chapels, Father Lambert tells us that any one of them usually includes three compartments, a place of burial, a place of skulls, and a place of sacrifice. But often the place of skulls is also the place of sacrifice; and in no case is the one far from the other. The family priest, who is commonly the senior member of the family, may address his prayers to the ancestors in the depth of the cavern, in the place of skulls, or in the place of sacrifice, whenever circumstances call for a ritual of unusual solemnity. Otherwise with the help of his amulets he may pray to the souls of the forefathers anywhere; for these amulets consist of personal and portable relics of the dead, such as locks of hair, teeth, and so forth; or again they may be leaves or other parts of plants which are sacred to the family; so that a wizard who is in possession of them can always and anywhere communicate with the ancestral spirits. The place of sacrifice would seem to be more often in the open air than in a cave, for Father Lambert tells us that in the centre of it a shrub, always of the same species, is planted and carefully cultivated. Beside it may be seen the pots and stones which are used in cooking the food offered to the dead. In this worship of the dead a certain differentiation of functions or division of labour obtains between the various families. All have not the same gifts and graces. The prayers of one family offered to their ancestral ghosts are thought to be powerful in procuring rain in time of drought; the prayers of another will cause the sun to break through the clouds when the sky is overcast; the supplications of a third will produce a fine crop of yams; the earnest entreaties of a fourth will ensure victory in war; and the passionate pleadings of a fifth will guard mariners against the perils and dangers of the deep. And so on through the whole gamut of human needs, so far as these are felt by savages. If only wrestling in prayer could satisfy the wants of man, few people should be better provided with all the necessaries and comforts of life than the New Caledonians. And according to the special purpose to which a family devotes its spiritual energies, so will commonly be the position of its oratory. For example, if rain-making is their strong point, their house of prayer will be established near a cultivated field, in order that the crops may immediately experience the benefit to be derived from their orisons. Again, if they enjoy a high reputation for procuring a good catch of fish, the family skulls will be placed in the mouth of a cave looking out over the great ocean, or perhaps on a bleak little wind-swept isle, where in the howl of the blast, the thunder of the waves on the strand, and the clangour of the gulls overhead, the fancy of the superstitious savage may hear the voices of his dead forefathers keeping watch and ward over their children who are tossed on the heaving billows.[534] Thus among these fortunate islanders religion and industry go hand in hand; piety has been reduced to a co-operative system which diffuses showers of blessings on the whole community. [Sidenote: Prayer-posts.] As it is clearly impossible even for the most devout to pray day and night without cessation, the weakness of the flesh requiring certain intervals for refreshment and repose, the New Caledonians have devised an ingenious method of continuing their orisons at the shrine in their own absence. For this purpose they make rods or poles of various lengths, carve and paint them rudely, wind bandages of native cloth about them, and having fastened large shells to the top, set them up either in the sepulchral caves or in the place of skulls. In setting up one of these poles the native will pray for the particular favour which he desires to obtain from the ancestors for himself or his family; and he appears to think that in some way the pole will continue to recite the prayer in the ears of the ghosts, when he himself has ceased to speak and has returned to his customary avocations. And when members of his family visit the shrine and see the pole, they will be reminded of the particular benefit which they are entitled to expect from the souls of the departed. A certain rude symbolism may be traced in the materials and other particulars of these prayer-posts. A hard wood signifies strength; a tall pole overtopping all the rest imports a wish that he for whose sake it was erected may out-top all his rivals; and so on.[535] [Sidenote: Religion combined with magic in the ritual of the New Caledonians. Sacred stones endowed with special magical virtues. The "stone of famine."] We may assume with some probability that in the mind of the natives such resemblances are not purely figurative or symbolic, but that they are also magical in intention, being supposed not merely to represent the object of the supplicant's prayer, but actually, on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, to contribute to its accomplishment. If that is so, we must conclude that the religion of these savages, as manifested in their prayers to the spirits of the dead, is tinctured with an alloy of magic; they do not trust entirely to the compassion of the spirits and their power to help them; they seek to reinforce their prayers by a certain physical compulsion acting through the natural properties of the prayer-posts. This interpretation is confirmed by a parallel use which these people make of certain sacred stones, which apart from their possible character as representatives of the ancestors, seem to be credited with independent magical virtues by reason of their various shapes and appearances. For example, there is a piece of polished jade which is called "the stone of famine," because it is supposed capable of causing either dearth or abundance, but is oftener used by the sorcerer to create, or at least to threaten, dearth, in order thereby to extort presents from his alarmed fellow tribesmen. This stone is kept in a burial-ground and derives its potency from the dead. The worshipper or the sorcerer (for he combines the two characters) who desires to cause a famine repairs to the burial-ground, uncovers the stone, rubs it with certain plants, and smears one half of it with black pigment. Then he makes a small hole in the ground and inserts the blackened end of the stone in the hole. Next he prays to the ancestors that nothing may go well with the country. If this malevolent rite should be followed by the desired effect, the sorcerer soon sees messengers arriving laden with presents, who entreat him to stay the famine. If his cupidity is satisfied, he rubs the stone again, inserts it upside down in the ground, and prays to his ancestors to restore plenty to the land.[536] [Sidenote: Stones to drive people mad.] Again, certain rough unhewn stones, which are kept in the sacred places, are thought to possess the power of driving people mad. To effect this purpose the sorcerer has only to strike one of them with the branches of a certain tree and to pray to the ancestral spirits that they would deprive so-and-so of his senses.[537] [Sidenote: Stones to blight coco-nut palms. Stones to make bread-fruit trees bear fruit.] Again, there is a stone which they use in cursing a plantation of coco-nut palms. The stone resembles a blighted coco-nut, and no doubt it is this resemblance which is supposed to endow it with the magical power to blight coco-nut trees. In order to effect his malicious purpose the sorcerer rubs the stone in the cemetery with certain leaves and then deposits it in a hole at the foot of a coco-nut tree, covers it up, and prays that all the trees of the plantation may be barren. This ceremony combines the elements of magic and religion. The prayer, which is no doubt addressed to the spirits of the dead, though this is not expressly affirmed, is purely religious; but the employment of a stone resembling a blighted coco-nut for the purpose of blighting the coco-nut palms is a simple piece of homoeopathic or imitative magic, in which, as usual, the desired effect is supposed to be produced by an imitation of it. Similarly, in order to make a bread-fruit tree bear fruit they employ two stones, one of which resembles the unripe and the other the ripe fruit. These are kept, as usual, in a cemetery; and when the trees begin to put forth fruit, the small stone resembling the unripe fruit is buried at the foot of one of the trees with the customary prayers and ceremonies; and when the fruits are more mature the small stone is replaced by the larger stone which resembles the ripe fruit. Then, when the fruits on the tree are quite ripe, the two stones are removed and deposited again in the cemetery: they have done their work by bringing to maturity the fruits which they resemble. This again is a piece of pure homoeopathic or imitative magic working by means of mimicry; but the magical virtue of the stones is reinforced by the spiritual power of the dead, for the stones have been kept in a cemetery and prayers have been addressed to the souls of the departed.[538] [Sidenote: The "stone of the sun."] Again, the natives have two disc-shaped stones, each with a hole in the centre, which together make up what they call "the stone of the sun." No doubt it is regarded as a symbol of the sun, and as such it is employed to cause drought in a ceremony which, like the preceding, combines the elements of magic and religion. The sun-stone is kept in one of the sacred places, and when a sorcerer wishes to make drought with it, he brings offerings to the ancestral spirits in the sacred place. These offerings are purely religious, but the rest of the ceremony is purely magical. At the moment when the sun rises from the sea, the magician or priest, whichever we choose to call him (for he combines both characters), passes a burning brand in and out of the hole in the sun-stone, while he says, "I kindle the sun, in order that he may eat up the clouds and dry up our land, so that it shall no longer bear fruit." Here the putting of fire to the sun-stone is a piece of pure homoeopathic or imitative magic, designed to increase the burning heat of the sun by mimicry.[539] [Sidenote: Stones to make rain.] On the contrary, when a wizard desires to make rain, he proceeds as follows. The place of sacrifice is decorated and enclosed with a fence, and a large quantity of provisions is deposited in it to be offered to the ancestors whose skulls stand there in a row. Opposite the skulls the wizard places a row of pots full of a medicated water, and he brings a number of sacred stones of a rounded form or shaped like a skull. Each of these stones, after being rubbed with the leaves of a certain tree, is placed in one of the pots of water. Then the wizard recites a long litany or series of invocations to the ancestors, which may be summarised thus: "We pray you to help us, in order that our country may revive and live anew." Then holding a branch in his hand he climbs a tree and scans the horizon if haply he may descry a cloud, be it no larger than a man's hand. Should he be fortunate enough to see one, he waves the branch to and fro to make the cloud mount up in the sky, while he also stretches out his arms to right and left to enlarge it so that it may hide the sun and overcast the whole heaven.[540] Here again the prayers and offerings are purely religious; while the placing of the skull-shaped stones in pots full of water, and the waving of the branch to bring up the clouds, are magical ceremonies designed to produce rain by mimicry and compulsion. [Sidenote: Stones to make or mar sea-voyages.] Again, the natives have a stone in the shape of a canoe, which they employ in ceremonies for the purpose of favouring or hindering navigation. If the sorcerer desires to make a voyage prosperous, he places the canoe-shaped stone before the ancestral skulls with the right side up; but if he wishes to cause his enemy to perish at sea, he places the canoe-shaped stone bottom upwards before the skulls, which, on the principles of homoeopathic or imitative magic, must clearly make his enemy's canoe to capsize and precipitate its owner into the sea. Whichever of these ceremonies he performs, the wizard accompanies the magical rite, as usual, with prayers and offerings of food to the ancestral spirits who are represented by the skulls.[541] [Sidenote: Stones to help fishermen.] The natives of the Isle of Pines subsist mainly by fishing; hence they naturally have a large number of sacred stones which they use for the purpose of securing the blessing of the ancestral spirits on the business of the fisherman. Indeed each species of fish has its own special sacred stone. These stones are kept in large shells in a cemetery. A wizard who desires to make use of one of them paints the stone with a variety of colours, chews certain leaves, and then breathes on the stone and moistens it with his spittle. After that he sets up the stone before the ancestral skulls, saying, "Help us, that we may be successful in fishing." The sacrifices to the spirits consist of bananas, sugar-cane, and fish, never of taros or yams. After the fishing and the sacrificial meal, the stone is put back in its place, and covered up respectfully.[542] [Sidenote: Stones to make yams grow.] Lastly, the natives of the Isle of Pines cultivate many different kinds of yams, and they have a correspondingly large number of sacred stones destined to aid them in the cultivation by ensuring the blessing of the dead upon the work. In shape and colour these stones differ from each other, each of them bearing a resemblance, real or fanciful, to the particular species of yam which it is supposed to quicken. But the method of operating with them is much the same for all. The stone is placed before the skulls, wetted with water, and wiped with certain leaves. Yams and fish, cooked on the spot, are offered in sacrifice to the dead, the priest or magician saying, "This is your offering in order that the crop of yams may be good." So saying he presents the food to the dead and himself eats a little of it. After that the stone is taken away and buried in the yam field which it is designed to fertilise.[543] Here, again, the prayer and sacrifice to the dead are purely religious rites intended to propitiate the spirits and secure their help; while the burying of the yam-shaped stone in the yam-field to make the yams grow is a simple piece of homoeopathic or imitative magic. Similarly in order to cultivate taros and bananas, stones resembling taros and bananas are buried in the taro field or the banana grove, and their magical virtue is reinforced by prayers and offerings to the dead.[544] [Sidenote: The religion of the New Caledonians is mainly a worship of the dead tinctured with magic.] On the whole we may conclude that among the natives of New Caledonia there exists a real worship of the dead, and that this worship is indeed the principal element in their religion. The spirits of the dead, though they are supposed to spend part of their time in a happy land far away under the sea, are nevertheless believed to be near at hand, hovering about in the burial-grounds or charnel-houses and embodied apparently in their skulls. To these spirits the native turns for help in all the important seasons and emergencies of life; he appeals to them in prayer and seeks to propitiate them by sacrifice. Thus in his attitude towards his dead ancestors we perceive the elements of a real religion. But, as I have just pointed out, many rites of this worship of ancestors are accompanied by magical ceremonies. The religion of these islanders is in fact deeply tinged with magic; it marks a transition from an age of pure magic in the past to an age of more or less pure religion in the future. [Sidenote: Evidence as to the religion of the New Caledonians furnished by Dr. G. Turner.] Thus far I have based my account of the beliefs and customs of the New Caledonians concerning the dead on the valuable information which we owe to the Catholic missionary Father Lambert. But, as I pointed out, his evidence refers not so much to the natives of the mainland as to the inhabitants of certain small islands at the two extremities of the great island. It may be well, therefore, to supplement his description by some notes which a distinguished Protestant missionary, the Rev. Dr. George Turner, obtained in the year 1845 from two native teachers, one a Samoan and the other a Rarotongan, who lived in the south-south-eastern part of New Caledonia for three years.[545] Their evidence, it will be observed, goes to confirm Father Lambert's view as to the general similarity of the religious beliefs and customs prevailing throughout the island. [Sidenote: Material culture of the New Caledonians.] The natives of this part of New Caledonia were divided into separate districts, each with its own name, and war, perpetual war, was the rule between the neighbouring communities. They cultivated taro, yams, coco-nuts, and sugar-cane; but they had no intoxicating _kava_ and kept no pigs. They cooked their food in earthenware pots manufactured by the women. In former days their only edge-tools were made of stone, and they felled trees by a slow fire smouldering close to the ground. Similarly they hollowed out the fallen trees by means of a slow fire to make their canoes. Their villages were not permanent. They migrated within certain bounds, as they planted. A village might comprise as many as fifty or sixty round houses. The chiefs had absolute power of life and death. Priests did not meddle in political affairs.[546] [Sidenote: Burial customs; preservation of the skulls and teeth.] At death they dressed the corpse with a belt and shell armlets, cut off the nails of the fingers and toes, and kept them as relics. They spread the grave with a mat, and buried all the body but the head. After ten days the friends twisted off the head, extracted the teeth to be kept as relics, and preserved the skull also. In cases of sickness and other calamities they presented offerings of food to the skulls of the dead. The teeth of the old women were taken to the yam plantations and were supposed to fertilise them; and their skulls were set up on poles in the plantations for the same purpose. When they buried a chief, they erected spears at his head, fastened a spear-thrower to his forefinger, and laid a club on the top of his grave,[547] no doubt for the convenience of the ghost. [Sidenote: Prayers to ancestors.] "Their gods," we are told, "were their ancestors, whose relics they kept up and idolised. At one place they had wooden idols before the chiefs' houses. The office of the priest was hereditary. Almost every family had its priest. To make sure of favours and prosperity they prayed not only to their own gods, but also, in a general way, to the gods of other lands. Fishing, planting, house-building, and everything of importance was preceded by prayers to their guardian spirits for success. This was especially the case before going to battle. They prayed to one for the eye, that they might see the spear as it flew towards them. To another for the ear, that they might hear the approach of the enemy. Thus, too, they prayed for the feet, that they might be swift in pursuing the enemy; for the heart, that they might be courageous; for the body, that they might not be speared; for the head, that it might not be clubbed; and for sleep, that it might be undisturbed by an attack of the enemy. Prayers over, arms ready, and equipped with their relic charms, they went off to battle."[548] [Sidenote: "Grand concert of spirits."] The spirits of the dead were believed to go away into the forest. Every fifth month they had a "spirit night" or "grand concert of spirits." Heaps of food were prepared for the occasion. The people assembled in the afternoon round a certain cave. At sundown they feasted, and then one stood up and addressed the spirits in the cave, saying, "You spirits within, may it please you to sing a song, that all the women and men out here may listen to your sweet voices." Thereupon a strange unearthly concert of voices burst on their ears from the cave, the nasal squeak of old men and women forming the dominant note. But the hearers outside listened with delight to the melody, praised the sweet voices of the singers, and then got up and danced to the music. The singing swelled louder and louder as the dance grew faster and more furious, till the concert closed in a nocturnal orgy of unbridled license, which, but for the absence of intoxicants, might compare with the worst of the ancient bacchanalia. The singers in the cave were the old men and women who had ensconced themselves in it secretly during the day; but the hoax was not suspected by the children and young people, who firmly believed that the spirits of the dead really assembled that night in the cavern and assisted at the sports and diversions of the living.[549] [Sidenote: Making rain by means of the bones of the dead.] The souls of the departed also kindly bore a hand in the making of rain. In order to secure their co-operation for this beneficent purpose the human rain-maker proceeded as follows. He blackened himself all over, exhumed a dead body, carried the bones to a cave, jointed them, and suspended the skeleton over some taro leaves. After that he poured water on the skeleton so that it ran down and fell on the leaves underneath. They imagined that the soul of the deceased took up the water, converted it into rain, and then caused it to descend in refreshing showers. But the rain-maker had to stay in the cavern fasting till his efforts were crowned with success, and when the ghost was tardy in executing his commission, the rain-maker sometimes died of hunger. As a rule, however, they chose the showery months of March and April for the operation of rain-making, so that the wizard ran little risk of perishing a martyr to the cause of science. When there was too much rain, and they wanted fine weather, the magician procured it by a similar process, except that instead of drenching the skeleton with water he lit a fire under it and burned it up,[550] which naturally induced or compelled the ghost to burn up the clouds and let the sun shine out. [Sidenote: Execution of maleficent sorcerers. Reincarnation of the dead in white people.] Another class of magicians were the maleficent sorcerers who caused people to fall ill and die by burning their personal rubbish. When one of these rascals was convicted of repeated offences of that sort, he was formally tried and condemned. The people assembled and a great festival was held. The condemned man was decked with a garland of red flowers; his arms and legs were covered with flowers and shells, and his face and body painted black. Thus arrayed he came dashing forward, rushed through the people, plunged from the rocks into the sea, and was seen no more. The natives also ascribed sickness to the arts of white men, whom they identified with the spirits of the dead; and assigned this belief as a reason for their wish to kill the strangers.[551] [Footnote 517: F. H. H. Guillemard, _Australasia_, II. _Malaysia and the Pacific Archipelagoes_ (London, 1894), p. 458.] [Footnote 518: J. Deniker, _The Races of Man_ (London, 1900), pp. 498 _sq._ As to the mediums of exchange, particularly the shell-money, see R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_ (Oxford, 1891), pp. 323 _sqq._; R. Parkinson, _Dreissig Jähre in der Südsee_ (Stuttgart, 1907), pp. 82 _sqq._] [Footnote 519: Le Père Lambert, _Moeurs et Superstitions des Néo-Calédoniens_ (Nouméa, 1900). This work originally appeared as a series of articles in the Catholic missionary journal _Les Missions Catholiques_.] [Footnote 520: Lambert, _Moeurs et Superstitions des Néo-Calédoniens_, pp. ii., iv. _sq._; 255.] [Footnote 521: George Turner, LL.D., _Samoa a Hundred Years Ago and long before_ (London, 1884), pp. 340 _sqq._] [Footnote 522: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 13-16.] [Footnote 523: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 235-239.] [Footnote 524: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 238, 239 _sq._] [Footnote 525: Above, pp. 136 _sq._, 235 _sq._] [Footnote 526: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 24, 240.] [Footnote 527: Lambert, _op. cit._ p. 274.] [Footnote 528: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 24, 26.] [Footnote 529: Lambert, _op. cit._ p. 211.] [Footnote 530: Lambert, _op. cit._ p. 218.] [Footnote 531: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 224 _sq._] [Footnote 532: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 275 _sqq._] [Footnote 533: Lambert, _op. cit._ p. 276.] [Footnote 534: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 288 _sq._] [Footnote 535: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 290, 292.] [Footnote 536: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 292 _sq._] [Footnote 537: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 293 _sq._] [Footnote 538: Lambert, _op. cit._ p. 294.] [Footnote 539: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 296 _sq._] [Footnote 540: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 297 _sq._] [Footnote 541: Lambert, _op. cit._ p. 298.] [Footnote 542: Lambert, _op. cit._ p. 300.] [Footnote 543: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 301 _sq._] [Footnote 544: Lambert, _op. cit._ pp. 217 _sq._, 300.] [Footnote 545: George Turner, LL.D., _Samoa a Hundred Years Ago and long before_ (London, 1884), pp. 340 _sqq._] [Footnote 546: G. Turner, _op. cit._ pp. 340, 341, 343, 344.] [Footnote 547: G. Turner, _op. cit._ pp. 342 _sq._] [Footnote 548: G. Turner, _op. cit._ p. 345.] [Footnote 549: G. Turner, _op. cit._ pp. 346 _sq._] [Footnote 550: G. Turner, _op. cit._ pp. 345 _sq._] [Footnote 551: G. Turner, _op. cit._ p. 342.] LECTURE XVI THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF CENTRAL MELANESIA [Sidenote: The islands of Central Melanesia. Distinction between the religion of the Eastern and Western Islanders.] In our survey of savage beliefs and practices concerning the dead we now pass from New Caledonia, the most southerly island of Melanesia, to the groups of islands known as the New Hebrides, the Banks' Islands, the Torres Islands, the Santa Cruz Islands, and the Solomon Islands, which together constitute what we may call Central Melanesia. These groups of islands may themselves be distinguished into two archipelagoes, a western and an eastern, of which the Western comprises the Solomon Islands and the Eastern includes all the rest. Corresponding to this geographical distinction there is a religious distinction; for while the religion of the Western islanders (the Solomon Islanders) consists chiefly in a fear and worship of the ghosts of the dead, the religion of the Eastern islanders is characterised mainly by the fear and worship of spirits which are not supposed ever to have been incarnate in human bodies. Both groups of islanders, the Western and the Eastern, recognise indeed both classes of spirits, namely ghosts that once were men and spirits who never were men; but the religious bias of the one group is towards ghosts rather than towards pure spirits, and the religious bias of the other group is towards pure spirits rather than towards ghosts. It is not a little remarkable that the islanders whose bent is towards ghosts have carried the system of sacrifice and the arts of life to a higher level than the islanders whose bent is towards pure spirits; this applies particularly to the sacrificial system, which is much more developed in the west than in the east.[552] From this it would seem to follow that if a faith in ghosts is more costly than a faith in pure spirits, it is at the same time more favourable to the evolution of culture. [Sidenote: Dr. R. H. Codrington on the Melanesians.] For the whole of this region we are fortunate in possessing the evidence of the Rev. Dr. R. H. Codrington, one of the most sagacious, cautious, and accurate of observers, who laboured as a missionary among the natives for twenty-four years, from 1864 to 1887, and has given us a most valuable account of their customs and beliefs in his book _The Melanesians_, which must always remain an anthropological classic. In describing the worship of the dead as it is carried on among these islanders I shall draw chiefly on the copious evidence supplied by Dr. Codrington; and I shall avail myself of his admirable researches to enter into considerable details on the subject, since details recorded by an accurate observer are far more instructive than the vague generalities of superficial observers, which are too often all the information we possess as to the religion of savages. [Sidenote: Melanesian theory of the soul.] In the first place, all the Central Melanesians believe that man is composed of a body and a soul, that death is the final parting of the soul from the body, and that after death the soul continues to exist as a conscious and more or less active being.[553] Thus the creed of these savages on this profound subject agrees fundamentally with the creed of the average European; if my hearers were asked to state their beliefs as to the nature of life and death, I imagine that most of them would formulate them in substantially the same way. However, when the Central Melanesian savage attempts to define the nature of the vital principle or soul, which animates the body during life and survives it after death, he finds himself in a difficulty; and to continue the parallel I cannot help thinking that if my hearers in like manner were invited to explain their conception of the soul, they would similarly find themselves embarrassed for an answer. But an examination of the Central Melanesian theory of the soul would lead us too far from our immediate subject; we must be content to say that, "whatever word the Melanesian people use for soul, they mean something essentially belonging to each man's nature which carries life to his body with it, and is the seat of thought and intelligence, exercising therefore power which is not of the body and is invisible in its action."[554] However the soul may be defined, the Melanesians are universally of opinion that it survives the death of the body and goes away to some more or less distant region, where the spirits of all the dead congregate and continue for the most part to live for an indefinite time, though some of them, as we shall see presently, are supposed to die a second death and so to come to an end altogether. In Western Melanesia, that is, in the Solomon Islands, the abode of the dead is supposed to be in certain islands, which differ in the creed of different islanders; but in Eastern Melanesia the abode of the dead is thought to be a subterranean region called Panoi.[555] [Sidenote: Distinction between ghosts of power and ghosts of no account.] But though the souls of the departed go away to the spirit land, nevertheless, with a seeming or perhaps real inconsistency, their ghosts are also supposed to haunt their graves and their old homes and to exercise great power for good or evil over the living, who are accordingly often obliged to woo their favour by prayer and sacrifice. According to the Solomon Islanders, however, among whom ghosts are the principal objects of worship, there is a great distinction to be drawn among ghosts. "The distinction," says Dr. Codrington, "is between ghosts of power and ghosts of no account, between those whose help is sought and their wrath deprecated, and those from whom nothing is expected and to whom no observance is due. Among living men there are some who stand out distinguished for capacity in affairs, success in life, valour in fighting, and influence over others; and these are so, it is believed, because of the supernatural and mysterious powers which they have, and which are derived from communication with those ghosts of the dead gone before them who are full of those same powers. On the death of a distinguished man his ghost retains the powers that belonged to him in life, in greater activity and with stronger force; his ghost therefore is powerful and worshipful, and so long as he is remembered the aid of his powers is sought and worship is offered him; he is the _tindalo_ of Florida, the _lio'a_ of Saa. In every society, again, the multitude is composed of insignificant persons, '_numerus fruges consumeri nati_,' of no particular account for valour, skill, or prosperity. The ghosts of such persons continue their insignificance, and are nobodies after death as before; they are ghosts because all men have souls, and the souls of dead men are ghosts; they are dreaded because all ghosts are awful, but they get no worship and are soon only thought of as the crowd of the nameless population of the lower world."[556] [Sidenote: Ghosts of the great and of the recently dead are chiefly regarded. Supernatural power (_mana_) acquired through ghosts.] From this account of Dr. Codrington we see that it is only the ghosts of great and powerful people who are worshipped; the ghosts of ordinary people are indeed feared, but no worship is paid to them. Further, we are told that it is the ghosts of those who have lately died that are deemed to be most powerful and are therefore most regarded; as the dead are forgotten, their ghosts cease to be worshipped, their power fades away,[557] and their place in the religion of the people is taken by the ghosts of the more recently departed. In fact here, as elsewhere, the existence of the dead seems to be dependent on the memory of the living; when they are forgotten they cease to exist. Further, it deserves to be noticed that in the Solomon Islands what we should call a man's natural powers and capacities are regarded as supernatural endowments acquired by communication with a mighty ghost. If a man is a great warrior, it is not because he is strong of arm, quick of eye, and brave of heart; it is because he is supported by the ghost of a dead warrior, whose power he has drawn to himself through an amulet of stone tied round his neck, or a tuft of leaves in his belt, or a tooth attached to one of his fingers, or a spell by the recitation of which he can enlist the aid of the ghost.[558] And similarly with all other pre-eminent capacities and virtues; in the mind of the Solomon Islanders, they are all supernatural gifts and graces bestowed on men by ghosts. This all-pervading supernatural power the Central Melanesian calls _mana_.[559] Thus for these savages the whole world teems with ghostly influences; their minds are filled, we may almost say, obsessed, with a sense of the unseen powers which encompass and determine even in its minute particulars the life of man on earth: in their view the visible world is, so to say, merely a puppet-show of which the strings are pulled and the puppets made to dance by hands invisible. Truly the attitude of these savages to the universe is deeply religious. We may now consider the theory and practice of the Central Melanesians on this subject somewhat more in detail; and in doing so we shall begin with their funeral customs, which throw much light on their views of death and the dead. [Sidenote: Burial customs in the Solomon Islands. Land burial and sea burial. Land-ghosts and sea-ghosts.] Thus, for example, in Florida, one of the Solomon Islands, the corpse is usually buried. Common men are buried in their gardens or plantations, chiefs sometimes in the village, a chief's child sometimes in the house. If the ghost of the deceased is worshipped, his grave becomes a sanctuary (_vunuhu_); the skull is often dug up and hung in the house. On the return from the burial the mourners take a different road from that by which they carried the corpse to the grave; this they do in order to throw the ghost off the scent and so prevent him from following them home. This practice clearly shews the fear which the natives feel for the ghosts of the newly dead. A man is buried with money, porpoise teeth, and some of his personal ornaments; but, avarice getting the better of superstition, these things are often secretly dug up again and appropriated by the living. Sometimes a dying man will express a wish to be cast into the sea; his friends will therefore paddle out with the corpse, tie stones to the feet, and sink it in the depths. In the island of Savo, another of the Solomon Islands, common men are generally thrown into the sea and only great men are buried.[560] The same distinction is made at Wango in San Cristoval, another of the same group of islands; there also the bodies of common folk are cast into the sea, but men of consequence are buried, and some relic of them, it may be a skull, a tooth, or a finger-bone, is preserved in a shrine at the village. From this difference in burial customs flows a not unimportant religious difference. The souls of the great people who are buried on land turn into land-ghosts, and the souls of commoners who are sunk in the sea turn into sea-ghosts. The land-ghosts are seen to hover about the villages, haunting their graves and their relics; they are also heard to speak in hollow whispers. Their aid can be obtained by such as know them. The sea-ghosts have taken a great hold on the imagination of the natives of the south-eastern Solomon Islands; and as these people love to illustrate their life by sculpture and painting, they shew us clearly what they suppose these sea-ghosts to be like. At Wango there used to be a canoe-house full of sculptures and paintings illustrative of native life; amongst others there was a series of scenes like those which are depicted on the walls of Egyptian tombs. One of the scenes represented a canoe attacked by sea-ghosts, which were portrayed as demons compounded partly of human limbs, partly of the bodies and tails of fishes, and armed with spears and arrows in the form of long-bodied garfish and flying-fish. If a man falls ill on returning from a voyage or from fishing on the rocks, it is thought that one of these sea-ghosts has shot him. Hence when men are in danger at sea, they seek to propitiate the ghosts by throwing areca-nuts and fragments of food into the water and by praying to the ghosts not to be angry with them. Sharks are also supposed to be animated by the ghosts of the dead.[561] It is interesting and instructive to find that in this part of the world sea-demons, who might be thought to be pure spirits of nature, are in fact ghosts of the dead. [Sidenote: Burnt offerings in honour of the dead.] In the island of Florida, two days after the death of a chief or of any person who was much esteemed, the relatives and friends assemble and hold a funeral feast, at which they throw a bit of food into the fire for the ghost, saying, "This is for you."[562] In other of the Solomon Islands morsels of food are similarly thrown on the fire at the death-feasts as the dead man's share.[563] Thus, in the Shortlands Islands, when a famous chief named Gorai died, his body was burnt and his relatives cast food, beads, and other property into the fire. The dead chief had been very fond of tea, so one of his daughters threw a cup of tea into the flames. Women danced a funeral dance round the pyre till the body was consumed.[564] Why should the dead man's food and property be burnt? No explanation of the practice is given by our authorities, so we are left to conjecture the reason of it. Is it that by volatilising the solid substance of the food you make it more accessible to the thin unsubstantial nature of the ghost? Is it that you destroy the property of the ghost lest he should come back in person to fetch it and so haunt and trouble the survivors? Is it that the spirits of the dead are supposed to reside in the fire on the hearth, so that offerings cast into the flames are transmitted to them directly? Whether it is with any such ideas that the Solomon Islanders throw food into the fire for ghosts, I cannot say. The whole question of the meaning of burnt sacrifice is still to a great extent obscure. [Sidenote: Funeral customs in the island of Florida. The ghostly ferry.] At the funeral feast of a chief in the island of Florida the axes, spears, shield and other belongings of the deceased are hung up with great lamentations in his house; everything remains afterwards untouched and the house falls into ruins, which as time goes on are thickly mantled with the long tendrils of the sprouting yams. But we are told that the weapons are not intended to accompany the ghost to the land of souls; they are hung up only as a memorial of a great and valued man. "With the same feeling they cut down a dead man's fruit-trees as a mark of respect and affection, not with any notion of these things serving him in the world of ghosts; he ate of them, they say, when he was alive, he will never eat again, and no one else shall have them." However, they think that the ghost benefits by burial; for if a man is killed and his body remains unburied, his restless ghost will haunt the place.[565] The ghosts of such Florida people as have been duly buried depart to Betindalo, which seems to be situated in the south-eastern part of the great island of Guadalcanar. A ship waits to ferry them across the sea to the spirit-land. This is almost the only example of a ferry-boat used by ghosts in Melanesia. On their way to the ferry the ghosts may be heard twittering; and again on the shore, while they are waiting for the ferry-boat, a sound of their dancing breaks the stillness of night; but no man can see the dancers. It is not until they land on the further shore that they know they are dead. There they are met by a ghost, who thrusts a rod into their noses to see whether the cartilage is pierced as it should be; ghosts whose noses have been duly bored in life follow the onward path with ease, but all others have pain and difficulty in making their way to the realm of the shades. Yet though the souls of the dead thus depart to Betindalo, nevertheless their ghosts as usual not only haunt their burial-places, but come to the sacrifices offered to them and may be heard disporting themselves at night, playing on pipes, dancing, and shouting.[566] [Sidenote: Belief of the Solomon Islanders that the souls of the dead live in islands. The second death.] Similarly at Bugotu in the island of Ysabel (one of the Solomon Islands) the ghosts of the dead are supposed to go away to an island, and yet to haunt their graves and shew themselves to the survivors by night. In the island of the dead there is a pool with a narrow tree-trunk lying across it. Here is stationed Bolafagina, the ghostly lord of the place. Every newly arrived ghost must appear before him, and he examines their hands to see whether they bear the mark of the sacred frigate-bird cut on them; if they have the mark, the ghosts pass across the tree-trunk and mingle with the departed spirits in the world of the dead. But ghosts who have not the mark on their hands are cast into the gulf and perish out of their ghostly life: this is the second death.[567] The same notion of a second death meets us in a somewhat different form among the natives of Saa in Malanta, another of the Solomon Islands. All the ghosts of these people swim across the sea to two little islands called Marapa, which lie off Marau in Guadalcanar. There the ghosts of children live in one island and the ghosts of grown-up people in another; for the older people would be plagued by the chatter of children if they all dwelt together in one island. Yet in other respects the life of the departed spirits in these islands is very like life on earth. There are houses, gardens, and canoes there just as here, but all is thin and unsubstantial. Living men who land in the islands see nothing of these things; there is a pool where they hear laughter and merry cries, and where the banks are wet with invisible bathers. But the life of the ghosts in these islands is not eternal. The spirits of common folk soon turn into the nests of white ants, which serve as food for the more robust ghosts. Hence a living man will say to his idle son, "When I die, I shall have ants' nests to eat, but then what will you have?" The ghosts of persons who were powerful on earth last much longer. So long as they are remembered and worshipped by the living, their natural strength remains unabated; but when men forget them, and turn to worship some of the more recent dead, then no more food is offered to them in sacrifice, so they pine away and change into white ants' nests just like common folk. This is the second death. However, while the ghosts survive they can return from the islands to Saa and revisit their village and friends. The living can even discern them in the form of dim and fleeting shadows. A man who wishes for any reason to see a ghost can always do so very simply by taking a pinch of lime from his betel-box and smearing it on his forehead. Then the ghost appears to him quite plainly.[568] [Sidenote: Burial customs in Saa. Preservation of the skull and jawbone. Burial customs in Santa Cruz. Burial customs in Ysabel.] In Saa the dead are usually buried in a common cemetery; but when the flesh has decayed the bones are taken up and heaped on one side. But if the deceased was a very great man or a beloved father, his body is preserved for a time in his son's house, being hung up either in a canoe or in the carved effigy of a sword-fish. Very favourite children are treated in the same way. The corpse may be kept in this way for years. Finally, there is a great funeral feast, at which the remains are removed to the common burial-ground, but the skull and jawbone are detached from the skeleton and kept in the house enclosed in the hollow wooden figure of a bonito-fish. By means of these relics the survivors think that they can secure the aid of the powerful ghost. Sometimes the corpse and afterwards the skull and jawbone are preserved, not in the house of the deceased, but in the _oha_ or public canoe-house, which so far becomes a sort of shrine or temple of the dead.[569] At Santa Cruz in the Solomon Islands the corpse is buried in a very deep grave in the house. Inland they dig up the bones again to make arrow-heads; also they detach the skull and keep it in a chest in the house, saying that it is the man himself. They even set food before the skull, no doubt for the use of the ghost. Yet they imagine that the ghosts of the dead go to the great volcano Tamami, where they are burnt in the crater and thus being renewed stay in the fiery region. Nevertheless the souls of the dead also haunt the forests in Santa Cruz; on wet and dark nights the natives see them twinkling in the gloom like fire-flies, and at the sight they are sore afraid.[570] So little consistent with itself is the creed of these islanders touching the state of the dead. At Bugotu in the island of Ysabel (one of the Solomon Islands) a chief is buried with his head near the surface and a fire is kept burning over the grave, in order that the skull may be taken up and preserved in the house of his successor. The spirit of the dead chief has now become a worshipful ghost, and an expedition is sent out to cut off and bring back human heads in his honour. Any person, not belonging to the place, whom the head-hunters come across will be killed by them and his or her skull added to the collection, which is neatly arranged on the shore. These ghastly trophies are believed to add fresh spiritual power (_mana_) to the ghost of the dead chief. Till they have been procured, the people of the place take care not to move about. The grave of the chief is built up with stones and sacrifices are offered upon it.[571] [Sidenote: Beliefs and customs of the Eastern islanders concerning the dead. Panoi, the subterranean abode of the dead.] Thus far we have been considering the beliefs and practices concerning the dead which prevail among the Western Melanesians of the Solomon Islands and Santa Cruz. We now turn to those of the Eastern Melanesians, who inhabit the Torres Islands, the Banks' Islands, and the New Hebrides. A broad distinction exists between the ghosts of these two regions in as much as the ghosts of the Western Melanesians all live in islands, but the ghosts of all Eastern Melanesians live underground in a subterranean region which commonly bears the name of Panoi. The exact position of Panoi has not been ascertained; all that is regarded as certain is that it is underground. However, there are many entrances to it and some of them are well known. One of them, for example, is a rock on the mountain at Mota, others are at volcanic vents which belch flames on the burning hill of Garat over the lake at Gaua, and another is on the great mountain of Vanua Lava. The ghosts congregate on points of land before their departure, as well as at the entrances to the underworld, and there on moonlight nights you may hear the ghostly crew dancing, singing, shouting, and whistling on the claws of land-crabs. It is not easy to extract from the natives a precise and consistent account of the place of the dead and the state of the spirits in it; nor indeed, as Dr. Codrington justly observes, would it be reasonable to expect full and precise details on a subject about which the sources of information are perhaps not above suspicion. However, as far as can be made out, Panoi or the abode of the dead is on the whole a happy region. In many respects it resembles the land of the living; for there are houses there and villages, and trees with red leaves, and day and night. Yet all is hollow and unreal. The ghosts do nothing but talk and sing and dance; there is no clubhouse there, and though men and women live together, there is no marrying or giving in marriage. All is very peaceful, too, in that land; for there is no war and no tyrant to oppress the people. Yet the ghost of a great man goes down like a great man among the ghosts, resplendent in all his trinkets and finery; but like everything else in the underworld these ornaments, for all the brave show they make, are mere unsubstantial shadows. The pigs which were killed at his funeral feast and the food that was heaped on his grave cannot go down with him into that far country; for none of these things, not even pigs, have souls. How then could they find their way to the spirit world? It is clearly impossible. The ghosts in the nether world do not mix indiscriminately. There are separate compartments for such as died violent deaths. There is one compartment for those who were shot, there is another for those who were clubbed, and there is another for those who were done to death by witchcraft. The ghosts of those who were shot keep rattling the reeds of the arrows which dealt them their fatal wounds. Ghosts in the nether world have no knowledge of things out of their sight and hearing; yet the living call upon them in time of need and trouble, as if they could hear and help. Life, too, in the kingdom of shadows is not eternal. The ghosts die the second death. Yet some say that there are two such kingdoms, each called Panoi, the one over the other; and that when the dead die the second death in the upper realm they rise again from the dead in the nether realm, where they never die but only turn into white ants' nests.[572] [Sidenote: Distinction between the fate of the good and the fate of the bad in the other world.] It is interesting and not unimportant to observe that some of these islanders make a distinction between the fate of good people and the fate of bad people after death. The natives of Motlav, one of the Banks' Islands, think that Panoi is a good place and that only the souls of the good can enter it. According to them the souls of murderers, sorcerers, thieves, liars, and adulterers are not suffered to enter the happy land. The ghost of a murderer, for example, is met at the entrance by the ghost of his victim, who withstands him and turns him back. All the bad ghosts go away to a bad place, where they live, not indeed in physical pain, but in misery: they quarrel, they are restless, homeless, pitiable, malignant: they wander back to earth: they eat the foulest food, their breath is noisome: they harm the living out of spite, they eat men's souls, they haunt graves and woods. But in the true Panoi the souls of the good live in peace and harmony.[573] Thus these people believe that the state of the soul after death depends on the kind of life a man led on earth; if he was good, he will be happy; if he was bad, he will be miserable. If this creed is of purely native origin, and Dr. Codrington seems to entertain no doubt that it is so, it marks a considerable ethical advance among those who accept it. [Sidenote: Descent of the living to the world of the dead.] The Eastern Melanesians think that living people can go down to the land of the dead and return alive to the upper world. Sometimes they do this in the body, but at other times only in the spirit, when they are asleep or in a faint; for at such times their souls quit their bodies and can wander away down to Panoi. When the living thus make their way to the spirit land, they are sometimes cautioned by friendly ghosts to eat nothing there, no doubt lest by partaking of ghostly food they should be turned to ghosts and never return to the land of the living.[574] [Sidenote: Disposal of the dead among the Eastern islanders. Burial customs of the Banks' Islanders.] We will now consider the various modes in which the Eastern Melanesians dispose of their dead; for funeral customs commonly furnish some indication of the ideas which a people entertain as to the state of the soul after death. The Banks' Islanders generally buried their dead in the forest not far from the village; but if the deceased was a great man or died a remarkable death, they might inter him in the village near the men's clubhouse (_gamal_). A favourite son or child might be buried in the house itself; but in such cases the grave would be opened after fifty or a hundred days and the bones taken up and hidden in the forest, though some of them might be hung up in the house. However, in some places there was, and indeed still is, a custom of keeping the putrefying corpse unburied in the house as a mark of affection. At Gaua, in Santa Maria, the body was dried over slow fires for ten days or more, till nothing but skin and bones remained; and the women who watched over it during these days drank the juices of putrefaction which dripped from the decaying flesh. The same thing used formerly to be done in Mota, another of the Banks' Islands. The corpses of great men in these islands were adorned in all their finery and laid out on the open space in the middle of the village. Here bunches of coco-nuts, yams, and other food were heaped up beside the body; and an orator of fluent speech addressed the ghost telling him that when he had gone down to Panoi, the spirit land, and the ghosts asked him after his rank, he was to give them a list of all the things heaped beside his dead body; then the ghosts would know what a great man he was and would treat him with proper deference. The orator dealt very candidly with the moral character of the deceased. If he had been a bad man, the speaker would say, "Poor ghost, will you be able to enter Panoi? I think not." The food which is piled up beside the body while the orator is pronouncing the eulogium or the censure of the departed is afterwards heaped up on the grave or buried in it. At Gaua they kill pigs and hang up the carcases or parts of them at the grave. The object of all this display is to make a favourable impression on the ghosts in the spirit land, in order that they may give the newly deceased man a good reception. When the departed was an eminent warrior or sorcerer, his friends will sometimes give him a sham burial and hide his real grave, lest people should dig up his bones and his skull to make magic with them; for the relics of such a man are naturally endowed with great magical virtue.[575] [Sidenote: Ghosts driven away from the village. Expulsion of the ghosts of persons who suffered from sores and ulcers.] In these islands the ghost does not at once leave the neighbourhood of his old body; he shews no haste to depart to the nether world. Indeed he commonly loiters about the house and the grave for five or ten days, manifesting his presence by noises in the house and by lights upon the grave. By the fifth day his relations generally think that they have had quite enough of him, and that it is high time he should set out for his long home. Accordingly they drive him away with shouts and the blowing of conch-shells or the booming sound of bull-roarers.[576] At Ureparapara the mode of expelling the ghost from the village is as follows. Missiles to be hurled at the lingering spirit are collected in the shape of small stones and pieces of bamboo, which have been charmed by wizards so as to possess a ghost-expelling virtue. The artillery having been thus provided, the people muster at one end of the village, armed with bags of enchanted stones and pieces of enchanted bamboos. The signal to march is given by two men, who sit in the dead man's house, one on either side, holding two white stones in their hands, which they clink together. At the sound of the clinking the women begin to wail and the men to march; tramp, tramp they go like one man through the village from end to end, throwing stones into the houses and all about and beating the bamboos together. Thus they drive the reluctant ghost step by step from the village into the forest, where they leave him to find his own way down to the land of the dead. Till that time the widow of the deceased was bound to remain on his bed without quitting it for a moment except on necessity; and if she had to leave it for a few minutes she always left a coco-nut on the bed to represent her till she came back. The reason for this was that her husband's ghost was believed to be lingering in the house all these days, and he would naturally expect to see his wife in the nuptial chamber. At Motlav the people are not so hard upon the poor ghosts: they do not drive away all ghosts from their old homes, but only the ghosts of such as had in their lifetime the misfortune to be afflicted with grievous sores and ulcers. The expulsion of such ghosts may therefore be regarded as a sanitary precaution designed to prevent the spirits from spreading the disease. When a man who suffers severely from sores or ulcers lies dying, the people of his village, taking time by the forelock, send word to the inhabitants of the next village westwards, warning them to be in readiness to give the ghost a warm reception. For it is well known that at their departure from the body ghosts always go westward towards the setting sun. So when the poor man is dead, they bury his diseased body in the village and devote all their energies to the expulsion of his soul. By blowing blasts on shell-trumpets and beating the ground with the stalks of coco-nut fronds they chase the ghost clean away from their own village and on to the next. The inhabitants of that village meantime are ready to receive their unwelcome visitor, and beating their bounds in the most literal sense they soon drive him onwards to the land of their next neighbours. So the chase goes on from village to village, till the ghost has been finally hunted into the sea at the point of the shore which faces the setting sun. There at last the beaters throw away the stalks which have served to whack the ghost, and return home in the perfect assurance that he has left the island and gone to his own place down below, so that he cannot afflict anybody with the painful disease from which he suffered. But as for his ulcerated corpse rotting in the grave, they do not give a thought to it. Their concern is with the spiritual and the unseen; they do not stoop to regard the material and carnal.[577] [Sidenote: Special treatment of the ghosts of women who died in childbed.] A special treatment is accorded to the ghosts of women who died in childbed. If the mother dies and the child lives, her ghost will not go away to the nether world without taking the infant with her. Hence in order to deceive the ghost, they wrap a piece of a banana-trunk loosely in leaves and lay it on the bosom of the dead mother when they lower her into the grave. The ghost clasps the bundle to her breast, thinking it is her baby, and goes away contentedly to the spirit land. As she walks, the banana-stalk slips about in the leaves and she imagines it is the infant stirring; for she has not all her wits about her, ghosts being naturally in a dazed state at first on quitting their familiar bodies. But when she arrives in deadland and finds she has been deceived, and when perhaps some heartless ghosts even jeer at her wooden baby, back she comes tearing to earth in grief and rage to seek and carry off the real infant. However, the survivors know what to expect and have taken the precaution of removing the child to another house where the mother will never find it; but she keeps looking for it always, and a sad and angry ghost is she.[578] [Sidenote: Funeral feasts.] After the funeral follows a series, sometimes a long series, of funeral feasts, which form indeed one of the principal institutions of these islands. The number of the feasts and the length of time during which they are repeated vary much in the different islands, and depend also on the consideration in which the deceased was held. The days on which the feasts are celebrated are the fifth and the tenth after the death, and afterwards every tenth day up to the hundredth or even it may be, in the case of a father, a mother, or a wife, up to the thousandth day. These feasts appear now to be chiefly commemorative, but they also benefit the dead; for the ghost is naturally gratified by seeing that his friends remember him and do their duty by him so handsomely. At these banquets food is put aside for the dead with the words "This is for thee." The practice of thus setting aside food for the ghost at a series of funeral feasts appears at first sight, as Dr. Codrington observes, inconsistent with the theory that the ghosts live underground.[579] But the objection thus suggested is rather specious than real; for we must always bear in mind that, to judge from the accounts given of them in all countries, ghosts experience no practical difficulty in obtaining temporary leave of absence from the other world and coming to this one, so to say, on furlough for the purpose of paying a surprise visit to their sorrowing friends and relations. The thing is so well known that it would be at once superfluous and tedious to illustrate it at length; many examples have incidentally met us in the course of these lectures. [Sidenote: Funeral customs in Vaté or Efat. Old people buried alive.] The natives of Vaté or Efat, one of the New Hebrides, set up a great wailing at a death and scratched their faces till they streamed with blood. Bodies of the dead were buried. When a corpse was laid in the grave, a pig was brought to the place and its head was chopped off and thrown into the grave to be buried with the body. This, we are told, "was supposed to prevent disease spreading to other members of the family." Probably, in the opinion of the natives, the pig's head was a sop thrown to the ghost to keep him from coming and fetching away other people to deadland. With the same intention, we may take it, they buried with the dead the cups, pillows, and other things which he had used in his lifetime. On the top of the grave they kindled a fire to enable the soul of the deceased to rise to the sun. If that were not done, the soul went to the wretched regions of Pakasia down below. The old were buried alive at their own request. It was even deemed a disgrace to the family of an aged chief if they did not bury him alive. When an old man felt sick and weak and thought that he was dying, he would tell his friends to get all ready and bury him. They yielded to his wishes, dug a deep round pit, wound a number of fine mats round his body, and lowered him into the grave in a sitting posture. Live pigs were then brought to the brink of the grave, and each of them was tethered by a cord to one of the old man's arms. When the pigs had thus, as it were, been made over to him, the cords were cut, and the animals were led away to be killed, baked, and eaten at the funeral feast; but the souls of the pigs the old man took away with him to the spirit land, and the more of them he took the warmer and more gratifying was the reception he met with from the ghosts. Having thus ensured his eternal welfare by the pig strings which dangled at his arms, the old man was ready; more mats were laid over him, the earth was shovelled in, and his dying groans were drowned amid the weeping and wailing of his affectionate kinsfolk.[580] [Sidenote: Burial and mourning customs in Aurora, one of the New Hebrides. Behaviour of the soul at death.] At Maewo in Aurora, one of the New Hebrides, when a death has taken place, the body is buried in a grave near the village clubhouse. For a hundred days afterwards the female mourners may not go into the open and their faces may not be seen; they stay indoors and in the dark and cover themselves with a large mat reaching to the ground. But the widow goes every day, covered with her mat, to weep at the grave; this she does both in the morning and in the afternoon. During this time of mourning the next of kin may not eat certain succulent foods, such as yams, bananas, and caladium; they eat only the gigantic caladium, bread-fruit, coco-nuts, mallows, and so forth; "and all these they seek in the bush where they grow wild, not eating those which have been planted." They count five days after the death and then build up great heaps of stones over the grave. After that, if the deceased was a very great man, who owned many gardens and pigs, they count fifty days and then kill pigs, and cut off the point of the liver of each pig; and the brother of the deceased goes toward the forest and calls out the dead man's name, crying, "This is for you to eat." They think that if they do not kill pigs for the benefit of their departed friend, his ghost has no proper existence, but hangs miserably on tangled creepers. After the sacrifice they all cry again, smear their bodies and faces all over with ashes, and wear cords round their necks for a hundred days in token that they are not eating good food.[581] They imagine that as soon as the soul quits the body at death, it mounts into a tree where there is a bird's nest fern, and sitting there among the fronds it laughs and mocks at the people who are crying and making great lamentations over his deserted tabernacle. "There he sits, wondering at them and ridiculing them. 'What are they crying for?' he says; 'whom are they sorry for? Here am I.' For they think that the real thing is the soul, and that it has gone away from the body just as a man throws off his clothes and leaves them, and the clothes lie by themselves with nothing in them."[582] This estimate of the comparative value of soul and body is translated from the words of a New Hebridean native; it singularly resembles that which is sometimes held up to our admiration as one of the finest fruits of philosophy and religion. So narrow may be the line that divides the meditations of the savage and the sage. When a Maewo ghost has done chuckling at the folly of his surviving relatives, who sorrow as those who have no hope, he turns his back on his old home and runs along the line of hills till he comes to a place where there are two rocks with a deep ravine between them. He leaps the chasm, and if he lands on the further side, he is dead indeed; but if he falls short, he returns to life. At the land's end, where the mountains descend into the sea, all the ghosts of the dead are gathered to meet him. If in his lifetime he had slain any one by club or arrow, or done any man to death by magic, he must now run the gauntlet of the angry ghosts of his victims, who beat and tear him and stab him with daggers such as people stick pigs with; and as they do so, they taunt him, saying, "While you were still in the world you thought yourself a valiant man; but now we will take our revenge on you." At another point in the path there is a deep gully, where if a ghost falls he is inevitably dashed to pieces; and if he escapes this peril, there is a ferocious pig waiting for him further on, which devours the ghosts of all persons who in their life on earth omitted to plant pandanus trees, from which mats are made. But the wise man, who planted pandanus betimes, now reaps the fruit of his labours; for when the pig makes a rush at his departed spirit, the ghost nimbly swarms up the pandanus tree and so escapes his pursuer. That is why everybody in Maewo likes to plant pandanus trees. And if a man's ears were not pierced in his life, his ghost will not be allowed to drink water; if he was not tattooed, his ghost may not eat good food. A thoughtful father will provide for the comfort of his children in the other world by building a miniature house for each of them in his garden when the child is a year old; if the infant is a boy, he puts a bow, an arrow, and a club in the little house; if the child is a girl, he plants pandanus for her beside the tiny dwelling.[583] [Sidenote: Only ghosts of powerful men are worshipped.] So much for the fate of common ghosts in Central Melanesia. We have now to consider the position of the more powerful spirits, who after death are believed to exercise great influence over the living, especially over their surviving relations, and who have accordingly to be propitiated with prayer and sacrifice. This worship of the dead, as we saw, forms the principal feature in the religion of the Solomon Islanders. "But it must not be supposed," says Dr. Codrington, "that every ghost becomes an object of worship. A man in danger may call upon his father, his grandfather, or his uncle: his nearness of kin is sufficient ground for it. The ghost who is to be worshipped is the spirit of a man who in his lifetime had _mana_ [supernatural or magical power] in him; the souls of common men are the common herd of ghosts, nobodies alike before and after death. The supernatural power abiding in the powerful living man abides in his ghost after death, with increased vigour and more ease of movement. After his death, therefore, it is expected that he should begin to work, and some one will come forward and claim particular acquaintance with the ghost; if his power should shew itself, his position is assured as one worthy to be invoked, and to receive offerings, till his cultus gives way before the rising importance of one newly dead, and the sacred place where his shrine once stood and his relics were preserved is the only memorial of him that remains; if no proof of his activity appears, he sinks into oblivion at once."[584] [Sidenote: Worship paid chiefly to the recent and well-remembered dead.] From this instructive account we learn that worship is paid chiefly to the recent and well-remembered dead, to the men whom the worshippers knew personally and feared or respected in their lifetime. On the other hand, when men have been long dead, and all who knew them have also been gathered to their fathers, their memory fades away and with it their worship gradually falls into complete desuetude. Thus the spirits who receive the homage of these savages were real men of flesh and blood, not mythical beings conjured up by the fancy of their worshippers, which some legerdemain of the mind has foisted into the shrine and encircled with the halo of divinity. Not that the Melanesians do not also worship beings who, so far as we can see, are purely mythical, though their worshippers firmly believe in their reality. But "they themselves make a clear distinction between the existing, conscious, powerful disembodied spirits of the dead, and other spiritual beings that never have been men at all. It is true that the two orders of beings get confused in native language and thought, but their confusion begins at one end and the confusion of their visitors at another; they think so much and constantly of ghosts that they speak of beings who were never men as ghosts; Europeans take the spirits of the lately dead for gods; less educated Europeans call them roundly devils."[585] [Sidenote: Way in which a dead warrior came to be worshipped as a martial ghost.] As an example of the way in which the ghost of a real man who has just died may come to be worshipped Dr. Codrington tells us the story of Ganindo, which he had from Bishop Selwyn. This Ganindo was a great fighting man of Honggo in Florida, one of the Solomon Islands. He went with other warriors on a head-hunting expedition against Gaeta; but being mortally wounded with an arrow near the collar-bone he was brought back by his comrades to the hill of Bonipari, where he died and was buried. His friends cut off his head, put it in a basket, built a house for it, and said that he was a worshipful ghost (_tindalo_). Afterwards they said, "Let us go and take heads." So they embarked on their canoe and paddled away to seek the heads of enemies. When they came to quiet water, they stopped paddling and waited till they felt the canoe rock under them, and when they felt it they said, "That is a ghost." To find out what particular ghost it was they called out the names of several, and when they came to the name of Ganindo, the canoe rocked again. So they knew that it was he who was making the canoe to rock. In like manner they learned what village they were to attack. Returning victorious with the heads of the foe they threw a spear into the roof of Ganindo's house, blew conch-shells, and danced round it, crying, "Our ghost is strong to kill!" Then they sacrificed fish and other food to him. Also they built him a new house, and made four images of him for the four corners, one of Ganindo himself, two of his sisters, and another. When it was all ready, eight men translated the relics to the new shrine. One of them carried Ganindo's bones, another his betel-nuts, another his lime-box, another his shell-trumpet. They all went into the shrine crouching down, as if burdened by a heavy weight, and singing in chorus, "Hither, hither, let us lift the leg!" At that the eight legs went up together, and then they sang, "Hither, hither!" and at that the eight legs went down together. In this solemn procession the relics were brought and laid on a bamboo platform, and sacrifices to the new martial ghost were inaugurated. Other warlike ghosts revered in Florida are known not to have been natives of the island but famous warriors of the western isles, where supernatural power is believed to be stronger.[586] [Sidenote: Offerings to the dead.] Throughout the islands of Central Melanesia prayers and offerings are everywhere made to ghosts or spirits or to both. The simplest and commonest sacrificial act is that of throwing a small portion of food to the dead; this is probably a universal practice in Melanesia. A morsel of food ready to be eaten, for example of yam, a leaf of mallow, or a bit of betel-nut, is thrown aside; and where they drink kava, a libation is made of a few drops, as the share of departed friends or as a memorial of them with which they will be pleased. At the same time the offerer may call out the name of some one who either died lately or is particularly remembered at the time; or without the special mention of individuals he may make the offering generally to the ghosts of former members of the community. To set food on a burial-place or before some memorial image is a common practice, though in some places, as in Santa Cruz, the offering is soon taken away and eaten by the living.[587] [Sidenote: Sacrificial ritual in the Solomon Islands.] In the Solomon Islands the sacrificial ritual is more highly developed. It may be described in the words of a native of San Cristoval. "In my country," he wrote, "they think that ghosts are many, very many indeed, some very powerful, and some not. There is one who is principal in war; this one is truly mighty and strong. When our people wish to fight with any other place, the chief men of the village and the sacrificers and the old men, and the elder and younger men, assemble in the place sacred to this ghost; and his name is Harumae. When they are thus assembled to sacrifice, the chief sacrificer goes and takes a pig; and if it be not a barrow pig they would not sacrifice it to that ghost, he would reject it and not eat of it. The pig is killed (it is strangled), not by the chief sacrificer, but by those whom he chooses to assist, near the sacred place. Then they cut it up; they take great care of the blood lest it should fall upon the ground; they bring a bowl and set the pig in it, and when they cut it up the blood runs down into it. When the cutting up is finished, the chief sacrificer takes a bit of flesh from the pig, and he takes a cocoa-nut shell and dips up some of the blood. Then he takes the blood and the bit of flesh and enters into the house (the shrine), and calls that ghost and says, 'Harumae! Chief in war! we sacrifice to you with this pig, that you may help us to smite that place; and whatsoever we shall carry away shall be your property, and we also will be yours.' Then he burns the bit of flesh in a fire upon a stone, and pours down the blood upon the fire. Then the fire blazes greatly upwards to the roof, and the house is full of the smell of pig, a sign that the ghost has heard. But when the sacrificer went in he did not go boldly, but with awe; and this is the sign of it; as he goes into the holy house he puts away his bag, and washes his hands thoroughly, to shew that the ghost shall not reject him with disgust." The pig was afterwards eaten. It should be observed that this Harumae who received sacrifices as a martial ghost, mighty in war, had not been dead many years when the foregoing account of the mode of sacrificing to him was written. The elder men remembered him alive, nor was he a great warrior, but a kind and generous man, believed to be plentifully endowed with supernatural power. His shrine was a small house in the village, where relics of him were preserved.[588] Had the Melanesians been left to themselves, it seems possible that this Harumae might have developed into the war-god of San Cristoval, just as in Central Africa another man of flesh and blood is known to have developed into the war-god of Uganda.[589] [Footnote 552: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_ (Oxford, 1891), pp. 122, 123, 124, 180 _sq._] [Footnote 553: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_ (Oxford, 1891), pp. 247, 253.] [Footnote 554: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ p. 248.] [Footnote 555: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 255 _sqq_., 264 _sqq_.] [Footnote 556: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ 253 _sq_.] [Footnote 557: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 254, 258, 261; compare _id._, pp. 125, 130.] [Footnote 558: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 120, 254.] [Footnote 559: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 118 _sqq._] [Footnote 560: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 254 _sq._] [Footnote 561: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 258 _sq._] [Footnote 562: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ p. 255.] [Footnote 563: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ p. 259.] [Footnote 564: G. Brown, D.D., _Melanesians and Polynesians_ (London, 1910), pp. 214, 217.] [Footnote 565: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ p. 255.] [Footnote 566: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 255 _sq._] [Footnote 567: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 256 _sq._] [Footnote 568: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 260 _sq._] [Footnote 569: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 261 _sq._] [Footnote 570: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 263 _sq._] [Footnote 571: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ p. 257.] [Footnote 572: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 264, 273 _sq._, 275-277.] [Footnote 573: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 274 _sq._] [Footnote 574: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 266, 276, 277, 286.] [Footnote 575: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 267-270.] [Footnote 576: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ p. 269.] [Footnote 577: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 270 _sq._] [Footnote 578: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, p. 275.] [Footnote 579: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 271 _sq._] [Footnote 580: G. Turner, _Samoa a Hundred Years Ago and long before_ (London, 1884), pp. 335 _sq._ This account is based on information furnished by Sualo, a Samoan teacher, who lived for a long time on the island. The statement that the fire kindled on the grave was intended "to enable the soul of the departed to rise to the sun" may be doubted; it may be a mere inference of Dr. Turner's Samoan informant. More probably the fire was intended to warm the shivering ghost. I do not remember any other evidence that the souls of the Melanesian dead ascend to the sun; certainly it is much more usual for them to descend into the earth.] [Footnote 581: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 281 _sq._] [Footnote 582: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 278 _sq._] [Sidenote: Journey of the ghost to the other world.] [Footnote 583: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 279 _sq._] [Footnote 584: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 124 _sq._] [Footnote 585: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, p. 121.] [Footnote 586: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 125 _sqq._] [Footnote 587: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 127, 128.] [Footnote 588: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 129 _sq._] [Footnote 589: Rev. J. Roscoe, "Kibuka, the War God of the Baganda," _Man_, vii. (1907) pp. 161-166; _id._, _The Baganda_ (London, 1911), pp. 301 _sqq._ The history of this African war-god is more or less mythical, but his personal relics, which are now deposited in the Ethnological Museum at Cambridge, suffice to prove his true humanity.] LECTURE XVII THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF CENTRAL MELANESIA (_concluded_) [Sidenote: Public sacrifices to ghosts in the Solomon Islands.] At the close of last lecture I described the mode in which sacrifices are offered to a martial ghost in San Cristoval, one of the Solomon Islands. We saw that the flesh of a pig is burned in honour of the ghost and that the victim's blood is poured on the flames. Similarly in Florida, another of the Solomon Islands, food is conveyed to worshipful ghosts by being burned in the fire. Some ghosts are known by name to everybody, others may be known only to individuals, who have found out or been taught how to approach them, and who accordingly regard such ghosts as their private property. In every village a public ghost is worshipped, and the chief is the sacrificer. He has learned from his predecessor how to throw or heave the sacrifice, and he imparts this knowledge to his son or nephew, whom he intends to leave as his successor. The place of sacrifice is an enclosure with a little house or shrine in which the relics are kept; it is new or old according as the man whose ghost is worshipped died lately or long ago. When a public sacrifice is performed, the people assemble near but not in the sacred place; boys but not women may be present. The sacrificer alone enters the shrine, but he takes with him his son or other person whom he has instructed in the ritual. Muttering an incantation he kindles a fire of sticks, but may not blow on the holy flame. Then from a basket he takes some prepared food, such as a mash of yams, and throws it on the fire, calling out the name of the ghost and bidding him take his food, while at the same time he prays for whatever is desired. If the fire blazes up and consumes the food, it is a good sign; it proves that the ghost is present and that he is blowing up the flame. The remainder of the food the sacrificer takes back to the assembled people; some of it he eats himself and some of it he gives to his assistant to eat. The people receive their portions of the food at his hands and eat it or take it away. While the sacrificing is going on, there is a solemn silence. If a pig is killed, the portion burned in the sacrificial fire is the heart in Florida, but the gullet at Bugotu. One ghost who is commonly known and worshipped is called Manoga. When the sacrificer invokes this ghost, he heaves the sacrifice round about and calls him, first to the east, where rises the sun, saying, "If thou dwellest in the east, where rises the sun, Manoga! come hither and eat thy _tutu_ mash!" Then turning he lifts it towards where sets the sun, and says, "If thou dwellest in the west, where sets the sun, Manoga! come hither and eat thy _tutu_!" There is not a quarter to which he does not lift it up. And when he has finished lifting it he says, "If thou dwellest in heaven above, Manoga! come hither and eat thy _tutu_! If thou dwellest in the Pleiades or Orion's belt; if below in Turivatu; if in the distant sea; if on high in the sun, or in the moon; if thou dwellest inland or by the shore, Manoga! come hither and eat thy _tutu_!"[590] [Sidenote: First-fruits of the canarium nuts sacrificed to ghosts.] Twice a year there are general sacrifices in which the people of a village take part. One of these occasions is when the canarium nut, so much used in native cookery, is ripe. None of the nuts may be eaten till the first-fruits have been offered to the ghost. "Devil he eat first; all man he eat behind," is the lucid explanation which a native gave to an English enquirer. The knowledge of the way in which the first-fruits must be offered is handed down from generation to generation, and the man who is learned in this lore has authority to open the season. He observes the state of the crop, and early one morning he is heard to shout. He climbs a tree, picks some nuts, cracks them, eats, and puts some on the stones in his sacred place for the ghost. Then the rest of the people may gather the nuts for themselves. The chief himself sacrifices the new nuts, mixed with other food, to the public ghost on the stones of the village sanctuary; and every man who has a private ghost of his own does the same in his own sacred place. About two months afterwards there is another public sacrifice when the root crops generally have been dug; pig or fish is then offered; and a man who digs up his yams, or whatever it may be, offers his private sacrifice besides.[591] [Sidenote: Sacrifice of first-fruits to ancestral spirits in Tanna.] In like manner the natives of Tanna, one of the Southern New Hebrides, offered the first-fruits to the deified spirits of their ancestors. On this subject I will quote the evidence of the veteran missionary, the Rev. Dr. George Turner, who lived in Tanna for seven months in 1841. He says: "The general name for gods seemed to be _aremha_; that means a _dead man_, and hints alike at the origin and nature of their religious worship. The spirits of their departed ancestors were among their gods. Chiefs who reach an advanced age were after death deified, addressed by name, and prayed to on various occasions. They were supposed especially to preside over the growth of the yams and the different fruit trees. The first-fruits were presented to them, and in doing this they laid a little of the fruit on some stone, or shelving branch of the tree, or some more temporary altar of a few rough sticks from the bush, lashed together with strips of bark, in the form of a table, with its four feet stuck in the ground. All being quiet, the chief acted as high priest, and prayed aloud thus: 'Compassionate father! here is some food for you; eat it; be kind to us on account of it.' And, instead of an _amen_, all united in a shout. This took place about mid-day, and afterwards those who were assembled continued together feasting and dancing till midnight or three in the morning."[592] [Sidenote: Private ghosts. Fighting ghosts kept as auxiliaries.] In addition to the public ghosts, each of whom is revered by a whole village, many a man keeps, so to say, a private or tame ghost of his own on leash. The art of taming a ghost consists in knowing the leaves, bark, and vines in which he delights and in treating him accordingly. This knowledge a man may acquire by the exercise of his natural faculties or he may learn it from somebody else. However he may obtain the knowledge, he uses it for his own personal advantage, sacrificing to the ghost in order to win his favour and get something from him in return. The mode of sacrificing to a private ghost is the same as to a public ghost. The owner has a sacred place or private chapel of his own, where he draws near to the ghost in prayer and burns his bit of food in the fire. A man often keeps a fighting ghost (_keramo_), who helps him in battle or in slaying his private enemy. Before he goes out to commit homicide, he pulls up his ginger-plant and judges from the ease or difficulty with which the plant yields to or resists his tug, whether he will succeed in the enterprise or not. Then he sacrifices to the ghost, and having placed some ginger and leaves on his shield, and stuffed some more in his belt and right armlet, he sallies forth. He curses his enemy by his fighting ghost, saying, "Siria (if that should be the name of the ghost) eats thee, and I shall slay thee"; and if he kills him, he cries to the ghost, "Thine is this man, Siria, and do thou give me supernatural power!" No prudent Melanesian would attempt to commit manslaughter without a ghost as an accomplice; to do so would be to court disaster, for the slain man's ghost would have power over the slayer; therefore before he imbrues his hands in blood he deems it desirable to secure the assistance of a valiant ghost who can, if need be, overcome the ghost of his victim in single combat. If he cannot procure such a useful auxiliary in any other way, he must purchase him. Further, he fortifies himself with some personal relic, such as a tooth or lock of hair of the deceased warrior, whose ghost he has taken into his service; this relic he wears as an amulet in a little bag round the neck, when he is on active service; at other times it is kept in the house.[593] [Sidenote: Garden ghosts.] Different from these truculent spirits are the peaceful ghosts who cause the garden to bear fruit. If the gardener happens to know such a ghost, he can pray and sacrifice to him on his own account; but if he has no such friend in the spirit world, he must employ an expert. The man of skill goes into the midst of the garden with a little mashed food in his left hand, and smiting it with his right hand he calls on the ghost to come and eat. He says: "This produce thou shall eat; give supernatural power (_mana_) to this garden, that food may be good and plentiful." He digs holes at the four corners of the garden, and in them he buries such leaves as the ghost loves, so that the garden may have ghostly power and be fruitful. And when the yams sprout, he twines them with the particular creeper and fastens them with the particular wood to which the ghost is known to be partial. These agricultural ghosts are very sensitive; if a man enters the garden, who has just eaten pork or cuscus or fish or shell-fish, the ghost of the garden manifests his displeasure by causing the produce of the garden to droop; but if the eater lets three or four days go by after his meal, he may then enter the garden with impunity, for the food has left his stomach. For a similar reason, apparently, when the yam vines are being trained, the men sleep near the gardens and never approach their wives; for should they tread the garden after conjugal intercourse, the yams would be blighted.[594] [Sidenote: Human sacrifices to ghosts.] Sometimes the favour of a ghost is obtained by human sacrifices. On these occasions the flesh of the victim does not, like the flesh of a pig, furnish the materials of a sacrificial banquet; but little bits of it are eaten by young men to improve their fighting power and by elders for a special purpose. Such sacrifices are deemed more effectual than the sacrifices of less precious victims; and advantage was sometimes taken of a real or imputed crime to offer the criminal to some ghost. So, for example, within living memory Dikea, chief of Ravu, convicted a certain man of stealing tobacco, and sentenced him to be sacrificed; and the grown lads ate pieces of him cooked in the sacrificial fire. Again, the same chief offered another human sacrifice in the year 1886. One of his wives had proved false, and he sent her away vowing that she should not return till he had offered a human sacrifice to Hauri. Also his son died, and he vowed to kill a man for him. The vow was noised abroad, and everybody knew that he would pay well for somebody to kill. Now the Savo people had bought a captive boy in Guadalcanar, but it turned out a bad bargain, for the boy was lame and nearly blind. So they brought him to Dikea, and he gave them twenty coils of shell money for the lad. Then the chief laid his hand on the victim's breast and cried, "Hauri! here is a man for you," and his followers killed him with axes and clubs. The cripple's skull was added to the chief's collection, and his legs were sent about the country to make known what had been done. In Bugotu of Ysabel, when the people had slain an enemy in fight, they used to bring back his head in triumph, cut slices off it, and burn them in sacrifice. And if they took a prisoner alive, they would bring him to the sacred place, the grave of the man whose ghost was to be honoured. There they bound him hand and foot and buffeted him till he died, or if he did not die under the buffets they cut his throat. As they beat the man with their fists, they called on the ghost to take him, and when he was dead, they burned a bit of him in the fire for the ghost.[595] [Sidenote: Sacrifices to ghosts in Saa.] At Saa in Malanta, one of the Solomon Islands, sacrifices are offered to ghosts on various occasions. Thus on his return from a voyage a man will put food in the case which contains the relics of his dead father; and in the course of his voyage, if he should land in a desert isle, he will throw food and call on father, grandfather, and other deceased friends. Again, when sickness is ascribed to the anger of a ghost, a man of skill is sent for to discover what particular ghost is doing the mischief. When he has ascertained the culprit, he is furnished by the patient's relatives with a little pig, which he is to sacrifice to the ghost as a substitute for the sick man. Provided with this vicarious victim he repairs to the haunt of the ghost, strangles the animal, and burns it whole in a fire along with grated yam, coco-nut, and fish. As he does so, he calls out the names of all the ghosts of his family, his ancestors, and all who are deceased, down even to children and women, and he names the man who furnished the pig for the ghostly repast. A portion of the mixed food he preserves unburnt, wraps it in a dracaena leaf, and puts it beside the case which contains the relics of the man to whose ghost the sacrifice has been offered. Sometimes, however, instead of burning a pig in the fire, which is an expensive and wasteful form of sacrifice, the relatives of the sick man content themselves with cooking a pig or a dog in the oven, cutting up the carcase, and laying out all the parts in order. Then the sacrificer comes and sits at the animal's head, and calls out the names of all the dead members of the ghost's family in order downwards, saying, "Help, deliver this man, cut short the line that has bound him." Then the pig is eaten by all present except the women; nothing is burnt.[596] [Sidenote: Sacrifices of first-fruits to ghosts in Saa.] The last sort of sacrifices to ghosts at Saa which we need notice is the sacrifice of first-fruits. Thus, when the yams are ripe the people fetch some of them from each garden to offer to the ghosts. All the male members of the family assemble at the holy place which belongs to them. Then one of them enters the shrine, lays a yam beside the skull which lies there, and cries with a loud voice to the ghost, "This is yours to eat." The others call quietly on the names of all the ancestors and give their yams, which are very many in number, because one from each garden is given to each ghost. If any man has besides a relic of the dead, such as a skull, bones, or hair, in his house, he takes home a yam and sets it beside the relic. Again, the first flying-fish of the season are sacrificed to ghosts, who may take the form of sharks; for we shall see presently that Melanesian ghosts are sometimes supposed to inhabit the bodies of these ferocious monsters. Some ghost-sharks have sacred places ashore, where figures of sharks are set up. In that case the first flying-fish are cooked and set before the shark images. But it may be that a shark ghost has no sacred place on land, and then there is nothing for it but to take the flying-fish out to sea and shred them into the water, while the sacrificer calls out the name of the particular ghost whom he desires to summon to the feast.[597] [Sidenote: Vicarious sacrifices for the sick.] Vicarious sacrifices for the sick are offered in San Cristoval to a certain malignant ghost called Tapia, who is believed to seize a man's soul and tie it up to a banyan tree. When that has happened, a man who knows how to manage Tapia intercedes with him. He takes a pig or fish to the sacred place and offers it to the grim ghost, saying, "This is for you to eat in place of that man; eat this, don't kill him." With that he can loose the captive soul and take it back to the sick man, who thereupon recovers.[598] [Sidenote: Sacrifices to ghosts in Santa Cruz. The dead represented by a stock.] In Santa Cruz the sacrifices offered to ghosts are very economical; for if the offering is of food, the living eat it up after a decent interval; if it is a valuable, they remove it and resume the use of it themselves. The principle of this spiritual economy probably lies in the common belief that ghosts, being immaterial, absorb the immaterial essence of the objects, leaving the material substance to be enjoyed by men. When a man of mark dies in Santa Cruz, his relations set up a stock of wood in his house to represent him. This is renewed from time to time, till after a while the man is forgotten or thrown into the shade by the attractions of some newer ghost, so that the old stock is neglected. But when the stock is first put up, a pig is killed and two strips of flesh from the back bone are set before the stock as food for the ghost, but only to be soon taken away and eaten by the living. Similar offerings may be repeated from time to time, as when the stock is renewed. Again, when a garden is planted, they spread feather-money and red native cloth round it for the use of the ghost; but his enjoyment of these riches is brief and precarious.[599] [Sidenote: Native account of sacrifices to ghosts in Santa Cruz.] To supplement the foregoing account of sacrifices to ghosts in Santa Cruz, I will add a description of some of them which was given by a native of Santa Cruz in his own language and translated for us by a missionary. It runs thus: "When anyone begins to fall sick he seeks a doctor (_meduka_), and when the doctor comes near the sick man he stiffens his body, and all those in the house think a ghost has entered into the doctor, and they are all very quiet. Some doctors tell the sick man's relatives to kill a pig for the ghost who has caused the sickness. When they have killed the pig they take it into the ghost-house and invite some other men, and they eat with prayers to the ghost; and the doctor takes a little piece and puts it near the base of the ghost-post, and says to it: 'This is thy food; oh, deliver up again the spirit of thy servant, that he may be well again.' The little portion they have offered to the ghost is then eaten; but small boys may not eat of it."[600] "Every year the people plant yams and tomagos; and when they begin to work and have made ready the place and begun to plant, first, they offer to the ghost who they think presides over foods. There is an offering place in the bush, and they go there and take much food, and also feather money. Men, women, and children do this, and they think the ghost notices if there are many children, and gives much food at harvest; and the ghost to whom they offer is named Ilene. When the bread-fruit begins to bear they take great care lest anyone should light a fire near the bole of the tree, or throw a stone at the tree. The ghost, who they think protects the bread-fruit, is called Duka-Kane or Kae Tuabia, who has two names; they think this ghost has four eyes."[601] "The heathen thinks a ghost makes the sun to shine and the rain. If it is continual sunshine and the yams are withering the people assemble together and contribute money, and string it to the man with whom the rain-ghost abides, and food also, and beseech him not to do the thing he was doing. That man will not wash his face for a long time, he will not work lest he perspire and his body be wet, for he thinks that if his body be wet it will rain. Then this man, with whom the rain-ghost is, takes water and goes into the ghost-house and sprinkles it at the head of the ghost-post (_duka_), and if there are many ghost-posts in the house he pours water over them all that it may rain."[602] [Sidenote: Combination of magic with religion.] In these ceremonies for the making of rain we see a combination of magic with religion. The appeal to the rain-ghost is religious; but the pouring of the water on the ghost-post is magical, being an imitation of the result which the officiating priest or magician, whichever we choose to call him, desires to produce. The taboos observed by the owner of the rain-ghost so long as he wishes to prevent the rain from falling are also based on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic: he abstains from washing his face or working, lest the water or the sweat trickling down his body should mimick rain and thereby cause it to fall.[603] [Sidenote: Prayers to the dead.] The natives of Aneiteum, one of the Southern New Hebrides, worshipped the spirits of their ancestors, chiefly on occasions of sickness.[604] Again, the people of Vaté or Efat, another of the New Hebrides, worshipped the souls of their forefathers and prayed to them over the _kava_-bowl for health and prosperity.[605] As an example of prayers offered to the dead we may take the petition which the natives of Florida put up at sea to Daula, a well-known ghost, who is associated with the frigate-bird. They say: "Do thou draw the canoe, that it may reach the land; speed my canoe, grandfather, that I may quickly reach the shore whither I am bound. Do thou, Daula, lighten the canoe, that it may quickly gain the land and rise upon the shore." They also invoke Daula to help them in fishing. "If thou art powerful, O Daula," they say, "put a fish or two into this net and let them die there." After a good catch they praise him, saying, "Powerful is the ghost of the net." And when the natives of Florida are in danger on the sea, they call upon their immediate forefathers; one will call on his grandfather, another on his father, another on some dead friend, calling with reverence and saying, "Save us on the deep! Save us from the tempest! Bring us to the shore!" In San Cristoval people apply to ghosts for victory in battle, health in sickness, and good crops; but the word which they use to signify such an application conveys the notion of charm rather than of prayer. However, in the Banks' Islands what may be called prayer is strictly speaking an invocation of the dead; indeed the very word for prayer (_tataro_) seems to be identical with that for a powerful ghost (_'ataro_ in San Cristoval). A man in peril on the sea will call on his dead friends, especially on one who was in his lifetime a good sailor. And in Mota, when an oven is opened, they throw in a leaf of cooked mallow for a ghost, saying to him, "This is a lucky bit for your eating; they who have charmed your food or clubbed you (as the case may be), take hold of their hands, drag them away to hell, let them be dead." So when they pour water on the oven, they pray to the ghost, saying, "Pour it on the head of him down there who has laid plots against me, has clubbed me, has shot me, has stolen things of mine (as the case may be), he shall die." Again, when they make a libation before drinking, they pray, saying, "Grandfather! this is your lucky drop of kava; let boars come in to me; the money I have spent, let it come back to me; the food that is gone, let it come back hither to the house of you and me." And on starting for a voyage they will say, "Uncle! father! plenty of boars for you, plenty of money; kava for your drinking, lucky food for your eating in the canoe. I pray you with this, look down upon me, let me go on a safe sea." Or when the canoe labours with a heavy freight, they will pray, "Take off your burden from us, that we may speed on a safe sea."[606] [Sidenote: Sanctuaries of ghosts in Florida.] In the island of Florida, the sanctuary of a powerful ghost is called a _vunuhu_. Sometimes it is in the village, sometimes in the garden-ground, sometimes in the forest. If it is in the village, it is fenced about, lest the foot of any rash intruder should infringe its sanctity. Sometimes the sanctuary is the place where the dead man is buried; sometimes it merely contains his relics, which have been translated thither. In some sanctuaries there is a shrine and in some an image. Generally, if not always, stones may be seen lying in such a holy place. The sight of one of them has probably struck the fancy of the man who founded the worship; he thought it a likely place for the ghost to haunt, and other smaller stones and shells have been subsequently added. Once a sanctuary has been established, everything within it becomes sacred (_tambu_) and belongs to the ghost. Were a tree growing within it to fall across the path, nobody would step over it. When a sacrifice is to be offered to the ghost on the holy ground, the man who knows the ghost, and whose duty it is to perform the sacrifice, enters first and all who attend him follow, treading in his footsteps. In going out no one will look back, lest his soul should stay behind. No one would pass such a sanctuary when the sun was so low as to cast his shadow into it; for if he did the ghost would seize his shadow and so drag the man himself into his den. If there were a shrine in the sanctuary, nobody but the sacrificer might enter it. Such a shrine contained the weapons and other properties which belonged in his lifetime to the man whose ghost was worshipped on the spot.[607] [Sidenote: Sanctuaries of ghosts in Malanta.] At Saa in Malanta, another of the Solomon Islands, all burial-grounds where common people are interred are so far sacred that no one will go there without due cause; but places where the remains of nobles repose, and where sacrifices are offered to their ghosts, are regarded with very great respect, they may indeed be called family sanctuaries. Some of them are very old, the powerful ghosts who are worshipped in them being remote ancestors. It sometimes happens that the man who used to sacrifice in such a place dies without having instructed his son in the proper chant of invocation with which the worshipful ghost should be approached. In such a case the young man who succeeds him may fear to go to the old sanctuary, lest he should commit a mistake and offend the ghost; so he will take some ashes from the old sacrificial fire-place and found a new sanctuary. It is not common in that part of Malanta to build shrines for the relics of the dead, but it is sometimes done. Such shrines, on the other hand, are common in the villages of San Cristoval and in the sacred places of that island where great men lie buried. To trespass on them would be likely to rouse the anger of the ghosts, some of whom are known to be of a malignant disposition.[608] [Sidenote: Sanctuaries which are not burial-grounds.] But burial-grounds are not the only sanctuaries in the Solomon Islands. There are some where no dead man is known to be interred, though in Dr. Codrington's opinion there are probably none which do not derive their sanctity from the presence of a ghost. In the island of Florida the appearance of something wonderful will cause any place to become a sanctuary, the wonder being accepted as proof of a ghostly presence. For example, in the forest near Olevuga a man planted some coco-nut and almond trees and died not long afterwards. Then there appeared among the trees a great rarity in the shape of a white cuscus. The people took it for granted that the animal was the dead man's ghost, and therefore they called it by his name. The place became a sanctuary; no one would gather the coco-nuts and almonds that grew there, till two Christian converts set the ghost at defiance and appropriated his garden, with the coco-nuts and almonds. Through the same part of the forest ran a stream full of eels, one of which was so big that the people were quite sure it must be a ghost; so nobody would bathe in that stream or drink from it, except at one pool, which for the sake of convenience was considered not to be sacred. Again, in Bugotu, a district of Ysabel, which is another of the Solomon Islands, there is a pool known to be the haunt of a very old ghost. When a man has an enemy whom he wishes to harm he will obtain some scraps of his food and throw them into the water. If the food is at once devoured by the fish, which swarm in the pool, the man will die, but otherwise his life may be saved by the intervention of a man who knows the habits of the ghost and how to propitiate him. In these sacred places there are stones, on which people place food in order to obtain good crops, while for success in fishing they deposit morsels of cooked fish. Such stones are treated with reverence and seem to be in a fair way to develop into altars. However, when the old ghost is superseded, as he often is, by younger rivals, the development of an altar out of the stones is arrested.[609] [Sidenote: Ghosts in animals, such as sharks, alligators, snakes, bonitos, and frigate-birds.] From some of these instances we learn that Melanesian ghosts can sometimes take up their abode in animals, such as cuscuses, eels, and fish. The creatures which are oftenest used as vehicles by the spirits of the dead are sharks, alligators, snakes, bonitos, and frigate-birds. Snakes which haunt a sacred place are themselves sacred, because they belong to or actually embody the ghost. Sharks, again, in all these islands are very often thought to be the abode of ghosts; for men before their death will announce that they will appear as sharks, and afterwards any shark remarkable for size or colour which haunts a certain shore or coast is taken to be somebody's ghost and receives the name of the deceased. At Saa certain food, such as coco-nuts from particular trees, is reserved to feed such a ghost-shark; and men of whom it is known for certain that they will be sharks after their death are allowed to anticipate the posthumous honours which await them by devouring such food in the sacred place, just as if they were real sharks. Sharks are very commonly believed to be the abode of ghosts in Florida and Ysabel, and in Savo, where they are particularly numerous; hence, though all sharks are not venerated, there is no living creature so commonly held sacred by the Central Melanesians as a shark; and shark-ghosts seem even to form a class of powerful supernatural beings. Again, when a lizard was seen frequenting a house after a death, it would be taken for the ghost returning to its old home; and many ghosts, powerful to aid the mariner at sea, take up their quarters in frigate-birds.[610] [Sidenote: The belief in ghosts underlies the Melanesian conception of magic.] Again, a belief in powerful ghosts underlies to a great extent the Melanesian conception of magic, as that conception is expounded by Dr. Codrington. "That invisible power," he tells us, "which is believed by the natives to cause all such effects as transcend their conception of the regular course of nature, and to reside in spiritual beings, whether in the spiritual part of living men or in the ghosts of the dead, being imparted by them to their names and to various things that belong to them, such as stones, snakes, and indeed objects of all sorts, is that generally known as _mana_. Without some understanding of this it is impossible to understand the religious beliefs and practices of the Melanesians; and this again is the active force in all they do and believe to be done in magic, white or black. By means of this men are able to control or direct the forces of nature, to make rain or sunshine, wind or calm, to cause sickness or remove it, to know what is far off in time and space, to bring good luck and prosperity, or to blast and curse. No man, however, has this power of his own; all that he does is done by the aid of personal beings, ghosts or spirits."[611] [Sidenote: Illness generally thought to be caused by ghosts.] Thus, to begin with the medical profession, which is a branch of magic long before it becomes a department of science, every serious sickness is believed to be brought about by ghosts or spirits, but generally it is to the ghosts of the dead that illness is ascribed both by the Eastern and by the Western islanders. Hence recourse is had to ghosts for aid both in causing and in curing sickness. They are thought to inflict disease, not only because some offence, such as trespass, has been committed against them, or because one who knows their ways has instigated them thereto by sacrifice and spells, but because there is a certain malignity in the feeling of all ghosts towards the living, who offend them simply by being alive. All human faculties, apart from the mere bodily functions, are supposed to be enhanced by death; hence the ghost of a powerful and ill-natured man is only too ready to take advantage of his increased powers for mischief.[612] Thus in the island of Florida illness is regularly laid at the door of a ghost; the only question that can arise is which particular ghost is doing the mischief. Sometimes the patient imagines that he has offended his dead father, uncle, or brother, who accordingly takes his revenge by stretching him on a bed of sickness. In that case no special intercessor is required; the patient himself or one of his kinsfolk will sacrifice and beg the ghost to take the sickness away; it is purely a family affair. Sometimes the sick man thinks that it is his own private or tame ghost who is afflicting him; so he will leave the house in order to escape his tormentor. But if the cause of sickness remains obscure, a professional doctor or medicine-man will be consulted. He always knows, or at least can ascertain, the ghost who is causing all the trouble, and he takes his measures accordingly. Thus he will bind on the sick man the kind of leaves that the ghost loves; he will chew ginger and blow it into the patient's ears and on that part of the skull which is soft in infants; he will call on the name of the ghost and entreat him to remove the sickness. Should all these remedies prove vain, the doctor is by no means at the end of his resources. He may shrewdly suspect that somebody, who has an ill-will at the patient, has set his private ghost to maul the sick man and do him a grievous bodily injury. If his suspicions are confirmed and he discovers the malicious man who is egging on the mischievous ghost, he will bribe him to call off his ghost; and if the man refuses, the doctor will hire another ghost to assault and batter the original assailant. At Wango in San Cristoval regular battles used to be fought by the invisible champions above the sickbed of the sufferer, whose life or death depended on the issue of the combat. Their weapons were spears, and sometimes more than one ghost would be engaged on either side.[613] [Sidenote: Diagnosis of ghosts who have caused illness.] In Ysabel the doctor employs an ingenious apparatus for discovering the cause of sickness and ascertaining its cure. He suspends a stone at one end of a string while he holds the other end in his hand. Then he recites the names of all the people who died lately, and when the stone swings at anybody's name, he knows that the ghost of that man has caused the illness. It remains to find out what the ghost will take to relax his clutch on the sick man, it may be a mash of yams, a fish, a pig, or perhaps a human substitute. The question is put and answered as before; and whatever the oracle declares to be requisite is offered on the dead man's grave. Thus the ghost is appeased and the sufferer is made whole.[614] In these islands a common cause of illness is believed to be an unwarrantable intrusion on premises occupied by a ghost, who punishes the trespasser by afflicting him with bodily pains and ailments, or it may be by carrying off his soul. At Maewo in Aurora, one of the New Hebrides, when there is reason to think that a sickness is due to ghostly agency, the friends of the sick man send for a professional dreamer, whose business it is to ascertain what particular ghost has been offended and to make it up with him. So the dreamer falls asleep and in his sleep he dreams a dream. He seems to himself to be in the place where the patient was working before his illness; and there he spies a queer little old man, who is really no other than the ghost. The dreamer falls into conversation with him, learns his name, and winning his confidence extracts from him a true account of the whole affair. The fact is that in working at his garden the man encroached, whether wittingly or not is no matter, on land which the ghost regards as his private preserve; and to punish the intrusion the ghost carried off the intruder's soul and impounded it in a magic fence in his garden, where it still languishes in durance vile. The dreamer at once tenders a frank and manly apology on behalf of his client; he assures the ghost that the trespass was purely inadvertent, that no personal disrespect whatever was intended, and he concludes by requesting the ghost to overlook the offence for this time and to release the imprisoned soul. This appeal to the better feelings of the ghost has its effect; he pulls up the fence and lets the soul out of the pound; it flies back to the sick man, who thereupon recovers. Sometimes an orphan child is made sick by its dead mother, whose ghost draws away the soul of the infant to keep her company in the spirit land. In such a case, again, a dreamer is employed to bring back the lost soul from the far country; and if he can persuade the mother's ghost to relinquish the tiny soul of her baby, the child will be made whole.[615] Once more certain long stones in the Banks' Islands are inhabited by ghosts so active and robust that if a man's shadow so much as falls on one of them, the ghost in the stone will clutch the shadow and pull the soul clean out of the man, who dies accordingly. Such stones, dangerous as they unquestionably are to the chance passer-by, nevertheless for that very reason possess a valuable property which can be turned to excellent account. A man, for example, will put one of these stones in his house to guard it like a watch-dog in his absence; and if he sends a friend to fetch something out of it which he has forgotten, the messenger, on approaching the house, will take good care to call out the owner's name, lest the ghost in the stone, mistaking him for a thief and a robber, should pounce out on him and do him a mischief before he had time to explain.[616] [Sidenote: Contrast between Melanesian and European medicine.] Thus it appears that for a medical practitioner in Melanesia the first requisite is an intimate acquaintance, not with the anatomy of the human frame and the properties of drugs, but with ghosts, their personal peculiarities, habits, and haunts. Only by means of the influence which such a knowledge enables him to exert on these powerful and dangerous beings can the good physician mitigate and assuage the sufferings of poor humanity. His professional skill, while it certainly aims at the alleviation of physical evils, attains its object chiefly, if not exclusively, by a direct appeal to those higher, though invisible, powers which encompass the life of man, or at all events of the Melanesian. The firm faith in the spiritual and the unseen which these sable doctors display in their treatment of the sick presents a striking contrast to the procedure of their European colleagues, who trust exclusively to the use of mere physical remedies, such as drugs and lancets, now carving the body of the sufferer with knives, and now inserting substances, about which they know little, into places about which they know nothing. Has not science falsely so called still much to learn from savagery? [Sidenote: The weather believed to be regulated by ghosts and spirits. Weather-doctors.] But it is not the departments of medicine and surgery alone, important as these are to human welfare, which in Melanesia are directed and controlled by spiritual forces. The weather in those regions is also regulated by ghosts and spirits. It is they who cause the wind to blow or to be still, the sun to shine forth or to be overcast with clouds, the rain to descend or the earth to be parched with drought; hence fertility and abundance or dearth and famine prevail alternately at the will of these spiritual directors. From this it follows that men who stand on a footing of intimacy with ghosts and spirits can by judicious management induce them to adapt the weather to the varying needs of mankind. But it is to be observed that the supernatural beings, who are the real sources of atmospheric phenomena, have delegated or deputed a portion of their powers not merely to certain material objects, such as stones or leaves, but to certain set forms of words, which men call incantations or spells; and accordingly all such objects and formulas do, by virtue of this delegation, possess in themselves a real and we may almost say natural influence over the weather, which is often manifested in a striking congruity or harmony between the things themselves and the effects which they are calculated to produce. This adaptation of means to end in nature may perhaps be regarded as a beautiful proof of the existence of spirits and ghosts working their purposes unseen behind the gaily coloured screen or curtain of the physical universe. At all events men who are acquainted with the ghostly properties of material objects and words can turn them to account for the benefit of their friends and the confusion of their foes, and they do so very readily if only it is made worth their while. Hence it comes about that in these islands there are everywhere weather-doctors or weather-mongers, who through their familiarity with ghosts and spirits and their acquaintance with the ghostly or spiritual properties of things, are able to control the weather and to supply their customers with wind or calm, rain or sunshine, famine or abundance, at a reasonable rate and a moderate figure.[617] The advantages of such a system over our own blundering method of managing the weather, or rather of leaving it to its own devices, are too obvious to be insisted on. To take a few examples. In the island of Florida, when a calm is wanted, the weather-doctor takes a bunch of leaves, of the sort which the ghost loves, and hides the bunch in the hollow of a tree where there is water, at the same time invoking the ghost with the proper charm. This naturally produces rain and with the rain a calm. In the seafaring life of the Solomon Islanders the maker of calms is a really valuable citizen.[618] The Santa Cruz people are also great voyagers, and their wizards control the weather on their expeditions, taking with them the stock or log which represents their private or tame ghost and setting it up on a stage in the cabin. The presence of the familiar ghost being thus secured, the weather-doctor will undertake to provide wind or calm according to circumstances.[619] We have already seen how in these islands the wizard makes rain by pouring water on the wooden posts which represent the rain-ghosts.[620] [Sidenote: Black magic working through personal refuse or rubbish of the victim.] Such exercises of ghostly power for the healing of the sick and the improvement of the weather are, when well directed and efficacious, wholly beneficial. But ghostly power is a two-edged weapon which can work evil as well as good to mankind. In fact it can serve the purpose of witchcraft. The commonest application of this pernicious art is one which is very familiar to witches and sorcerers in many parts of the world. The first thing the wizard does is to obtain a fragment of food, a bit of hair, a nail-clipping, or indeed anything that has been closely connected with the person of his intended victim. This is the medium through which the power of the ghost or spirit is brought to bear; it is, so to say, the point of support on which the magician rests the whole weight of his infernal engine. In order to give effect to the charm it is very desirable, if not absolutely necessary, to possess some personal relic, such as a bone, of the dead man whose ghost is to set the machinery in motion. At all events the essential thing is to bring together the man who is to be injured and the ghost or spirit who is to injure him; and this can be done most readily by placing the personal relics or refuse of the two men, the living and the dead, in contact with each other; for thus the magic circuit, if we may say so, is complete, and the fatal current flows from the dead to the living. That is why it is most dangerous to leave any personal refuse or rubbish lying about; you never can tell but that some sorcerer may get hold of it and work your ruin by means of it. Hence the people are naturally most careful to hide or destroy all such refuse in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of witches and wizards; and this sage precaution has led to habits of cleanliness which the superficial European is apt to mistake for what he calls enlightened sanitation, but which a deeper knowledge of native thought would reveal to him in their true character as far-seeing measures designed to defeat the nefarious art of the sorcerer.[621] [Sidenote: Black magic working without any personal relic of the victim. The ghost-shooter.] Unfortunately, however, an adept in the black art can work his fell purpose even without any personal relic of his victim. In the Banks' Islands, for example, he need only procure a bit of human bone or a fragment of some lethal weapon, it may be a splinter of a club or a chip of an arrow, which has killed somebody. This he wraps up in the proper leaves, recites over it the appropriate charm, and plants it secretly in the path along which his intended victim is expected to pass. The ghost of the man who owned the bone in his life or perished by the club or the arrow, is now lurking like a lion in the path; and if the poor fellow strolls along it thinking no evil, the ghost will spring at him and strike him with disease. The charm is perfectly efficient if the man does come along the path, but clearly it misses fire if he does not. To remedy this defect in the apparatus a sorcerer sometimes has recourse to a portable instrument, a sort of pocket pistol, which in the Banks' Islands is known as a ghost-shooter. It is a bamboo tube, loaded not with powder and shot, but with a dead man's bone and other magical ingredients, over which the necessary spell has been crooned. Armed with this deadly weapon the sorcerer has only to step up to his unsuspecting enemy, whip out the pocket pistol, uncork the muzzle by removing his thumb from the orifice, and present it at the victim; the fatal discharge follows in an instant and the man drops to the ground. The ghost in the pistol has done his work. Sometimes, however, an accident happens. The marksman misses his victim and hits somebody else. This occurred, for example, not very many years ago in the island of Mota. A man named Isvitag was waiting with his ghost-shooter to pop at his enemy, but in his nervous excitement he let fly too soon, just as a woman with a child on her hip stepped across the path. The shot, or rather the ghost, hit the child point-blank, and it was his sister's child, his own next of kin! You may imagine the distress of the affectionate uncle at this deplorable miscarriage. To prevent inflammation of the wound he, with great presence of mind, plunged his pocket pistol in water, and this timely remedy proved so efficacious that the child took no hurt.[622] [Sidenote: Prophecy inspired by ghosts.] Another department of Melanesian life in which ghosts figure very prominently is prophecy. The knowledge of future events is believed to be conveyed to the people by a ghost or spirit speaking with the voice of a man, who is himself unconscious while he speaks. The predictions which emanate from the prophet under these circumstances are in the strictest sense inspired. His human personality is for the time being in abeyance, and he is merely the mouthpiece of the powerful spirit which has temporarily taken possession of his body and speaks with his voice. The possession is indeed painfully manifest. His eyes glare, foam bursts from his mouth, his limbs writhe, his whole body is convulsed. These are the workings of the mighty spirit shaking and threatening to rend the frail tabernacle of flesh. This form of inspiration is not clearly distinguishable from what we call madness; indeed the natives do not attempt to distinguish between the two things; they regard the madman and the prophet as both alike inspired by a ghost or spirit, and a man will sometimes pretend to be mad in order that he may get the reputation of being a prophet. At Saa a man will speak with the voice of a powerful man deceased, while he twists and writhes under the influence of the ghost; he calls himself by the name of the deceased who speaks through him, and he is so addressed by others; he will eat fire, lift enormous weights, and foretells things to come. When the inspiration, or insanity, is particularly violent, and the Banks' Islanders think they have had quite enough of it, the friends of the prophet or of the madman will sometimes catch him and hold him struggling and roaring in the smoke of strong-smelling leaves, while they call out the names of the dead men whose ghosts are most likely to be abroad at the time, for as soon as the right name is mentioned the ghost departs from the man, who then returns to his sober senses. But this method of smoking out a ghost is not always successful.[623] [Sidenote: Divination by means of ghosts.] There are many methods by which ghosts and spirits are believed to make known to men who employ them the secret things which the unassisted human intelligence could not discover; and some of them hardly perhaps need the intervention of a professional wizard. These methods of divination differ very little in the various islands. In the Solomon Islands, for instance, when an expedition has started in a fleet of canoes, there is sometimes a hesitation whether they shall proceed, or a doubt as to what direction they should take. Thereupon a diviner may declare that he has felt a ghost step on board; for did not the canoe tip over to the one side? Accordingly he asks the invisible passenger, "Shall we go on? Shall we go to such and such a place?" If the canoe rocks, the answer is yes; if it lies on an even keel, the answer is no. Again, when a man is sick and his friends wish to know what ghost is vexing or, as they say, eating him, a diviner or wizard is sent for. He comes bringing an assistant, and the two sit down, the wizard in front and the assistant at his back, and they hold a stick or bamboo by the two ends. The wizard then begins to slap the end of the bamboo he holds, calling out one after another the names of men not very long deceased, and when he names the one who is afflicting the sick man the stick of itself becomes violently agitated.[624] We are not informed, but we may probably assume, that it is the ghost and not the man who really agitates the stick. A somewhat different mode of divination was occasionally employed at Motlav in the Banks' Islands in order to discover a thief or other criminal. After a burial they would take a bag, put some Tahitian chestnut and scraped banana into it, and tie it to the end of a hollow bamboo tube about ten feet long in such a way that the end of the tube was inserted in the mouth of the bag. Then the bag was laid on the dead man's grave, and the diviners grasped the other end of the bamboo. The names of the recently dead were then called over, and while this was being done the men felt the bamboo grow heavy in their hands, for a ghost was scrambling up from the bag into the hollow of the bamboo. Having thus secured him they carried the imprisoned ghost in the bamboo into the village, where the roll of the recent dead was again called over in order to learn whose ghost had been caught in the trap. When wrong names were mentioned, the free end of the bamboo moved from side to side, but at the mention of the right name it revolved briskly. Having thus ascertained whom they had to deal with, they questioned the entrapped ghost, "Who stole so and so? Who was guilty in such a case?" Thereupon the bamboo, moved no doubt by the ghost inside, pointed at the culprit, if he was present, or made signs as before when the names of the suspected evildoers were mentioned.[625] [Sidenote: Taboo based on a fear of ghosts.] Of the many departments of Central Melanesian life which are permeated by a belief in ghostly power the last which I shall mention is the institution of taboo. In Melanesia, indeed, the institution is not so conspicuous as it used to be in Polynesia; yet even there it has been a powerful instrument in the consolidation of the rights of private property, and as such it deserves the attention of historians who seek to trace the evolution of law and morality. As understood in the Banks' Islands and the New Hebrides the word taboo (_tambu_ or _tapu_) signifies a sacred and unapproachable character which is imposed on certain things by the arbitrary will of a chief or other powerful man. Somebody whose authority with the people gives him confidence to make the announcement will declare that such and such an object may not be touched, that such and such a place may not be approached, and that such and such an action may not be performed under a certain penalty, which in the last resort will be inflicted by ghostly or spiritual agency. The object, place, or action in question becomes accordingly taboo or sacred. Hence in these islands taboo may be defined as a prohibition with a curse expressed or implied. The sanction or power at the back of the taboo is not that of the man who imposes it; rather it is that of the ghost or spirit in whose name or in reliance upon whom the taboo is imposed. Thus in Florida a chief will forbid something to be done or touched under a penalty; he may proclaim, for example, that any one who violates his prohibition must pay him a hundred strings of shell money. To a European such a proclamation seems a proof of the chief's power; but to the native the chiefs power, in this and in everything, rests on the persuasion that the chief has his mighty ghost at his back. The sense of this in the particular case is indeed remote, the fear of the chiefs anger is present and effective, but the ultimate sanction is the power of the ghost. If a common man were to take upon himself to taboo anything he might do so; people would imagine that he would not dare to make such an announcement unless he knew he could enforce it; so they would watch, and if anybody violated the taboo and fell sick afterwards, they would conclude that the taboo was supported by a powerful ghost who punished infractions of it. Hence the reputation and authority of the man who imposed the taboo would rise accordingly; for it would be seen that he had a powerful ghost at his back. Every ghost has a particular kind of leaf for his badge; and in imposing his taboo a man will set the leaf of his private ghost as a mark to warn trespassers of the spiritual power with which they have to reckon; when people see a leaf stuck, it may be, on a tree, a house, or a canoe, they do not always know whose it is; but they do know that if they disregard the mark they have to deal with a ghost and not with a man,[626] and the knowledge is a more effectual check on thieving and other crimes than the dread of mere human justice. Many a rascal fears a ghost who does not fear the face of man. [Sidenote: The life of the Central Melanesians deeply influenced by their belief in the survival of the human soul after death.] What I have said may suffice to impress you with a sense of the deep practical influence which a belief in the survival of the human soul after death exercises on the life and conduct of the Central Melanesian savage. To him the belief is no mere abstract theological dogma or speculative tenet, the occasional theme of edifying homilies and pious meditation; it is an inbred, unquestioning, omnipresent conviction which affects his thoughts and actions daily and at every turn; it guides his fortunes as an individual and controls his behaviour as a member of a community, by inculcating a respect for the rights of others and enforcing a submission to the public authorities. With him the fear of ghosts and spirits is a bulwark of morality and a bond of society; for he firmly believes in their unseen presence everywhere and in the punishments which they can inflict on wrongdoers. His whole theory of causation differs fundamentally from ours and necessarily begets a fundamental difference of practice. Where we see natural forces and material substances, the Melanesian sees ghosts and spirits. A great gulf divides his conception of the world from ours; and it may be doubted whether education will ever enable him to pass the gulf and to think and act like us. The products of an evolution which has extended over many ages cannot be forced like mushrooms in a summer day; it is vain to pluck the fruit of the tree of knowledge before it is ripe. [Footnote 590: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 130-132.] [Footnote 591: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 132 _sq._; C. M. Woodford, _A Naturalist among the Head-hunters_ (London, 1890), pp. 26-28.] [Footnote 592: G. Turner, LL.D., _Samoa a Hundred Years Ago and long before_ (London, 1884), pp. 318 _sq._ Yams are the principal fruits cultivated by the Tannese, who bestow a great deal of labour on the plantation and keep them in fine order. See G. Turner, _op. cit._ pp. 317 _sq._] [Footnote 593: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 133 _sq._] [Footnote 594: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, p. 134.] [Footnote 595: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 135 _sq._] [Footnote 596: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 137 _sq._] [Footnote 597: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, p. 138.] [Footnote 598: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 138 _sq._] [Footnote 599: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ p. 139.] [Footnote 600: "Native Stories of Santa Cruz and Reef Islands," translated by the Rev. W. O'Ferrall, _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xxxiv. (1904) p. 223.] [Footnote 601: "Native Stories from Santa Cruz and Reef Islands," _op. cit._ p. 224.] [Footnote 602: "Native Stories from Santa Cruz and Reef Islands," _op. cit._ p. 225.] [Footnote 603: Compare _The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings_, i. 269 _sqq._] [Footnote 604: G. Turner, _Samoa a Hundred Years Ago and long before_ (London, 1884), p. 326.] [Footnote 605: G. Turner, _op. cit._ p. 334.] [Footnote 606: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 145-148.] [Footnote 607: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 175 _sq._] [Footnote 608: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 176 _sq._] [Footnote 609: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ pp. 177 _sq._] [Footnote 610: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 178-180.] [Footnote 611: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ p. 191.] [Footnote 612: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ p. 194.] [Footnote 613: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 194-196.] [Footnote 614: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ p. 196.] [Footnote 615: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 208 _sq._ As to sickness supposed to be caused by trespass on the premises of a ghost see further _id._, pp. 194, 195, 218.] [Footnote 616: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, p. 184.] [Footnote 617: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, p. 200.] [Footnote 618: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 200, 201. The spirit whom the Florida wizard appeals to for good or bad weather is called a _vigona_; and the natives believe it to be always the ghost of a dead man. But it seems very doubtful whether this opinion is strictly correct. See R. H. Codrington, _op cit._ pp. 124, 134.] [Footnote 619: R. H. Codrington, _op. cit._ p. 201. The Santa Cruz name for such a ghost is _duka_ (_ibid._ p. 139).] [Footnote 620: Above, p. 375.] [Footnote 621: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 202-204.] [Footnote 622: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 205 _sq._] [Footnote 623: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 209 _sq._, 218-220.] [Footnote 624: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 210.] [Footnote 625: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 211 _sq._] [Footnote 626: R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, pp. 215 _sq._] LECTURE XVIII THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF NORTHERN AND EASTERN MELANESIA [Sidenote: Northern Melanesia. Material culture of the North Melanesians.] In the last lecture I concluded my account of the belief in immortality and the worship of the dead among the natives of Central Melanesia. To-day we pass to what may be called Northern Melanesia, by which is to be understood the great archipelago lying to the north-east of New Guinea. It comprises the two large islands of New Britain and New Ireland, now called New Pomerania and New Mecklenburg, with the much smaller Duke of York Island lying between them, and the chain of New Hanover and the Admiralty Islands stretching away westward from the north-western extremity of New Ireland. The whole of the archipelago, together with the adjoining island of Bougainville in the Solomon Islands, is now under German rule. The people belong to the same stock and speak the same language as the natives of Central and Southern Melanesia, and their level of culture is approximately the same. They live in settled villages and subsist chiefly by the cultivation of the ground, raising crops of taro, yams, bananas, sugar-cane, and so forth. Most of the agricultural labour is performed by the women, who plant, weed the ground, and carry the produce to the villages. The ground is, or rather used to be, dug by sharp-pointed sticks. The men hunt cassowaries, wallabies, and wild pigs, and they catch fish by both nets and traps. Women and children take part in the fishing and many of them become very expert in spearing fish. Among the few domestic animals which they keep are pigs, dogs, and fowls. The villages are generally situated in the midst of a dense forest; but on the coast the natives build their houses not far from the beach as a precaution against the attacks of the forest tribes, of whom they stand greatly in fear. A New Britain village generally consists of a number of small communities or families, each of which dwells in a separate enclosure. The houses are very small and badly built, oblong in shape and very low. Between the separate hamlets which together compose a village lie stretches of virgin forest, through which run irregular and often muddy foot-tracks, scooped out here and there into mud-holes where the pigs love to wallow during the heat of the tropical day. As the people of any one district used generally to be at war with their neighbours, it was necessary that they should live together for the sake of mutual protection.[627] [Sidenote: Commercial habits of the North Melanesians. Their backwardness in other respects.] Nevertheless, in spite of their limited intercourse with surrounding villages, the natives of the New Britain or the Bismarck Archipelago were essentially a trading people. They made extensive use of shell money and fully recognised the value of any imported articles as mediums of exchange or currency. Markets were held on certain days at fixed places, where the forest people brought their yams, taro, bananas and so forth and exchanged them for fish, tobacco, and other articles with the natives of the coast. They also went on long trading expeditions to procure canoes, cuscus teeth, pigs, slaves, and so forth, which on their return they generally sold at a considerable profit. The shell which they used as money is the _Nassa immersa_ or _Nassa calosa_, found on the north coast of New Britain. The shells were perforated and threaded on strips of cane, which were then joined together in coils of fifty to two hundred fathoms.[628] The rights of private property were fully recognised. All lands belonged to certain families, and husband and wife had each the exclusive right to his or her goods and chattels. But while in certain directions the people had made some progress, in others they remained very backward. Pottery and the metals were unknown; no metal or specimen of metal-work has been found in the archipelago; on the other hand the natives made much use of stone implements, especially adzes and clubs. In war they never used bows and arrows.[629] They had no system of government, unless that name may be given to the power wielded by the secret societies and by chiefs, who exercised a certain degree of influence principally by reason of the reputation which they enjoyed as sorcerers and magicians. They were not elected nor did they necessarily inherit their office; they simply claimed to possess magical powers, and if they succeeded in convincing the people of the justice of their claim, their authority was recognised. Wealth also contributed to establish their position in the esteem of the public.[630] [Sidenote: The Rev. George Brown on the Melanesians.] With regard to the religious ideas and customs of the natives we are not fully informed, but so far as these have been described they appear to agree closely with those of their kinsfolk in Central Melanesia. The first European to settle in the archipelago was the veteran missionary, the Rev. George Brown, D.D., who resided in the islands from 1875 to 1880 and has revisited them on several occasions since; he reduced the language to writing for the first time,[631] and is one of our best authorities on the people. In what follows I shall make use of his valuable testimony along with that of more recent observers. [Sidenote: North Melanesian theory of the soul. Fear of ghosts, especially the ghosts of persons who have been killed and eaten.] The natives of the archipelago believe that every person is animated by a soul, which survives his death and may afterwards influence the survivors for good or evil. Their word for soul is _nio_ or _niono_, meaning a shadow. The root is _nio_, which by the addition of personal suffixes becomes _niong_ "my soul or shadow," _niom_ "your soul or shadow," _niono_ "his soul or shadow." They think that the soul is like the man himself, and that it always stays inside of his body, except when it goes out on a ramble during sleep or a faint. A man who is very sleepy may say, "My soul wants to go away." They believe, however, that it departs for ever at death; hence when a man is sick, his friends will offer prayers to prevent its departure. There is only one kind of soul, but it can appear in many shapes and enter into animals, such as rats, lizards, birds, and so on. It can hear, see, and speak, and present itself in the form of a wraith or apparition to people at the moment of or soon after death. On being asked why he thought that the soul does not perish with the body, a native said, "Because it is different; it is not of the same nature at all." They believe that the souls of the dead occasionally visit the living and are seen by them, and that they haunt houses and burial-places. They are very much afraid of the ghosts and do all they can to drive or frighten them away. Above all, being cannibals, they stand in great fear of the ghosts of the people whom they have killed and eaten. The man who is cutting up a human body takes care to tie a bandage over his mouth and nose during the operation of carving in order to prevent the enraged soul of the victim from entering into his body by these apertures; and for a similar reason the doors of the houses are shut while the cannibal feast is going on inside. And to keep the victim's ghost quiet while his body is being devoured, a cut from a joint is very considerately placed on a tree outside of the house, so that he may eat of his own flesh and be satisfied. At the conclusion of the banquet, the people shout, brandish spears, beat the bushes, blow horns, beat drums, and make all kinds of noises for the purpose of chasing the ghost or ghosts of the murdered and eaten men away from the village. But while they send away the souls, they keep the skulls and jawbones of the victims; as many as thirty-five jawbones have been seen hanging in a single house in New Ireland. As for the skulls, they are, or rather were placed on the branch of a dead tree and so preserved on the beach or near the house of the man who had taken them.[632] [Sidenote: Offerings to the souls of the dead.] With regard to the death of their friends they deem it very important to obtain the bodies and bury them. They offer food to the souls of their departed kinsfolk for a long time after death, until all the funeral feasts are over; but they do not hold annual festivals in honour of dead ancestors. The food offered to the dead is laid every day on a small platform in a tree; but the natives draw a distinction between offerings to the soul of a man who died a natural death and offerings to the soul of a man who was killed in a fight; for whereas they place the former on a living tree, they deposit the latter on a dead tree. Moreover, they lay money, weapons, and property, often indeed the whole wealth of the family, near the corpse of their friend, in order that the soul of the deceased may carry off the souls of these valuables to the spirit land. But when the body is carried away to be buried, most of the property is removed by its owners for their own use. However, the relations will sometimes detach a few shells from the coils of shell money and a few beads from a necklace and drop them in a fire for the behoof of the ghost. But when the deceased was a chief or other person of importance, some of his property would be buried with him. And before burial his body would be propped up on a special chair in front of his house, adorned with necklaces, wreaths of flowers and feathers, and gaudy with war-paint. In one hand would be placed a large cooked yam, and in the other a spear, while a club would be put on his shoulder. The yam was to stay the pangs of hunger on his long journey, and the weapons were to enable him to fight the foes who might resist his entrance into the spirit land. In the Duke of York Island the corpse was usually disposed of by being sunk in a deep part of the lagoon; but sometimes it was buried in the house and a fire kept burning on the spot.[633] [Sidenote: Burial customs in New Ireland and New Britain. Preservation of the skull.] In New Ireland the dead were rolled up in winding-sheets made of pandanus leaves, then weighted with stones and buried at sea. However, at some places they were deposited in deep underground watercourses or caverns. Towards the northern end of New Ireland corpses were burned on large piles of firewood in an open space of the village. A number of images curiously carved out of wood or chalk were set round the blazing pyre, but the meaning of these strange figures is uncertain. Men and women uttered the most piteous wailings, threw themselves on the top of the corpse, and pulled at the arms and legs. This they did not merely to express their grief, but because they thought that if they saw and handled the dead body while it was burning, the ghost could not or would not haunt them afterwards.[634] Amongst the natives of the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain the dead are generally buried in shallow graves in or near their houses. Some of the shell money which belonged to a man in life is buried with him. Women with blackened bodies sleep on the grave for weeks.[635] When the deceased was a great chief, his corpse, almost covered with shell money, is placed in a canoe, which is deposited in a small house. Thereupon the nearest female relations are led into the house, and the door being walled up they are obliged to remain there with the rotting body until all the flesh has mouldered away. Food is passed in to them through a hole in the wall, and under no pretext are they allowed to leave the hut before the decomposition of the corpse is complete. When nothing of the late chief remains but a skeleton, the hut is opened and the solemn funeral takes place. The bones of the dead are buried, but his skull is hung up in the taboo house in order, we are told, that his ghost may remain in the neighbourhood of the village and see how his memory is honoured. After the burial of the headless skeleton feasting and dancing go on, often for more than a month, and the expenses are defrayed out of the riches left by the deceased.[636] Even in the case of eminent persons who have been buried whole and entire in the usual way, a special mark of respect is sometimes paid to their memory by digging up their skulls after a year or more, painting them red and white, decorating them with feathers, and setting them up on a scaffold constructed for the purpose.[637] [Sidenote: Disposal of the dead among the Sulka of New Britain.] Somewhat similar is the disposal of the dead among the Sulka, a tribe of New Britain who inhabit a mountainous and well-watered country to the south of the Gazelle Peninsula. When a Sulka dies, his plantation is laid waste, and the young fruit-trees cut down, but the ripe fruits are first distributed among the living. His pigs are slaughtered and their flesh in like manner distributed, and his weapons are broken. If the deceased was a rich man, his wife or wives will sometimes be killed. The corpse is usually buried next morning. A hole is dug in the house and the body deposited in it in a sitting posture. The upper part of the corpse projects from the grave and is covered with a tower-like structure of basket-work, which is stuffed with banana-leaves. Great care is taken to preserve the body from touching the earth. Stones are laid round about the structure and a fire kindled. Relations come and sleep for a time beside the corpse, men and women separately. Some while afterwards the soul of the deceased is driven away. The time for carrying out the expulsion is settled by the people in whispers, lest the ghost should overhear them and prepare for a stout resistance. The evening before the ceremony takes place many coco-nut leaves are collected. Next morning, as soon as a certain bird (_Philemon coquerelli_) is heard to sing, the people rise from their beds and set up a great cry. Then they beat the walls, shake the posts, set fire to dry coco-nut leaves, and finally rush out into the paths. At that moment, so the people think, the soul of the dead quits the hut. When the flesh of the corpse is quite decayed, the bones are taken from the grave, sewed in leaves, and hung up. Soon afterwards a funeral feast is held, at which men and women dance. For some time after a burial taro is planted beside the house of death and enclosed with a fence. The Sulka think that the ghost comes and gathers the souls of the taro. The ripe fruit is allowed to rot. Falling stars are supposed to be the souls of the dead which have been hurled up aloft and are now descending to bathe in the sea. The trail of light behind them is thought to be a tail of coco-nut leaves which other souls have fastened to them and set on fire. In like manner the phosphorescent glow on the sea comes from souls disporting themselves in the water. Persons who at their death left few relations, or did evil in their life, or were murdered outside of the village, are not buried in the house. Their corpses are deposited on rocks or on scaffolds in the forest, or are interred on the spot where they met their death. The reason for this treatment of their corpses is not mentioned; but we may conjecture that their ghosts are regarded with contempt, dislike, or fear, and that the survivors seek to give them a wide berth by keeping their bodies at a distance from the village. The corpses of those who died suddenly are not buried but wrapt up in leaves and laid on a scaffold in the house, which is then shut up and deserted. This manner of disposing of them seems also to indicate a dread or distrust of their ghosts.[638] [Sidenote: Disposal of the dead among the Moanus of the Admiralty Islands. Prayers offered to the skull of a dead chief.] Among the Moanus of the Admiralty Islands the dead are kept in the houses unburied until the flesh is completely decayed and nothing remains but the bones. Old women then wash the skeleton carefully in sea-water, after which it is disjointed and divided. The backbone, together with the bones of the legs and upper arms, is deposited in one basket and put away somewhere; the skull, together with the ribs and the bones of the lower arms, is deposited in another basket, which is sunk for a time in the sea. When the bones are completely cleaned and bleached in the water, they are laid with sweet-smelling herbs in a wooden vessel and placed in the house which the dead man inhabited during his life. But the teeth have been previously extracted from the skull and converted into a necklace for herself by the sister of the deceased. After a time the ribs are distributed by the son among the relatives. The principal widow gets two, other near kinsfolk get one apiece, and they wear these relics under their arm-bands. The distribution of the ribs is the occasion of a great festival, and it is followed some time afterwards by a still greater feast, for which extensive preparations are made long beforehand. All who intend to be present at the ceremony send vessels of coco-nut oil in advance; and if the deceased was a great chief the number of the oil vessels and of the guests may amount to two thousand. Meantime the giver of the feast causes a scaffold to be erected for the reception of the skull, and the whole art of the wood-carver is exhausted in decorating the scaffold with figures of turtles, birds, and so forth, while a wooden dog acts as sentinel at either end. When the multitude has assembled, and the orchestra of drums, collected from the whole neighbourhood, has sent forth a far-sounding crash of music, the giver of the feast steps forward and pronounces a florid eulogium on the deceased, a warm panegyric on the guests who have honoured him by their presence, and a fluent invective against his absent foes. Nor does he forget to throw in some delicate allusions to his own noble generosity in providing the assembled visitors with this magnificent entertainment. For this great effort of eloquence the orator has been primed in the morning by the sorcerer. The process of priming consists in kneeling on the orator's shoulders and tugging at the hair of his head with might and main, which is clearly calculated to promote the flow of his rhetoric. If none of the hair comes out in the sorcerer's hands, a masterpiece of oratory is confidently looked forward to in the afternoon. When the speech, for which such painful preparations have been made, is at last over, the drums again strike up. No sooner have their booming notes died away over land and sea, than the sorcerer steps up to the scaffold, takes from it the bleached skull, and holds it in both his hands. Then the giver of the feast goes up to him, dips a bunch of dracaena leaves in a vessel of oil, and smites the skull with it, saying, "Thou art my father!" At that the drums again beat loudly. Then he strikes the skull a second time with the leaves, saying, "Take the food that has been made ready in thine honour!" And again there is a crash of drums. After that he smites the skull yet again and prays saying, "Guard me! Guard my people! Guard my children!" And every prayer of the litany is followed by the solemn roll of the drums. When these impressive invocations to the spirit of the dead chief are over, the feasting begins. The skull is thenceforth carefully preserved.[639] [Sidenote: Disposal of the dead in the Kaniet Islands. Preservation of the skull.] In the Kaniet Islands, a small group to the north-west of the Admiralty Islands, the dead are either sunk in the sea or buried in shallow graves, face downward, near the house. All the movable property of the deceased is piled on the grave, left there for three weeks, and then burnt. Afterwards the skull is dug up, placed in a basket, and having been decorated with leaves and feathers is hung up in the house. Thus adorned it not only serves to keep the dead in memory, but is also employed in many conjurations to defeat the nefarious designs of other ghosts, who are believed to work most of the ills that afflict humanity.[640] Apparently these islanders employ a ghost to protect them against ghosts on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief. [Sidenote: Death attributed to witchcraft.] Amongst the natives of the Bismarck Archipelago few persons, if any, are believed to die from natural causes alone; if they are not killed in war they are commonly supposed to perish by witchcraft or sorcery, even when the cause of death might seem to the uninstructed European to be sufficiently obvious in such things as exposure to heavy rain, the carrying of too heavy a burden, or remaining too long a time under water. So when a man has died, his friends are anxious to discover who has bewitched him to death. In this enquiry the ghost is expected to lend his assistance. Thus on the night after the decease the friends will assemble outside the house, and a sorcerer will address the ghost and request him to name the author of his death. If the ghost, as sometimes happens, makes no reply, the sorcerer will jog his memory by calling out the name of some suspected person; and should the ghost still be silent, the wizard will name another and another, till at the mention of one name a tapping sound is heard like the drumming of fingers on a board or on a mat The sound may proceed from the house or from a pearl shell which the sorcerer holds in his hand; but come from where it may, it is taken as a certain proof that the man who has just been named did the deed, and he is dealt with accordingly. Many a poor wretch in New Britain has been killed and eaten on no other evidence than that of the fatal tapping.[641] [Sidenote: Burial customs in the Duke of York Island. Preservation of the skull.] When a man of mark is buried in the Duke of York Island, the masters of sorcery take leaves, spit on them, and throw them, with a number of poisonous things, into the grave, uttering at the same time loud imprecations on the wicked enchanter who has killed their friend. Then they go and bathe, and returning they fall to cursing again; and if the miscreant survived the first imprecations, it is regarded as perfectly certain that he will fall a victim to the second. Sometimes, when the deceased was a chief distinguished for bravery and wisdom, his corpse would be exposed on a high platform in front of his house and left there to rot, while his relatives sat around and inhaled the stench, conceiving that with it they absorbed the courage and skill of the departed worthy. Some of them would even anoint their bodies with the drippings from the putrefying corpse for the same purpose. The women also made fires that the ghost might warm himself at them. When the head became detached from the trunk, it was carefully preserved by the next of kin, while the other remains were buried in a shallow grave in the house. All the female relatives blackened their dusky faces for a long time, after which the skull was put on a platform, a great feast was held, and dances were performed for many nights in its honour. Then at last the spirit of the dead man, which till that time was supposed to be lingering about his old abode, took his departure, and his friends troubled themselves about him no more.[642] [Sidenote: Prayers to the spirits of the dead.] The souls of the dead are always regarded by these people as beings whose help can be invoked on special occasions, such as fighting or fishing or any other matter of importance; and since the spirits whom they invoke are always those of their own kindred they are presumed to be friendly to the petitioners. The objects for which formal prayers are addressed to the souls of ancestors appear to be always temporal benefits, such as victory over enemies and plenty of food; prayers for the promotion of moral virtue are seemingly unknown. For example, if a woman laboured hard in childbirth, she was thought to be bewitched, and prayers would be offered to the spirits of dead ancestors to counteract the spell. Again, young men are instructed by their elders in the useful art of cursing the enemies of the tribe; and among a rich variety of imprecations an old man will invoke the spirit of his brother, father, or uncle, or all of them, to put their fingers into the ears of the enemy that he may not hear, to cover his eyes that he may not see, and to stop his mouth that he may not cry for help, but may fall an easy prey to the curser and his friends.[643] More amiable and not less effectual are the prayers offered to the spirits of the dead over a sick man. At the mention of each name in the prayer the supplicants make a chirping or hissing sound, and rub lime over the patient. Before administering medicine they pray over it to the spirits of the dead; then the patient gulps it down, thus absorbing the virtue of the medicine and of the prayer in one. In New Britain they reinforce the prayers to the dead in time of need by wearing the jawbone of the deceased; and in the Duke of York Island people often wear a tooth or some hair of a departed relative, not merely as a mark of respect, but as a magical means of obtaining supernatural help.[644] [Sidenote: North Melanesian views as to the land of the dead.] Sooner or later the souls of all the North Melanesian dead take their departure for the spirit land. But the information which has reached the living as to that far country is at once vague and inconsistent. They call it _Matana nion_, but whereabout it lies they cannot for the most part precisely tell. All they know for certain is that it is far away, and that there is always some particular spot in the neighbourhood from which the souls take their departure; for example, the Duke of York ghosts invariably start from the little island of Nuruan, near Mioko. Wherever it may be, the land of souls is divided into compartments; people who have died of sickness or witchcraft go to one place, and people who have been killed in battle go to another. They do not go unattended; for when a man dies two friends sleep beside his corpse the first night, one on each side, and their spirits are believed to accompany the soul of the dead man to the spirit land. They say that on their arrival in the far country, betel-nut is presented to them all, but the two living men refuse to partake of it, because they know that were they to eat it they would return no more to the land of the living. When they do return, they have often, as might be expected, strange tales to tell of what they saw among the ghosts. The principal personage in the other world is called the "keeper of souls." It is said that once on a time the masterful ghost of a dead chief attempted to usurp the post of warden of the dead; in pursuance of this ambitious project he attacked the warden with a tomahawk and cut off one of his legs, but the amputated limb immediately reunited itself with the body; and a second amputation was followed by the same disappointing result. Life in the other world is reported to be very like life in this world. Some people find it very dismal, and others very beautiful. Those who were rich here will be rich there, and those who were poor on earth will be poor in Hades. As to any moral retribution which may overtake evil-doers in the life to come, their ideas are very vague; only they are sure that the ghosts of the niggardly will be punished by being dumped very hard against the buttress-roots of chestnut-trees. They say, too, that all breaches of etiquette or of the ordinary customs of the country will meet with certain appropriate punishments in the spirit land. When the soul has thus done penance, it takes possession of the body of some animal, for instance, the flying-fox. Hence a native is much alarmed if he should be sitting under a tree from which a flying-fox has been frightened away. Should anything drop from the bat or from the tree on which it was hanging, he would look on it as an omen of good or ill according to the nature of the thing which fell on or near him. If it were useless or dirty, he would certainly apprehend some serious misfortune. Sometimes when a man dies and his soul arrives in the spirit land, his friends do not want him there and drive him back to earth, so he comes to life again. That is the explanation which the natives give of what we call the recovery of consciousness after a faint or swoon.[645] [Sidenote: The land of the dead. State of the dead in the other world supposed to depend on the amount of money they left in this one.] Some of the natives of the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain imagine that the home of departed spirits is in Nakanei, the part of the coast to which they sail to get their shell money. Others suppose that it is in the islands off Cape Takes. So when they are sailing past these islands they dip the paddles softly in the water, and observe a death-like stillness, cowering down in the canoes, lest the ghosts should spy them and do them a mischief. At the entrance to these happy isles is posted a stern watchman to see that no improper person sneaks into them. To every ghost that arrives he puts three questions, "Who are you? Where do you come from? How much shell money did you leave behind you?" On his answers to these three questions hangs the fate of the ghost. If he left much money, he is free to enter the realm of bliss, where he will pass the time with other happy souls smoking and eating and enjoying other sensual delights. But if he left little or no money, he is banished the earthly paradise and sent home to roam like a wild beast in the forest, battening on leaves and filth. With bitter sighs and groans he prowls about the villages at night and seeks to avenge himself by scaring or plaguing the survivors. To stay his hunger and appease his wrath relatives or friends will sometimes set forth food for him to devour. Yet even for such an impecunious soul there is hope; for if somebody only takes pity on him and gives a feast in his honour and distributes shell money to the guests, the ghost may return to the islands of the blest, and the door will be thrown open to him.[646] [Sidenote: Fiji and the Fijians.] So much for the belief in immortality as it is reported to exist among the Northern Melanesians of New Britain and the Bismarck Archipelago. We now pass to the consideration of a similar belief among another people of the same stock, who have been longer known to Europe, the Fijians. The archipelago which they occupy lies to the east of the New Hebrides and forms in fact the most easterly outpost of the black Melanesian race in the Pacific. Beyond it to the eastward are situated the smaller archipelagoes of Samoa and Tonga, inhabited by branches of the brown Polynesian race, whose members are scattered over the islands of the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii in the north to New Zealand in the south. Of all the branches of the Melanesian stock the Fijians at the date of their discovery by Europeans appear to have made the greatest advance in culture, material, social, and political. "The Fijian," says one who knew him long and intimately, "takes no mean place among savages in the social scale. Long before the white man visited his shores he had made very considerable progress towards civilisation. His intersexual code had advanced to the 'patriarchal stage': he was a skilful and diligent husbandman, who carried out extensive and laborious agricultural operations: he built good houses, whose interior he ornamented with no little taste, carved his weapons in graceful and intricate forms, manufactured excellent pottery, beat out from the inner bark of a tree a serviceable papyrus-cloth, upon which he printed, from blocks either carved or ingeniously pieced together, elegant and elaborate patterns in fast colours; and, with tools no better than a stone hatchet, a pointed shell, and a firestick, he constructed large canoes capable of carrying more than a hundred warriors across the open sea."[647] [Sidenote: Political superiority of the Fijians over the other Melanesians.] Politically the Fijians shewed their superiority to all the other Melanesians in the advance they had made towards a regular and organised government. While among the other branches of the same race government can hardly be said to exist, the power of chiefs being both slender and precarious, in Fiji the highest chiefs exercised despotic sway and received from Europeans the title of kings. The people had no voice in the state; the will of the king was generally law, and his person was sacred. Whatever he touched or wore became thereby holy and had to be made over to him; nobody else could afterwards touch it without danger of being struck dead on the spot as if by an electric shock. One king took advantage of this superstition by dressing up an English sailor in his royal robes and sending him about to throw his sweeping train over any article of food, whether dead or alive, which he might chance to come near. The things so touched were at once conveyed to the king without a word of explanation being required or a single remonstrance uttered. Some of the kings laid claim to a divine origin and on the strength of the claim exacted and received from their subjects the respect due to deities. In these exorbitant pretensions they were greatly strengthened by the institution of taboo, which lent the sanction of religion to every exertion of arbitrary power.[648] Corresponding with the growth of monarchy was the well-marked gradation of social ranks which prevailed in the various tribes from the king downwards through chiefs, warriors, and landholders, to slaves. The resulting political constitution has been compared to the old feudal system of Europe.[649] [Sidenote: Means of subsistence of the Fijians. Ferocity and depravity of the Fijians.] Like the other peoples of the Melanesian stock the Fijians subsist chiefly by agriculture, raising many sorts of esculent fruits and roots, particularly yams, taro, plantains, bread-fruit, sweet potatoes, bananas, coco-nuts, ivi nuts, and sugar-cane; but the chief proportion of their food is derived from yams (_Dioscorea_), of which they cultivate five or six varieties.[650] It has been observed that "the increase of cultivated plants is regular on receding from the Hawaiian group up to Fiji, where roots and fruits are found that are unknown on the more eastern islands."[651] Yet the Fijians in their native state, like all other Melanesian and Polynesian peoples, were entirely ignorant of the cereals; and in the opinion of a competent observer the consequent defect in their diet has contributed to the serious defects in their national character. The cereals, he tells us, are the staple food of all races that have left their mark in history; and on the other hand "the apathy and indolence of the Fijians arise from their climate, their diet and their communal institutions. The climate is too kind to stimulate them to exertion, their food imparts no staying power. The soil gives the means of existence for every man without effort, and the communal institutions destroy the instinct of accumulation."[652] Nor are apathy and indolence the only or the worst features in the character of these comparatively advanced savages. Their ferocity, cruelty, and moral depravity are depicted in dark colours by those who had the best opportunity of knowing them in the old days before their savagery was mitigated by contact with a milder religious faith and a higher civilisation. "In contemplating the character of this extraordinary portion of mankind," says one observer, "the mind is struck with wonder and awe at the mixture of a complicated and carefully conducted political system, highly finished manners, and ceremonious politeness, with a ferocity and practice of savage vices which is probably unparalleled in any other part of the world."[653] One of the first civilised men to gain an intimate acquaintance with the Fijians draws a melancholy contrast between the baseness and vileness of the people and the loveliness of the land in which they live.[654] [Sidenote: Scenery of the Fijian islands.] For the Fijian islands are exceedingly beautiful. They are of volcanic origin, mostly high and mountainous, but intersected by picturesque valleys, clothed with woods, and festooned with the most luxuriant tropical vegetation. "Among their attractions," we are told, "are high mountains, abrupt precipices, conical hills, fantastic turrets and crags of rock frowning down like olden battlements, vast domes, peaks shattered into strange forms; native towns on eyrie cliffs, apparently inaccessible; and deep ravines, down which some mountain stream, after long murmuring in its stony bed, falls headlong, glittering as a silver line on a block of jet, or spreading like a sheet of glass over bare rocks which refuse it a channel. Here also are found the softer features of rich vales, cocoa-nut groves, clumps of dark chestnuts, stately palms and bread-fruit, patches of graceful bananas or well-tilled taro-beds, mingling in unchecked luxuriance, and forming, with the wild reef-scenery of the girdling shore, its beating surf, and far-stretching ocean beyond, pictures of surpassing beauty."[655] Each island is encircled by a reef of white coral, on which the sea breaks, with a thunderous roar, in curling sheets of foam; while inside the reef stretches the lagoon, a calm lake of blue crystalline water revealing in its translucent depths beautiful gardens of seaweed and coral which fill the beholder with delighted wonder. Great and sudden is the contrast experienced by the mariner when he passes in a moment from the tossing, heaving, roaring billows without into the unbroken calm of the quiet haven within the barrier reef.[656] [Sidenote: Fijian doctrine of souls.] Like most savages, the Fijians believed that man is animated by a soul which quits his body temporarily in sleep and permanently at death, to survive for a longer or a shorter time in a disembodied state thereafter. Indeed, they attributed souls to animals, vegetables, stones, tools, houses, canoes, and many other things, allowing that all of them may become immortal.[657] On this point I will quote the evidence of one of the earliest and best authorities on the customs and beliefs of the South Sea Islanders. "There seems," says William Mariner, "to be a wide difference between the opinions of the natives in the different clusters of the South Sea islands respecting the future existence of the soul. Whilst the Tonga doctrine limits immortality to chiefs, _matabooles_, and at most, to _mooas_, the Fiji doctrine, with abundant liberality, extends it to all mankind, to all brute animals, to all vegetables, and even to stones and mineral substances. If an animal or a plant die, its soul immediately goes to Bolotoo; if a stone or any other substance is broken, immortality is equally its reward; nay, artificial bodies have equal good luck with men, and hogs, and yams. If an axe or a chisel is worn out or broken up, away flies its soul for the service of the gods. If a house is taken down, or any way destroyed, its immortal part will find a situation on the plains of Bolotoo; and, to confirm this doctrine, the Fiji people can show you a sort of natural well, or deep hole in the ground, at one of their islands, across the bottom of which runs a stream of water, in which you may clearly perceive the souls of men and women, beasts and plants, of stocks and stones, canoes and houses, and of all the broken utensils of this frail world, swimming or rather tumbling along one over the other pell-mell into the regions of immortality. Such is the Fiji philosophy, but the Tonga people deny it, unwilling to think that the residence of the gods should be encumbered with so much useless rubbish. The natives of Otaheite entertain similar notions respecting these things, viz. that brutes, plants, and stones exist hereafter, but it is not mentioned that they extend the idea to objects of human invention."[658] [Sidenote: Reported Fijian doctrine of two human souls, a light one and a dark one.] According to one account, the Fijians imagined that every man has two souls, a dark soul, consisting of his shadow, and a light soul, consisting of his reflection in water or a looking-glass: the dark soul departs at death to Hades, while the light soul stays near the place where he died or was killed. "Probably," says Thomas Williams, "this doctrine of shadows has to do with the notion of inanimate objects having spirits. I once placed a good-looking native suddenly before a mirror. He stood delighted. 'Now,' said he, softly, 'I can see into the world of spirits.'"[659] However, according to another good authority this distinction of two human souls rests merely on a misapprehension of the Fijian word for shadow, _yaloyalo_, which is a reduplication of _yalo_, the word for soul.[660] Apparently the Fijians pictured to themselves the human soul as a miniature of the man himself. This may be inferred from the customs observed at the death of a chief among the Nakelo tribe. When a chief dies, certain men who are the hereditary undertakers call him, as he lies, oiled and ornamented, on fine mats, saying, "Rise, sir, the chief, and let us be going. The day has come over the land." Then they conduct him to the river side, where the ghostly ferryman comes to ferry Nakelo ghosts across the stream. As they attend the chief on his last journey, they hold their great fans close to the ground to shelter him, because, as one of them explained to a missionary, "His soul is only a little child."[661] [Sidenote: Absence of the soul in sleep. Catching the soul of a rascal in a scarf.] The souls of some men were supposed to quit their bodies in sleep and enter into the bodies of other sleepers, troubling and disturbing them. A soul that had contracted this bad habit was called a _yalombula_. When any one fainted or died, his vagrant spirit might, so the Fijians thought, be induced to come back by calling after it. Sometimes, on awaking from a nap, a stout man might be seen lying at full length and bawling out lustily for the return of his own soul.[662] In the windward islands of Fiji there used to be an ordeal called _yalovaki_ which was much dreaded by evil-doers. When the evidence was strong against suspected criminals, and they stubbornly refused to confess, the chief, who was also the judge, would call for a scarf, with which "to catch away the soul of the rogue." A threat of the rack could not have been more effectual. The culprit generally confessed at the sight and even the mention of the light instrument; but if he did not, the scarf would be waved over his head until his soul was caught in it like a moth or a fly, after which it would be carefully folded up and nailed to the small end of a chief's canoe, and for want of his soul the suspected person would pine and die.[663] [Sidenote: Fijian dread of sorcery and witchcraft.] Further, the Fijians, like many other savages, stood in great terror of witchcraft, believing that the sorcerer had it in his power to kill them by the practice of his nefarious art. "Of all their superstitions," says Thomas Williams, "this exerts the strongest influence on the minds of the people. Men who laugh at the pretensions of the priest tremble at the power of the wizard; and those who become christians lose this fear last of all the relics of their heathenism."[664] Indeed "native agents of the mission who, in the discharge of their duty, have boldly faced death by open violence, have been driven from their posts by their dread of the sorcerer; and my own observation confirms the statement of more than one observer that savages not unfrequently die of fear when they think themselves bewitched."[665] Professed practitioners of witchcraft were dreaded by all classes, and by destroying mutual confidence they annulled the comfort and shook the security of society. Almost all sudden deaths were set down to their machinations. A common mode of effecting their object was to obtain a shred of the clothing of the man they intended to bewitch, some refuse of his food, a lock of his hair, or some other personal relic; having got it they wrapped it up in certain leaves, and then cooked or buried it or hung it up in the forest; whereupon the victim was supposed to die of a wasting disease. Another way was to bury a coco-nut, with the eye upward, beneath the hearth of the temple, on which a fire was kept constantly burning; and as the life of the nut was destroyed, so the health of the person whom the nut represented would fail till death put an end to his sufferings. "The native imagination," we are told, "is so absolutely under the control of fear of these charms, that persons, hearing that they were the object of such spells, have lain down on their mats, and died through fear."[666] To guard against the fell craft of the magician the people resorted to many precautions. A man who suspected another of plotting against him would be careful not to eat in his presence or at all events to leave no morsel of food behind, lest the other should secrete it and bewitch him by it; and for the same reason people disposed of their garments so that no part could be removed; and when they had their hair cut they generally hid the clippings in the thatch of their own houses. Some even built themselves a small hut and surrounded it with a moat, believing that a little water had power to neutralise the charms directed against them.[667] [Sidenote: The fear of sorcery has had the beneficial effect of enforcing habits of personal cleanliness.] "In the face of such instances as these," says one who knows the Fijians well, "it demands some courage to assert that upon the whole the belief in witchcraft was formerly a positive advantage to the community. It filled, in fact, the place of a system of sanitation. The wizard's tools consisting in those waste matters that are inimical to health, every man was his own scavenger. From birth to old age a man was governed by this one fear; he went into the sea, the graveyard or the depths of the forest to satisfy his natural wants; he burned his cast-off _malo_; he gave every fragment left over from his food to the pigs; he concealed even the clippings of his hair in the thatch of his house. This ever-present fear even drove women in the western districts out into the forest for the birth of their children, where fire destroyed every trace of their lying-in. Until Christianity broke it down, the villages were kept clean; there were no festering rubbish-heaps nor filthy _raras_."[668] [Sidenote: Fijian dread of ghosts. Uproar made to drive away ghosts.] Of apparitions the Fijians used to be very much afraid. They believed that the ghosts of the dead appeared often and afflicted mankind, especially in sleep. The spirits of slain men, unchaste women, and women who died in childbed were most dreaded. After a death people have been known to hide themselves for a few days, until they supposed the soul of the departed was at rest. Also they shunned the places where people had been murdered, particularly when it rained, because then the moans of the ghost could be heard as he sat up, trying to relieve his pain by resting his poor aching head on the palms of his hands. Some however said that the moans were caused by the soul of the murderer knocking down the soul of his victim, whenever the wretched spirit attempted to get up.[669] When Fijians passed a spot in the forest where a man had been clubbed to death, they would sometimes throw leaves on it as a mark of homage to his spirit, believing that they would soon be killed themselves if they failed in thus paying their respects to the ghost.[670] And after they had buried a man alive, as they very often did, these savages used at nightfall to make a great din with large bamboos, trumpet-shells, and so forth, in order to drive away his spirit and deter him from loitering about his old home. "The uproar is always held in the late habitation of the deceased, the reason being that as no one knows for a certainty what reception he will receive in the invisible world, if it is not according to his expectations he will most likely repent of his bargain and wish to come back. For that reason they make a great noise to frighten him away, and dismantle his former habitation of everything that is attractive, and clothe it with everything that to their ideas seems repulsive."[671] [Sidenote: Killing a ghost.] However, stronger measures were sometimes resorted to. It was believed to be possible to kill a troublesome ghost. Once it happened that many chiefs feasted in the house of Tanoa, King of Ambau. In the course of the evening one of them related how he had slain a neighbouring chief. That very night, having occasion to leave the house, he saw, as he believed, the ghost of his victim, hurled his club at him, and killed him stone dead. On his return to the house he roused the king and the rest of the inmates from their slumbers, and recounted his exploit. The matter was deemed of high importance, and they all sat on it in solemn conclave. Next morning a search was made for the club on the scene of the murder; it was found and carried with great pomp and parade to the nearest temple, where it was laid up for a perpetual memorial. Everybody was firmly persuaded that by this swashing blow the ghost had been not only killed but annihilated.[672] [Sidenote: Dazing the ghost of a grandfather.] A more humane method of dealing with an importunate ghost used to be adopted in Vanua-levu, the largest but one of the Fijian islands. In that island, as a consequence, it is said, of reckoning kinship through the mother, a child was considered to be more closely related to his grandfather than to his father. Hence when a grandfather died, his ghost naturally desired to carry off the soul of his grandchild with him to the spirit land. The wish was creditable to the warmth of his domestic affection, but if the survivors preferred to keep the child with them a little longer in this vale of tears, they took steps to baffle grandfather's ghost. For this purpose when the old man's body was stretched on the bier and raised on the shoulders of half-a-dozen stout young fellows, the mother's brother would take the grandchild in his arms and begin running round and round the corpse. Round and round he ran, and grandfather's ghost looked after him, craning his neck from side to side and twisting it round and round in the vain attempt to follow the rapid movements of the runner. When the ghost was supposed to be quite giddy with this unwonted exercise, the mother's brother made a sudden dart away with the child in his arms, the bearers fairly bolted with the corpse to the grave, and before he could collect his scattered wits grandfather was safely landed in his long home.[673] [Sidenote: Special relation of grandfather to grandchild. Soul of a grandfather reborn in his grandchildren.] Mr. Fison, who reports this quaint mode of bilking a ghost, explains the special attachment of the grandfather to his grandchild by the rule of female descent which survives in Vanua-levu; and it is true that where exogamy prevails along with female descent, a child regularly belongs to the exogamous class of its grandfather and not of its father and hence may be regarded as more closely akin to the grandfather than to the father. But on the other hand it is to be observed that exogamy at present is unknown in Fiji, and at most its former prevalence in the islands can only be indirectly inferred from relics of totemism and from the existence of the classificatory system of relationship.[674] Perhaps the real reason why in Vanua-levu a dead grandfather is so anxious to carry off the soul of his living grandchild lies nearer to hand in the apparently widespread belief that the soul of the grandfather is actually reborn in his grandchild. For example, in Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas Islands, every one "is persuaded that the soul of a grandfather is transmitted by nature into the body of his grandchildren; and that, if an unfruitful wife were to place herself under the corpse of her deceased grandfather, she would be sure to become pregnant."[675] Again, the Kayans of Borneo "believe in the reincarnation of the soul, although this belief is not clearly harmonised with the belief in the life in another world. It is generally believed that the soul of a grandfather may pass into one of his grandchildren, and an old man will try to secure the passage of his soul to a favourite grandchild by holding it above his head from time to time. The grandfather usually gives up his name to his eldest grandson, and reassumes the original name of his childhood with the prefix or title _Laki_, and the custom seems to be connected with this belief or hope."[676] [Sidenote: A dead grandfather may reasonably reclaim his own soul from his grandchild.] Now where such a belief is held, it seems reasonable enough that a dead grandfather should reclaim his own soul for his personal use before he sets out for the spirit land; else how could he expect to be admitted to that blissful abode if on arriving at the portal he were obliged to explain to the porter that he had no soul about him, having left that indispensable article behind in the person of his grandchild? "Then you had better go back and fetch it. There is no admission at this gate for people without souls." Such might very well be the porter's retort; and foreseeing it any man of ordinary prudence would take the precaution of recovering his lost spiritual property before presenting himself to the Warden of the Dead. This theory would sufficiently account for the otherwise singular behaviour of grandfather's ghost in Vanua-levu. At the same time it must be admitted that the theory of the reincarnation of a grandfather in a grandson would be suggested more readily in a society where the custom of exogamy was combined with female descent than in one where the same custom coexisted with male descent; since, given exogamy and female descent, grandfather and grandson regularly belong to the same exogamous class, whereas father and son never do so.[677] Thus Mr. Fison may after all be right in referring the partiality of a Fijian grandfather for his grandson in the last resort to a system of exogamy and female kinship. [Footnote 627: G. Brown, D.D., _Melanesians and Polynesians_ (London, 1910), pp. 23 _sq._, 125, 320 _sqq._] [Footnote 628: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 294 _sqq._; P. A. Kleintitschen, _Die Küstenbewohner der Gazellehalbinsel_ (Hiltrup bei Münster, N.D.), pp. 90 _sqq._ The shell money is called _tambu_ in New Britain, _diwara_ in the Duke of York Island, and _aringit_ in New Ireland.] [Footnote 629: Rev. G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 307, 313, 435, 436.] [Footnote 630: Rev. G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 270 _sq._, compare pp. 127, 200.] [Footnote 631: Rev. G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. v., 18.] [Footnote 632: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 141 _sq._, 144, 145, 190-193.] [Footnote 633: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 142, 192, 385, 386 _sq._] [Footnote 634: G. Brown, _op. cit._ p. 390. The custom of cremating the dead in New Ireland is described more fully by Mr. R. Parkinson, who says that the life-sized figures which are burned with the corpse represent the deceased (_Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee_, pp. 273 _sqq._). In the central part of New Ireland the dead are buried in the earth; afterwards the bones are dug up and thrown into the sea. See Albert Hahl, "Das mittlere Neumecklenburg," _Globus_, xci. (1907) p. 314.] [Footnote 635: R. Parkinson, _Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee_ (Stuttgart, 1907) p. 78; P. A. Kleintitschen, _Die Küstenbewohner der Gazellehalbinsel_ (Hiltrup bei Münster, N.D.), p. 222.] [Footnote 636: Mgr. Couppé, "En Nouvelle-Poméranie," _Les Missions Catholiques_, xxiii. (1891) pp. 364 _sq._; J. Graf Pfeil, _Studien und Beobachtungen aus der Südsee_ (Brunswick, 1899), p. 79.] [Footnote 637: R. Parkinson, _op. cit._ p. 81.] [Footnote 638: _P._ Rascher, _M.S.C._, "Die Sulka, ein Beitrag zur Ethnographic Neu-Pommern," _Archiv für Anthropologie_, xxix. (1904) pp. 214 _sq._, 216; R. Parkinson, _Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee_, pp. 185-187.] [Footnote 639: R. Parkinson, _Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee_, pp. 404-406.] [Footnote 640: R. Parkinson, _op. cit._ pp. 441 _sq._] [Footnote 641: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 176, 183, 385 _sq._ As to the wide-spread belief in New Britain that what we call natural deaths are brought about by sorcery, see further _P._ Rascher, _M.S.C._, "Die Sulka, ein Beitrag zur Ethnographic Neu-Pommern," _Archiv für Ethnographie_, xxix. (1904) pp. 221 _sq._; R. Parkinson, _Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee_, pp. 117 _sq._ 199-201; P. A. Kleintitschen, _Die Küsten-bewohner der Gazellehalbinsel_ (Hiltrup bei Münster, N.D.), p. 215.] [Footnote 642: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 387-390.] [Footnote 643: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 35, 89, 196, 201.] [Footnote 644: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 177, 183, 184.] [Footnote 645: G. Brown, _op. cit._ pp. 192-195.] [Footnote 646: P. A. Kleintitschen, _Die Küstenbewohner der Gazellehalbinsel_, pp. 225 _sq._ Compare R. Parkinson, _Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee_, p. 79.] [Footnote 647: Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_ (London, 1904), p. xiv.] [Footnote 648: Thomas Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, Second Edition (London, 1860), i. 22-26.] [Footnote 649: Charles Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 77; Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 18.] [Footnote 650: Charles Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 332 _sqq._; Thomas Williams _Fiji and the Fijians_, Second Edition (London, 1860), i. 60 _sqq._; Berthold Seeman, _Viti_ (Cambridge, 1862), pp. 279 _sqq._; Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_ (London, 1908), pp. 335 _sq._] [Footnote 651: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 60 _sq._] [Footnote 652: Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_, pp. 338, 389 _sq._ The Fijians are in the main vegetarians, but the vegetables which they cultivate "contain a large proportion of starch and water, and are deficient in proteids. Moreover, the supply of the principal staples is irregular, being greatly affected by variable seasons, and the attacks of insects and vermin. Very few of them will bear keeping, and almost all of them must be eaten when ripe. As the food is of low nutritive value, a native always eats to repletion. In times of plenty a full-grown man will eat as much as ten pounds' weight of vegetables in the day; he will seldom be satisfied with less than five. A great quantity, therefore, is required to feed a very few people, and as everything is transported by hand, a disproportionate amount of time is spent in transporting food from the plantation to the consumer. The time spent in growing native food is also out of all proportion to its value" (Basil Thomson, _op. cit._ pp. 334 _sq._). The same writer tells us (p. 335) that it has never occurred to the Fijians to dry any of the fruits they grow and to grind them into flour, as is done in Africa.] [Footnote 653: Capt. J. E. Erskine, _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_ (London, 1853), pp. 272 _sq._] [Footnote 654: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 46, 363. As to the cruelty and depravity of the Fijians in the old days see further Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_ (London, 1904), pp. xv. _sqq._] [Footnote 655: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 6 _sq._ As to the scenery of the Fijian archipelago see further _id._, i. 4 _sqq._; Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 46, 322; _Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel, Australasia_, vol. ii. _Malaysia and the Pacific Archipelago_, edited by F. H. H. Guillemard (London, 1894), pp. 467 _sqq._; Miss Beatrice Grimshaw, _From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands_ (London, 1907), pp. 43 _sq._, 54 _sq._, 76-78, 106, 109 _sq._] [Footnote 656: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 5 _sq._, 11; Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 46 _sq._ However, there is a remarkable difference not only in climate but in appearance between the windward and the leeward sides of these islands. The windward side, watered by abundant showers, is covered with luxuriant tropical vegetation; the leeward side, receiving little rain, presents a comparatively barren and burnt appearance, the vegetation dying down to the grey hues of the boulders among which it struggles for life. Hence the dry leeward side is better adapted for European settlement. See Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 320 _sq._; Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 10; B. Seeman, _Viti, an Account of a Government Mission to the Vitian or Fijian Islands in the years 1860-1861_ (Cambridge, 1862), pp. 277 _sq._] [Footnote 657: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 241; J. E. Erskine, _op. cit._ p. 249; B. Seeman, _Viti_ (Cambridge, 1862), p. 398.] [Footnote 658: William Mariner, _An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands_, Second Edition (London, 1818), ii. 129 _sq._ The _matabooles_ were a sort of honourable attendants on chiefs and ranked next to them in the social hierarchy; the _mooas_ were the next class of people below the _matabooles_. See W. Mariner, _op. cit._ ii. 84, 86. Bolotoo or Bulu was the mythical land of the dead.] [Footnote 659: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 241.] [Footnote 660: This is the opinion of my late friend, the Rev. Lorimer Fison, which he communicated to me in a letter dated 26th August, 1898.] [Footnote 661: Communication of the late Rev. Lorimer Fison in a letter to me dated 3rd November, 1898. I have already published it in _Taboo and the Perils of the Soul_, pp. 29 _sq._] [Footnote 662: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 242; Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_, pp. 163 _sq._; _Taboo and the Perils of the Soul_, pp. 39 _sq._] [Footnote 663: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 250.] [Footnote 664: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 248.] [Footnote 665: Lorimer Fison, _op. cit._ p. xxxii.] [Footnote 666: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 248 _sq._; Lorimer Fison, _op. cit._ pp. xxxi. _sq._] [Footnote 667: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 249.] [Footnote 668: Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_ (London, 1908), p. 166. A _rara_ is a public square (Rev. Lorimer Fison, in _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xiv. (1885) p. 17).] [Footnote 669: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 241.] [Footnote 670: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 50.] [Footnote 671: Narrative of John Jackson, in Capt. J. E. Erskine's _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_ (London, 1853), p. 477.] [Footnote 672: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 85.] [Footnote 673: Lorimer Fison, _op. cit._ pp. 168 _sq_.] [Footnote 674: W. H. R. Rivers, "Totemism in Fiji," _Man_, viii. (1908) pp. 133 _sqq._; _Totemism and Exogamy_, ii. 134 _sqq._] [Footnote 675: U. Lisiansky, _A Voyage Round the World_ (London, 1814), p. 89.] [Footnote 676: Ch. Hose and W. McDougall, _The Pagan Tribes of Borneo_ (London, 1912), ii. 47.] [Footnote 677: Compare _Totemism and Exogamy_, iii. 297-299.] LECTURE XIX THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF EASTERN MELANESIA (FIJI) (_continued_) [Sidenote: Fijian indifference to death.] At the close of last lecture I illustrated the unquestioning belief which the Fijians entertain with regard to the survival of the human soul after death. "The native superstitions with regard to a future state," we are told, "go far to explain the apparent indifference of the people about death; for, while believing in an eternal existence, they shut out from it the idea of any moral retribution in the shape either of reward or punishment. The first notion concerning death is that of simple rest, and is thus contained in one of their rhymes:-- "Death is easy: Of what use is life? To die is rest."[678] Again, another writer, speaking of the Fijians, says that "in general, the passage from life to death is considered as one from pain to happiness, and I was informed that nine out of ten look forward to it with anxiety, in order to escape from the infirmities of old age, or the sufferings of disease."[679] [Sidenote: John Jackson's account of the burying alive of a young Fijian man. Son buried alive by his father.] The cool indifference with which the Fijians commonly regarded their own death and that of other people might be illustrated by many examples. I will give one in the words of an English eye-witness, who lived among these savages for some time like one of themselves. At a place on the coast of Viti Levu, the largest of the Fijian Islands, he says, "I walked into a number of temples, which were very plentiful, and at last into a _bure theravou_ (young man's _bure_), where I saw a tall young man about twenty years old. He appeared to be somewhat ailing, but not at all emaciated. He was rolling up the mat he had been sleeping upon, evidently preparing to go away somewhere. I addressed him, and asked him where he was going, when he immediately answered that he was going to be buried. I observed that he was not dead yet, but he said he soon should be dead when he was put under ground. I asked him why he was going to be buried? He said it was three days since he had eaten anything, and consequently he was getting very thin; and that if he lived any longer he would be much thinner, and then the women would call him a _lila_ (skeleton), and laugh at him. I said he was a fool to throw himself away for fear of being laughed at; and asked him what or who his private god was, knowing it to be no use talking to him about Providence, a thing he had never heard of. He said his god was a shark, and that if he were cast away in a canoe and was obliged to swim, the sharks would not bite him. I asked him if he believed the shark, his god, had any power to act over him? He said yes. 'Well then,' said I, 'why do you not live a little longer, and trust to your god to give you an appetite?' Finding that he could not give me satisfactory answers, and being determined to get buried to avoid the jeers of the ladies, which to a Feejeean are intolerable, he told me I knew nothing about it, and that I must not compare him to a white man, who was generally insensible to all shame, and did not care how much he was laughed at. I called him a fool, and said the best thing he could do was to get buried out of the way, because I knew that most of them work by the rules of contrary; but it was all to no purpose. By this time all his relations had collected round the door. His father had a kind of wooden spade to dig the grave with, his mother a new suit of _tapa_ [bark-cloth], his sister some vermilion and a whale's tooth, as an introduction to the great god of Rage-Rage. He arose, took up his bed and walked, not for life, but for death, his father, mother, and sister following after, with several other distant relations, whom I accompanied. I noticed that they seemed to follow him something in the same way that they follow a corpse in Europe to the grave (that is, as far as relationship and acquaintance are concerned), but, instead of lamenting, they were, if not rejoicing, acting and chatting in a very unconcerned way. At last we reached a place where several graves could be seen, and a spot was soon selected by the man who was to be buried. The old man, his father, began digging his grave, while his mother assisted her son in putting on a new _tapa_ [bark-cloth], and the girl (his sister) was besmearing him with vermilion and lamp-black, so as to send him decent into the invisible world, he (the victim) delivering messages that were to be taken by his sister to people then absent. His father then announced to him and the rest that the grave was completed, and asked him, in rather a surly tone, if he was not ready by this time. The mother then _nosed_ him, and likewise the sister. He said, 'Before I die, I should like a drink of water.' His father made a surly remark, and said, as he ran to fetch it in a leaf doubled up, 'You have been a considerable trouble during your life, and it appears that you are going to trouble us equally at your death.' The father returned with the water, which the son drank off, and then looked up into a tree covered with tough vines, saying he should prefer being strangled with a vine to being smothered in the grave. His father became excessively angry, and, spreading the mat at the bottom of the grave, told the son to die _faka tamata_ (like a man), when he stepped into the grave, which was not more than four feet deep, and lay down on his back with the whale's tooth in his hands, which were clasped across his belly. The spare sides of the mats were lapped over him so as to prevent the earth from getting to his body, and then about a foot of earth was shovelled in upon him as quickly as possible. His father stamped it immediately down solid, and called out in a loud voice, '_Sa tiko, sa tiko_ (You are stopping there, you are stopping there),' meaning 'Good-bye, good-bye.' The son answered with a very audible grunt, and then about two feet more earth was shovelled in and stamped as before by the loving father, and '_Sa tiko_' called out again, which was answered by another grunt, but much fainter. The grave was then completely filled up, when, for curiosity's sake, I said myself, '_Sa tiko_' but no answer was given, although I fancied, or really did see, the earth crack a little on the top of the grave. The father and mother then turned back to back on the middle of the grave, and, having dropped some kind of leaves from their hands, walked away in opposite directions towards a running stream of water hard by, where they and all the rest washed themselves, and made me wash myself, and then we returned to the town, where there was a feast prepared. As soon as the feast was over (it being then dark), began the dance and uproar which are always carried on either at natural or violent deaths."[680] [Sidenote: The readiness of the Fijians to die seems to have been partly a consequence of their belief in immortality.] The readiness with which the Fijians submitted to or even sought death appears to have been to some extent a direct consequence of their belief in immortality and of their notions as to the state of the soul hereafter. Thus we are informed by an early observer of this people that "self-immolation is by no means rare, and they believe that as they leave this life, so will they remain ever after. This forms a powerful motive to escape from decrepitude, or from a crippled condition, by a voluntary death."[681] Or, as another equally early observer puts it more fully, "the custom of voluntary suicide on the part of the old men, which is among their most extraordinary usages, is also connected with their superstitions respecting a future life. They believe that persons enter upon the delights of their elysium with the same faculties, mental and physical, that they possess at the hour of death, in short, that the spiritual life commences where the corporeal existence terminates. With these views, it is natural that they should desire to pass through this change before their mental and bodily powers are so enfeebled by age as to deprive them of their capacity for enjoyment. To this motive must be added the contempt which attaches to physical weakness among a nation of warriors, and the wrongs and insults which await those who are no longer able to protect themselves. When therefore a man finds his strength declining with the advance of age, and feels that he will soon be unequal to discharge the duties of this life, and to partake in the pleasures of that which is to come, he calls together his relations, and tells them that he is now worn out and useless, that he sees they are all ashamed of him, and that he has determined to be buried." So on a day appointed they met and buried him alive.[682] [Sidenote: The sick and aged put to death by their relatives.] The proposal to put the sick and aged to death did not always emanate from the parties principally concerned; when a son, for example, thought that his parents were growing too old and becoming a burden to him, he would give them notice that it was time for them to die, a notice which they usually accepted with equanimity, if not alacrity. As a rule, it was left to the choice of the aged and infirm to say whether they would prefer to be buried alive or to be strangled first and buried afterwards; and having expressed a predilection one way or the other they were dealt with accordingly. To strangle parents or other frail and sickly relatives with a rope was considered a more delicate and affectionate way of dispatching them than to knock them on the head with a club. In the old days the missionary Mr. Hunt witnessed several of these tender partings. "On one occasion, he was called upon by a young man, who desired that he would pray to his spirit for his mother, who was dead. Mr. Hunt was at first in hopes that this would afford him an opportunity of forwarding their great cause. On inquiry, the young man told him that his brothers and himself were just going to bury her. Mr. Hunt accompanied the young man, telling him he would follow in the procession, and do as he desired him, supposing, of course, the corpse would be brought along; but he now met the procession, when the young man said that this was the funeral, and pointed out his mother, who was walking along with them, as gay and lively as any of those present, and apparently as much pleased. Mr. Hunt expressed his surprise to the young man, and asked him how he could deceive him so much by saying his mother was dead, when she was alive and well. He said, in reply, that they had made her death-feast, and were now going to bury her; that she was old; that his brother and himself had thought she had lived long enough, and it was time to bury her, to which she had willingly assented, and they were about it now. He had come to Mr. Hunt to ask his prayers, as they did those of the priest. He added, that it was from love for his mother that he had done so; that, in consequence of the same love, they were now going to bury her, and that none but themselves could or ought to do so sacred an office! Mr. Hunt did all in his power to prevent so diabolical an act; but the only reply he received was, that she was their mother, and they were her children, and they ought to put her to death. On reaching the grave, the mother sat down, when they all, including children, grandchildren, relations, and friends, took an affectionate leave of her; a rope, made of twisted _tapa_ [bark-cloth], was then passed twice around her neck by her sons, who took hold of it, and strangled her; after which she was put into her grave, with the usual ceremonies. They returned to feast and mourn, after which she was entirely forgotten as though she had not existed."[683] [Sidenote: Wives strangled or buried alive at their husbands' funerals.] Again, wives were often strangled, or buried alive, at the funeral of their husbands, and generally at their own instance. Such scenes were frequently witnessed by white residents in the old days. On one occasion a Mr. David Whippy drove away the murderers, rescued the woman, and carried her to his own house, where she was resuscitated. But far from feeling grateful for her preservation, she loaded him with reproaches and ever afterwards manifested the most deadly hatred towards him. "That women should desire to accompany their husbands in death, is by no means strange when it is considered that it is one of the articles of their belief, that in this way alone can they reach the realms of bliss, and she who meets her death with the greatest devotedness, will become the favourite wife in the abode of spirits. The sacrifice is not, however, always voluntary; but, when a woman refuses to be strangled, her relations often compel her to submit. This they do from interested motives; for, by her death, her connexions become entitled to the property of her husband. Even a delay is made a matter of reproach. Thus, at the funeral of the late king Ulivou, which was witnessed by Mr. Cargill, his five wives and a daughter were strangled. The principal wife delayed the ceremony, by taking leave of those around her; whereupon Tanoa, the present king, chid her. The victim was his own aunt, and he assisted in putting the rope around her neck, and strangling her, a service he is said to have rendered on a former occasion to his own mother."[684] In the case of men who were drowned at sea or killed and eaten by enemies in war, their wives were sacrificed in the usual way. Thus when Ra Mbithi, the pride of Somosomo, was lost at sea, seventeen of his wives were destroyed; and after the news of a massacre of the Namena people at Viwa in 1839 eighty women were strangled to accompany the spirits of their murdered husbands.[685] [Sidenote: Human "grass" for the grave.] The bodies of women who were put to death for this purpose were regularly laid at the bottom of the grave to serve as a cushion for the dead husband to lie upon; in this capacity they were called grass (_thotho_), being compared to the dried grass which in Fijian houses used to be thickly strewn on the floors and covered with mats.[686] On this point, however, a nice distinction was observed. While wives were commonly sacrificed at the death of their husbands, in order to be spread like grass in their graves, it does not transpire that husbands were ever sacrificed at the death of their wives for the sake of serving as grass to their dead spouses in the grave. The great truth that all flesh is grass appears to have been understood by the Fijians as applicable chiefly to the flesh of women. Sometimes a man's mother was strangled as well as his wives. Thus Ngavindi, a young chief of Lasakau, was laid in the grave with a wife at his side, his mother at his feet, and a servant not far off. However, men as well as women were killed to follow their masters to the far country. The confidential companion of a chief was expected as a matter of common decency to die with his lord; and if he shirked the duty, he fell in the public esteem. When Mbithi, a chief of high rank and greatly esteemed in Mathuata, died in the year 1840, not only his wife but five men with their wives were strangled to form the floor of his grave. They were laid on a layer of mats, and the body of the chief was stretched upon them.[687] There used to be a family in Vanua Levu which enjoyed the high privilege of supplying a hale man to be buried with the king of Fiji on every occasion of a royal decease. It was quite necessary that the man should be hale and hearty, for it was his business to grapple with the Fijian Cerberus in the other world, while his majesty slipped past into the abode of bliss.[688] [Sidenote: Sacrifices of foreskins and fingers in honour of the dead. Circumcision performed on a lad as a propitiatory sacrifice to save the life of his father or father's brother. The rite of circumcision followed by a licentious orgy.] A curious sacrifice offered in honour of a dead chief consisted in the foreskins of all the boys who had arrived at a suitable age; the lads were circumcised on purpose to furnish them. Many boys had their little fingers chopped off on the same occasion, and the severed foreskins and fingers were placed in the chief's grave. When this bloody rite had been performed, the chief's relatives presented young bread-fruit trees to the mutilated boys, whose friends were bound to cultivate them till the boys could do it for themselves.[689] Women as well as boys had their fingers cut off in mourning. We read of a case when after the death of a king of Fiji sixty fingers were amputated and being each inserted in a slit reed were stuck along the eaves of the king's house.[690] Why foreskins and fingers were buried with a dead chief or stuck up on the roof of his house, we are not informed, and it is not easy to divine. Apparently we must suppose that, when they were buried with the body, they were thought to be of some assistance to the departed spirit in the land of souls. At all events it deserves to be noted that according to a very good authority a similar sacrifice of foreskins used to be made not only for the dead but for the living. When a man of note was dangerously ill, a family council would be held, at which it might be agreed that a circumcision should take place as a propitiatory measure. Notice having been given to the priests, an uncircumcised lad, the sick man's own son or the son of one of his brothers, was then taken by his kinsman to the _Vale tambu_ or God's House, and there presented as a _soro_, or offering of atonement, in order that his father or father's brother might be made whole. His escort at the same time made a present of valuable property at the shrine and promised much more in future, should their prayers be answered. The present and the promises were graciously received by the priest, who appointed a day on which the operation was to be performed. In the meantime no food might be taken from the plantations except what was absolutely required for daily use; no pigs or fowls might be killed, and no coco-nuts plucked from the trees. Everything, in short, was put under a strict taboo; all was set apart for the great feast which was to follow the performance of the rite. On the day appointed the son or nephew of the sick chief was circumcised, and with him a number of other lads whose friends had agreed to take advantage of the occasion. Their foreskins, stuck in the cleft of a split reed, were taken to the sacred enclosure (_Nanga_) and presented to the chief priest, who, holding the reeds in his hand, offered them to the ancestral gods and prayed for the sick man's recovery. Then followed a great feast, which ushered in a period of indescribable revelry and licence. All distinctions of property were for the time being suspended. Men and women arrayed themselves in all manner of fantastic garbs, addressed one another in the foulest language, and practised unmentionable abominations openly in the public square of the town. The nearest relationships, even that of own brother and sister, seemed to be no bar to the general licence, the extent of which was indicated by the expressive phrase of an old Nandi chief, who said, "While it lasts, we are just like the pigs." This feasting and orgy might be kept up for several days, after which the ordinary restraints of society and the common decencies of life were observed once more. The rights of private property were again respected; the abandoned revellers and debauchees settled down into staid married couples; and brothers and sisters, in accordance with the regular Fijian etiquette, might not so much as speak to one another. It should be added that these extravagances in connexion with the rite of circumcision appear to have been practised only in certain districts of Viti Levu, the largest of the Fijian Islands, where they were always associated with the sacred stone enclosures which went by the name of _Nanga_.[691] [Sidenote: These orgies were apparently associated with the worship of the dead, to whom offerings were made in the _Nanga_ or sacred enclosure of stones.] The meaning of such orgies is very obscure, but from what we know of the savage and his ways we may fairly assume that they were no mere outbursts of unbridled passion, but that in the minds of those who practised them they had a definite significance and served a definite purpose. The one thing that seems fairly clear about them is that in some way they were associated with the worship or propitiation of the dead. At all events we are told on good authority that the _Nanga_, or sacred enclosure of stones, in which the severed foreskins were offered, was "the Sacred Place where the ancestral spirits are to be found by their worshippers, and thither offerings are taken on all occasions when their aid is to be invoked. Every member of the _Nanga_ has the privilege of approaching the ancestors at any time. When sickness visits himself or his kinsfolk, when he wishes to invoke the aid of the spirits to avert calamity or to secure prosperity, or when he deems it advisable to present a thank-offering, he may enter the _Nanga_ with proper reverence and deposit on the dividing wall his whale's tooth, or bundle of cloth, or dish of toothsome eels so highly prized by the elders, and therefore by the ancestors whose living representatives they are: or he may drag into the Sacred _Nanga_ his fattened pig, or pile up there his offering of the choicest yams. And, having thus recommended himself to the dead, he may invoke their powerful aid, or express his thankfulness for the benefits they have conferred, and beg for a continuance of their goodwill."[692] The first-fruits of the yam harvest were presented with great ceremony to the ancestors in the _Nanga_ before the bulk of the crop was dug for the people's use, and no man might taste of the new yams until the presentation had been made. The yams so offered were piled up in the sacred enclosure and left to rot there. If any one were impious enough to appropriate them to his own use, it was believed that he would be smitten with madness. Great feasts were held at the presentation of the first-fruits; and the sacred enclosure itself was often spoken of as the _Mbaki_ or Harvest.[693] [Sidenote: Periodical initiation of young men in the _Nanga_.] But the most characteristic and perhaps the most important of the rites performed in the _Nanga_ or sacred stone enclosure was the periodical initiation of young men, who by participation in the ceremony were admitted to the full privileges of manhood. According to one account the ceremony of initiation was performed as a rule only once in two years; according to another account it was observed annually in October or November, when the _ndrala_ tree (_Erythrina_) was in flower. The flowering of the tree marked the beginning of the Fijian year; hence the novices who were initiated at this season bore the title of _Vilavou_, that is, "New Year's Men." As a preparation for the feasts which attended the ceremony enormous quantities of yams were garnered and placed under a strict taboo; pigs were fattened in large numbers, and bales of native cloth stored on the tie-beams of the house-roofs. Spears of many patterns and curiously carved clubs were also provided against the festival. On the day appointed the initiated men went first into the sacred enclosure and made their offerings, the chief priest having opened the proceedings by libation and prayer. The heads of the novices were clean shaven, and their beards, if they had any, were also removed. Then each youth was swathed in long rolls of native cloth, and taking a spear in one hand and a club in the other he marched with his comrades, similarly swathed and armed, in procession into the sacred enclosure, though not into its inner compartment, the Holy of Holies. The procession was headed by a priest bearing his carved staff of office, and it was received on the holy ground by the initiates, who sat chanting a song in a deep murmuring tone, which occasionally swelled to a considerable volume of sound and was thought to represent the muffled roar of the surf breaking on a far-away coral reef. On entering the enclosure the youths threw down their weapons before them, and with the help of the initiated men divested themselves of the huge folds of native cloth in which they were enveloped, each man revolving slowly on his axis, while his attendant pulled at the bandage and gathered in the slack. The weapons and the cloth were the offerings presented by the novices to the ancestral spirits for the purpose of rendering themselves acceptable to these powerful beings. The offerings were repeated in like manner on four successive days; and as each youth was merely, as it were, the central roller of a great bale of cloth, the amount of cloth offered was considerable. It was all put away, with the spears and clubs, in the sacred storehouse by the initiated men. A feast concluded each day and was prolonged far into the night. [Sidenote: Ceremony of death and resurrection.] On the fifth day, the last and greatest of the festival, the heads of the young men were shaven again and their bodies swathed in the largest and best rolls of cloth. Then, taking their choicest weapons in their hands, they followed their leader as before into the sacred enclosure. But the outer compartment of the holy place, where on the previous days they had been received by the grand chorus of initiated men, was now silent and deserted. The procession stopped. A dead silence prevailed. Suddenly from the forest a harsh scream of many parrots broke forth, and then followed a mysterious booming sound which filled the souls of the novices with awe. But now the priest moves slowly forward and leads the train of trembling novices for the first time into the inner shrine, the Holy of Holies, the _Nanga tambu-tambu_. Here a dreadful spectacle meets their startled gaze. In the background sits the high priest, regarding them with a stony stare; and between him and them lie a row of dead men, covered with blood, their bodies seemingly cut open and their entrails protruding. The leader steps over them one by one, and the awestruck youths follow him until they stand in a row before the high priest, their very souls harrowed by his awful glare. Suddenly he utters a great yell, and at the cry the dead men start to their feet, and run down to the river to cleanse themselves from the blood and filth with which they are besmeared. They are initiated men, who represent the departed ancestors for the occasion; and the blood and entrails are those of many pigs that have been slaughtered for that night's revelry. The screams of the parrots and the mysterious booming sound were produced by a concealed orchestra, who screeched appropriately and blew blasts on bamboo trumpets, the mouths of which were partially immersed in water. [Sidenote: Sacrament of food and water.] The dead men having come to life again, the novices offered their weapons and the bales of native cloth in which they were swathed. These were accordingly removed to the storehouse and the young men were made to sit down in front of it. Then the high priest, cheered perhaps by the sight of the offerings, unbent the starched dignity of his demeanour. Skipping from side to side he cried in stridulous tones, "Where are the people of my enclosure? Are they gone to Tongalevu? Are they gone to the deep sea?" He had not called long when an answer rang out from the river in a deep-mouthed song, and soon the singers came in view moving rhythmically to the music of their solemn chant. Singing they filed in and took their places in front of the young men; then silence ensued. After that there entered four old men of the highest order of initiates; the first bore a cooked yam carefully wrapt in leaves so that no part of it should touch the hands of the bearer; the second carried a piece of baked pork similarly enveloped; the third held a drinking-cup of coco-nut shell or earthenware filled with water and wrapt round with native cloth; and the fourth bore a napkin of the same material. Thereupon the first elder passed along the row of novices putting the end of the yam into each of their mouths, and as he did so each of them nibbled a morsel of the sacred food; the second elder did the same with the sacred pork; the third elder followed with the holy water, with which each novice merely wetted his lips; and the rear was brought up by the fourth elder, who wiped all their mouths with his napkin. Then the high priest or one of the elders addressed the young men, warning them solemnly against the sacrilege of divulging to the profane any of the high mysteries they had seen and heard, and threatening all such traitors with the vengeance of the gods. [Sidenote: Presentation of the pig.] That ceremony being over, all the junior initiated men (_Lewe ni Nanga_) came forward, and each man presented to the novices a yam and a piece of nearly raw pork; whereupon the young men took the food and went away to cook it for eating. When the evening twilight had fallen, a huge pig, which had been specially set aside at a former festival, was dragged into the sacred enclosure and there presented to the novices, together with other swine, if they should be needed to furnish a plenteous repast. [Sidenote: Acceptance of the novices by the ancestral spirits.] The novices were now "accepted members of the _Nanga_, qualified to take their place among the men of the community, though still only on probation. As children--their childhood being indicated by their shaven heads--they were presented to the ancestors, and their acceptance was notified by what (looking at the matter from the natives' standpoint) we might, without irreverence, almost call the _sacrament_ of food and water, too sacred even for the elders' hands to touch. This acceptance was acknowledged and confirmed on the part of all the _Lewe ni Nanga_ [junior initiated men] by their gift of food, and it was finally ratified by the presentation of the Sacred Pig. In like manner, on the birth of an infant, its father acknowledges it as legitimate, and otherwise acceptable, by a gift of food; and his kinsfolk formally signify approval and confirmation of his decision on the part of the clan by similar presentations." [Sidenote: The initiation followed by a period of sexual license. Sacred pigs.] Next morning the women, their hair dyed red and wearing waistbands of hibiscus or other fibre, came to the sacred enclosure and crawled through it on hands and knees into the Holy of Holies, where the elders were singing their solemn chant. The high priest then dipped his hands into the water of the sacred bowl and prayed to the ancestral spirits for the mothers and for their children. After that the women crawled back on hands and feet the way they had come, singing as they went and creeping over certain mounds of earth which had been thrown up for the purpose in the sacred enclosure. When they emerged from the holy ground, the men and women addressed each other in the vilest language, such as on ordinary occasions would be violently resented; and thenceforth to the close of the ceremonies some days later very great, indeed almost unlimited, licence prevailed between the sexes. During these days a number of pigs were consecrated to serve for the next ceremony. The animals were deemed sacred, and had the run of the fleshpots in the villages in which they were kept. Indeed they were held in the greatest reverence. To kill one, except for sacrifice at the rites in the _Nanga_, would have been a sacrilege which the Fijian mind refused to contemplate; and on the other hand to feed the holy swine was an act of piety. Men might be seen throwing down basketfuls of food before the snouts of the worshipful pigs, and at the same time calling the attention of the ancestral spirits to the meritorious deed. "Take knowledge of me," they would cry, "ye who lie buried, our heads! I am feeding this pig of yours." Finally, all the men who had taken part in the ceremonies bathed together in the river, carefully cleansing themselves from every particle of the black paint with which they had been bedaubed. When the novices, now novices no more, emerged from the water, the high priest, standing on the river bank, preached to them an eloquent sermon on the duties and responsibilities which devolved on them in their new position.[694] [Sidenote: The intention of the initiatory rites seems to be to introduce the young men to the ancestral spirits. The drama of death and resurrection. The Fijian rites of initiation seem to have been imported by Melanesian immigrants from the west.] The general intention of these initiatory rites appears to be, as Mr. Fison has said in the words which I have quoted, to introduce the young men to the ancestral spirits at their sanctuary, to incorporate them, so to say, in the great community which embraces all adult members of the tribe, whether living or dead. At all events this interpretation fits in very well with the prayers which are offered to the souls of departed kinsfolk on these occasions, and it is supported by the analogy of the New Guinea initiatory rites which I described in former lectures; for in these rites, as I pointed out, the initiation of the youths is closely associated with the conceptions of death and the dead, the main feature in the ritual consisting indeed of a simulation of death and subsequent resurrection. It is, therefore, significant that the very same simulation figures prominently in the Fijian ceremony, nay it would seem to be the very pivot on which the whole ritual revolves. Yet there is an obvious and important difference between the drama of death and resurrection as it is enacted in New Guinea and in Fiji; for whereas in New Guinea it is the novices who pretend to die and come to life again, in Fiji the pretence is carried out by initiated men who represent the ancestors, while the novices merely look on with horror and amazement at the awe-inspiring spectacle. Of the two forms of ritual the New Guinea one is probably truer to the original purpose of the rite, which seems to have been to enable the novices to put off the old, or rather the young, man and to put on a higher form of existence by participating in the marvellous powers and privileges of the mighty dead. And if such was really the intention of the ceremony, it is obvious that it was better effected by compelling the young communicants, as we may call them, to die and rise from the dead in their own persons than by obliging them to assist as mere passive spectators at a dramatic performance of death and resurrection. Yet in spite of this difference between the two rituals, the general resemblance between them is near enough to justify us in conjecturing that there may be a genetic connexion between the one and the other. The conjecture is confirmed, first, by the very limited and definite area of Fiji in which these initiatory rites were practised, and, second, by the equally definite tradition of their origin. With regard to the first of these points, the _Nanga_ or sacred stone enclosure with its characteristic rites was known only to certain tribes, who occupied a comparatively small area, a bare third of the island of Viti Levu. These tribes are the Nuyaloa, Vatusila, Mbatiwai, and Mdavutukia. They all seem to have spread eastward and southward from a place of origin in the western mountain district. Their physical type is pure Melanesian, with fewer traces of Polynesian admixture than can be detected in the tribes on the coast.[695] Hence it is natural to enquire whether the ritual of the _Nanga_ may not have been imported into Fiji by Melanesian immigrants from the west. The question appears to be answered in the affirmative by native tradition. "This is the word of our fathers concerning the _Nanga_," said an old Wainimala grey-beard to Mr. Fison. "Long, long ago their fathers were ignorant of it; but one day two strangers were found sitting in the _rara_ (public square), and they said they had come up from the sea to give them the _Nanga_. They were little men, and very dark-skinned, and one of them had his face and bust painted red, while the other was painted black. Whether these two were gods or men our fathers did not tell us, but it was they who taught our people the _Nanga_. This was in the old old times when our fathers were living in another land--not in this place, for we are strangers here. Our fathers fled hither from Navosa in a great war which arose among them, and when they came there was no _Nanga_ in the land. So they built one of their own after the fashion of that which they left behind them." "Here," says Mr. Basil Thomson, "we have the earliest tradition of missionary enterprise in the Pacific. I do not doubt that the two sooty-skinned little men were castaways driven eastward by one of those strong westerly gales that have been known to last for three weeks at a time. By Fijian custom the lives of all castaways were forfeit, but the pretence to supernatural powers would have saved men full of the religious rites of their Melanesian home, and would have assured them a hearing. The Wainimala tribes can name six generations since they settled in their present home, and therefore the introduction of the _Nanga_ cannot have been less than two centuries ago. During that time it has overspread one third of the large island." [Sidenote: The general licence associated with the ritual of the _Nanga_ may be a temporary revival of primitive communism.] A very remarkable feature in the _Nanga_ ritual consists in the temporary licence accorded to the sexes and the suspension of proprietary rites in general. What is the meaning of this curious and to the civilised mind revolting custom? Here again the most probable, though merely conjectural, answer is furnished by Mr. Fison. "We cannot for a moment believe," he says, "that it is a mere licentious outbreak, without an underlying meaning and purpose. It is part of a religious rite, and is supposed to be acceptable to the ancestors. But why should it be acceptable to them unless it were in accordance with their own practice in the far-away past? There may be another solution of this difficult problem, but I confess myself unable to find any other which will cover all the corroborating facts."[696] In other words, Mr. Fison supposes that in the sexual licence and suspension of the rights of private property which characterise these festivals we have a reminiscence of a time when women and property were held in common by the community, and the motive for temporarily resuscitating these obsolete customs was a wish to propitiate the ancestral spirits, who were thought to be gratified by witnessing a revival of that primitive communism which they themselves had practised in the flesh so long ago. Truly a religious revival of a remarkable kind! [Sidenote: Description of the _Nanga_ or sacred enclosure of stones.] To conclude this part of my subject I will briefly describe the construction of a _Nanga_ or sacred stone enclosure, as it used to exist in Fiji. At the present day only ruins of these structures are to be seen, but by an observation of the ruins and a comparison of the traditions which still survive among the natives on the subject it is possible to reconstruct one of them with a fair degree of exactness. A _Nanga_ has been described as an open-air temple, and the description is just. It consisted of a rough parallelogram enclosed by flat stones set upright and embedded endwise in the earth. The length of the enclosure thus formed was about one hundred feet and its breadth about fifty feet. The upright stones which form the outer walls are from eighteen inches to three feet high, but as they do not always touch they may be described as alignments rather than walls. The long walls or alignments run east and west, the short ones north and south; but the orientation is not very exact. At the eastern end are two pyramidal heaps of stones, about five feet high, with square sloping sides and flat tops. The narrow passage between them is the main entrance into the sacred enclosure. Internally the structure was divided into three separate enclosures or compartments by two cross-walls of stone running north and south. These compartments, taking them from east to west, were called respectively the Little Nanga, the Great Nanga, and the Sacred Nanga or Holy of Holies (_Nanga tambu-tambu_). The partition walls between them were built solid of stones, with battering sides, to a height of five feet, and in the middle of each there was an opening to allow the worshippers to pass from one compartment to another. Trees, such as the candlenut and the red-leaved dracaena, and odoriferous shrubs were planted round the enclosure; and outside of it, to the west of the Holy of Holies, was a bell-roofed hut called _Vale tambu_, the Sacred House or Temple. The sacred _kava_ bowl stood in the Holy of Holies.[697] It is said that when the two traditionary founders of the _Nanga_ in Fiji were about to erect the first structure of that name in their new home, the chief priest poured a libation of _kava_ to the ancestral gods, "and, calling upon those who died long, long ago by name, he prayed that the people of the tribe, both old and young, might live before them."[698] [Sidenote: Comparison of the _Nanga_ with the cromlechs and other megalithic monuments of Europe.] The sacred enclosures of stones which I have described have been compared to the alignments of stones at Carnac in Brittany and Merivale on Dartmoor, and it has been suggested that in the olden time these ancient European monuments may have witnessed religious rites like those which were till lately performed in the rude open-air temples of Fiji.[699] If there is any truth in the suggestion, which I mention for what it is worth, it would furnish another argument in favour of the view that our European cromlechs and other megalithic monuments were erected specially for the worship of the dead. The mortuary character of Stonehenge, for example, is at least suggested by the burial mounds which cluster thick around and within sight of it; about three hundred such tombs have been counted within a radius of three miles, while the rest of the country in the neighbourhood is comparatively free from them.[700] [Footnote 678: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, Second Edition (London, 1860), i. 242 _sq._] [Footnote 679: Charles Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 86.] [Footnote 680: John Jackson's Narrative, in Capt. J. E. Erskine's _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_ (London, 1853), pp. 475-477. The narrator, John Jackson, was an English seaman who resided alone among the Fijians for nearly two years and learned their language.] [Footnote 681: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 96.] [Footnote 682: _United States Exploring Expedition, Ethnology and Philology_, by H. Hale (Philadelphia, 1846), p. 65. Compare Capt. J. E. Erskine, _op. cit._ p. 248: "It would also seem that a belief in the resurrection of the body, in the exact condition in which it leaves the world, is one of the causes that induce, in many instances, a desire for death in the vigour of manhood, rather than in the decrepitude of old age"; Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 183: "The heathen notion is, that, as they die, such will their condition be in another world; hence their desire to escape extreme infirmity."] [Footnote 683: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 94 _sq._ Compare Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 183-186; Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_ (London, 1904), pp. xxv. _sq._] [Footnote 684: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 96. Compare Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 188 _sq._, 193 _sqq._, 200-202; Lorimer Fison, _op. cit._ pp. xxv. _sq._] [Footnote 685: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 200.] [Footnote 686: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 189; Lorimer Fison, _op. cit._ p. xvi.] [Footnote 687: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 189.] [Footnote 688: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 197.] [Footnote 689: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 100. Williams also says (_op. cit._ i. 167) that the proper time for performing the rite of circumcision was after the death of a chief, and he tells us that "many rude games attend it. Blindfolded youths strike at thin vessels of water hung from the branch of a tree. At Lakemba, the men arm themselves with branches of the cocoa-nut, and carry on a sham fight. At Ono, they wrestle. At Mbau, they fillip small stones from the end of a bamboo with sufficient force to make the person hit wince again. On Vanua Levu, there is a mock siege."] [Footnote 690: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 198.] [Footnote 691: Rev. Lorimer Fison, "The Nanga, or Sacred Stone Enclosure, of Wainimala, Fiji," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xiv. (1885) pp. 27 _sq._ On the other hand Mr. Basil Thomson's enquiries, made at a later date, did not confirm Mr. Fison's statement that the rite of circumcision was practised as a propitiation to recover a chief from sickness. "I was assured," he says, "on the contrary, that while offerings were certainly made in the _Nanga_ for the recovery of the sick, every youth was circumcised as a matter of routine, and that the rite was in no way connected with sacrifice for the sick" (Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_, pp. 156 _sq._). However, Mr. Fison was a very careful and accurate enquirer, and his testimony is not to be lightly set aside.] [Footnote 692: Rev. Lorimer Fison, "The Nanga, or Sacred Stone Enclosure, of Wainimala, Fiji," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xiv. (1885) p. 26. Compare Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_, p. 147: "The _Nanga_ was the 'bed' of the Ancestors, that is, the spot where their descendants might hold communion with them; the _Mbaki_ were the rites celebrated in the _Nanga_, whether of initiating the youths, or of presenting the first-fruits, or of recovering the sick, or of winning charms against wounds in battle."] [Footnote 693: Rev. Lorimer Fison, _op. cit._ p. 27.] [Footnote 694: Rev. Lorimer Fison, "The Nanga, or Sacred Stone Enclosure, of Wainimala, Fiji," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xiv. (1885) pp. 14-26. The _Nanga_ and its rites have also been described by Mr. A. B. Joske ("The Nanga of Viti-levu," _Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie_, ii. (1889) pp. 254-266), and Mr. Basil Thomson (_The Fijians_, pp. 146-156). As to the interval between the initiatory ceremonies Mr. Fison tells us that it was normally two years, but he adds: "This period, however, is not necessarily restricted to two years. There are always a number of youths who are growing to the proper age, and the length of the interval depends upon the decision of the elders. Whenever they judge that there is a sufficient number of youths ready for admission, a _Nanga_ is appointed to be held; and thus the interval may be longer or shorter, according to the supply of novices" (_op. cit._ p. 19). According to Mr. Basil Thomson the rites were celebrated annually. Mr. Fison's evidence as to the gross license which prevailed between the sexes after the admission of the women to the sacred enclosure is confirmed by Mr. Basil Thomson, who says, amongst other things, that "a native of Mbau, who lived for some years near the _Nanga_, assured me that the visit of the women to the _Nanga_ resulted in temporary promiscuity; all tabus were defied, and relations who could not speak to one another by customary law committed incest" (_op. cit._ p. 154).] [Footnote 695: Rev. Lorimer Fison, "The Nanga, or Sacred Stone Enclosure, of Wainimala, Fiji," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, xiv. (1885) pp. 14 _sqq._; Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_, pp. 147, 149.] [Footnote 696: Rev. Lorimer Fison, _op. cit._ p. 30.] [Footnote 697: Rev. Lorimer Fison, _op. cit._ pp. 15, 17, with Plate I.; Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_, pp. 147 _sq._ Mr. Fison had not seen a _Nanga_; his description is based on information received from natives. Mr. Basil Thomson visited several of these structures and found them so alike that one description would serve for all. He speaks of only two inner compartments, which he calls the Holy of Holies (_Nanga tambu-tambu_) and the Middle Nanga (_Loma ni Nanga_), but the latter name appears to imply a third compartment, which is explicitly mentioned and named by Mr. Fison. The bell-shaped hut or temple to the west of the sacred enclosure is not noticed by Mr. Thomson.] [Footnote 698: Rev. Lorimer Fison, _op. cit._ p. 17.] [Footnote 699: Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_, p. 147.] [Footnote 700: As to these monuments see Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), _Prehistoric Times_, Fifth Edition (London, 1890), p. 127.] LECTURE XX THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE NATIVES OF EASTERN MELANESIA (FIJI) (_concluded_) [Sidenote: Worship of ancestors in Fiji.] In the last lecture I described the rites of ancestor worship which in certain parts of Fiji used to be celebrated at the sacred enclosures of stones known as _Nangas_. But the worship of ancestral spirits was by no means confined to the comparatively small area in Fiji where such sacred enclosures were erected, nor were these open-air temples the only structures where the homage of the living was paid to the dead. On the contrary we are told by one who knew the Fijians in the old heathen days that among them "as soon as beloved parents expire, they take their place amongst the family gods. _Bures_, or temples, are erected to their memory, and offerings deposited either on their graves or on rudely constructed altars--mere stages, in the form of tables, the legs of which are driven into the ground, and the top of which is covered with pieces of native cloth. The construction of these altars is identical with that observed by Turner in Tanna, and only differs in its inferior finish from the altars formerly erected in Tahiti and the adjacent islands. The offerings, consisting of the choicest articles of food, are left exposed to wind and weather, and firmly believed by the mass of Fijians to be consumed by the spirits of departed friends and relations; but, if not eaten by animals, they are often stolen by the more enlightened class of their countrymen, and even some of the foreigners do not disdain occasionally to help themselves freely to them. However, it is not only on tombs or on altars that offerings are made; often, when the natives eat or drink anything, they throw portions of it away, stating them to be for their departed ancestors. I remember ordering a young chief to empty a bowl containing _kava_, which he did, muttering to himself, 'There, father, is some _kava_ for you. Protect me from illness or breaking any of my limbs whilst in the mountains.'"[701] [Sidenote: Fijian notion of divinity. Two classes of gods, namely, gods strictly so called, and deified men.] "The native word expressive of divinity is _kalou_, which, while used to denote the people's highest notion of a god, is also constantly heard as a qualificative of any thing great or marvellous, or, according to Hazlewood's Dictionary, 'anything superlative, whether good or bad.'... Often the word sinks into a mere exclamation, or becomes an expression of flattery. 'You are a _kalou_!' or, 'Your countrymen are gods!' is often uttered by the natives, when hearing of the triumphs of art among civilized nations."[702] The Fijians distinguished two classes of gods: first, _kalou vu_, literally "Root-gods," that is, gods strictly so called, and second, _kalou yalo_, literally, "Soul-gods," that is, deified mortals. Gods of the first class were supposed to be absolutely eternal; gods of the second class, though raised far above mere humanity, were thought nevertheless to be subject to human passions and wants, to accidents, and even to death. These latter were the spirits of departed chiefs, heroes, and friends; admission into their number was easy, and any one might secure his own apotheosis who could ensure the services of some one to act as his representative and priest after his death.[703] However, though the Fijians admitted the distinction between the two classes of gods in theory, they would seem to have confused them in practice. Thus we are informed by an early authority that "they have superior and inferior gods and goddesses, more general and local deities, and, were it not an obvious contradiction, we should say they have gods _human_, and gods _divine_; for they have some gods who were gods originally, and some who were originally men. It is impossible to ascertain with any degree of probability how many gods the Fijians have, as any man who can distinguish himself in murdering his fellow-men may certainly secure to himself deification after death. Their friends are also sometimes deified and invoked. I have heard them invoke their friends who have been drowned at sea. I need not advert to the absurdity of praying to those who could not save themselves from a watery grave. Tuikilakila, the chief of Somosomo, offered Mr. Hunt a preferment of this sort. 'If you die first,' said he, 'I shall make you my god.' In fact, there appears to be no certain line of demarcation between departed spirits and gods, nor between gods and living men, for many of the priests and old chiefs are considered as sacred persons, and not a few of them will also claim to themselves the right of divinity. 'I am a god,' Tuikilakila would sometimes say; and he believed it too. They were not merely the words of his lips; he believed he was something above a mere man."[704] Writers on Fiji have given us lists of some of the principal gods of the first class,[705] who were supposed never to have been men; but in their account of the religious ritual they do not distinguish between the worship which was paid to such deities and that which was paid to deified men. Accordingly we may infer that the ritual was practically the same, and in the sequel I shall assume that what is told us of the worship of gods in general holds good of the worship of deified men in particular. [Sidenote: The Fijian temple (_bure_).] Every Fijian town had at least one _bure_ or temple, many of them had several. Significantly enough the spot where a chief had been killed was sometimes chosen for the site of a temple. The structure of these edifices was somewhat peculiar. Each of them was built on the top of a mound, which was raised to the height of from three to twenty feet above the ground and faced on its sloping sides with dry rubble-work of stone. The ascent to the temple was by a thick plank, the upper surface of which was cut into notched steps. The proportions of the sacred edifice itself were inelegant, if not uncouth, its height being nearly twice as great as its breadth at the base. The roof was high-pitched; the ridge-pole was covered with white shells (_Ovula cypraea_) and projected three or four feet at each end. For the most part each temple had two doors and a fire-place in the centre. From some temples it was not lawful to throw out the ashes, however much they might accumulate, until the end of the year, which fell in November. The furniture consisted of a few boxes, mats, several large clay jars, and many drinking vessels. A temple might also contain images, which, though highly esteemed as ornaments and held sacred, were not worshipped as idols. From the roof depended a long piece of white bark-cloth; it was carried down the angle so as to hang before the corner-post and lie on the floor. This cloth formed the path down which the god was believed to pass in order to enter and inspire his priest. It marked the holy place which few but he dared to approach. However, the temples were by no means dedicated exclusively to the use of religion. Each of them served also as a council-chamber and town-hall; there the chiefs lounged for hours together; there strangers were entertained; and there the head persons of the village might even sleep.[706] In some parts of Viti Levu the dead were sometimes buried in the temples, "that the wind might not disturb, nor the rain fall upon them," and in order that the living might have the satisfaction of lying near their departed friends. A child of high rank having died under the charge of the queen of Somosomo, the little body was placed in a box and hung from the tie-beam of the principal temple. For some months afterwards the daintiest food was brought daily to the dead child, the bearers approaching with the utmost respect and clapping their hands when the ghost was thought to have finished his meal just as a chiefs retainers used to do when he had done eating.[707] [Sidenote: Worship at the temples.] Temples were often unoccupied for months and allowed to fall into ruins, until the chief had some request to make to the god, when the necessary repairs were first carried out. No regular worship was maintained, no habitual reverence was displayed at the shrines. The principle of fear, we are told, seemed to be the only motive of religious observances, and it was artfully fomented by the priests, through whom alone the people had access to the gods when they desired to supplicate the favour of the divine beings. The prayers were naturally accompanied by offerings, which in matters of importance comprised large quantities of food, together with whales' teeth; in lesser affairs a tooth, club, mat, or spear sufficed. Of the food brought by the worshippers part was dedicated to the god, but as usual he only ate the soul of it, the substance being consumed by the priest and old men; the remainder furnished a feast of which all might partake.[708] [Sidenote: The priests.] The office of priest (_mbete_, _bete_) was usually hereditary, but when a priest died without male heirs a cunning fellow, ambitious of enjoying the sacred character and of living in idleness, would sometimes simulate the convulsive frenzy, which passed for a symptom of inspiration, and if he succeeded in the imposture would be inducted into the vacant benefice. Every chief had his priest, with whom he usually lived on a very good footing, the two playing into each other's hands and working the oracle for their mutual benefit. The people were grossly superstitious, and there were few of their affairs in which the priest had not a hand. His influence over them was great. In his own district he passed for the representative of the deity; indeed, according to an early missionary, the natives seldom distinguished the idea of the god from that of his minister, who was viewed by them with a reverence that almost amounted to deification.[709] [Sidenote: Oracles given by the priest under the inspiration of the god. Paroxysm of inspiration.] The principal duty of the priest was to reveal to men the will of the god, and this he always did through the direct inspiration of the deity. The revelation was usually made in response to an enquiry or a prayer; the supplicant asked, it might be, for a good crop of yams or taro, for showers of rain, for protection in battle, for a safe voyage, or for a storm to drive canoes ashore, so that the supplicant might rob, murder, and eat the castaways. To lend force to one or other of these pious prayers the worshipper brought a whale's tooth to the temple and presented it to the priest. The man of god might have had word of his coming and time to throw himself into an appropriate attitude. He might, for example, be seen lying on the floor near the sacred corner, plunged in a profound meditation. On the entrance of the enquirer the priest would rouse himself so far as to get up and then seat himself with his back to the white cloth, down which the deity was expected to slide into the medium's body. Having received the whale's tooth he would abstract his mind from all worldly matters and contemplate the tooth for some time with rapt attention. Presently he began to tremble, his limbs twitched, his features were distorted. These symptoms, the visible manifestation of the entrance of the spirit into him, gradually increased in violence till his whole frame was convulsed and shook as with a strong fit of ague: his veins swelled: the circulation of the blood was quickened. The man was now possessed and inspired by the god: his own human personality was for a time in abeyance: all that he said and did in the paroxysm passed for the words and acts of the indwelling deity. Shrill cries of "_Koi au! Koi au!_" "It is I! It is I!" filled the air, proclaiming the actual presence of the powerful spirit in the vessel of flesh and blood. In giving the oracular response the priest's eyes protruded from their sockets and rolled as in a frenzy: his voice rose into a squeak: his face was pallid, his lips livid, his breathing depressed, his whole appearance that of a furious madman. At last sweat burst from every pore, tears gushed from his eyes: the strain on the organism was visibly relieved; and the symptoms gradually abated. Then he would look round with a vacant stare: the god within him would cry, "I depart!" and the man would announce the departure of the spirit by throwing himself on his mat or striking the ground with his club, while blasts on a shell-trumpet conveyed to those at a distance the tidings that the deity had withdrawn from mortal sight into the world invisible.[710] "I have seen," says Mr. Lorimer Fison, "this possession, and a horrible sight it is. In one case, after the fit was over, for some time the man's muscles and nerves twitched and quivered in an extraordinary way. He was naked except for his breech-clout, and on his naked breast little snakes seemed to be wriggling for a moment or two beneath his skin, disappearing and then suddenly reappearing in another part of his chest. When the _mbete_ (which we may translate 'priest' for want of a better word) is seized by the possession, the god within him calls out his own name in a stridulous tone, 'It is I! Katouviere!' or some other name. At the next possession some other ancestor may declare himself."[711] [Sidenote: Specimens of the oracular utterances of Fijian gods.] From this last description of an eye-witness we learn that the spirit which possessed a priest and spoke through him was often believed to be that of a dead ancestor. Some of the inspired utterances of these prophets have been recorded. Here are specimens of Fijian inspiration. Speaking in the name of the great god Ndengei, who was worshipped in the form of a serpent, the priest said: "Great Fiji is my small club. Muaimbila is the head; Kamba is the handle. If I step on Muaimbila, I shall sink it into the sea, whilst Kamba shall rise to the sky. If I step on Kamba, it will be lost in the sea, whilst Muaimbila would rise into the skies. Yes, Viti Levu is my small war-club. I can turn it as I please. I can turn it upside down." Again, speaking by the mouth of a priest, the god Tanggirianima once made the following observations: "I and Kumbunavannua only are gods. I preside over wars, and do as I please with sickness. But it is difficult for me to come here, as the foreign god fills the place. If I attempt to descend by that pillar, I find it pre-occupied by the foreign god. If I try another pillar, I find it the same. However, we two are fighting the foreign god; and if we are victorious, we will save the woman. I _will_ save the woman. She will eat food to-day. Had I been sent for yesterday, she would have eaten then," and so on. The woman, about whose case the deity was consulted and whom he announced his fixed intention of saving, died a few hours afterwards.[712] [Sidenote: Human sacrifices in Fiji.] Ferocious and inveterate cannibals themselves, the Fijians naturally assumed that their gods were so too; hence human flesh was a common offering, indeed the most valued of all.[713] Formal human sacrifices were frequent. The victims were usually taken from a distant tribe, and when war and violence failed to supply the demand, recourse was sometimes had to negotiation. However obtained, the victims destined for sacrifice were often kept for a time and fattened to make them better eating. Then, tightly bound in a sitting posture, they were placed on hot stones in one of the usual ovens, and being covered over with leaves and earth were roasted alive, while the spectators roared with laughter at the writhings and contortions of the victims in their agony. When their struggles ceased and the bodies were judged to be done to a nicety, they were raked out of the oven, their faces painted black, and so carried to the temple, where they were presented to the gods, only, however, to be afterwards removed, cut up, and devoured by the people.[714] [Sidenote: Human sacrifices offered when a king's house was built or a great new canoe launched.] However, roasting alive in ovens was not the only way in which men and women were made away with in the service of religion. When a king's house was built, men were buried alive in the holes dug to receive the posts: they were compelled to clasp the posts in their arms, and then the earth was shovelled over them and rammed down. And when a large new canoe was launched, it was hauled down to the sea over the bodies of living men, who were pinioned and laid out at intervals on the beach to serve as rollers on which the great vessel glided smoothly into the water, leaving a row of mangled corpses behind. The theory of both these modes of sacrifice was explained by the Fijians to an Englishman who witnessed them. I will quote their explanation in his words. "They said in answer to the questions I put respecting the people being buried alive with the posts, that a house or palace of a king was just like a king's canoe: if the canoe was not hauled over men, as rollers, she would not be expected to float long, and in like manner the palace could not stand long if people were not to sit down and continually hold the posts up. But I said, 'How could they hold the posts up after they were dead?' They said, if they sacrificed their lives endeavouring to hold the posts in their right position to their superior's _turanga kai na kalou_ (chiefs and god), that the virtue of the sacrifice would instigate the gods to uphold the house after they were dead, and that they were honoured by being considered adequate to such a noble task."[715] Apparently the Fijians imagined that the souls of the dead men would somehow strengthen the souls of the houses and canoes and so prolong the lives of these useful objects; for it is to be remembered that according to Fijian theology houses and canoes as well as men and women were provided with immortal souls. [Sidenote: High estimation in which murder was held by the Fijians.] Perhaps the same theory of immortality partially accounts for the high honour in which the Fijian held the act of murder and for the admiration which he bestowed on all murderers. "Shedding of blood," we are told, "to him is no crime, but a glory. Whoever may be the victim,--whether noble or vulgar, old or young, man, woman, or child,--whether slain in war, or butchered by treachery,--to be somehow an acknowledged murderer is the object of the Fijian's restless ambition."[716] It was customary throughout Fiji to give honorary names to such as had clubbed to death a human being, of any age or either sex, during a war. The new epithet was given with the complimentary prefix _Koroi_. Mr. Williams once asked a man why he was called _Koroi_. "Because," he replied, "I, with several other men, found some women and children in a cave, drew them out and clubbed them, and then was consecrated."[717] Mr. Fison learned from another stout young warrior that he had earned the honourable distinction of _Koroi_ by lying in wait among the mangrove bushes at the waterside and killing a miserable old woman of a hostile tribe, as she crept along the mudflat seeking for shellfish. The man would have been equally honoured, adds Mr. Fison, if his victim had been a child. The hero of such an exploit, for two or three days after killing his man or woman, was allowed to besmear his face and bust with a mixture of lampblack and oil which differed from the common black war-paint; decorated with this badge of honour he strutted proudly through the town, the cynosure of all eyes, an object of envy to his fellows and of tender interest to the girls. The old men shouted approval after him, the women would _lulilu_ admiringly as he passed by, and the boys looked up to him as a superior being whose noble deeds they thirsted to emulate. Higher titles of honour still were bestowed on such as had slain their ten, or twenty, or thirty; and Mr. Fison tells us of a chief whose admiring countrymen had to compound all these titles into one in order to set forth his superlative claims to glory. A man who had never killed anybody was of very little account in this life, and he received the penalty due to his sin in the life hereafter. For in the spirit land the ghost of such a poor-spirited wretch was sentenced to what the Fijians regarded as the most degrading of all punishments, to beat a heap of muck with his bloodless club.[718] [Sidenote: Ceremony of consecrating a manslayer. The temporary restrictions laid on a manslayer were probably dictated by a fear of his victim's ghost.] The ceremony of consecrating a manslayer was elaborate. He was anointed with red oil from the hair of his head to the soles of his feet; and when he had been thus incarnadined he exchanged clubs with the spectators, who believed that their weapons acquired a mysterious virtue by passing through his holy hands. Afterwards the anointed one, attended by the king and elders, solemnly stalked down to the sea and wetted the soles of his feet in the water. Then the whole company returned to the town, while the shell-trumpets sounded and the men raised a peculiar hoot. Custom required that a hut should be built in which the anointed man and his companions must pass the next three nights, during which the hero might not lie down, but had to sleep as he sat; all that time he might not change his bark-cloth garment, nor wash the red paint away from his body, nor enter a house in which there was a woman.[719] The reason for observing these curious restrictions is not mentioned, but in the light of similar practices, some of which have been noticed in these lectures,[720] we may conjecture that they were dictated by a fear of the victim's ghost, who among savages generally haunts his slayer and will do him a mischief, if he gets a chance. As it is especially in dreams that the naturally incensed spirit finds his opportunity, we can perhaps understand why the slayer might not lie down for the first three nights after the slaughter; the wrath of the ghost would then be at its hottest, and if he spied his murderer stretched in slumber on the ground, the temptation to take an unfair advantage of him might have been too strong to be resisted. But when his anger had had time to cool down or he had departed for his long home, as ghosts generally do after a reasonable time, the precautions taken to baffle his vengeance might be safely relaxed. Perhaps, as I have already hinted, the reverence which the Fijians felt for any man who had taken a human life, or at all events the life of an enemy, may have partly sprung from a belief that the slayer increased his own strength and valour either by subjugating the ghost of his victim and employing it as his henchman, or perhaps rather by simply absorbing in some occult fashion the vital energy of the slain. This view is confirmed by the permission given to the killer to assume the name of the killed, whenever his victim was a man of distinguished rank;[721] for by taking the name he, according to an opinion common among savages, assumed the personality of his namesake. [Sidenote: Other funeral customs based on a fear of the ghost.] The same fear of the ghost of the recently departed which manifested itself, if my interpretation of the customs is right, in the treatment of manslayers, seems to have imprinted itself, though in a more attenuated form, on some of the practices observed by Fijian mourners after a natural, not a violent, death. [Sidenote: Persons who have handled a corpse forbidden to touch food. Seclusion of grave-diggers.] Thus all the persons who had handled a corpse were forbidden to touch anything for some time afterwards; in particular they were strictly debarred from touching their food with their hands; their victuals were brought to them by others, and they were fed like infants by attendants or obliged to pick up their food with their mouths from the ground. The time during which this burdensome restriction lasted was different according to the rank of the deceased: in the case of great chiefs it lasted from two to ten months; in the case of a petty chief it did not exceed one month; and in the case of a common person a taboo of not more than four days sufficed. When a chief's principal wife did not follow him to the other world by being strangled or buried alive, she might not touch her own food with her hands for three months. When the mourners grew tired of being fed like infants or feeding themselves like dogs, they sent word to the head chief and he let them know that he would remove the taboo whenever they pleased. Accordingly they sent him presents of pigs and other provisions, which he shared among the people. Then the tabooed persons went into a stream and washed themselves; after that they caught some animal, such as a pig or a turtle, and wiped their hands on it, and the animal thereupon became sacred to the chief. Thus the taboo was removed, and the men were free once more to work, to feed themselves, and to live with their wives. Lazy and idle fellows willingly undertook the duty of waiting on the dead, as it relieved them for some time from the painful necessity of earning their own bread.[722] The reason why such persons might not touch food with their hands was probably a fear of the ghost or at all events of the infection of death; the ghost or the infection might be clinging to their hands and might so be transferred from them to their food with fatal effects. In Great Fiji not every one might dig a chief's grave. The office was hereditary in a certain clan. After the funeral the grave-digger was shut up in a house and painted black from head to foot. When he had to make a short excursion, he covered himself with a large mantle of painted native cloth and was supposed to be invisible. His food was brought to the house after dark by silent bearers, who placed it just within the doorway. His seclusion might last for a long time;[723] it was probably intended to screen him from the ghost. [Sidenote: Hair cropped and finger-joints cut off in mourning.] The usual outward sign of mourning was to crop the hair or beard, or very rarely both. Some people merely made bald the crown of the head. Indeed the Fijians were too vain of their hair to part with it lightly, and to conceal the loss which custom demanded of them on these occasions they used to wear wigs, some of which were very skilfully made. The practice of cutting off finger-joints in mourning has already been mentioned; one early authority affirms and another denies that joints of the little toes were similarly amputated by the living as a mark of sorrow for the dead. So common was the practice of lopping off the little fingers in mourning that till recently few of the older natives could be found who had their hands intact; most of them indeed had lost the little fingers of both hands. There was a Fijian saying that the fourth finger "cried itself hoarse in vain for its absent mate" (_droga-droga-wale_). The mutilation was usually confined to the relations of the deceased, unless he happened to be one of the highest chiefs. However, the severed joints were often sent by poor people to wealthy families in mourning, who never failed to reward the senders for so delicate a mark of sympathy. Female mourners burned their skin into blisters by applying lighted rolls of bark-cloth to various parts of their bodies; the brands so produced might be seen on their arms, shoulders, necks, and breasts.[724] During the mourning for a king people fasted till evening for ten or twenty days; the coast for miles was tabooed and no one might fish there; the nuts also were made sacred. Some people in token of grief for a bereavement would abstain from fish, fruit, or other pleasant food for months together; others would dress in leaves instead of in cloth.[725] [Sidenote: Men whipped by women in time of mourning for a chief.] Though the motive for these observances is not mentioned, we may suppose that they were intended to soothe and please the ghost by testifying to the sorrow felt by the survivors at his decease. It is more doubtful whether the same explanation would apply to another custom which the Fijians used to observe in mourning. During ten days after a death, while the soul of a deceased chief was thought to be still lingering in or near his body, all the women of the town provided themselves with long whips, knotted with shells, and applied them with great vigour to the bodies of the men, raising weals and inflicting bloody wounds, while the men retorted by flirting pellets of clay from splinters of bamboo.[726] According to Mr. Williams, this ceremony was performed on the tenth day or earlier, and he adds: "I have seen grave personages, not accustomed to move quickly, flying with all possible speed before a company of such women. Sometimes the men retaliate by bespattering their assailants with mud; but they use no violence, as it seems to be a day on which they are bound to succumb."[727] As the soul of the dead was believed to quit his body and depart to his destined abode on the tenth day after death,[728] the scourging of the men by the women was probably supposed in some way to speed the parting guest on his long journey. [Sidenote: The dead taken out of the house by a special opening made in a wall. Examples of the custom among Aryan peoples.] When a certain king of Fiji died, the side of the house was broken down to allow the body to be carried out, though there were doorways wide enough for the purpose close at hand. The missionary who records the fact could not learn the reason of it.[729] The custom of taking the dead out of the house by a special opening, which is afterwards closed up, has not been confined to Fiji; on the contrary it has been practised by a multitude of peoples, savage, barbarous, and civilised, in many parts of the world. For example, it was an old Norse rule that a corpse might not be carried out of the house by the door which was used by the living; hence a hole was made in the wall at the back of the dead man's head and he was taken out through it backwards, or a hole was dug in the ground under the south wall and the body was drawn out through it.[730] The custom may have been at one time common to all the Aryan or Indo-european peoples, for it is mentioned in other of their ancient records and has been observed by widely separated branches of that great family down to modern times. Thus, the Zend-Avesta prescribes that, when a death has occurred, a breach shall be made in the wall and the corpse carried out through it by two men, who have first stripped off their clothes.[731] In Russia "the corpse was often carried out of the house through a window, or through a hole made for the purpose, and the custom is still kept up in many parts."[732] Speaking of the Hindoos a French traveller of the eighteenth century says that "instead of carrying the corpse out by the door they make an opening in the wall by which they pass it out in a seated posture, and the hole is closed up after the ceremony."[733] Among various Hindoo castes it is still customary, when a death has occurred on an inauspicious day, to remove the corpse from the house not through the door, but through a temporary hole made in the wall.[734] Old German law required that the corpses of criminals and suicides should be carried out through a hole under the threshold.[735] In the Highlands of Scotland the bodies of suicides were not taken out of the house for burial by the doors, but through an opening made between the wall and the thatch.[736] [Sidenote: Examples of the custom among non-Aryan peoples.] But widespread as such customs have been among Indo-european peoples, they have been by no means confined to that branch of the human race. It was an ancient Chinese practice to knock down part of the wall of a house for the purpose of carrying out a corpse.[737] Some of the Canadian Indians would never take a corpse out of the hut by the ordinary door, but always lifted a piece of the bark wall near which the dead man lay and then drew him through the opening.[738] Among the Esquimaux of Bering Strait a corpse is usually raised through the smoke-hole in the roof, but is never taken out by the doorway. Should the smoke-hole be too small, an opening is made in the rear of the house and then closed again.[739] When a Greenlander dies, "they do not carry out the corpse through the entry of the house, but lift it through the window, or if he dies in a tent, they unfasten one of the skins behind, and convey it out that way. A woman behind waves a lighted chip backward and forward, and says: 'There is nothing more to be had here.'"[740] Similarly the Hottentots, Bechuanas, Basutos, Marotse, Barongo, and many other tribes of South and West Africa never carry a corpse out by the door of the hut but always by a special opening made in the wall.[741] A similar custom is observed by the maritime Gajos of Sumatra[742] and by some of the Indian tribes of North-west America, such as the Tlingit and the Haida.[743] Among the Lepchis of Sikhim, whose houses are raised on piles, the dead are taken out by a hole made in the floor.[744] Dwellers in tents who practise this custom remove a corpse from the tent, not by the door, but through an opening made by lifting up an edge of the tent-cover: this is done by European gypsies[745] and by the Koryak of north-eastern Asia.[746] [Sidenote: The motive of the custom is a desire to prevent the ghost from returning to the house.] In all such customs the original motive probably was a fear of the ghost and a wish to exclude him from the house, lest he should return and carry off the survivors with him to the spirit land. Ghosts are commonly credited with a low degree of intelligence, and it appears to be supposed that they can only find their way back to a house by the aperture through which their bodies were carried out. Hence people made a practice of taking a corpse out not by the door, but through an opening specially made for the purpose, which was afterwards blocked up, so that when the ghost returned from the grave and attempted to enter the house, he found the orifice closed and was obliged to turn away disappointed. That this was the train of reasoning actually followed by some peoples may be gathered from the explanations which they themselves give of the custom. Thus among the Tuski of Alaska "those who die a natural death are carried out through a hole cut in the back of the hut or _yaráng_. This is immediately closed up, that the spirit of the dead man may not find his way back."[747] Among the Esquimaux of Hudson Bay "the nearest relatives on approach of death remove the invalid to the outside of the house, for if he should die within he must not be carried out of the door but through a hole cut in the side wall, and it must then be carefully closed to prevent the spirit of the person from returning."[748] Again, "when a Siamese is dead, his relations deposit the body in a coffin well covered. They do not pass it through the door but let it down into the street by an opening which they make in the wall. They also carry it thrice round the house, running at the top of their speed. They believe that if they did not take this precaution, the dead man would remember the way by which he had passed, and that he would return by night to do some ill turn to his family."[749] In Travancore the body of a dead rajah "is taken out of the palace through a breach in the wall, made for the purpose, to avoid pollution of the gate, and afterwards built up again so that the departed spirit may not return through the gate to trouble the survivors."[750] Among the Kayans of Borneo, whose dwellings are raised on piles above the ground, the coffin is conveyed out of the house by lowering it with rattans either through the floor, planks being taken up for the purpose, or under the eaves at the side of the gallery. "In this way they avoid carrying it down the house-ladder; and it seems to be felt that this precaution renders it more difficult for the ghost to find its way back to the house."[751] Among the Cheremiss of Russia, "old custom required that the corpse should not be carried out by the door but through a breach in the north wall, where there is usually a sash-window. But the custom has long been obsolete, even among the heathen, and only very old people speak of it. They explain it as follows: to carry it out by the door would be to shew the _Asyrèn_ (the dead man) the right way into the house, whereas a breach in the wooden wall is immediately closed by replacing the beams in position, and thus the _Asyrèn_ would in vain seek for an entrance."[752] The Samoyeds never carry a corpse out of the hut by the door, but lift up a piece of the reindeer-skin covering and draw the body out, head foremost, through the opening. They think that if they were to carry a corpse out by the door, the ghost would soon return and fetch away other members of the family.[753] On the same principle, as soon as the Indians of Tumupasa, in north-west Bolivia, have carried a corpse out of the house, "they shift the door to the opposite side, in order that the deceased may not be able to find it."[754] Once more, in Mecklenburg "it is a law regulating the return of the dead that they are compelled to return by the same way by which the corpse was removed from the house. In the villages of Picher, Bresegard, and others the people used to have movable thresholds at the house-doors, which, being fitted into the door-posts, could be shoved up. The corpse was then carried out of the house under the threshold, and therefore could not return over it."[755] [Sidenote: Some people only remove in this manner the bodies of persons whose ghosts are especially feared.] Even without such express testimonies to the meaning of the custom we may infer from a variety of evidence that the real motive for practising it is a fear of the ghost and a wish to prevent his return. For it is to be observed that some peoples do not carry out all their dead by a special opening, but that they accord this peculiar mode of removal only to persons who die under unlucky or disgraceful circumstances, and whose ghosts accordingly are more than usually dreaded. Thus we have seen that some modern Hindoo castes observe the custom only in the case of people who have died on inauspicious days; and that in Germany and the Highlands of Scotland this mode of removal was specially reserved for the bodies of suicides, whose ghosts are exceedingly feared by many people, as appears from the stringent precautions taken against them.[756] Again, among the Kavirondo of Central Africa, "when a woman dies without having borne a child, she is carried out of the back of the house. A hole is made in the wall and the corpse is ignominiously pushed through the hole and carried some distance to be buried, as it is considered a curse to die without a child. If the woman has given birth to a child, then her corpse is carried out through the front door and buried in the verandah of the house."[757] In Brittany a stillborn child is removed from the house, not by the door, but by the window; "for if by ill-luck it should chance otherwise, the mothers who should pass through that fatal door would bear nothing but stillborn infants."[758] In Perche, another province of France, the same rule is observed with regard to stillborn children, though the reason for it is not alleged.[759] But of all ghosts none perhaps inspire such deep and universal terror as the ghosts of women who have died in childbed, and extraordinary measures are accordingly taken to disable these dangerous spirits from returning and doing a mischief to the living.[760] Amongst the precautions adopted to keep them at bay is the custom of carrying their corpses out of the house by a special opening, which is afterwards blocked up. Thus in Laos, a province of Siam, "the bodies of women dying in childbirth, or within a month afterwards, are not even taken out of the house in the ordinary way by the door, but are let down through the floor."[761] The Kachins of Burma stand in such fear of the ghosts of women dying in childbed that no sooner has such a death occurred than the husband, the children, and almost all the people in the house take to flight lest the woman's ghost should bite them. "The body of the deceased must be burned as soon as possible in order to punish her for dying such a death, and also in order to frighten her ghost (_minla_). They bandage her eyes with her own hair and with leaves to prevent her from seeing anything; they wrap her in a mat, and they carry her out of the house, not by the ordinary door, but by an opening made for the purpose in the wall or the floor of the room where she breathed her last. Then they convey her to a deep ravine, where no one dares to pass; they lay her in the midst of a great pyre with all the clothes, jewellery, and other objects which belonged to her and of which she made use; and they burn the whole to cinders, to which they refuse the rites of sepulture. Thus they destroy all the property of the unfortunate woman, in order that her soul may not think of coming to fetch it afterwards and to bite people in the attempt."[762] Similarly among the Kayans or Bahaus of Central Borneo "the corpses of women dying in childbed excite a special horror; no man and no young woman may touch them; they are not carried out of the house through the front gallery, but are thrown out of the back wall of the dwelling, some boards having been removed for the purpose."[763] Indeed so great is the alarm felt by the Kayans at a miscarriage of this sort that when a woman labours hard in childbed, the news quickly spreads through the large communal house in which the people dwell; and if the attendants begin to fear a fatal issue, the whole household is thrown into consternation. All the men, from the chief down to the boys, will flee from the house, or, if it is night, they will clamber up among the beams of the roof and there hide in terror; and, if the worst happens, they remain there until the woman's corpse has been removed from the house for burial.[764] [Sidenote: Sometimes the custom is observed when the original motive for it is forgotten.] Sometimes, while the custom continues to be practised, the idea which gave rise to it has either become obscured or has been incorrectly reported. Thus we are told that when a death has taken place among the Indians of North-west America "the body is at once taken out of the house through an opening in the wall from which the boards have been removed. It is believed that his ghost would kill every one if the body were to stay in the house."[765] Such a belief, while it would furnish an excellent reason for hurrying the corpse out of the house as soon as possible, does not explain why it should be carried out through a special opening instead of through the door. Again, when a Queen of Bali died, "the body was drawn out of a large aperture made in the wall to the right-hand side of the door, in the absurd opinion of _cheating the devil_, whom these islanders believe to lie in wait in the ordinary passage."[766] Again, in Mukden, the capital of Manchuria, the corpses of children "must not be carried out of a door or window, but through a new or disused opening, in order that the evil spirit which causes the disease may not enter. The belief is that the Heavenly Dog which eats the sun at an eclipse demands the bodies of children, and that if they are denied to him he will bring certain calamity on the household."[767] These explanations of the custom are probably misinterpretations adopted at a later time when its original meaning was forgotten. For a custom often outlives the memory of the motives which gave it birth. And as royalty is very conservative of ancient usages, it would be no matter for surprise if the corpses of kings should continue to be carried out through special openings long after the bodies of commoners were allowed to be conveyed in commonplace fashion through the ordinary door. In point of fact we find the old custom observed by kings in countries where it has apparently ceased to be observed by their subjects. Thus among the Sakalava and Antimerina of Madagascar, "when a sovereign or a prince of the royal family dies within the enclosure of the king's palace, the corpse must be carried out of the palace, not by the door, but by a breach made for the purpose in the wall; the new sovereign could not pass through the door that had been polluted by the passage of a dead body."[768] Similarly among the Macassars and Buginese of Southern Celebes there is in the king's palace a window reaching to the floor through which on his decease the king's body is carried out.[769] That such a custom is only a limitation to kings of a rule which once applied to everybody becomes all the more probable, when we learn that in the island of Saleijer, which lies to the south of Celebes, each house has, besides its ordinary windows, a large window in the form of a door, through which, and not through the ordinary entrance, every corpse is regularly removed at death.[770] [Sidenote: Another Fijian funeral custom.] To return from this digression to Fiji, we may conclude with a fair degree of probability that when the side of a Fijian king's house was broken down to allow his corpse to be carried out, though there were doors at hand wide enough for the purpose, the original intention was to prevent the return of his ghost, who might have proved a very unwelcome intruder to his successor on the throne. But I cannot offer any explanation of another Fijian funeral custom. You may remember that in Fiji it was customary after the death of a chief to circumcise such lads as had reached a suitable age.[771] Well, on the fifth day after a chief's death a hole used to be dug under the floor of a temple and one of the newly circumcised lads was secreted in it. Then his companions fastened the doors of the temple securely and ran away. When the lad hidden in the hole blew on a shell-trumpet, the friends of the deceased chief surrounded the temple and thrust their spears at him through the fence.[772] What the exact significance of this curious rite may have been, I cannot even conjecture; but we may assume that it had something to do with the state of the late chief's soul, which was probably supposed to be lingering in the neighbourhood. [Sidenote: Fijian notions concerning the other world and the way thither. The River of the Souls.] It remains to say a little as to the notions which the Fijians entertained of the other world and the way thither. After death the souls of the departed were believed to set out for Bulu or Bulotu, there to dwell with the great serpent-shaped god Ndengei. His abode seems to have been generally placed in the Nakauvandra mountains, towards the western end of Viti Levu, the largest of the Fijian Islands. But on this subject the ideas of the people were, as might be expected, both vague and inconsistent. Each tribe filled in the details of the mythical land and the mythical journey to suit its own geographical position. The souls had generally to cross water, either the sea or a river, and they were put across it by a ghostly ferryman, who treated the passengers with scant courtesy.[773] According to some people, the River of the Souls (_Waini-yalo_) is what mortals now call the Ndravo River. When the ghosts arrived on the bank, they hailed the ferryman and he paddled his canoe over to receive them. But before he would take them on board they had to state whether they proposed to ship as steerage or as cabin passengers, and he gave them their berths accordingly; for there was no mixing up of the classes in the ferry-boat; the ghosts of chiefs kept strictly to themselves at one end of the canoe, and the ghosts of commoners huddled together at the other end.[774] The natives of Kandavu, in Southern Fiji, say that on clear days they often see Bulotu, the spirit land, lying away across the sea with the sun shining sweetly on it; but they have long ago given up all hope of making their way to that happy land.[775] They seem to say with the Demon Lover, "O yonder are the hills of heaven Where you will never win." [Sidenote: The place of embarcation for the ghosts.] Though every island and almost every town had its own portal through which the spirits passed on their long journey to the far country, yet there was one called Nai Thombothombo, which appears to have been more popular and frequented than any of the others as a place of embarcation for ghosts. It is at the northern point of Mbua Bay, and the ghosts shew their good taste in choosing it as their port to sail from, for really it is a beautiful spot. The foreland juts out between two bays. A shelving beach slopes up to precipitous cliffs, their rocky face mantled with a thick green veil of creepers. Further inland the shade of tall forest trees and the softened gloom cast by crags and rocks lend to the scene an air of solemnity and hallowed repose well fitted to impress the susceptible native mind with an awful sense of the invisible beings that haunt these sacred groves. Natives have been known to come on pilgrimage to the spot expecting to meet ghosts and gods face to face.[776] [Sidenote: The ghost and the pandanus tree.] Many are the perils and dangers that beset the Path of the Souls (_Sala Ni Yalo_). Of these one of the most celebrated is a certain pandanus tree, at which every ghost must throw the ghost of the real whale's tooth which was placed for the purpose in his hand at burial. If he hits the tree, it is well for him; for it shews that his friends at home are strangling his wives, and accordingly he sits down contentedly to wait for the ghosts of his helpmeets, who will soon come hurrying to him. But if he makes a bad shot and misses the tree, the poor ghost is very disconsolate, for he knows that his wives are not being strangled, and who then will cook for him in the spirit land? It is a bitter thought, and he reflects with sorrow and anger on the ingratitude of men and especially of women. His reflections, as reported by the best authority, run thus: "How is this? For a long time I planted food for my wife, and it was also of great use to her friends: why then is she not allowed to follow me? Do my friends love me no better than this, after so many years of toil? Will no one, in love to me, strangle my wife?"[777] [Sidenote: Hard fate of unmarried ghosts.] But if the lot of a married ghost, whose wives have not been murdered, is hard, it is nevertheless felicity itself compared to the fate of bachelor ghosts. In the first place there is a terrible being called the Great Woman, who lurks in a shady defile, ready to pounce out on him; and if he escapes her clutches it is only to fall in with a much worse monster, of the name of Nangganangga, from whom there is, humanly speaking, no escape. This ferocious goblin lays himself out to catch the souls of bachelors, and so vigilant and alert is he that not a single unmarried Fijian ghost is known to have ever reached the mansions of the blest. He sits beside a big black stone at high-water mark waiting for his prey. The bachelor ghosts are aware that it would be useless to attempt to march past him when the tide is in; so they wait till it is low water and then try to sneak past him on the wet sand left by the retiring billows. Vain hope! Nangganangga, sitting by the stone, only smiles grimly and asks, with withering sarcasm, whether they imagine that the tide will never flow again? It does so only too soon for the poor ghosts, driving them with every breaking wave nearer and nearer to their implacable enemy, till the water laps on the fatal stone, and then he grips the shivering souls and dashes them to pieces on the big black block.[778] [Sidenote: The Killer of Souls.] Again, there is a very terrible giant armed with a great axe, who lies in wait for all and sundry. He makes no nice distinction between the married and the unmarried, but strikes out at all ghosts indiscriminately. Those whom he wounds dare not present themselves in their damaged state to the great God Ndengei; so they never reach the happy fields, but are doomed to roam the rugged mountains disconsolate. However, many ghosts contrive to slip past him unscathed. It is said that after the introduction of fire-arms into the islands the ghost of a certain chief made very good use of a musket which had been providentially buried with his body. When the giant drew near and was about to lunge out with the axe in his usual style, the ghost discharged the blunderbuss in his face, and while the giant was fully engaged in dodging the hail of bullets, the chief rushed past him and now enjoys celestial happiness.[779] Some lay the scene of this encounter a little beyond the town of Nambanaggatai; for it is to be remembered that many of the places in the Path of the Souls were identified with real places in the Fijian Islands. And the name of the giant is Samu-yalo, that is, the Killer of Souls. He artfully conceals himself in some mangrove bushes just beyond the town, from which he rushes out in the nick of time to fell the passing ghosts. Whenever he kills a ghost, he cooks and eats him and that is the end of the poor ghost. It is the second death. The highway to the Elysian fields runs, or used to run, right through the town of Nambanaggatai; so all the doorways of the houses were placed opposite each other to allow free and uninterrupted passage to the invisible travellers. And the inhabitants spoke to each other in low tones and communicated at a little distance by signs. The screech of a paroquet in the woods was the signal of the approach of a ghost or ghosts; the number of screeches was proportioned to the number of the ghosts,--one screech, one ghost, and so on.[780] [Sidenote: A trap for unwary ghosts.] Souls who escape the Killer of Souls pass on till they come to Naindelinde, one of the highest peaks of the Kauvandra mountains. Here the path ends abruptly on the brink of a precipice, the foot of which is washed by a deep lake. Over the edge of the precipice projects a large steer-oar, and the handle is held either by the great god Ndengei himself or, according to the better opinion, by his deputy. When a ghost comes up and peers ruefully over the precipice, the deputy accosts him. "Under what circumstances," he asks, "do you come to us? How did you conduct yourself in the other world?" Should the ghost be a man of rank, he may say, "I am a great chief. I lived as a chief, and my conduct was that of a chief. I had great wealth, many wives, and ruled over a powerful people. I have destroyed many towns, and slain many in war." "Good, good," says the deputy, "just sit down on the blade of that oar, and refresh yourself in the cool breeze." If the ghost is unwary enough to accept the invitation, he has no sooner seated himself on the blade of the oar with his legs dangling over the abyss, than the deputy-deity tilts up the other end of the oar and precipitates him into the deep water, far far below. A loud smack is heard as the ghost collides with the water, there is a splash, a gurgle, a ripple, and all is over. The ghost has gone to his account in Murimuria, a very second-rate sort of heaven, if it is nothing worse. But a ghost who is in favour with the great god Ndengei is warned by him not to sit down on the blade of the oar but on the handle. The ghost takes the hint and seats himself firmly on the safe end of the oar; and when the deputy-deity tries to heave it up, he cannot, for he has no purchase. So the ghost remains master of the situation, and after an interval for refreshment is sent back to earth to be deified.[781] [Sidenote: Murimuria, an inferior sort of heaven. The Fijian Elysium.] In Murimuria, which, as I said, is an inferior sort of heaven, the departed souls by no means lead a life of pure and unmixed enjoyment. Some of them are punished for the sins they committed in the flesh. But the Fijian notion of sin differs widely from ours. Thus we saw that the ghosts of men who did no murder in their lives were punished for their negligence by having to pound muck with clubs. Again, people who had not their ears bored on earth are forced in Hades to go about for ever bearing on their shoulders one of the logs of wood on which bark-cloth is beaten out with mallets, and all who see the sinner bending under the load jeer at him. Again, women who were not tattooed in their life are chased by the female ghosts, who scratch and cut and tear them with sharp shells, giving them no respite; or they scrape the flesh from their bones and bake it into bread for the gods. And ghosts who have done anything to displease the gods are laid flat on their faces in rows and converted into taro beds. But the few who do find their way into the Fijian Elysium are blest indeed. There the sky is always cloudless; the groves are perfumed with delicious scents; the open glades in the forest are pleasant; there is abundance of all that heart can desire. Language fails to describe the ineffable bliss of the happy land. There the souls of the truly good, who have murdered many of their fellows on earth and fed on their roasted bodies, are lapped in joy for ever.[782] [Sidenote: Fijian doctrine of transmigration.] Nevertheless the souls of the dead were not universally believed to depart by the Spirit Path to the other world or to stay there for ever. To a certain extent the doctrines of transmigration found favour with the Fijians. Some of them held that the spirits of the dead wandered about the villages in various shapes and could make themselves visible or invisible at pleasure. The places which these vagrant souls loved to haunt were known to the people, who in passing by them were wont to make propitiatory offerings of food or cloth. For that reason, too, they were very loth to go abroad on a dark night lest they should come bolt upon a ghost. Further, it was generally believed that the soul of a celebrated chief might after death enter into some young man of the tribe and animate him to deeds of valour. Persons so distinguished were pointed out and regarded as highly favoured; great respect was paid to them, they enjoyed many personal privileges, and their opinions were treated with much consideration.[783] [Sidenote: Few souls saved under the old Fijian dispensation.] On the whole, when we survey the many perils which beset the way to the Fijian heaven, and the many risks which the souls of the dead ran of dying the second death in the other world or of being knocked on the head by the living in this, we shall probably agree with the missionary Mr. Williams in concluding that under the old Fijian dispensation there were few indeed that were saved. "Few, comparatively," he says, "are left to inhabit the regions of Mbulu, and the immortality even of these is sometimes disputed. The belief in a future state is universal in Fiji; but their superstitious notions often border upon transmigration, and sometimes teach an eventual annihilation."[784] * * * * * [Sidenote: Concluding observations.] Here I must break off my survey of the natural belief in immortality among mankind. At the outset I had expected to carry the survey further, but I have already exceeded the usual limits of these lectures and I must not trespass further on your patience. Yet the enquiry which I have opened seems worthy to be pursued, and if circumstances should admit of it, I shall hope at some future time to resume the broken thread of these researches and to follow it a little further through the labyrinth of human history. Be that as it may, I will now conclude with a few general observations suggested by the facts which I have laid before you. [Sidenote: Strength and universality of the natural belief in immortality among savages. Wars between savage tribes spring in large measure from their belief in immortality. Economic loss involved in sacrifices to the dead.] In the first place, then, it is impossible not to be struck by the strength, and perhaps we may say the universality, of the natural belief in immortality among the savage races of mankind. With them a life after death is not a matter of speculation and conjecture, of hope and fear; it is a practical certainty which the individual as little dreams of doubting as he doubts the reality of his conscious existence. He assumes it without enquiry and acts upon it without hesitation, as if it were one of the best-ascertained truths within the limits of human experience. The belief influences his attitude towards the higher powers, the conduct of his daily life, and his behaviour towards his fellows; more than that, it regulates to a great extent the relations of independent communities to each other. For the state of war, which normally exists between many, if not most, neighbouring savage tribes, springs in large measure directly from their belief in immortality; since one of the commonest motives for hostility is a desire to appease the angry ghosts of friends, who are supposed to have perished by the baleful arts of sorcerers in another tribe, and who, if vengeance is not inflicted on their real or imaginary murderers, will wreak their fury on their undutiful fellow-tribesmen. Thus the belief in immortality has not merely coloured the outlook of the individual upon the world; it has deeply affected the social and political relations of humanity in all ages; for the religious wars and persecutions, which distracted and devastated Europe for ages, were only the civilised equivalents of the battles and murders which the fear of ghosts has instigated amongst almost all races of savages of whom we possess a record. Regarded from this point of view, the faith in a life hereafter has been sown like dragons' teeth on the earth and has brought forth crop after crop of armed men, who have turned their swords against each other. And when we consider further the gratuitous and wasteful destruction of property as well as of life which is involved in sacrifices to the dead, we must admit that with all its advantages the belief in immortality has entailed heavy economical losses upon the races--and they are practically all the races of the world--who have indulged in this expensive luxury. It is not for me to estimate the extent and gravity of the consequences, moral, social, political, and economic, which flow directly from the belief in immortality. I can only point to some of them and commend them to the serious attention of historians and economists, as well as of moralists and theologians. [Sidenote: How does the savage belief in immortality bear on the question of the truth or falsehood of that belief in general? The answer depends to some extent on the view we take of human nature. The view of the grandeur and dignity of man.] My second observation concerns, not the practical consequences of the belief in immortality, but the question of its truth or falsehood. That, I need hardly say, is an even more difficult problem than the other, and as I intimated at the outset of the lectures I find myself wholly incompetent to solve it. Accordingly I have confined myself to the comparatively easy task of describing some of the forms of the belief and some of the customs to which it has given rise, without presuming to pass judgment upon them. I must leave it to others to place my collections of facts in the scales and to say whether they incline the balance for or against the truth of this momentous belief, which has been so potent for good or ill in history. In every enquiry much depends upon the point of view from which the enquirer approaches his subject; he will see it in different proportions and in different lights according to the angle and the distance from which he regards it. The subject under discussion in the present case is human nature itself; and as we all know, men have formed very different estimates of themselves and their species. On the one hand, there are those who love to dwell on the grandeur and dignity of man, and who swell with pride at the contemplation of the triumphs which his genius has achieved in the visionary world of imagination as well as in the realm of nature. Surely, they say, such a glorious creature was not born for mortality, to be snuffed out like a candle, to fade like a flower, to pass away like a breath. Is all that penetrating intellect, that creative fancy, that vaulting ambition, those noble passions, those far-reaching hopes, to come to nothing, to shrivel up into a pinch of dust? It is not so, it cannot be. Man is the flower of this wide world, the lord of creation, the crown and consummation of all things, and it is to wrong him and his creator to imagine that the grave is the end of all. To those who take this lofty view of human nature it is easy and obvious to find in the similar beliefs of savages a welcome confirmation of their own cherished faith, and to insist that a conviction so widely spread and so firmly held must be based on some principle, call it instinct or intuition or what you will, which is deeper than logic and cannot be confuted by reasoning. [Sidenote: The view of the pettiness and insignificance of man.] On the other hand, there are those who take a different view of human nature, and who find in its contemplation a source of humility rather than of pride. They remind us how weak, how ignorant, how short-lived is the individual, how infirm of purpose, how purblind of vision, how subject to pain and suffering, to diseases that torture the body and wreck the mind. They say that if the few short years of his life are not wasted in idleness and vice, they are spent for the most part in a perpetually recurring round of trivialities, in the satisfaction of merely animal wants, in eating, drinking, and slumber. When they survey the history of mankind as a whole, they find the record chequered and stained by folly and crime, by broken faith, insensate ambition, wanton aggression, injustice, cruelty, and lust, and seldom illumined by the mild radiance of wisdom and virtue. And when they turn their eyes from man himself to the place he occupies in the universe, how are they overwhelmed by a sense of his littleness and insignificance! They see the earth which he inhabits dwindle to a speck in the unimaginable infinities of space, and the brief span of his existence shrink into a moment in the inconceivable infinities of time. And they ask, Shall a creature so puny and frail claim to live for ever, to outlast not only the present starry system but every other that, when earth and sun and stars have crumbled into dust, shall be built upon their ruins in the long long hereafter? It is not so, it cannot be. The claim is nothing but the outcome of exaggerated self-esteem, of inflated vanity; it is the claim of a moth, shrivelled in the flame of a candle, to outlive the sun, the claim of a worm to survive the destruction of this terrestrial globe in which it burrows. Those who take this view of the pettiness and transitoriness of man compared with the vastness and permanence of the universe find little in the beliefs of savages to alter their opinion. They see in savage conceptions of the soul and its destiny nothing but a product of childish ignorance, the hallucinations of hysteria, the ravings of insanity, or the concoctions of deliberate fraud and imposture. They dismiss the whole of them as a pack of superstitions and lies, unworthy the serious attention of a rational mind; and they say that if such drivellings do not refute the belief in immortality, as indeed from the nature of things they cannot do, they are at least fitted to invest its high-flown pretensions with an air of ludicrous absurdity. [Sidenote: The conclusion left open.] Such are the two opposite views which I conceive may be taken of the savage testimony to the survival of our conscious personality after death. I do not presume to adopt the one or the other. It is enough for me to have laid a few of the facts before you. I leave you to draw your own conclusion. [Footnote 701: Berthold Seeman, _Viti, an Account of a Government Mission to the Vitian or Fijian Islands_ (Cambridge, 1862), pp. 391 _sq._] [Footnote 702: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 216.] [Footnote 703: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 216, 218 _sq._; Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_, p. 112.] [Footnote 704: Hazlewood, quoted by Capt. J. E. Erskine, _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_ (London, 1853), pp. 246 _sq._] [Footnote 705: Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 83 _sq._; Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 217 _sqq._] [Footnote 706: Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 49, 86, 351, 352; Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 221-223; B. Seeman, _Viti_, pp. 392-394.] [Footnote 707: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 191 _sq._] [Footnote 708: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 223, 231.] [Footnote 709: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 87; Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 226, 227; Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_, pp. 157 _sqq._] [Footnote 710: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 87 _sq._; Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 224 _sq._; Capt. J. E. Erskine, _op. cit._ p. 250; Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_ (London, 1904), pp. 166 _sq._ As for the treatment of castaways, see J. E. Erskine, _op. cit._ p. 249; Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 210. The latter writer mentions a recent case in which fourteen or sixteen shipwrecked persons were cooked and eaten.] [Footnote 711: The Rev. Lorimer Fison, in a letter to me dated August 26th, 1898. I have already quoted the passage in _The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings_, i. 378.] [Footnote 712: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 225 _sq._] [Footnote 713: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 231.] [Footnote 714: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 97; Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 53.] [Footnote 715: John Jackson's Narrative, in Capt. J. E. Erskine's _Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific_ (London, 1853), pp. 464 _sq._, 472 _sq._ The genital members of the men over whom the canoe was dragged were cut off and hung on a sacred tree (_akau-tambu_), "which was already artificially prolific in fruit, both of the masculine and feminine gender." The tree which bore such remarkable fruit was commonly an ironweed tree standing in a conspicuous situation. As to these sacrifices compare Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 97; Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_, pp. xvi. _sq._] [Footnote 716: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i, 112.] [Footnote 717: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 55.] [Footnote 718: Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_, pp. xx., xxi. _sq._; Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 247; B. Seeman, _Viti_ (Cambridge, 1862), p. 401.] [Footnote 719: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 55 _sq._ The writer witnessed what he calls the ceremony of consecration in the case of a young man of the highest rank in Somosomo and he has described what he saw. In this case a special hut was not built for the manslayer, and he was allowed to pass the nights in the temple of the war god.] [Footnote 720: See above, pp. 205 _sq._, 229 _sq._, 258, 279 _sq._, 323, 396, 415.] [Footnote 721: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 55.] [Footnote 722: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 98, 99 _sq._ Compare Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_, p. 163: "A person who has defiled himself by touching a corpse is called _yambo_, and is not allowed to touch food with his hands for several days." The custom as to a surviving widow is mentioned by Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 198.] [Footnote 723: Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_, p. 167.] [Footnote 724: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 101; Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 197 _sq._; Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_, p. 168; Basil Thomson, _The Fijian_, p. 375.] [Footnote 725: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 197, 198.] [Footnote 726: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 99.] [Footnote 727: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 198 _sq._] [Footnote 728: Ch. Wilkes, _l.c._] [Footnote 729: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 197.] [Footnote 730: K. Weinhold, _Altnordisches Leben_ (Berlin, 1856), p. 476.] [Footnote 731: _The Zend-Avesta_, Part i. _The Vendidâd,_ translated by James Darmesteter (Oxford, 1880), p. 95 (Fargard, viii. 2. 10) (_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. iv.).] [Footnote 732: W. R. S. Ralston, _The Songs of the Russian People_, Second Edition (London, 1872), p. 318.] [Footnote 733: Sonnerat, _Voyage aux Indes Orientales et à la Chine_ (Paris, 1782), i. 86.] [Footnote 734: J. A. Dubois, _Moeurs, Institutions et Cérémonies des Peuples de l'Inde_ (Paris, 1825), ii. 225; E. Thurston, _Ethnographic Notes in Southern India_ (Madras, 1906), pp. 226 _sq._] [Footnote 735: J. Grimm, _Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer_ 3rd ed. (Göttingen, 1881), pp. 726 _sqq._] [Footnote 736: Rev. J. G. Campbell, _Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland_ (Glasgow, 1900), p. 242.] [Footnote 737: _The Sacred Books of China_, translated by James Legge, Part iii. _The Lî-Kî_, i.-x. (Oxford, 1885) pp. 144 _sq._ (Bk. ii. Sect. i. Pt. II. 33) (_Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xxvii.); J. F. Lafitau, _Moeurs des Sauvages Ameriquains_ (Paris, 1724), ii. 401 _sq._, citing Le Comte, _Nouv. Mémoires de la Chine_, vol. ii. p. 187.] [Footnote 738: _Relations des Jésuites_, 1633, p. 11; _id._, 1634, p. 23 (Canadian reprint, Quebec, 1858); J. G. Kohl, _Kitschi-Gami_ (Bremen, 1859), p. 149 note.] [Footnote 739: E. W. Nelson, "The Eskimo about Bering Strait," _Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology_, Part i. (Washington, 1899), p. 311.] [Footnote 740: David Crantz, _History of Greenland_ (London, 1767), i. 237. Compare Hans Egede, _Description of Greenland_, Second Edition (London, 1818), pp. 152 _sq._; Captain G. F. Lyon, _Private Journal_ (London, 1824), p. 370; C. F. Hall, _Narrative of the Second Arctic Expedition_ (Washington, 1879), p. 265 (Esquimaux).] [Footnote 741: P. Kolben, _The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope_ (London, 1731-1738), i. 316; C. P. Thunberg, "An Account of the Cape of Good Hope," in Pinkerton's _Voyages and Travels_, xvi. (London, 1814) p. 142; _Bulletin de la Société de Géographie_ (Paris), ii, Série, ii. (1834) p. 196 (Bechuanas); _id._, vii. Série, vii. (1886) p. 587 (Fernando Po); T. Arbousset et F. Daumas, _Relation d'un Voyage d'Exploration au Nord-est de la Colonie du Cap de Bonne-Espérance_ (Paris, 1842), pp. 502 _sq._; C. J. Andersson, _Lake Ngami_, Second Edition (London, 1856), p. 466; G. Fritsch, _Die Eingeborenen Süd-Afrika's_ (Breslau, 1872), pp. 210, 335; R. Moffat, _Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa_ (London, 1842), p. 307; E. Casalis, _The Basutos_ (London, 1861), p. 202; Ladislaus Magyar, _Reisen in Süd-Afrika_ (Buda-Pesth and Leipsic, 1859), p. 350; Rev. J. Macdonald, _Light in Africa_, Second Edition (London, 1890), p. 166; E. Béguin, _Les Ma-Rotse_ (Lausanne and Fontaines, 1903), p. 115; Henri A. Junod, _Les Ba-Ronga_ (Neuchâtel, 1898), p. 48; _id._, _The Life of a South African Tribe_, i. (Neuchâtel, 1912) p. 138; Dudley Kidd, _The Essential Kafir_ (London, 1904), p. 247; A. F. Mockler-Ferryman, _British Nigeria_ (London, 1902), p. 234; Ramseyer and Kühne, _Four Years in Ashantee_ (London, 1875), p. 50; A. B. Ellis, _The Land of Fetish_ (London, 1883), p. 13; _id._, _The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast_ (London, 1887), p. 239; E. Perregaud, _Chez les Achanti_ (Neuchâtel, 1906), p. 127; J. Spieth, _Die Ewe-Stämme_ (Berlin, 1906), p. 756; H. R. Palmer, "Notes on the Korôrofawa and Jukoñ," _Journal of the African Society_, No. 44 (July, 1912), p. 414. The custom is also observed by some tribes of Central Africa. See Miss A. Werner, _The Natives of British Central Africa_ (London, 1906), p. 161; B. Gutmann, "Trauer und Begräbnisssitten der Wadschagga," _Globus_, lxxxix. (1906) p. 200; Rev. N. Stam, "Religious Conceptions of the Kavirondo," _Anthropos_, v. (1910) p. 361.] [Footnote 742: C. Snouck Hurgronje, _Het Gajoland en zijne Bewoners_ (Batavia, 1903), p. 313.] [Footnote 743: Aurel Krause, _Die Tlinkit-Indianer_ (Jena, 1885), p. 225; Franz Boas, in _Sixth Report of the Committee on the North-western Tribes of Canada_, p. 23 (separate reprint from the _Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science_, Leeds Meeting, 1890); J. R. Swanton, _Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida_ (Leyden and New York, 1905), pp. 52, 54 (_The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History_).] [Footnote 744: J. A. H. Louis, _The Gates of Thibet_ (Calcutta, 1894), p. 114.] [Footnote 745: H. von Wlislocki, _Volksglaube und religiöser Brauch der Zigeuner_ (Münster i. W., 1891), p. 99.] [Footnote 746: W. Jochelson, _The Koryak_ (New York and Leyden, 1908), pp. 110 _sq._ (_The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History_).] [Footnote 747: W. H. Dall, _Alaska and its Resources_ (London, 1870), p. 382.] [Footnote 748: Lucien M. Turner, "Ethnology of the Ungava District, Hudson Bay Territory," _Eleventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_ (Washington, 1894), p. 191.] [Footnote 749: Mgr. Bruguière, in _Annales de l'Association de la Propagation de la Foi_, v. (Lyons and Paris, 1831) p. 180. Compare Mgr. Pallegoix, _Description du royaume Thai ou Siam_ (Paris, 1854), i. 245; Adolf Bastian, _Die Volker des östlichen Asien_, iii. (Jena, 1867) p. 258; E. Young, _The Kingdom of the Yellow Robe_ (Westminster, 1898), p. 246.] [Footnote 750: S. Mateer, _Native Life in Travancore_ (London, 1883), p. 137. Compare A. Butterworth, "Royal Funerals in Travancore," _Indian Antiquary_, xxxi. (1902) p. 251.] [Footnote 751: Ch. Hose and W. McDougall, _The Pagan Tribes of Borneo_ (London, 1912), ii. 35.] [Footnote 752: S. K. Kusnezow, "�ber den Glauben vom Jenseits und den Todtencultus der Tscheremissen," _Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie_, ix. (1896) p. 157.] [Footnote 753: P. S. Pallas, _Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Russischen Reichs_ (St. Petersburg, 1771-1776), iii. 75; Middendorff, _Reise in den äussersten Norden und Osten Sibiriens_, iv. 1464.] [Footnote 754: _Exploraciones y Noticias hidrograficas de los Rios del Norte de Bolivia_, publicados por Manuel V. Ballivian, Segunda Parte, _Diario del Viage al Madre de Dios hecho por el P. Fr. Nicolas Armentia, en los años de 1884 y 1885_ (La Paz, 1890), p. 20: _"Cuando muere alguno, apénas sacan el cadáver de la casa, cambian la puerta al lado opuesto, para que no dé con ella el difunto."_] [Footnote 755: Karl Bartsch, _Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Meklenburg_ (Vienna, 1879-1880), ii. 100, § 358.] [Footnote 756: For some evidence on this subject, see R. Lasch, "Die Behandlung der Leiche des Selbstmörders," _Globus_, lxxxvi. (1899) pp. 63-66; Rev. J. Roscoe, _The Baganda_ (London, 1911), pp. 20 _sq._; A. Karasek, "Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Waschamba," _Baessler-Archiv_, i. (1911) pp. 190 _sq._] [Footnote 757: Rev. N. Stam, "The Religious Conceptions of the Kavirondo," _Anthropos_, v. (1910) p. 361.] [Footnote 758: Alfred de Nore, _Coutumes, Mythes, et Traditions des Provinces de France_ (Paris and Lyons, 1846), p. 198.] [Footnote 759: Félix Chapiseau, _Le Folk-lore de la Beauce et du Perche_ (Paris, 1902), ii. 164.] [Footnote 760: For some evidence on this subject see _Psyche's Task_, pp. 64 _sq._] [Footnote 761: Carl Bock, _Temples and Elephants_ (London, 1884), p. 262.] [Footnote 762: Ch. Gilhodes, "Naissance et Enfance chez les Katchins (Birmanie)," _Anthropos_, vi. (1911) pp. 872 _sq._] [Footnote 763: A. W. Nieuwenhuis, _Quer durch Borneo_ (Leyden, 1901-1907), i. 91.] [Footnote 764: Ch. Hose and W. McDougall, _The Pagan Tribes of Borneo_ (London, 1912), ii. 155.] [Footnote 765: Franz Boas, in _Sixth Report of the Committee on the North-western Tribes of Canada_, p. 23 (separate reprint from the _Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science_, Leeds Meeting, 1890).] [Footnote 766: Prevost, quoted by John Crawford, _History of the Indian Archipelago_ (Edinburgh, 1820), ii. 245. Compare Adolf Bastian, _Die Völker des östlichen Asien_, v. (Jena, 1869) p. 83.] [Footnote 767: Mrs. Bishop (Isabella L. Bird), _Korea and her Neighbours_ (London, 1898), i. 239 _sq._] [Footnote 768: Arnold van Gennep, _Tabou et Totémisme à Madagascar_ (Paris, 1904), p. 65, quoting Dr. Catat.] [Footnote 769: B. F. Matthes, _Bijdragen tot de Ethnologie van Zuid-Celebes_ (The Hague, 1875), p. 139; _id._, "Over de âdá's of gewoonten der Makassaren en Boegineezen," _Verslagen en Mededeelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen_, Afdeeling Letterkunde, Derde Reeks, ii. (Amsterdam, 1885) p. 142.] [Footnote 770: W. M. Donselaar "Aanteekeningen over het eiland Saleijer," _Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap_, i. (1857) p. 291.] [Footnote 771: See above, p. 426.] [Footnote 772: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, Second Edition (London, 1860), i. 167.] [Footnote 773: Ch. Wilkes, _Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition_, New Edition (New York, 1851), iii. 83; Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_, p. 117.] [Footnote 774: Basil Thomson, _op. cit._ p. 121.] [Footnote 775: Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_, p. 163.] [Footnote 776: Th. Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, i. 239.] [Footnote 777: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 243 _sq._ Compare Berthold Seeman, _Viti, an Account of a Government Mission to the Vitian of Fijian Islands in the years 1860-1861_ (Cambridge, 1862), p. 399; Lorimer Fison, _Tales from Old Fiji_, p. 163; Basil Thomson, _The Fijians_, pp. 120 _sq._, 121 _sq._] [Footnote 778: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i, 244 _sq._] [Footnote 779: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 83.] [Footnote 780: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 245 _sq._] [Footnote 781: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 246 _sq._] [Footnote 782: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 247.] [Footnote 783: Ch. Wilkes, _op. cit._ iii. 85 _sq._] [Footnote 784: Th. Williams, _op. cit._ i. 248.] NOTE MYTH OF THE CONTINUANCE OF DEATH[785] The following story is told by the Balolo of the Upper Congo to explain the continuance, if not the origin, of death in the world. One day, while a man was working in the forest, a little man with two bundles, one large and one small, went up to him and said, "Which of these bundles will you have? The large one contains knives, looking-glasses, cloth and so forth; and the small one contains immortal life." "I cannot choose by myself," answered the man; "I must go and ask the other people in the town." While he was gone to ask the others, some women arrived and the choice was left to them. They tried the edges of the knives, decked themselves in the cloth, admired themselves in the looking-glasses, and, without more ado, chose the big bundle. The little man, picking up the small bundle, vanished. So when the man came back from the town, the little man and his bundles were gone. The women exhibited and shared the things, but death continued on the earth. Hence the people often say, "Oh, if those women had only chosen the small bundle, we should not be dying like this!"[786] [Footnote 785: See above, p. 77.] [Footnote 786: Rev. John H. Weeks, "Stories and other Notes from the Upper Congo," _Folk-lore_, xii. (1901) p. 461; _id._, _Among Congo Cannibals_ (London, 1913), p. 218. The country of the Balolo lies five miles south of the Equator, on Longitude 18° East.] INDEX Abinal, Father, 49 Abipones, their belief in sorcery as a cause of death, 35 Abnormal mental states explained by inspiration, 15 Aborigines, magical powers attributed by immigrants to, 193 Abstinence from certain food in mourning, 198, 208, 209, 230, 314, 360, 452 Abundance of food and water favourable to social progress, 90 _sq._ Action as a clue to belief, 143 Actors personating ghosts and spirits, 176, 179 _sq._, 180 _sqq._, 185 _sqq._ Adiri, the land of the dead, 211, 212, 213, 214 Admiralty Islands, 393, 400, 401 ---- Islanders, their myths of the origin of death, 71, 76 _sq._ Advance of culture among the aborigines of South-Eastern Australia, 141 _sq._, 148 _sq._ Africa, aborigines of, their ideas as to the cause of death, 49 _sqq._; use of poison ordeal in, 50 _sqq._ ----, British Central, 162 ----, British East, 61, 66, 254 Agriculture, rise of, favourable to astronomy, 140 _sq._; Fijian, 408 Akamba, their story of the origin of death, 61 _sq._ Akikuyu, resurrection and circumcision among the, 254 _Alcheringa_ or dream times, 96, 103, 114 ---- ancestors, their marvellous powers, 103 ---- home of the dead, 167 Alfoors of Celebes, 166 Alligators, ghosts in, 380 _Alols_, bachelors' houses, 221, 222 Altars, stones used as, 379 Amputation of fingers in mourning, 199, 426 _sq._, 451 Amulets consisting of relics of the dead, 332, 370 Ancestor, totemic, developing into a god, 113 Ancestor-worship possibly evolved from totemism, 114 _sq._ Ancestors, reincarnation of, 92 _sqq._; marvellous powers ascribed to remote, 103, 114 _sq._; totemic, traditions concerning, 115 _sqq._; dramatic ceremonies to commemorate the doings of, 118 _sqq._; possible evolution of worship of, in Central Australia, 125 _sq._; worshipped, 221, 297 _sq._, 328 _sqq._, 338, 340; ghosts of, appealed to for help, 258 _sq._; offerings to, 298; prayers to, 329 _sq._, 332 _sqq._ _See also_ Dead Ancestral gods, foreskins of circumcised lads offered to, 427; libations to, 430, 438 ---- images, 307 _sqq._, 315, 316 _sq._, 321, 322 ---- spirits help hunters and fishers, 226; shrines for, 316, 317; worshipped as gods, 369; worshipped in the _Nanga_, 428 _sq._; first-fruits offered to, 429; cloth and weapons offered to, 430 _sq._; novices presented to, at initiation, 432 _sq._, 434. Angola, the poison ordeal in, 51 _sq._ Angoni, their burial customs, 162 Animals, souls of sorcerers in, 39; spirits of, go to the spirit land, 210; sacrifices to the souls of, 239; transmigration of dead into, 242, 245; ghosts in the form of, 282; ghosts turn into, 287; ghosts incarnate in, 379 _sq._ Animistic views of the Papuans, 264 Anjea, a mythical being, 128 Annam, 67, 69 Anointing manslayers, 448 Ant-hills, ghosts turn into, 287 Ant totem, dramatic ceremony concerned with, 120 _sq._ Ants' nests, ghosts turn into, 351 Anthropology, comparative and descriptive, 230 _sq._ Antimerina of Madagascar, burial custom of the, 461 Anuto, a creator, 296 Apparitions, 396; fear of, 414 Appearance of the dead in dreams, 229 Araucanians of Chili, their disbelief in natural death, 35, 53 _sq._ Arawaks of Guiana, 36; their myth of the origin of death, 70 Arm-bone, final burial ceremony performed with the, 167 _sq._; lower, of dead preserved, 274 ---- -bones, special treatment of the, 199; of dead preserved, 225, 249 Aroma district of British New Guinea, 201, 202 Arrow-heads made of bones of the dead, 352 Art, primitive religious, 114; Papuan, 220 _Arugo_, soul of dead, 207 _Arumburinga_, spiritual double, 164 Arunta, the, of Central Australia, 94; ceremonies connected with totems, 119 _sqq._; their magical ceremonies for the multiplication of the totems, 122 _sq._; their customs as to the hair of the dead, 138; their cuttings for the dead, 155 _sq._, 159; burial customs of the, 164 _sq._, 166 Aryan burial custom, 453 _Asa_, Secret Society, 233 Ashantee story of the origin of death, 63 _sq._ Ashes smeared on mourners, 184, 361 Astrolabe Bay in German New Guinea, 218, 230, 235, 237 Astronomy, rise of, favoured by agriculture, 140 _sq._ Asylums, 243 _Asyrèn_, dead man, 457 _Ataro_, a powerful ghost, 377 Atonement for sick chief, 427 Aukem, a mythical being, 181 Aurora, one of the New Hebrides, 360, 382 Australia, causes which retarded progress in, 89 _sq._; germs of a worship of the dead in, 168 _sq._ _See also_ Central Australia, Western Australia ----, the aborigines of, their ideas as to death from natural causes, 40 _sqq._; their primitive character, 88, 91; the belief in immortality among, 127 _sqq._; thought to be reborn in white people, 130, 131 _sqq._; their burial customs, 144 _sqq._; their primitive condition, 217 ----, South, beliefs as to the dead in, 134 _sqq._ Australia, South-Eastern, beliefs as to the dead in, 133 _sq._, 139; burial customs among the aborigines of, 145 _sqq._ ----, Western, burial customs in, 147, 150, 151 Authority of chiefs based on their claim to magical powers, 395 Avenging a death, pretence of, 282, 328 Bachelor ghosts, hard fate of, 464 Bachelors' houses, 221 Bad and good, different fate of the, after death, 354 Baganda, the, their ideas as to the causes of death, 56 _n._ 2; their myth of the origin of death, 78 _sqq._ _See also_ Uganda Bahaus, the, of Borneo, 459 Bahnars of Cochinchina, 74 Bakaïri, the, of Brazil, 35 Bakerewe, the, of the Victoria Nyanza, 50 Bali, burial custom in, 460 Balking ghosts, 455 _sqq._ Balolo, of the Upper Congo, their myth of the continuance of death, 472 _Balum_, ghost or spirit of dead, 244; name for bull-roarer, 250; name for a ghost or monster who swallows lads at initiation, 251, 255, 260, 261; soul of a dead man, 257, 261 Bamler, G., 291, 297 _sq._ Bananas in myths of the origin of death, 60, 70, 72 _sq._ Bandages to prevent entrance of ghosts, 396 Bandaging eyes of corpse, 459 Banks' Islands, 343, 353, 386; myths of the origin of death in, 71, 83 _sq._ ---- Islanders, funeral customs of the, 355 _sqq._ Bantu family, 60 Baronga, the, 61; burial custom of the, 454 Bartle Bay, 206, 208 Basutos, the, 61; burial custom of the, 454 Bat in myth of origin of death, 75 Bathing in sea after funeral, 207 _sq._; as purification after a death, 314, 319 Battel, Andrew, 51 _sq._ Bechuanas, the, 61; burial custom of the, 454 Beetles in myth of the origin of death, 70 Belep tribe of New Caledonia, 325 Belief, acts as a clue to, 143 Belief in immortality, origin of belief in, 25 _sqq._; almost universal among races of mankind, 33; among the aborigines of Central Australia, 87 _sqq._; among the islanders of Torres Straits, 170 _sqq._; among the natives of British New Guinea, 190 _sqq._; among the natives of German New Guinea, 216 _sqq._; among the natives of Dutch New Guinea, 303 _sqq._; among the natives of Southern Melanesia, 324 _sqq._; among the natives of Central Melanesia, 343 _sqq._; its practical effect on the life of the Central Melanesians, 391 _sq._; among the natives of Northern Melanesia, 393 _sqq._; among the Fijians, 406 _sqq._; strongly held by savages, 468; destruction of life and property entailed by the, 468 _sq._; the question of its truth, 469 _sqq._ Belief in sorcery a cause of keeping down the population, 38, 40 Berkeley, his theory of knowledge, 11 _sq._ Berlin Harbour in German New Guinea, 218 Bernau, Rev. J. H., 38 Beryl-stone in _Rose Mary_, 130 Betindalo, the land of the dead, 350 Bhotias, the, of the Himalayas, 163 Biak or Wiak, island, 303 Bilking a ghost, 416 Bird in divination as to cause of death, 45 Birds, souls of sorcerers in, 39 Birth, new, at initiation, pretence of, 254 Birthplaces, the dead buried in their, 160 Birth-stones and birth-sticks (_churinga_) of the Central Australians, 96 _sqq._ Bismarck Archipelago, 70, 394, 402 Black, mourners painted, 178, 241, 293; gravediggers painted, 451 ---- -snake people, 94 Blackened, faces of mourners, 403 Blood of mourners dropped on corpse or into grave, 158 _sq._, 183, 185; and hair of mourners offered to the dead, 183; of pigs smeared on skulls and bones of the dead, 200; soul thought to reside in the, 307; of sacrificial victim not allowed to fall on the ground, 365 ---- revenge, duty of, 274, 276 _sq._; discharged by sham fight, 136 _sq._ Bogadyim, in German New Guinea, 230, 231 Boigu, the island of the dead, 175, 184, 213 Bolafagina, the lord of the dead, 350 Bolotoo, the land of souls, 411 Bones of the dead, second burial of the, 166 _sq._; kept in house, 203; worn by survivors, 225; disinterred and kept in house, 225, 294; making rain by means of the, 341 ---- and skulls of dead smeared with blood of pigs, 200 Bonitos, ghosts in, 380 _Boollia_, magic, 41 _sq._ "Born of an oak or a rock," 128 Bougainville, island of, 393 Boulia district of Queensland, 147, 155 Bow, divination by, 241 Bread-fruit trees, stones to make them bear fruit, 335 _sq._ Breaking things offered to the dead, 276 Breath, vital principle associated with the, 129 _sq._ Brett, Rev. W. H., 35 _sqq._ Brewin, an evil spirit, 45 Brittany, burial custom in, 458 Brothers-in-law in funeral rites, 177 Brown, Rev. Dr. George, 48, 395 Buandik, the, 138 Buckley, the convict, 131 Buginese, burial custom of the, 461 Bugotu, 350, 352; in Ysabel, 372, 379 Building king's house, men sacrificed at, 446 Bukaua, the, of German New Guinea, 242, 256 _sqq._ Bull-roarers, 243; used in divination, 249; described, 250; used at initiation of young men among the Yabim, 250 _sqq._; among the Kaya-Kaya, 255; at initiation among the Bukaua, 260 _sq._; associated with the spirits of the dead, 261; at initiation among the Kai, 263, 291; at initiation of young men among the Tami, 301, 302 Bulotu or Bulu, the land of the dead, 462, 463 Bundle, the fatal, 472; story of, 77 _sq._ _Bures_, Fijian temples, 439 Burial different for old and young, married and unmarried, etc., 161 _sqq._; and burning of the dead, 162 _sq._; special modes of, intended to prevent or facilitate the return of the spirit, 163 _sqq._; second, custom of, 166 _sq._; in trees, 203; in island, 319; in the sea, 347 _sq._ ---- customs of the Australian aborigines, 144 _sqq._; in Tumleo, 223; of the Kai, 274; of the New Caledonians, 326 _sq._, 339 _sq._; in New Ireland, 397 _sq._; in the Duke of York Island, 403. _See also_ Corpse, Grave ---- -grounds, sacred, 378 Buried alive, old people, 359 _sq._ Burma, 75 Burning and burial of the dead, 162 _sq._ ---- bodies of women who died in childbed, 459 Burns inflicted on themselves by mourners, 154, 155, 157, 327, 451 Burnt offerings to the dead, 294 ---- sacrifices, reasons for, 348 _sq._; to ghosts, 366, 367 _sq._, 373 Burying alive the sick and old, Fijian custom of, 420 _sqq._ ---- people in their birthplaces, 160 Bushmen, 65 _Buwun_, deities, 296 Caffres of South Africa, their beliefs as to the causes of death, 55 _sq._ Calabar, poison ordeal in, 52 California, Indians of, 68 Calling back a lost soul, 312 Calm and wind produced by weather-doctors, 385 _sq._ Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, 171, 191 Canaanites, the heathen, 154 Canadian Indians, burial custom of the, 454 Canarium nuts, first-fruits of, offered to ghosts, 368 _sq._ Cannibal feasts in Fiji, 446 Cannibals fear the ghosts of their victims, 396 Canoe, men sacrificed at launching a new, 446 _sq._ Canoes, Papuan, 220 Cape Bedford in Queensland, 129, 130, 131 ---- King William in German New Guinea, 218, 238 Carnac in Brittany, 438 Catching soul in a scarf, 412 _sq._ Cause, Hume's analysis of, 18 _sq._ Causes, the propensity to search for, 17 _sq._; two classes of, 22 Caves used as burial-places or charnel-houses, 330 _sqq._ Celebes, Central, 72 Central Australia, aborigines of, their ideas as to natural death, 46 _sq._; their ideas as to resurrection, 68; their belief in immortality, 87 _sqq._; their belief in reincarnation of the dead, 92 _sqq._; their attitude towards the dead, 124 _sqq._ Cereals unknown to Melanesians and Polynesians, 408 Ceremonial impurity of manslayer, 229 _sq._ Ceremonies performed in honour of the Wollunqua, a mythical water-snake, 108 _sqq._; dramatic, to commemorate the doings of ancestors, 118 _sqq._; funeral, of the Torres Straits Islanders, 176 _sqq._ _See also_ Dramatic Ceremonies, Dramatic Representations, Funeral Ceremonies, Totems Chameleon in myths of the origin of death, 60 _sqq._ Chams of Annam, 67 Charms imparted by dead in dreams, 139 Charnel-houses, 221 _sq._, 225, 328 Cheating the devil, 460 Chepara, the, 139 Cheremiss of Russia, burial custom of the, 457 Cherokee Indians, 77 Chief, spirit of dead, a worshipful ghost, 352 Chief's power in Central Melanesia based on a fear of ghosts, 391 Chiefs deified after death, 369 Chiefs' authority based on their claim to magical powers, 395 Chieftainship, rise of, 141 Childbed, treatment of ghosts of women dying in, 358; special fear of ghosts of women dying in, 458 _sqq._ Childless women, burial of, 458 Children, Central Australian theory of the birth of, 93 _sq._; belief of Queensland natives as to the birth of, 128 Children buried in trees, 161, 312 _sq._; stillborn, burial of, 458 Child-stones, 93 _sq._ Chingpaws of Burma, 75 _Choi_, disembodied human spirits, 128 Chukchansi Indians, 163 _Churinga_, sacred sticks or stones, 96 _sqq._ Circumcision as initiatory rite of young men, 233; among the Yabim, 250 _sqq._; among the Akikuyu, 254; among the Bukaua, 260 _sq._; among the Kai, 290 _sq._; among the Tami, 301 _sq._; as a propitiatory sacrifice, 426 _sqq._ Clans, totemic, 104 Clay, widow's body smeared with, 223 Cleanliness due to fear of sorcery, 386 _sq._, 414 Cleft stick used in cure, 271 Clercq, F. S. A. de, 316 Cloth and weapons offered to ancestral spirits, 430 _sq._ Clubhouses for men, 221, 225, 226, 243, 256 _sq._, 355 Cochinchina, 74 Coco-nut trees of dead cut down, 208, 209, 327; stones to blight, 335 ---- -nuts tabooed, 297 Codrington, Dr. R. H., 54 _sq._, 344, 345 _sq._, 353, 355, 359, 362 _sq._, 368, 380 _sq._ Collins, David, 133 Commemorative and magical ceremonies combined, 122, 126 Commercial habits of the North Melanesians, 394 Communal houses, 304 Communism, temporary revival of primitive, 436 _sq._ Comparative and descriptive anthropology, their relation, 230 _sq._ Comparative method applied to the study of religion, 5 _sq._; in anthropology, 30 Compartments in land of the dead, 244, 354, 404 Competition as a cause of progress, 89 _sq._ Conception in women, Central Australian theory of, 93 _sq._; belief of Queensland natives concerning, 128 Conception of death, the savage, 31 _sqq._ Concert of spirits, 340 _sq._ Confession of sins, 201 Congo, natives of the, their ideas as to natural death, 50; worship of the moon on the, 68 Consecration of manslayers in Fiji, 448 _sq._ Consultation of ancestral images, 308 _sqq._ Continence, required in training yam vines, 371 Continuance of death, myth of the, 472 Contradictions and inconsistencies in reasoning not peculiar to savages, 111 _sq._ Convulsions as evidence of inspiration, 443, 444 Co-operative system of piety, 333 Coorgs, the, 163 Cord worn round neck by mourners, 241, 242, 249, 259, 361 Corpse inspected to discover sorcerer, 37, 38, 53 _sq._; dried on fire, 135, 184, 249, 313, 355; tied to prevent ghost from walking, 144; mauled and mutilated in order to disable the ghost, 153; putrefying juices of, received by mourners on their bodies, 167, 205; carried out feet foremost, 174; decked with ornaments and flowers, 232; painted white and red, 233; crowned with red roses, 233, 234; stript of ornaments before burial, 234, 241; kept in house, 355; property displayed beside the, 397; persons who have handled a corpse forbidden to touch food with their hands, 450 _sq._; carried out of house by special opening, 452 _sqq._ Corpses mummified, 313; of women dying in childbed burnt, 459 Costume of mourners, 184, 198, 241 _sq._; of widow and widower, 204 Costumes of actors in dramatic ceremonies concerned with totems, 119 _sqq._ Crabs in myth of the origin of death, 70 Cracking joints of fingers at incantation, 223 Creator, the, and the origin of death, 73 Crocodiles, transmigration of dead into, 245 Cromlechs, 438 Crops, ghosts expected to make the crops thrive, 259, 284, 288 _sq._ Cross-questioning a ghost by means of fire, 278 Cultivation of the ground, spirits of ancestors supposed to help in the, 259 Culture, advance of, among the aborigines of South-Eastern Australia, 141 _sq._, 148 _sq._; advanced, of the Fijians, 407 Cursing enemies, 370, 403, 404 Cutting down trees of the dead, 208, 209 Cuttings of the flesh in honour of the dead, 154 _sqq._, 183, 184 _sq._, 196, 272, 327, 359 Dance of death, 185 _sqq._ Dances as funeral rites, 179 _sqq._, 200; masked, of the Monumbo, 228; masked, of a Secret Society, 233; at deaths, 293 _sq._; of masked men in imitation of spirits, 297; at festivals, 316; at festivals of the dead, 321; at funeral feasts, 399 ---- and games at festivals, 226 Dark, ghosts dreaded in the, 197, 283, 306, 467; female mourners remain in the, 360 Daula, a ghost associated with the frigate-bird, 376 Dawson, James, 42, 142, 143 Dazing a ghost, 416 Dead, worship of the, 23 _sqq._, 31, 328 _sqq._, 338; seen in dreams, 27; belief in the reincarnation of the, 92 _sqq._, 107; spirits of, associated with conspicuous features of the landscape, 115 _sqq._; reincarnation of the, 124 _sq._, 127 _sqq._; souls of the, supposed to go to the sky, 133 _sq._, 135, 138 _sq._, 141, 142; souls of the, supposed to be in stars, 134, 140; names of the, not mentioned, 135; magical virtue attributed to the hair of the, 137 _sq._; appear to the living in dreams, 139, 195, 213, 229; attentions paid to the, in regard to food, fire, property, etc., 144 _sqq._; property of, deposited in grave, 145 _sqq._; motive for destroying the property of the, 147 _sq._; economic loss entailed by sacrifices to the, 149; incipient worship of the, in Australia, 149, 150; feared, 152 _sq._, 173 _sqq._, 196 _sq._, 201, 203, 244, 248; cuttings of the flesh in honour of the, 154 _sqq._, 183, 184 _sq._, 196, 327, 359; thought to be strengthened by blood, 159; disposed of in different ways according to their age, manner of death, etc., 161 _sqq._; fear of the, 168; germs of a worship of the, in Australia, 168 _sq._; destruction of the property of the, 174; land of the, 175 _sq._, 192, 193, 194 _sq._, 202, 203, 207, 209 _sq._, 211 _sqq._, 224, 228 _sq._, 244, 260, 286 _sq._, 292, 299, 305 _sq._, 307, 322, 326, 345, 350 _sq._, 353 _sq._, 404 _sqq._, 462 _sqq._; personated by masked men, 176, 179 _sq._, 182 _sq._, 185 _sqq._; food offered to the, 183, 211, 214, 232, 241, 332, 338, 348 _sq._, 364 _sq._, 367 _sq._, 372 _sq._, 396 _sq._, 429, 442, 467; elements of a worship of the, in Torres Straits, 189; laid on platforms, 199, 203, 205; worshipped in British New Guinea, 201 _sq._; prayers to the, 201 _sq._, 214, 259, 288, 307, 329 _sq._, 332 _sqq._, 340, 376 _sq._, 401, 403 _sq._, 427, 441; names of, not mentioned, 210, 246; monuments of the, 225; offerings of hunters and fishers to the, 226; oracles of the, 235; buried in the house, 236, 347, 352, 397, 398, 399; offerings to the, 239, 276, 292, 298; transmigrate into animals, 242, 245; spirits of the, give good crops, 247 _sq._; elements of a worship of the dead among the Yabim, 255; spirits of the, believed to be mischievous, 257; ancestors supposed to help in the cultivation of the ground, 259; first-fruits offered to the, 259; buried under houses, 259; envious of the living, 267, 381; burnt offerings to the, 294; predominance of the worship of the, 297 _sq._; power of the, over the living, 298, 306 _sq._, 307; sacrifices to the, 307, 338; wooden images (_korwar_) of the, 307 _sqq._, 315, 316 _sq._, 321, 322; buried in island, 319; festival of the, 320 _sq._; medicine-men, inspired by spirits of the, 322; spirits of the, embodied in their skulls, 338; spirits of the, identified with white men, 342; buried in the sea, 347 _sq._, 397; relics of the, preserved, 348; bodies of the, preserved for a time in the house, 351; represented by wooden stocks, 374, 386; burned in New Ireland, 397; carried out of house by special opening, 452 _sqq._ _See also_ Ghost Dead kings of Uganda consulted as oracles, 151 Death, the problem of, 31 _sqq._; the savage conception of, 31 _sqq._; thought to be an effect of sorcery, 33 _sqq._; by natural causes, recognised by some savages, 55 _sq._; myths of the origin of, 59 _sqq._; personified in tales, 79 _sqq._; not regarded as a natural necessity, 84 _sqq._; the second, of the dead, 195, 286, 299, 345, 350, 351, 354; attributed to sorcery, 249; violent, ascribed to sorcery, 268 _sq._; myth of the continuance of, 472 Death and resurrection at initiation, ceremony of, 431, 434 _sq._; pretence of, at initiation, 254 _sq._, 261, 302 Death-dances, 293 _sq._; of the Torres Straits Islanders, 179 _sqq._ Deaths from natural causes, disbelief of savages in, 33 _sqq._; attributed to sorcery, 136, 203; set down to sorcery or ghosts, 203, 268, 270 Deceiving the ghost, 237, 273, 280 _sqq._, 328 Deceiving the spirits, 298 Deification of the dead, 24, 25; of parents, 439 Deity consumes soul of offering, 297 Demon carries off soul of sick, 194 Demons as causes of disease and death, 36 _sq._ Demonstrations, extravagant, of grief at a death, dictated by fear of the ghost, 271 _sqq._ Déné or Tinneh Indians, their ideas as to death, 39 _sq._ Departure of ghost thought to coincide with disappearance of flesh from bones, 165 _sq._ Descent of the living into the nether world, 300, 355 Descriptive and comparative anthropology, their relation, 230 _sq._ Descriptive method in anthropology, 30 Desertion of house after a death, 195, 196 _n._ 1, 210, 248, 275, 349, 400; of village after a death, 275 Deserts as impediments to progress, 89, 90 Design emblematic of totem, 168 Destruction of house after a death, 210 ---- of life and property entailed by the belief in immortality, 468 _sq._ ---- of property of the dead, 174, 459; motive for, 147 _sq._, 327 Development arrested or retarded in savagery, 88 _sqq._ Dieri, the, 138; their burial customs, 144 Differentiation of function in prayer, 332 _sq._ Disbelief of savages in death from natural causes, 34 _sqq._ Disease supposed to be caused by sorcery, 35 _sqq._; demons regarded as causes of, 36 _sq._; recognised by some savages as due to natural causes, 55 _sq._; special modes of disposing of bodies of persons who die of, 162, 163. _See also_ Sickness Diseases ascribed to ghosts, 257 Disinterment of the bones of the dead, 225, 294 Dissection of corpse to discover cause of death, 53 _sq._ Divination to discover cause of death, 35, 36, 37 _sq._, 38, 39 _sq._, 44, 45 _sq._, 50 _sqq._, 53 _sq._, 136; by liver, 54; by dreams, 136, 383; by the skulls of the dead, 179; to discover sorcerer who caused death, 240 _sq._, 249 _sq._, 257, 402; by bow, 241; by hair to discover cause of death, 319; by means of ghosts, 389 _sq._; to discover ghost who has caused sickness, 382 Divinity of kings, 16; of Fijian kings, 407 _sq._; Fijian notion of, 440 _sq._ Dog, in myth of the origin of death, 66; the Heavenly, 460 Dogs sacrificed to the dead, 232, 234; sacrificed in epidemics, 296 Doreh Bay in Dutch New Guinea, 303, 306 Dragon supposed to swallow lads at initiation, 301. _See also_ Monster Drama of death and resurrection at initiation, 431, 434 _sq._ ----, evolution of, 189 Dramatic ceremonies in Central Australia, magical intention of, 122 _sq._, 126 ---- concerned with totems, 119 _sqq._ ---- to commemorate the doings of ancestors, 118 _sqq._ Dramatic representation of ghosts and spirits by masked men, 176, 179 _sq._, 180 _sqq._, 185 _sqq._ Drawings on ground in religious or magical ceremony, 112 _sq._ ---- on rocks, 318 Dread of witchcraft, 413 _sq._ Dreamer, professional, 383 Dreams as a source of the belief in immortality and of the worship of the dead, 27 _sq._, 214; divination by, 136; appearance of the dead to the living in, 139, 195, 213, 229; savage faith in the truth of, 139 _sq._; consultation of the dead in, 179; danger of, 194; the dead communicate with the living in, 248 Driving away the ghost, 178, 197, 248, 305, 306, 323, 356 _sqq._, 396, 399, 415 Drowning of ghosts, 224 Duke of York Island, 393, 397, 403, 404 Dying, threats of the, 273 Ears of corpse stopped with hot coals, 152; of mourners cut, 183, 272, 327 Earth-burial and tree-burial, 161, 166 _sq._ Earthquakes ascribed to ghosts, 286, 288; caused by deities, 296 Eating totemic animals or plants, 120 _sq._ Economic loss entailed by sacrifices to the dead, 149; entailed by the belief in immortality, 468 _sq._ Eel, ghost in, 379 Eels offered to the dead, 429 Egypt, custom at embalming a corpse in ancient, 178 Elysium, the Fijian, 466 _sq._ Embryology of religion, 88 Emu totem, dramatic ceremonies concerned with, 122, 123 Encounter Bay tribe of South Australia, 42 Epilepsy ascribed to anger of ghosts, 257, 283 ---- and inspiration, 15 Erdweg, Father Josef, 218, 219, 227 Erskine, Capt. J. E., 409 _Ertnatulunga_, sacred store-house, 99 _Erythrophloeum guiniense_, in poison ordeal, 50 Esquimaux, burial custom of the, 454, 456 Essence, immaterial, of sacrifice absorbed by ghosts and spirits, 285, 287, 374 Euhemerism, 24 _sq._ Euhemerus, 24 European teaching, influence of, on native beliefs, 142 _sq._ Evil spirits regarded as causes of death, 36 _sq._ Excitement as mark of inspiration, 14 Exogamy with female descent, 416, 418 Exorcism as cure for sickness, 222 _sq._ Experience defined, 12; two sorts of, 13 _sq._ ---- and intuition, 11 External world, question of the reality of, 13 _sq._; an illusion, 21 Eye, soul resides in the, 267 Eyes of corpse bandaged, 459 Faints ascribed to action of ghosts, 257, 283 Faith, weakening of religious, 4 Falling stars the souls of the dead, 229, 399 Family prayers of the New Caledonians, 332 _sq._, 340 ---- priests, 332, 340 Famine, the stone of, 334 _sq._ Fasting in mourning for a king, 451 _sq._ Father-in-law, mourning for a, 155 Favourable natural conditions, their influence in stimulating social progress, 141 _sq._, 148 _sq._ Fear of ghosts, 134, 135, 147, 151 _sqq._, 158, 173 _sqq._, 195, 196 _sq._, 201, 203, 229 _sq._, 232, 237, 276, 282 _sq._, 305, 321, 327, 347, 396, 414 _sq._, 449, 455, 467; a moral restraint, 175; the source of extravagant demonstrations of grief at death, 271 _sqq._; taboo based on, 390 _sq._; a bulwark of morality, 392; funeral customs based on, 450 _sqq._; of women dying in childbed, 458 _sqq._ Fear of the dead, 152 _sq._, 168, 173 _sqq._, 195, 196 _sq._, 201, 203, 244, 248 ---- of witchcraft, 244 ---- the only principle of religious observances in Fiji, 443 Feasts provided for ghosts, 247 _sq._ _See also_ Funeral Feasts Feather-money offered to ghosts, 374, 375 Feet foremost, corpse carried out, 174 Ferry for ghosts, 224, 244 _sq._, 350, 412, 462 Festival of the dead, 320 _sq._ Fig-trees, sacred, 199 Fighting or warrior ghosts, 370 Fiji and the Fijians, 406 _sqq._ ----, human sacrifices in, 446 _sq._ Fijian islands, scenery of, 409 _sq._ ---- myths of origin of death, 66 _sq._, 75 _sq._ Fijians, belief in immortality among the, 406 _sqq._; their advanced culture, 407 Fingers amputated in mourning, 199, 451 ---- of living sacrificed in honour of the dead, 426 _sq._ Finsch Harbour in German New Guinea, 218, 242, 262 Fire as a means of keeping off ghosts, 131 ---- -flies, ghosts as, 352 ---- kindled on grave, to warm ghost, 144 _sq._, 196 _sq._, 209, 211, 223, 275, 359 ---- supplied to ghost, 246 _sq._; used to keep off ghosts, 258, 283; used in cross-questioning a ghost, 278 Firstborn children, skull-topped images made of dead, 312 First-fruits offered to the dead, 259; of canarium nuts offered to ghosts, 368 _sq._; offered to deified spirits of dead chiefs, 369; offered to ghosts, 373 _sq._; of yams offered to the ancestral spirits, 429 Fish offered by fishermen to the dead, 226; prayers for, 329; ghost in, 379 ---- totem, dramatic ceremony concerned with, 119 _sq._, 121 Fishermen pray to ghosts, 289 ----, stones to help, 337 Fison, Lorimer, 407, 412, 416, 418, 428 _n._ 1, 434, 435 _sqq._, 438 _n._ 1, 445, 448 Fits ascribed to contact with ghosts, 283. _See also_ Epilepsy Florida, one of the Solomon Islands, 346, 347, 348, 349, 367, 368, 376, 377, 379, 380 Flutes, sacred, 221, 226, 233, 252 Flying-foxes, souls of the dead in, 405 Food placed on grave, 144; offered to the dead, 183, 201, 208, 211, 214, 232, 241, 332, 338, 364 _sq._, 367 _sq._, 372 _sq._, 396 _sq._, 429, 442, 467; abstinence from certain, in mourning, 198, 208, 209, 230, 314, 360, 452; supply promoted by ghosts, 283; offered to ancestral spirits, 316; offered to the skulls of the dead, 339 _sq._, 352; offered to ghosts, 348 _sq._; of ghosts, the living not to partake of the, 355 ---- not to be touched with the hands by gravediggers, 327; not to be touched with hands by persons who have handled a corpse, 450 _sq._ ---- and water, abundance of, favourable to social progress, 90 _sq._; offered to the dead, 174 Fool and Death, 83 Footprints, magic of, 45 Foundation-sacrifice of men, 446 Fowlers pray to ghosts, 289 Frenzy a symptom of inspiration, 443, 444 _sq._ Frigate-bird, mark of the, 350; ghost associated with the, 376 Frigate-birds, ghosts in, 380 Frog in stories of the origin of death, 61, 62 _sq._ Fruit-trees cut down for ghost, 246 ---- of the dead cut down, 399 Funeral ceremonies intended to dismiss the ghost from the land of the living, 174 _sq._ ---- ceremonies of the Torres Straits Islanders, 176 _sqq._ ---- customs of the Tami, 293 _sq._; of the Central Melanesians, 347 _sqq._, 355 _sqq._; based on fear of ghosts, 450 _sqq._ ---- feasts, 348, 351, 358 _sq._, 360, 396; orations, 355 _sq._ Forces, impersonal, the world conceived as a complex of, 21 Foreskins sacrificed in honour of the dead, 426 _sq._; of circumcised lads presented to ancestral gods, 427 Gaboon, the, 54 Gajos of Sumatra, burial custom of the, 455 Gall used in divination, 54 Game offered by hunters to the dead, 226 Ganindo, a warrior ghost, 363 _sq._ Gardens, ghosts of, 371 Gazelle Peninsula, New Britain, 48, 69, 398, 405 Geelvink Bay, in Dutch New Guinea, 303, 307 Genital members of human victims hung on tree, 447 _n._ 1 German burial custom, 453, 458 Ghost appeased by sham fight, 137; hunted into the grave, 164 _sq._; thought to linger near body till flesh is decayed, 165 _sq._; elaborate funeral ceremonies designed to get rid of, 174 _sq._; driven away, 178, 197, 248; extracted from body of patient, 271; calls for vengeance, 278; cursed and ill-treated, 285; who causes sunshine and rain, 375 ---- -posts, 375 ---- -seer, 204 _sq._, 214, 229 ---- -shooter, 387 _sq._ Ghostly ferry, 350, 412. _See also_ Ferry Ghosts, mischievous nature of, 28; as causes of sickness, 54 _sqq._, 195, 197, 222, 300, 305, 322, 389; feared, 134, 135, 147, 151 _sqq._, 158, 173 _sqq._, 195, 196 _sq._, 201, 203, 229 _sq._, 232, 237, 271 _sqq._, 276, 282 _sq._, 305, 321, 327, 347, 396, 414 _sq._, 449, 457, 467; attentions paid to, in regard to food, fire, property, etc., 144 _sqq._; feared only of recently departed, 151 _sq._; of nearest relations most feared, 153; represented dramatically by masked men, 176, 179 _sq._, 182 _sq._, 185 _sqq._; should have their noses bored, 192, 194 _sq._; return of the, 195, 198, 246, 300; carry off the souls of the living, 197; cause bad luck in hunting and fishing, 197; identified with phosphorescent lights, 198, 258; appear to seer, 204 _sq._; of slain enemies especially dreaded, 205; of the hanged specially feared, 212; certain classes of ghosts specially feared, 212; malignity of, 212, 381; drowned, 224; village of, 231 _sq._, 234; give information, 240; provided with fire, 246 _sq._; feasts provided for, 247 _sq._; thought to give good crops, 247 _sq._; communicate with the living in dreams, 248; diseases ascribed to action of, 257; of the slain, special fear of, 258, 279, 306, 323; of ancestors appealed to for help, 258 _sq._; precautions taken against, 258; expected to make the crops thrive, 259, 284, 288 _sq._; natural death ascribed to action of, 268; sickness ascribed to action of, 269 _sq._, 271, 279, 372, 375, 381 _sqq._; deceived, 273, 280 _sqq._, 328; thought to help hunters, 274, 284 _sq._; in the form of animals, 282; help the living by promoting supply of food, 283; cause earthquakes, 286, 288; as patrons of hunting and other departments, 287; die the second death, 287; turn into animals, 287; turn into ant-hills, 287; of warriors invoked by warriors, 288; invoked by warriors, farmers, fowlers, fishermen, etc., 288 _sqq._; of men may grow into gods, 289 _sq._; of the dead in the form of serpents, 300; driven away, 305, 306, 323, 356 _sqq._, 396, 399, 415; cause all sorts of misfortunes, 306 _sq._; call for vengeance, 310, 468; sacrifices to, 328; of power and ghosts of no account, distinction between, 345 _sq._; of the recent dead most powerful, 346; prayers to, 348; of land and sea, 348; food offered to, 348 _sq._; live in islands, 350, 353; live underground, 353 _sq._; worshipful, 362 _sq._; public and private, 367, 369 _sq._; first-fruits offered to, 368 _sq._, 373 _sq._; warlike, 370; of gardens, 371; human sacrifices to, 371 _sq._; incarnate in sharks, 373; sacrifices to, at planting, 375; sanctuaries of, 377 _sq._; incarnate in animals, 379 _sq._; envious of the living, 381; carry off souls, 383; in stones, 383 _sq._; inspiration by means of, 389 _sq._; killed, 415 _sq._; dazed, 416; prevented from returning to the house, 455 _sq._; unmarried, hard fate of, 464 Ghosts and spirits, distinction between, in Central Melanesia, 343, 363; regulate the weather, 384 _sq._ ---- of women dying in childbed, special fear of, 458 _sqq._; special treatment of, 358. _See also_ Dead _and_ Spirits Giant, mythical, thought to appear annually with the south-east monsoon, 255 Gifford, Lord, 2, 3 Girdle made from hair of dead, 138 Gnanji, the, of Central Australia, 92 Goat in story of the origin of death, 64 God, the question of his existence, 2; defined, 9 _sq._; knowledge of, how acquired, 11 _sqq._; inferred as a cause, 22 _sq._; and the origin of death, 61 _sqq._; in form of serpent, 445, 462 Gods created by man in his own likeness, 19 _sq._; of nature, 20; human, 20, 23 _sqq._; unknown among aborigines of Australia, 91; often developed out of ghosts, 289 _sq._; ancestors worshipped as, 340, 369; ancestral, sacrifice of foreskins to, 427; ancestral, libations to, 438; two classes of, in Fiji, 440 ---- and spirits, no certain demarcation between, 441 Goldie, Rev. Hugh, 52 Good crops given by ghosts, 247 _sq._ ---- spirit, 143 ---- and bad, different fate of the, after death, 354 Gran Chaco, in Argentina, 165 Grandfather, soul of, reborn in grandchild, 417; his ghost dazed, 416 Grandfather and grandchild, their relation under exogamy and female kinship, 416, 418 Grandidier, A., 49 Grass for graves, euphemism for human victims buried with the dead, 425 _sq._ ---- -seed, magical ceremony for increasing, 102 Grave, food placed on, 144, 145; property of dead deposited in, 145 _sqq._; hut erected on, 203; of worshipful dead a sanctuary, 347; stones heaped on, 360; sacrifices to ghost on, 382 Gravediggers, purification of, 314; secluded, 327; secluded and painted black, 451 Graves, huts built on, for use of ghosts, 150 _sq._; under the houses, 274. _See also_ Huts Great Woman, the, 464 Greek tragedy, W. Ridgeway on the origin of, 189 Greeks, purificatory rites of ancient, 206 Greenlanders, burial custom of the, 454 Grey, Sir George, 41; taken for an Australian aboriginal, 131 _sqq._ Grief, extravagant demonstrations of grief in mourning, their motives, 135 _sq._ ---- at a death, extravagant demonstrations of, dictated by fear of the ghost, 271 _sqq._ _Grihya-Sutras_, 163 Ground drawings in magical or religious ceremony, 112 _sq._ Groves, sacred, the dead buried in, 326 Guadalcanar, one of the Solomon Islands, 350, 372 Guardian spirits, 227 Guiana, Indians of, their ideas as to the cause of death, 35 _sqq._; their offerings to the dead, 165 Gullet of pig sacrificed, 368 Gulu, king of heaven, 78 Gypsies, European, burial custom of, 455 Haddon, Dr. A. C., 171, 172 _sq._, 175, 176, 180 Hagen, Dr. B., 230, 231 Haida, burial custom of the, 455 Hair burnt as charm, 43; cut in mourning, 135, 320, 451; of widow unshorn, 184; of dead child worn by mother, 315; of gravediggers not cut, 327; used as amulet, 332 ---- of the dead, magical virtue attributed to, 137 _sq._; worn by relatives, 249; divination by means of, 319 ---- of mourners offered to the dead, 183; cut off, 183, 204 Hakea flower totem, dramatic ceremony concerned with, 119, 121 Hands, gravediggers and persons who have handled a corpse not to touch food with their, 327, 450 _sq._ Hanged, ghosts of the, specially feared, 212 Hare in myth of the origin of death, 65 Harumae, a warrior ghost, 365 _sq._ Hasselt, J. L. van, 305 Hauri, a worshipful ghost, 372 Head-dress of gravediggers, 327 Head-hunters, 352 Head of corpse cut off in order to disable the ghost, 153; removed and preserved, 178. _See also_ Skulls Heads of mourners shaved, 208 ----, human, cut off in honour of the dead, 352 Heaps of stones on grave, 360 Heart supposed to be the seat of human spirit, 129 ---- of pig sacrificed, 368 Heavenly Dog, 460 Hebrew prophets, 14 Hen in myth of the origin of death, 79 Highlands of Scotland, burial custom in the, 453, 458 Hindoos, burial custom of the, 453, 458 Historical method of treating natural theology, 2 _sq._ History of religion, its importance, 3 Hiyoyoa, the land of the dead, 207 Hole in the wall, dead carried out through a, 452 _sqq._ Holy of Holies, 430, 431, 433, 437, 438 Homer on blood-drinking ghosts, 159 Homicides, precautions taken by, against the ghosts of their victims, 205 _sq._; purification of, 206; honours bestowed on, in Fiji, 447 _sq._ _See also_ Manslayers Homoeopathic magic, 288, 376 ---- or imitative magic, 335, 336, 338 Honorary titles of homicides in Fiji, 447 _sq._ Hood Peninsula of British New Guinea, 47, 202, 203 Hos of Togoland, their myth of the origin of death, 81 _sqq._ Hose, Ch., and McDougall, W., quoted, 265 _n._, 417 Hottentots, their myth of the origin of death, 65; burial custom of the, 454 House deserted after a death, 195, 196 _n._ 1, 248, 275, 349, 400; deserted or destroyed after a death, 210; dead buried in the, 236, 347, 352, 397, 398, 399; dead carried out of, by special opening, 452 _sqq._ Houses, native, at Kalo, 202; communal, 304 Howitt, Dr. A. W., 44 _sq._, 139, 141 Human gods, 20, 23 _sqq._ ---- nature, two different views of, 469 _sqq._ ---- sacrifices to ghosts, 371 _sq._; in Fiji, 446 _sq._ Hume's analysis of cause, 18 _sq._ Hunt, Mr., his experience in Fiji, 423 _sq._ Hunters supposed to be helped by ghosts, 274, 284 _sq._ Huon Gulf, in German New Guinea, 242, 256 Hut built to represent mythical monster at initiation, 251, 290, 301 _sq._ Huts erected on graves for use of ghosts, 150 _sq._; erected on graves, 203, 223, 248, 259, 275, 293, 294 Hypocritical lamentations at a death, 273 ---- indignation of accomplice at a murder, 280 _sqq._ Idu, mountain of the dead, 193, 194 _sq._ Iguana in myth of origin of death, 70 Ilene, a worshipful ghost, 373 Ill-treatment of ghost who gives no help, 285 Illusion of the external world, 21 Images of the dead, wooden (_korwar_ or _karwar_), 307 _sqq._, 311, 315, 316 _sq._, 321, 322; of sharks, 373; in temples, 442 Imitation of totems by disguised actors, 119 _sqq._; of totemic animals, 177 Imitative magic, 335, 336, 338, 376 Immortality, belief in, among the aborigines of Central Australia, 87 _sqq._; among the islanders of Torres Straits, 170 _sqq._; among the natives of British New Guinea, 190 _sqq._; among the natives of German New Guinea, 216 _sqq._; among the natives of Dutch New Guinea, 303 _sqq._; among the natives of Southern Melanesia, 324 _sqq._; among the natives of Central Melanesia, 343 _sqq._; among the natives of Northern Melanesia, 393 _sqq._; among the Fijians, 406 _sqq._; strongly held by savages, 468 Immortality, limited sense of, 25; origin of belief in, 25 _sqq._; belief in human, almost universal among races of mankind, 33; rivalry between men and animals for gift of, 74 _sq._; question of the truth of the belief in, 469 _sqq._; destruction of life and property entailed by the belief in, 468 _sq._ ---- in a bundle, 77 _sq._ Impecunious ghosts, hard fate of, 406 Impurity, ceremonial, of manslayer, 229 _sq._ Im Thurn, Sir Everard F., 38 _sq._ Incantations or spells, 385 Inconsistencies and contradictions in reasoning not peculiar to savages, 111 _sq._ Inconsistency of savage thought, 143 Indians of Guiana, their ideas about death, 35 _sqq._; their beliefs as to the dead, 165 ---- of North-West America, burial custom of the, 455, 460 Indifference to death, 419; a consequence of belief in immortality, 422 _sq._ Indo-European burial custom, 453 Infanticide as cause of diminished population, 40 Influence of European teaching on native beliefs, 142 _sq._ Initiation at puberty regarded as a process of death and resurrection, 254, 261 ---- of young men, 233; in Central Australia, 100; among the Yabim, 250 _sqq._; among the Bukaua, 260 _sq._; among the Kai, 290 _sq._; in Fiji, 429 _sqq._ Insanity, influence of, in history, 15 _sq._ ---- and inspiration not clearly distinguished, 388 Insect in divination as to cause of death, 44, 46 Inspiration, theory of, 14 _sq._; of medium by ancestral spirits, 308 _sqq._; by spirits of the dead, 322; by ghosts in Central Melanesia, 388 _sq._; attested by frenzy, 443, 444 _sq._ ---- and insanity not clearly distinguished, 388 Insufflations, magical, to heal the sick, 329 _Intichiuma_, magical ceremonies for the multiplication of totems, 122 _sq._ Intuition and experience, 11 Invocation of ghosts, 288 _sq._; of the dead, 329 _sq._, 332 _sqq._, 377, 378, 401, 441 Island, dead buried in, 319 ---- of the dead, fabulous, 175 Islands, ghosts live in, 350, 353 Isle of Pines, 325, 330, 337 Israelites forbidden to cut themselves for the dead, 154 Ivory Coast, 52 Jackson, John, quoted, 419 _sqq._, 447 Jappen or Jobi, island, 303 Jawbone of husband worn by widow, 204; lower, of corpse preserved, 234 _sq._, 236, 274; of dead king of Uganda preserved and consulted oracularly, 235 Jawbones of the dead preserved, 351 _sq._; of dead worn by relatives, 404 Journey of ghosts to the land of the dead, 286 _sq._, 361 _sq._, 462 _sqq._ Juices of putrefaction received by mourners on their bodies, 167, 205, 403 ---- of putrefying corpse drunk by widow, 313; drunk by women, 355 Kachins of Burma, burial custom of the, 459 Kafirs, their beliefs as to the causes of death, 56 Kagoro, the, of Northern Nigeria, 28 _n._ 1, 49 Kai, the, of German New Guinea, 71, 262 _sqq._; theory of the soul, 267 Kaikuzi, brother of Death, 80 Kaitish, the, 68, 158, 166 Kalo, in British New Guinea, 202 _sq._ _Kalou_, Fijian word for "god," 440 _Kalou vu_, "root gods," 440 _Kalou yalo_, "soul gods," 440 _Kami_, the souls of the dead, 297 _sq._ Kamilaroi tribe of New South Wales, 46, 155 _Kanaima_ (_kenaima_), 36, 38 _Kani_, name applied to ghosts, to bull-roarers, and to the monster who is thought to swallow lads at circumcision, 301 Kaniet islands, 401 _Kava_ offered to ancestral spirits, 440 Kavirondo, burial custom of the, 458 Kaya-Kaya or Tugeri, the, of Dutch New Guinea, 255 Kayans, the, of Borneo, 417; burial custom of, 456 _sq._, 459 Kemp Welch River, 202 _Keramo_, a fighting ghost, 370 Keysser, Ch., 262, 263 _sq._, 267, 269 _n._ 3 Kibu, the land of the dead, 175 Kibuka, war-god of Uganda, 366 Kidd, Dudley, 55 Kidney-fat, extraction of, 43 Killer of Souls, the, 465 _sq._ Killing a ghost, 415 _sq._ King, mourning for a, 451 _sq._ King's corpse not carried out through the door, 452, 461 Kings, divinity of, 16; sanctity of Fijian, 407 _sq._ Kintu and the origin of death, 78 _sqq._ Kiwai, beliefs and customs concerning the dead in island of, 211 _sqq._ Koita or Koitapu, of British New Guinea, 193 Kolosh Indians, 163 Komars, the, 163 _Koroi_, honorary title of homicides in Fiji, 447 _sq._ _Korwar_, or _karwar_, wooden images of the dead, 307 _sqq._, 315, 316 _sq._, 321, 322 Koryak, burial custom of the, 455 Kosi and the origin of death, 76 _sq._ Knowledge, natural, how acquired, 11 ---- of God, how acquired, 11 _sqq._; of ghosts essential to medical practitioners in Melanesia, 384 Kulin, the, 138 Kurnai tribe of Victoria, 44, 138 Kweariburra tribe, 153 _Kwod_, sacred or ceremonial ground, 179 Lambert, Father, 325, 327, 328, 332, 339 Lamboam, the land of the dead, 260, 292, 299 Lamentations, hypocritical, at a death, 271 _sqq._, 280 _sqq._ Land burial and sea burial, 347 _sq._ ---- cleared for cultivation, 238, 242 _sq._, 256, 262 _sq._, 304 ---- ghosts and sea ghosts, 348 ---- of the dead, 175 _sq._, 192, 193, 194 _sq._, 202, 203, 207, 209 _sq._, 211 _sqq._, 224, 228 _sq._, 244, 260, 286 _sq._, 292, 299, 305 _sq._, 307, 322, 326, 345, 350 _sq._, 353 _sq._, 404 _sqq._, 462 _sqq._; journeys of the living to the, 207, 355; way to the, 212 _sq._, 462 _sqq._ Landtman, Dr. G., 214 Lang, Andrew, 216 _sq._ Laos, burial custom in, 459 Leaf as badge of a ghost, 391 Leaves thrown on scene of murder, 415 Leg bones of the dead preserved, 221, 249 Legs of corpse broken in order to disable the ghost, 153 Lehner, Stefan, 256 Lepchis of Sikhim, burial custom of the, 455 Le Souëf, A. A. C., 40 _sq._ Libations to ancestral gods, 430, 438 Licence, period of, following circumcision, 427 _sq._; following initiation, 433, 434 _n._ 1, 436 _sq._ Licentious orgy following circumcision, 427 _sq._ Life in the other world like life in this, 286 _sq._ Lightning, savage theory of, 19 Lights, phosphorescent, thought to be ghosts, 198, 258 Lime, powdered, used to dust the trail of a ghost, 277 _sq._ _Lio'a_, a powerful ghost, 346 Liver extracted by magic, 50; divination by, 54 Livers of pigs offered to the dead, 360 _sq._ Lizard in divination as to cause of death, 44; in myths of the origin of death, 60 _sq._, 70, 74 _sq._ Lizards, ghosts in, 380 Local totem centres, 97, 99, 124 Long soul and short soul, 291 _sq._ Lost souls, recovery of, 270 _sq._, 300 _sq._ Luck, bad, in fishing and hunting, caused by ghosts, 197 Luck of a village dependent on ghosts, 198 _Lum_, men's clubhouse, 243, 250, 257 Mabuiag, island of, 174 Macassars, burial custom of the, 461 Macluer Gulf in Dutch New Guinea, 317, 318 Mad, stones to drive people, 335 Madagascar, ideas as to natural death in, 48 _sq._ Mafulu (Mambule), the, of British New Guinea, 198 _sqq._ Maggots, appearance of, sign of departure of soul, 292 Magic as a cause of death, 34 _sqq._; Age of, 58; attributed to aboriginal inhabitants of a country, 193; homoeopathic or imitative, 288, 335, 336, 338, 376; combined with religion, 111 _sq._, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 376; Melanesian conception of, 380 _sq._; working by means of personal refuse, 413 _sq._ _See also_ Sorcery _and_ Witchcraft ---- and religion compared in reference to their destruction of human life, 56 _sq._ Magical ceremonies for increasing the food supply, 102; ceremonies for the multiplication of totems, 124 _sq._; intention of dramatic ceremonies in Central Australia, 122 _sq._, 126; virtues attributed to sacred stones in New Caledonia, 334 _sqq._ Magician or priest, 336, 338. _See also_ Sorcerer Magicians, their importance in history, 16; but no priests at Doreh, 306 Malagasy, their ideas as to natural death, 48 _sq._ Malanta, one of the Solomon Islands, 350 Malayalis, the, of Malabar, 162 Malignity of ghosts, 212, 381 Malo, island of, 48 Man creates gods in his own likeness, 19 _sq._ ----, grandeur and dignity of, 469 _sq._; pettiness and insignificance of, 470 _sq._ _Mana_, supernatural or spiritual power, 346 _sq._, 352, 371, 380 _Manoam_, evil spirits, 321 Manoga, a worshipful ghost, 368 Manslayers, precautions taken by, against the ghosts of their victims, 205 _sq._, 258, 279, 323; secluded, 279 _sq._, consecration of, 448 _sq._; restrictions imposed on, 449. _See also_ Homicides _Mari_ or _mar_, ghost, 173 _Mariget_, "ghost-hand," 177 Mariner, William, 411 Mariners, stones to help, 337 Markets, native, 394 Marotse, burial custom of the, 454 Marquesas Islands, 417 Married and unmarried, different modes of disposing of their corpses, 162 Masai, their myth of the origin of death, 65 _sq._ Masked men, dramatic representation of ghosts and spirits by, 176, 179 _sq._, 180 _sqq._, 185 _sqq._ ---- dances, 297; of the Monumbo, 228 Masks worn by actors in sacred ceremonies, 179; used in dances, 233, 297 Masquerades, 297 Massim, the, of British New Guinea, 206 Master of Life, 163 Matacos Indians, 165 Mate, a worshipful spirit, 239 Material culture of the natives of New Guinea, 191; of the natives of Tumleo, 219 _sq._; of Papuans, 231; of the Yabim, 242 _sq._; of the Noofoor, 304 _sq._; of the New Caledonians, 339; of the North Melanesians, 393 _sqq._ Mawatta or Mowat, 47 _Mbete_, priest, 443, 445 Mea, a spiritual medium, 196 Mecklenburg, burial custom in, 457 Medicine-men, their importance in history, 16; inspired by spirits of the dead, 322 Medium inspired by soul of dead, 308 _sq._ Mediums, spiritual, 196 Mediums who send their souls to deadland, 300 Megalithic monuments, 438 Melanesia, Central, belief in immortality among the natives of, 343 _sqq._ ----, Northern, belief in immortality among the natives of, 393 _sqq._ ----, Southern, belief in immortality among the natives of, 324 _sqq._ Melanesian myths of the origin of death, 69, 71 _sq._, 83 _sq._; theory of the soul, 344 _sq._ Melanesians, their ideas as to natural deaths, 48, 54 _sq._; Central, funeral customs of the, 347 _sqq._, 355 _sqq._; and Papuans in New Guinea, 190 _sq._ Memorial trees, 225 Men sacrificed to support posts of new house, 446 _sq._; whipped by women in mourning, 452 Men's clubhouses, 221, 225, 226, 243, 256 _sq._, 355 Mentras or Mantras of the Malay Peninsula, 73 Merivale on Dartmoor, 438 Messengers, the Two, myth of origin of death, 60 _sqq._ Messou, Indian magician, 78 Metals unknown in Northern Melanesia, 395 Metempsychosis, widespread belief in, 29 Methods of treating natural theology, 1 _sqq._ ---- of natural knowledge, 11 Mexicans, the ancient, 163 Meyer, H. E. A., 42 Migration of villages, 339 Migratory cultivation, 243 Miklucho-Maclay, Baron N., 235 Milky Way, Central Australian belief as to the, 140; souls of dead go to, 153 Milne Bay, 207 Mimika district in Dutch New Guinea, 318 Minnetaree Indians, 163 Misfortunes of all kinds caused by ghosts, 306 _sq._ Moanus, the, of the Admiralty Islands, 400 Monarchical government, rise of, 141 _sq._ Monsoon, south-east, festival at, 255 Monsoons, seasons determined by, 216 Monster supposed to swallow lads at initiation, 251 _sq._, 255, 260, 261, 290 _sq._, 301 _sq._ Monumbo, the, of German New Guinea, 227 _sq._ Monuments of the dead, 225 Moon, the waxing and waning, in myths of the origin of death, 60, 65 _sqq._ ---- in relation to doctrine of resurrection, 67 _sq._; worship of the, 68 Moral restraint afforded by a fear of ghosts, 175 ---- depravity of the Fijians, 409 Morality, superstition a crutch to, 175 Mortuary dramas, 189 _Mos_, a disembodied soul, 224 Mota, island of, 387 Motlav, in the Banks' Islands, 357 Motu, the, of British New Guinea, 192 Mound erected in a totemic ceremony, 110 _sq._ Mounds on graves, 150, 164 Mourners, professional, 136 ---- smeared with white clay, 158, 177; painted black, 178, 293, 403; garb of, 184, 198; cut their hair, 183, 204, 320, 451; abstain from certain foods, 198, 208, 209, 230, 314, 360, 452; restrictions observed by, 313 _sq._; tattooed, 314; purified by bathing, 314, 319; plastered with mud, 318; cut or tear their ears, 183, 272, 327; secluded, 360; smeared with ashes, 361; anoint themselves with juices of putrefying corpse, 403; amputate their fingers, 199, 451; burn their skin, 154, 155, 157, 327, 451. _See also_ Cuttings _and_ Seclusion Mourning, hair cut in, 135; extravagant demonstrations of grief in, 135 _sq._; for a father-in-law, 155; amputation of fingers in, 199; varying period of, 274, 293; for a king, 451 _sq._ ---- costume, 249, 274, 320; a protection against ghosts, 241 _sq._; of widower and widow, 259 _sq._ Mowat or Mawatta, 47 Mud, mourners plastered with, 318 Mukden, burial custom in, 460 Mukjarawaint tribe, 155 Mummies of dead preserved in houses, 188 Mummification of the dead, 184, 185, 313 _Mungai_, places associated with totems, 117, 124 Murder, leaves thrown on scene of, 415 ---- highly esteemed in Fiji, 447 _sq._ Murdered man, ghost of, haunts murderer, 248 Murimuria, a second-rate heaven, 466 Murray Island, 174 Mutilations, bodily, at puberty, 303 Myth of the prelogical savage, 266 ---- of the continuance of death, 472 Myths of the origin of death, 59 _sqq._ _Nai_, souls of the dead, 240 Nai Thombothombo, in Fiji, 463 Nails of dead detached, 145; preserved, 339 Naindelinde in Fiji, 465 Naiteru-kop, a Masai god, 65 Namaquas, their myth of the origin of death, 65 Nambanaggatai, in Fiji, 465 Nambi and the origin of death, 78 _sqq._ Name of mythical water-snake not uttered, 105 Names of the dead not mentioned, 135, 210, 246 Nandi, their myth of the origin of death, 66 _Nanga_, sacred stone enclosure, 428 _sqq._; description of, 437 _sq._ Nangganangga, the foe of unmarried ghosts, 464 _Nanja_ tree or stone, 98 ---- spot, 164, 165 Narrinyeri tribe of South Australia, 43; their beliefs as to the dead, 134 _sqq._ Nassau, Rev. R. H., 51 Native beliefs influenced by European teaching, 142 _sq._ Natural theology defined, 1, 8 ---- death, disbelief of savages in, 33 _sqq._ ---- causes of death recognised by some savages, 55 _sq._ ---- features of landscape associated with traditions about the dead, 115 _sqq._ Nature, gods of, 20; souls of the dead identified with spirits of, 130; two different views of human, 469 _sqq._ Nayars, the, of Cochin, 162 _sq._ Ndengei, Fijian god in form of serpent, 445, 462, 464, 465, 466 Necklaces worn in mourning, 198 Negen Negorijen in Dutch New Guinea, 316, 317 Negrito admixture in New Guinea, 198 Nemunemu, a creator, 240 Nether world, the lord of the, 286; abode of the dead in the, 292, 299, 322, 326, 353 _sq._; descent of the living into the, 300; _See also_ Land of the Dead Nets worn by widows in mourning, 249, 260, 274, 293; worn by women in mourning, 241 New birth at initiation, pretence of, 254 New Britain (New Pomerania), 48, 69, 393, 394, 402, 404 ---- Caledonia, natives of, 324; their beliefs and customs concerning the dead, 325 _sqq._; their system of family prayers, 332 _sq._, 340; material culture of the, 339 ---- Georgia, 48 ---- Guinea, aborigines of, their ideas as to natural death, 47; the races of, 190 _sq._; belief in immortality among the natives of British, 190 _sqq._; belief in immortality among the natives of Dutch, 303 _sqq._; belief in immortality among the natives of German, 216 _sqq._ New Hebrides, myth of the origin of death in, 71, 343, 353 ---- Ireland (New Mecklenburg), 393, 397 ---- South Wales, aborigines of, their ideas as to the causes of death, 45 _sq._; as to the home of the dead, 133 _sq._ Newton, Alfred, 90 _n._ 1 Neyaux, the, of the Ivory Coast, 52 _Ngai_, human spirit, 129 Ngoc, the, of Annam, 69 Ngoni, the, 61 Nias, island of, 70 Nigeria, Northern, 28 _n._ 1, 49 Niggardly people punished in the other world, 405 Noblemen alone immortal, 33 Noofoor, the, of Dutch New Guinea, 303 Noomfor, island, 303 Norse burial custom, 453 Noses bored, ghosts should have their, 192, 194 _sq._ Novices presented to ancestral spirits at initiation, 432 _sq._, 434 Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas Islands, 417 Objects offered to the dead broken, 276 Offering, soul of, consumed by deity or spirit, 297, 298 Offerings of food and water to the dead, 174; of food to the dead, 183, 201, 208, 211, 214, 232, 241, 332, 338, 364 _sq._, 367 _sq._, 372 _sq._, 396 _sq._, 429, 442, 467; of blood and hair to the dead, 183; of game and fish to the dead, 226; to the dead, 239, 276, 292; of first-fruits to the dead, 259; to ancestors, 298; of food to ghosts, 348 _sq._; to ghosts, 364 _sq._; of first-fruits to ancestral spirits, 429; of cloth and weapons to ancestral spirits, 430 _sq._ _See also_ Sacrifices ----, burnt, to the dead, 294 _Oknanikilla_, local totem centre, 97, 99, 124 Old and young, difference between the modes of burying, 161, 162 _sq._ Old people buried alive, 359 Olympia, Pelops at, 159 Omens after a death, 319 Opening, special, for carrying dead out of house, 452 _sqq._ Oracles of dead kings, 151 ---- of the dead, 151, 176, 179, 235 Oracular responses of Fijian priests, 443 _sqq._ Oranges, spirits of the dead play with, 326 Ordeal to detect sorcerer, 50 _sqq._ Orgy, licentious, following circumcision, 427 _sq._ Origin of belief in immortality, 26 _sqq._ ---- of death, myths of the, 59 _sqq._ Orion's belt, 368 Ornaments of corpse removed before burial, 223, 234, 241 Pahouins, the, 54 Palsy, a Samoan god, 72 Pandanus, reason for planting, 362 ---- and ghosts, 463 Panoi, Melanesian land of the dead, 83, 345, 353 _sq._, 355, 356 Papuan art, 220 Papuans, animistic views of the, 264 ---- and Melanesians in New Guinea, 190 _sq._ _Paraks_, temples, 220 Parents deified, 439 Parkinson, R., 219, 221 Pelops, human blood offered on grave of, 159 Penates in New Guinea, 308, 317 Pennefather River, natives of the, their belief in reincarnation of the dead, 128 Perche, burial custom in, 458 Personal refuse, magic working through, 386, 413 _sq._ Personification of natural phenomena, 20; of death, 81 Phosphorescent lights supposed to be ghosts, 198, 258 _Physostigma venenosum_ in poison ordeal, 52 Piety, two types of, 23; co-operative system of, 333 Pigs, blood of, smeared on skulls and bones of the dead, 200; sacrificed to the dead, 201; sacrificed to monster who swallows lads at initiation, 251, 253, 260, 290, 301; sacrificed at grave, 356; sacrificed at burial, 359; sacrificed to ghosts, 365 _sq._; sacrificed vicariously for the sick, 373, 374, 375; sacred, 433 ----, livers of, offered to the dead, 360 _sq._ Pines, Isle of, 325, 330, 337 Pirnmeheel, good spirit, 143 Place of sacrifice to ghosts, 370 Planting, sacrifices to ghosts at, 375 Platforms, dead laid on, 199, 203, 205 Plato, on death, 33 Pleiades, the, 368 Plum-tree people, 94 ---- totem, dramatic ceremony connected with, 120, 121 Poison ordeal to detect sorcerers, 50 _sqq._ Political constitution of the Fijians, 407 Pollution, ceremonial, of gravediggers, 327 Polynesian blood, infusion of, in New Guinea, 291 ---- race, 406 Polytheism and monotheism, 11 Polytheism discarded, 20 _sq._ Population, belief in sorcery a cause of keeping down the, 38, 40, 46 _sq._, 51 _sqq._ Port Lincoln tribe of S. Australia, 42 ---- Moresby, 193, 195 Poso in Celebes, 72 Posts of new house, men sacrificed to support, 446 _sq._ Potsdam Harbour, in German New Guinea, 218, 227 Pottery, native, 220; in New Guinea, 305 ----, Fijian, 407 ---- unknown in Northern Melanesia, 395 Practical character of the savage, 274 Prayer-posts, 333 _sq._ Prayers to the dead, 201 _sq._, 214, 222 _sq._, 259, 288, 307, 329 _sq._, 332 _sqq._, 340, 376 _sq._, 401, 403 _sq._, 427, 441; to ghosts, 348 Precautions taken against ghosts, 152 _sq._, 258; against a wife's ghost, 197; against ghosts of the slain, 205 _sq._ Predominance of the worship of the dead, 297 _sq._ Prelogical savage, myth of the, 266 Pretence of attacking persons engaged in attending to a corpse, 177, 178 ---- of avenging the dead, 136 _sq._, 282, 328 _See also_ Sham fight Priest, family, 332, 340 ----, chief or high, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434 ---- or magician, 336, 338 Priests, Fijian, 433 _sqq._ Private or tame ghosts, 369 _sq._, 381, 382, 386 ---- property, rights of, consolidated by taboo, 390 Problem of death, 31 _sqq._ Progress partly determined by competition, 89 _sq._ ----, social, stimulated by favourable natural conditions, 148 _sq._ Promiscuity, temporary, 427 _sq._, 433, 434 _n._ 1, 436 _sq._ Property displayed beside the corpse, 397 ----, rights of private, consolidated by taboo, 390; temporarily suspended, 427 _sq._ Property of dead deposited in grave, 145 _sqq._, 359, 397; motive for destroying, 147 _sq._; hung up on trees, 148; destroyed, 327, 459; burnt, 401 _sq._ Prophecy inspired by ghosts, 388 Prophets inspired by ghosts, 388 _sq._ ----, Hebrew, 14 Propitiation of the dead, 201, 307, 338; of ghosts and spirits, 226, 239, 348 Puberty, initiation at, 254 _sq._; bodily mutilations at, 303 Public ghosts, 367, 369 Purification of homicides, 206, 229 ---- by bathing and shaving, 208 ---- of mourners by bathing, 314, 319 Queensland, belief in reincarnation of the dead among the aborigines of, 127 _sqq._; burial customs in, 147 Rain sent by a mythical water-snake, 112, 114; prayers for, 288; stones to make, 336 _sq._ ---- and sunshine caused by a ghost, 375 ---- -ghost, 375 ---- -making, 288; by the bones of the dead, 341 Rat in myth of the origin of death, 67 Rationality of the savage, 264 _sqq._ Rebirth of the dead, 93 _sq._, 107, 127 _sq._ _See also_ Reincarnation ---- of parents in their children, 315 Recovery of lost souls, 194, 270 _sq._, 300 _sq._ Red, skulls painted, 178 Red bark in poison ordeals, 50, 52 ---- paint, manslayers smeared with, 448, 449 ---- roses, corpse crowned with, 233, 234 Reflection or shadow, soul associated with, 207, 267 Refuse, personal, magic working by means of, 413 _sq._ Reincarnation, widespread belief in, 29. _See also_ Rebirth ---- doctrine of, unknown in Torres Straits, 172 ---- of the dead, belief of Central Australians in, 92 _sqq._, 107 ---- of the dead, 124 _sq._, 127 _sq._; of Australian aborigines in white people, 130, 131 _sqq._; of parents in their children, 315; of grandfather in grandchild, 417, 418 Relics of the dead as amulets, 332, 370; preserved, 348 Religion, importance of the history of, 3; embryology of, 88 Religion and magic compared in reference to their destruction of human life, 57 _sq._; combined in ritual, 111 _sq._, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 376 ---- and theology, how related, 9 Resemblance of children to the dead, a source of belief in the transmigration of souls, 28 _sq._ Restrictions observed by mourners, 313 _sq._; ceremonial, laid on gravediggers, 327; imposed on manslayers, 449 Resurrection, ceremony of, among the Akikuya, 254 ---- from the dead after three days, 67 _sq._; of the dead, steps taken to prevent the, 144; as an initiatory rite at puberty, 254 _sq._, 261, 302, 431, 434 _sq._ Return of the ghosts, 195, 198, 246, 300 Revelation, the question of a supernatural, 8 _sq._ Revival, temporary, of primitive communism, 436 _sq._ Rheumatism attributed to sorcery, 45 Rhodesia, 77 Ribs of dead distributed among relatives, 400 Ridgeway, W., on the origin of Greek tragedy, 189 Rights of property temporarily suspended, 427 _sq._ Ritual combining elements of religion and magic, 111 _sq._ Rivalry between man and animals for gift of immortality, 74 _sq._ River crossed by souls of the dead, 299, 462 Rocking stone, 213 Roro-speaking tribes of British New Guinea, 47, 196, 198 Roth, W. E., 128 Run or Ron, island, 303, 311 Russia, burial custom in, 453 Saa, in Malanta, 350, 351, 372, 378 Sacrament of pork and water at initiation, 432 _sq._ Sacred stones in New Caledonia, magical virtues attributed to, 334 _sqq._ ---- enclosure of stones (_Nanga_) in Fiji, 428 _sqq._, 437 _sq._ ---- pigs, 433 Sacrifice, crude motives for, 298 _sq._; place of, 332 ---- of dogs in epidemics, 296; of foreskins and fingers in honour of the dead, 426 _sq._ Sacrifices to the dead, economic loss entailed by, 149 ---- to the dead, 239, 307, 338. _See also_ Offerings Sacrifices, burnt, reasons for, 348 _sq._; burnt, to ghosts, 366, 367 _sq._, 373 ---- to ghosts, 328; at planting, 375 ----, human, to ghosts, 371 _sq._; human, in Fiji, 446 _sq._ Sacrificial ritual in the Solomon Islands, 365 _sq._ Saddle Mountain in German New Guinea, 262 St. Joseph River in New Guinea, 196, 198 Sakalava, the, of Madagascar, 49; burial custom of, 461 Saleijer, island of, burial custom in, 461 Samoa, 406 ---- Harbour, in German New Guinea, 256 Samoan myth of the origin of death, 72 Samoyeds, burial custom of the, 457 Samu-yalo, the killer of souls, 465 San Cristoval, one of the Solomon Islands, 347, 376 Sanctuaries, primitive, 99 ---- of ghosts, 377 _sq._ Sanctuary, grave of worshipful dead becomes a, 347 Sanitation based on fear of sorcery, 386 _sq._, 414 Santa Cruz Islands, 343 Santa Cruz, in the Solomon Islands, burial customs at, 352; sacrifices to ghosts in, 374 _sq._ Savage, myth of the prelogical, 266 ----, practical character of the, 274 ----, rationality of the, 264 _sqq._ ---- notions of causality, 19 _sq._; conception of death, 31 _sqq._; disbelief in death from natural causes, 33 _sqq._; thought vague and inconsistent, 143 ---- religion, the study of, 7 Savagery, importance of the study of, 6 _sq._; a case of arrested or retarded development, 88 _sq._; rise of monarchy essential to emergence from, 142 Savages pay little attention to the stars, 140; strength and universality of belief in immortality among, 468 Savo, one of the Solomon Islands, 347 Scarf, soul caught in a, 412 _sq._ Scenery of Fiji, 409 _sq._ Schomburgk, Richard, 38 Schürmann, C. W., 42 _sq._ Scientific conception of the world as a system of impersonal forces, 20 _sq._ Scotland, burial custom in, 453, 458 Sea, land of the dead at the bottom of the, 307, 326 ---- -burial, 397 ---- -burial and land-burial, 347 _sq._ ---- -ghosts and land-ghosts, 348 Seclusion of widow and widower, 204, 248 _sq._, 259, 275; of relatives at grave, 209; of mourners, 223 _sq._, 313 _sq._, 360; of novices at circumcision, 251 _sq._, 260 _sq._, 302; of manslayers, 279 _sq._; of gravediggers, 327, 451; of female mourners, 398 Seclusion and purification of manslayer, 229 _sq._ Second death of the dead, 195, 287, 299, 345, 350, 351, 354 Secret societies, 395 ---- Society (_Asa_), 233 Seemann, Berthold, 439 _sq._ Seer describes ghosts, 204 _sq._ Seget Sélé, the, of Dutch New Guinea, 317 Seligmann, Dr. C. G., 47, 191, 197, 206 Selwyn, Bishop, 363 Serpent and his cast skin in myths of the origin of death, 60, 69 _sqq._, 74 _sq._, 83 ----, god in form of, 445, 462 Serpents, souls of the dead in the form of, 300 Setting sun, ghosts attracted to the, 175 _sq._ Sexual licence following initiation, 433, 434 _n._ 1, 436 _sq._ Shadow or reflection, human soul associated with, 129, 130, 173, 207, 267, 395, 412 Shadows of people seized by ghosts, 378, 383 Shaking of medium a symptom of inspiration, 308, 309, 311 Sham attack on men engaged in attending to a corpse, 177, 178 ---- burial, 356 ---- fight to appease ghost, 136 _sq._; as a funeral ceremony, 235 _sq._, 327 _sq._; as a ceremony to promote the growth of yams, 330. _See also_ Pretence Sharks animated by ghosts, 348 ----, ghosts incarnate in, 373, 380; images of, 373 Shaving heads of mourners, 208 Sheep in story of the origin of death, 64 Shell-money, 394; laid on corpse and buried with it, 398 Shortlands Islands, 71 Shrine of warrior ghost, 365 Shrines for ancestral spirits, 316, 317 Siamese, burial custom of the, 456 Siasi Islands, 244 Sick and old buried alive in Fiji, 420 _sqq._ Sickness caused by demons, 194; caused by ghosts, 56 _sq._, 195, 197, 222, 269 _sq._, 271, 279, 300, 305, 322, 372, 381 _sqq._, 389 ---- supposed to be an effect of witchcraft, 35 _sqq._ Sickness and death set down to sorcery, 240, 257 ---- and disease recognised by some savages as due to natural causes, 55 _sq._ _See also_ Disease Sido, his journey to the land of the dead, 211 _sq._ Sins, confession of, 201 Skin cast as a means of renewing youth, 69 _sqq._, 74 _sq._, 83 Skull-shaped stones in rain-making, 336 _sq._ Skulls, spirits of the dead embodied in their, 338 ---- and arm-bones, special treatment of the, 199 _sq._; carried by dancers at funeral dance, 200 ---- of the dead preserved, 199 _sqq._, 209, 249, 318, 328, 339, 347, 351 _sq._, 398, 400 _sq._, 403; preserved and consulted as oracles, 176, 178 _sq._, 179; used in divination, 213; kept in men's clubhouses, 221, 225; inserted in wooden images, 311 _sq._, 321; religious ceremonies performed with the, 329 _sq._; food offered to the, 339 _sq._, 352; used to fertilise plantations, 340; used in conjurations, 402 Sky, souls of the dead thought to be in the, 133 _sq._, 135, 138 _sq._, 141, 142 Slain, ghosts of the, especially dreaded, 205, 258, 279, 306, 323 Sleep, soul thought to quit body in, 257, 291, 395, 412 Smith, E. R., 53 Smyth, R. Brough, 43 _sq._ Snakes, ghosts in, 380 Sneezing, omens from, 194 Social progress stimulated by favourable natural conditions, 141 _sq._, 148 _sq._ ---- ranks, gradation of, in Fiji, 408 Solomon Islands, 343, 346 _sqq._; sacrificial ritual in the, 365 _sq._ Somosomo, one of the Fijian islands, 425, 441, 442 Sorcerers, their importance in history, 16 ---- catch and detain souls, 267, 268 _sq._, 270 ---- put to death, 35, 35 _sq._, 37 _sq._, 40 _sq._, 44, 50, 136, 250, 269, 277, 278 _sq._, 341 _sq._ _See also_ Magician Sorcery as the supposed cause of natural deaths, 33 _sqq._, 136, 268, 270, 402; sickness and death ascribed to, 257 ---- a cause of keeping down the population, belief in, 38, 40, 46 _sq._, 51 _sqq._ ---- Fijian dread of, 413 _sq._; _See also_ Magic _and_ Witchcraft Sores ascribed to action of ghosts, 257 _Soro_, atonement, 427 Soul, world-wide belief in survival of soul after death, 24, 25, 33 Soul of sleeper detained by enemy, 49; human, associated with shadow or reflection, 173, 267, 395, 412; pretence of carrying away the, 181 _sq._; detained by demon, 194; recovery of a lost, 194, 270 _sq._; thought to quit body in sleep, 257, 291, 395, 412; resides in the eye, 267; thought to pervade the body, 267; two kinds of human, 267 _sq._; caught and detained by sorcerer, 267, 268 _sq._, 270; long soul and short soul, 291 _sq._; of offering consumed by deity or spirit, 297, 298; thought to reside in the blood, 307; Melanesian theory of the, 344 _sq._; of sick tied up by ghost, 374; North Melanesian theory of the, 395 _sq._; in form of animals, 396; Fijian theory of the, 410 _sqq._; caught in a scarf, 412 _sq._; of grandfather reborn in grandchild, 417; of offerings consumed by gods, 443 ---- -stuff or spiritual essence, 267 _sq._, 270, 271, 279. _See also_ Spirit Souls, recovery of lost, 300 _sq._; River of the, 462; the killer of, 464 _sq._ ---- of animals, sacrifices to the, 239; of animals offered to ghosts, 246 ---- attributed by the Fijians to animals, vegetables, and inanimate things, 410 _sq._ ---- of the dead identified with spirits of nature, 130; turned into animals, 229; as falling stars, 229; live in trees, 316 ---- carried off by ghosts, 197, 383; of sorcerers in animals, 39 ---- of noblemen only saved, 33; of those who died from home called back, 311 Spells or incantations, 385 Spencer and Gillen, 46 _sq._, 91 _sq._, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 116 _sqq._, 123 _sq._, 140, 148, 156, 157, 158 Spider and Death, 82 _sq._ Spirit, human, associated with the heart, 129; associated with the shadow, 129, 130. _See also_ Soul Spirits, ancestral, help hunters and fishers, 226; worshipped in the _Nanga_, 428 _sq._; cloth and weapons offered to, 430 _sq._; novices presented to, at initiation, 432 _sq._, 434 ---- of animals go to the spirit land, 210 ---- consume spiritual essence of sacrifices, 285, 287, 297, 298 ---- of the dead thought to be strengthened by blood, 159; reborn in women, 93 _sq._; give information to the living, 240; give good crops, 247 _sq._; thought to be mischievous, 257 Spirits and ghosts, distinction between, in Central Melanesia, 343, 363 ---- and gods, no certain demarcation between, 441 ----, grand concert of, 340 _sq._; represented by masked dancers, 297; in tree-tops, 313 ----, guardian, 227 ---- of nature identified with souls of the dead, 130. _See also_ Dead _and_ Ghost Spiritual essence or soul-stuff, 267 _sq._, 279. _See also_ Soul-stuff Squatting posture of corpse in burial, 207 Stanbridge, W. E., 44 Stars associated with the souls of the dead, 134, 140; little regarded by savages, 140; falling, the souls of the dead, 229 Steinen, K. von den, 35 Sternberg, L., 15 _n._ 1 Stick, cleft, used in cure, 271 Stillborn children, burial of, 458 Stocks, wooden, as representatives of the dead, 374, 386 Stolz, Mr., 238, 239 Stomach, soul seated in, 291 _sq._ Stone, a rocking, 213 ---- used in rain-making, 288 ---- of Famine, 334 ---- of the Sun, 336 Stonehenge, 438 Stones, sacred, in New Caledonia, magical virtues attributed to, 334 _sqq._; sacred, in sanctuaries, 377 _sq._ ---- used as altars, 379 Stones inhabited by ghosts, 383 _sq._ Store-houses, sacred, in Central Australia, 99, 101 Strangling the sick and aged in Fiji, 423 _sq._ _Sua_, human spirit or ghost, 193 Suicide to escape decrepitude of old age, 422 _sq._ Suicides, burial of, 164, 453, 458 Sulka, the, of New Britain, 398 _sq._ Sumatra, the Gajos of, 455 Sun and the origin of death, 77 ----, ghosts attracted to the setting, 175 _sq._ ----, Stone of the, 336 Sunshine, the making of, 336 ---- and rain caused by a ghost, 375 Supernatural or spiritual power (_mana_) acquired from ghosts, 346 _sq._, 352, 371, 380 Superstition a crutch to morality, 175 Supreme Being unknown among aborigines of Central Australia, 91 _sq._; among the Monumbo, 228 Survival of human soul after death, world-wide belief in, 24, 25, 33 Swallowed by monster, pretence that candidates at initiation are, 251 _sqq._, 260 _sq._, 290 _sq._, 301 _sq._ Swine sent to ravage fields by ghosts, 278 Symbolism of prayer-posts, 333 _sq._ Taboo, meaning of, 390; in Central Melanesia based on a fear of ghosts, 390 _sq._; a prop of monarchical power, 408 _Tabu_, demon, 194 Tago, spirits, 297 Tahiti, 439 Tamanachiers, an Indian tribe, 70 _sq._ Tami Islanders of German New Guinea, 291 _sqq._ Taming a ghost, 370 Tamos, the, of German New Guinea, 230 Tanna, one of the New Hebrides, 369, 439 Tanoa, king of Fiji, 425 Taplin, Rev. George, 43, 134 _sqq._ _Tapum_, guardian spirits, 227 Taro, prayer for good crop of, 289 Tasmanians, the, 89 Tattooing as sign of mourning, 314 Teeth of dead worn by relatives, 314 _sq._, 400, 404; used as amulets, 332; preserved as relics, 339; used to fertilise plantations, 340 Temples (_paraks_) in Tumleo, 220 _sq._ ----, Fijian, 439, 441 _sq._ Terer, a mythical being, 181 Thapauerlu, a pool, 105, 108 Theology, natural, defined, 1, 8 ---- and religion, how related, 9 Thomson, Basil, 408, 414, 428 _n._ 1, 429 _n._ 1, 434 _n._ 1, 436 Threats of the dying, 273 Three days, resurrection after, 67 _sq._ Threshold, the dead carried out under the, 453, 457; movable, 457 Thrush in story of the origin of death, 61 _sq._ Thunder the voice of a mythical being, 112, 114, 143 _Tindalo_, a powerful ghost, 346 Tinneh or Déné Indians, their ideas as to death, 39 _sq._ Tlaloc, Mexican rain-god, 163 Tlingit Indians, 163; burial custom of the, 455 To Kambinana, 69 To Korvuvu, 69 Togoland, West Africa, 81 Toll exacted from ghosts, 224 Tollkeeper, ghostly, 224 Tonga, 406, 411 Tongans, their limited doctrine of immortality, 33 Torres Islands, 343, 353 ---- Straits Islanders, their ideas as to sickness and death, 47; their belief in immortality, 170 _sqq._; their ethnological affinity and social culture, 170 _sqq._; funeral ceremonies of the, 176 _sqq._ Totem, a dominant, 113; design emblematic of, 168 Totemic ancestor developing into a god, 113; ancestors, traditions concerning, 115 _sqq._ ---- animals, imitation of, 177 ---- clans, 104; animals and plants eaten, 120 _sq._; animals and plants dramatically represented by actors, 121 _sq._ Totemism, 95; possibly developing into ancestor worship, 114 _sq._; in Torres Straits, 172 Totems, dramatic ceremonies connected with, 119 _sqq._; eaten, 120 _sqq._; magical ceremonies for the multiplication of, 124 _sq._ Tracking a ghost, 277 _sq._ Traditions of the dead associated with conspicuous features of the landscape, 115 _sqq._ Transmigration, widespread belief in, 29; of dead into animals, 242, 245; of souls, 322; Fijian doctrine of, 467 Travancore, burial custom in, 456 Tree of immortality, 74 Tree-burial, 161, 166, 167, 199, 203; of young children, 312 _sq._ ---- -tops, spirits in, 313 Trees, property of dead hung up on, 148; as monuments of the dead, 225; huts built in, 263; souls of the dead live in, 316 Tremearne, Major A. J. N., 28 _n._ 1 Truth of the belief in immortality, question of the, 469 _sqq._ Tsiabiloum, the land of the dead, 326 Tube inserted in grave, 277 Tubes, magical, 269, 270 Tubetube, island of, 206, 209, 210 Tugeri or Kaya-Kaya, the, of Dutch New Guinea, 255 Tully River in Queensland, 130 Tulmeng, lord of the nether world, 286 Tumleo, island of, 218 _sqq._ Tumudurere, a mythical being, 207 Tumupasa, burial custom of the Indians of, 457 Turner, Dr. George, 325, 339, 369 Turrbal tribe, 146 Tuski of Alaska, burial custom of the, 456 Two Messengers, the, myth of the origin of death, 60 _sqq._ Uganda, first man in, 78; dead kings of, worshipped, 151; jawbones of dead kings of, preserved, 235; war-god of, 366. _See also_ Baganda Unburied dead, ghosts of the, 349 Unfruitful wife, mode of impregnating, 417 Unkulunkulu, 60 Unmarried ghosts, hard fate of, 464 Umatjera tribe, 68, 166 Urabunna, the, of Central Australia, 95 Vagueness and inconsistency of savage thought, 143 _Vale tambu_, the Sacred House, 438 Vanigela River, 202, 203 Vanua Lava, mountain, 355 ---- -levu, one of the Fijian Islands, 416, 417, 418, 426 Vaté or Efat, one of the New Hebrides, 359, 376 Vengeance taken on enemies by means of a ghost, 258; ghost calls for, 278, 310, 468 Vetter, Konrad, 242, 244, 245, 248, 255 Vicarious sacrifices of pigs for the sick, 372, 374, 375 Victoria, aborigines of, their ideas as to natural death, 40 _sq._, 42; their beliefs as to the dead, 142; their burial customs, 145, 145 _sq._; cuttings for the dead among the, 154 _sq._ Views of human nature, two different, 469 _sqq._ Village of ghosts, 231 _sq._, 234 ---- deserted after a death, 275 Viti Levu, one of the Fijian Islands, 419, 428, 435, 445 Vormann, Franz, 228 _sq._ Vuatom, island, 70 Wagawaga, in British New Guinea, 206 _sqq._ Wainimala in Fiji, 436 Wakelbura, the, 152 Wallace, Alfred Russel, on death, 85 _sq._ War, ancestral images taken to, 310, 315; perpetual state of, 339 ---- -god of Uganda, 366 Warramunga, the, of Central Australia, 94; their totem the Wollunqua, 103 _sqq._, 108 _sqq._; dramatic ceremonies connected with totems among the, 123 _sq._; cuttings for the dead among the, 156 _sqq._; burial customs of the, 167 _sq._ Warrior ghost, 363 _sq._ Warriors pray to ghosts, 288 Wars among savages undertaken to appease angry ghosts, 468 Wa-Sania, tribe of E. Africa, 66 Washing body a rain-charm, 375 Watch-an-die, tribe of W. Australia, 41 Watch at the grave, 293 ---- of widow or widower on grave, 241 Water as a barrier against ghosts, 152; poured as a rain-charm, 375 _sq._ ---- great, to be crossed by ghosts, 224 ---- -snake, great mythical (Wollunqua), 104 _sqq._, 108 _sqq._ Way to the land of the dead, 212 _sq._ Weakening of religious faith, 4 Weapons deposited with the dead, 145 _sqq._; deposited at grave, 211; of dead broken, 399 Weather regulated by ghosts and spirits, 384 _sq._ ---- -doctors, 385 _sq._ Weaving in New Guinea, 305 Weismann, August, on death, 84 _sq._ Wemba, the, of Northern Rhodesia, 77 Western Australia, beliefs as to death among the natives of, 41 _sq._ Whale's teeth as offerings, 420, 421, 429, 443, 444 Whip of souls, 270 Whipping men in mourning, 452 White ants' nests, ghosts turn into, 351 ---- clay smeared on mourners, 158, 177 ---- men identified with the spirits of the dead, 342 ---- people, souls of dead Australian aborigines thought to be reborn in, 130, 131 _sqq._ Whitened with chalk, bodies of lads after circumcision, 302 Widow, mourning costume of, 184, 204; seclusion of, 204; killed to accompany the ghost of her husband, 249, 275; drinks juices of putrefying corpse, 313 Widower exposed to attacks of his wife's ghost, 197; costume of, 204; seclusion of, 204, 248 _sq._, 259 Widows cut and burn their bodies in mourning, 176 Wigs worn by Fijians, 451 Wiimbaio tribe, 145 Wilkes, Charles, 424 _sq._ Williams, Thomas, 408, 412, 413, 452, 467 Williamson, R. W., 201 Wind, ghosts float down the, 176 Windessi, in Dutch New Guinea, burial customs at, 318 _sq._ _Wingara_, early mythical times, 116 Witchcraft, fear of, 244; death ascribed to, 277, 402; Fijian terror of, 413 _sq._; benefits derived from, 414 Witchcraft or black magic in Central Melanesia, 386 _sq._ ---- as a cause of death, 34 _sqq._ _See also_ Sorcery Witchetty grub totem, dramatic ceremonies concerned with, 121 _sq._, 123 Wives of the dead killed, 399; strangled or buried alive at their husbands' funerals in Fiji, 424 _sq._ Woibu, the land of the dead, 211 Wolgal tribe, 146 Wollunqua, mythical water-snake, totem of the Warramunga, 103 _sqq._, 108 _sqq._, 125; ceremonies in honour of the, 108 _sqq._ Woman, old, in myths of the origin of death, 64, 71 _sq._ ----, the Great, 464 Women thought not to have immortal spirits, 92; cut and burn their bodies in mourning, 154 _sqq._, 196, 203; excluded from circumcision ground, 291, 301; dance at deaths, 293; drink juices of putrefying corpse, 355; not allowed to be present at sacrifices, 367; whip men in mourning, 452; burial of childless, 458; the cause of death, 472 ---- dying in childbed, special treatment of their ghosts, 358; their ghosts specially feared, 212, 458 _sqq._ Wordsworth on immortality, 26 _n._ 1 Worship of ancestors, 221, 328 _sqq._, 338; predominance of the, 297 _sq._; possibly evolved from totemism, 114 _sq._ _See also_ Worship of the dead. ---- of ancestors in Central Australia, possible evolution of, 125 _sq._; of ancestral spirits in the _Nanga_, 428 _sq._ ---- of the dead, 23 _sqq._, 328 _sqq._, 338; in part based on a theory of dreams, 27 _sq._; elements of it widespread, 31; in British New Guinea, 201 _sq._; predominance of the, 297 _sq._ ---- of the dead, incipient, in Australia, 149, 150, 168 _sq._ ---- of the dead in Torres Straits, elements of a, 189; among the Yabim, elements of a, 255 Worshipful ghosts, 362 _sq._ Wotjobaluk, the, 67, 139 Wraiths, 396 Wurunjerri, the, 146 Yabim, the, of German New Guinea, 242 _sqq._; their ideas as to death, 47 Yams, prayers for, 330; stones to make yams grow, 337 _sq._ Young children buried on trees, 312 _sq._ Young and old, difference between the modes of burying, 161, 162 _sq._ Youth supposed to be renewed by casting skin, 69 _sqq._, 74 _sq._, 83 Ysabel, one of the Solomon Islands, 350, 372, 379, 380 Yule Island, 196 _n._ 2, 197 Zahn, Heinrich, 242, 244 Zend-Avesta, 453 Zulus, their story of the origin of death, 60 _sq._ END OF VOL. I * * * * * Works by J. G. FRAZER, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D. THE GOLDEN BOUGH A STUDY IN MAGIC AND RELIGION Third Edition, revised and enlarged. 8vo. Part I. The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings. Two volumes, 20s. net. II. Taboo and the Perils of the Soul. One volume. 10s. net. III. The Dying God. One volume. Second Impression. 10s. net. IV. Adonis, Attis, Osiris. One volume. Second Edition. 10s. net. V. Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild. Two volumes. 20s. net. VI. The Scapegoat. (_Spring_, 1913.) VII. Balder the Beautiful. (_Spring_, 1913.) _TIMES._--"The verdict of posterity will probably be that _The Golden Bough_ has influenced the attitude of the human mind towards supernatural beliefs and symbolical rituals more profoundly than any other books published in the nineteenth century except those of Darwin and Herbert Spencer." LECTURES ON THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE KINGSHIP. 8vo. 8s. 6d. net. _ATHEN�UM._--"It is the effect of a good book not only to teach, but also to stimulate and to suggest, and we think this the best and highest quality, and one that will recommend these lectures to all intelligent readers, as well as to the learned." PSYCHE'S TASK. A Discourse concerning the Influence of Superstition on the Growth of Institutions. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net. _TIMES._--"Dr. Frazer has answered the question of how the moral law has been safeguarded, especially in its infancy, with a wealth of learning and a clearness of utterance that leave nothing to be desired. Perhaps the uses of superstition is not quite such a new theme as he seems to fancy. Even the most ignorant of us were aware that many false beliefs of a religious or superstitious character had had very useful moral or physical, or especially sanitary, results. But if the theme is fairly familiar, the curious facts which are adduced in support of it will be new to most people, and will make the book as interesting to read as the lectures must have been to hear." THE SCOPE OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY. 8vo. Sewed. 6d. net. _OXFORD MAGAZINE._--"In his inaugural lecture the new Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Liverpool defines his Science, states its aims, and puts in a spirited plea for the scientific study of primitive man while there is still time, before the savage in his natural state becomes as extinct as the dodo." TOTEMISM AND EXOGAMY. A Treatise on Certain Early Forms of Superstition and Society. With Maps. Four vols. 8vo. 50s. net. Mr. A. E. Crawley in _NATURE_.--"Prof. Frazer is a great artist as well as a great anthropologist. He works on a big scale; no one in any department of research, not even Darwin, has employed a wider induction of facts. No one, again, has dealt more conscientiously with each fact; however seemingly trivial, it is prepared with minute pains and cautious tests for its destiny as a slip to be placed under the anthropological microscope. He combines, so to speak, the merits of Tintoretto and Meissonier.... That portion of the book which is concerned with totemism (if we may express our own belief at the risk of offending Prof. Frazer's characteristic modesty) is actually 'The Complete History of Totemism, its Practice and its Theory, its Origin and its End.'... Nearly two thousand pages are occupied with an ethnographical survey of totemism, an invaluable compilation. The maps, including that of the distribution of totemic peoples, are a new and useful feature." PAUSANIAS'S DESCRIPTION OF GREECE. Translated with a Commentary, Illustrations, and Maps. Second Edition. Six vols. 8vo. 126s. net. _ATHEN�UM._--"All these writings in many languages Mr. Frazer has read and digested with extraordinary care, so that his book will be for years _the_ book of reference on such matters, not only in England, but in France and Germany. It is a perfect thesaurus of Greek topography, archæology, and art. It is, moreover, far more interesting than any dictionary of the subject; for it follows the natural guidance of the Greek traveller, examining every town or village which he describes; analysing and comparing with foreign parallels every myth or fairy tale which he records; citing every information which can throw light on the works of art he admires." PAUSANIAS AND OTHER GREEK SKETCHES. Globe 8vo. 4s. net. _GUARDIAN._--"Here we have material which every one who has visited Greece, or purposes to visit it, most certainly should read and enjoy.... We cannot imagine a more excellent book for the educated visitor to Greece." LETTERS OF WILLIAM COWPER. Chosen and Edited with a Memoir and a few Notes by J. G. Frazer, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D. Two vols. Globe 8vo. 8s. net. (_Eversley Series._) Mr. Clement Shorter in the _DAILY CHRONICLE_.--"To the task Dr. Frazer has given a scholarly care that will make the edition one that is a joy to possess. His introductory Memoir, of some eighty pages in length, is a valuable addition to the many appraisements of Cowper that these later years have seen. It is no mere perfunctory 'introduction' but a piece of sound biographical work.... Dr. Frazer has given us two volumes that are an unqualified joy." MacMillan and Co., Ltd., London.