"And as one body seems the aggregate Of atoms numberless, each organized, So, by a strange and dim similitude, Infinite myriads of self conscious minds In one containing Spirit live, who fills With absolute ubiquity of thought All his involved monads, that yet seem Each to pursue its own self centring end."

A third mode of answering the question of human destiny is by the conception of a general resurrection. Souls, as fast as they leave the body, are gathered in some intermediate state, a starless grave world, a ghostly limbo. When the present cycle of things is completed, when the clock of time runs down and its lifeless weight falls in the socket, and "Death's empty helmet yawns grimly over the funeral hatchment of the world," the gates of this long barred receptacle of the deceased will be struck open, and its pale prisoners, in accumulated hosts, issue forth, and enter on the immortal inheritance reserved for them. In the sable land of Hades all departed generations are bivouacking in one vast army. On the resurrection morning, striking their shadowy tents, they will scale the walls of the abyss, and, reinvested with their bodies, either plant their banners on the summits of the earth in permanent encampment, or storm the battlements of the sky and colonize heaven with flesh and blood.

5 Philosophy and Doctrines of Erigena, Universalist Quarterly Review, vol. vii. p. 100.

All advocates of the doctrine of psychopannychism, or the sleep of souls from death till the last day, in addition to the general body of orthodox Christians, have been supporters of this conclusion.6

Three explanations are possible of the origination of this belief. First, a man musing over the affecting panorama of the seasons as it rolls through the year, budding life alternating with deadly desolation, spring still bringing back the freshness of leaves, flowers, and carolling birds, as if raising them from an annual interment in winter's cold grave, and then thinking of the destiny of his own race, how many generations have ripened and decayed, how many human crops have been harvested from the cradle and planted in the tomb, might naturally especially if he had any thing of the poet's associating and creative mind say to himself, Are we altogether perishable dust, or are we seed sown for higher fields, seed lying dormant now, but at last to sprout into swift immortality when God shall make a new sunshine and dew omnipotently penetrate the dry mould where we tarry? No matter how partial the analogy, how forced the process, how false the result, such imagery would sooner or later occur; and, having occurred, it is no more strange that it should get literal acceptance than it is that many other popular figments should have secured the firm establishment they have.

Secondly, a mourner just bereaved of one in whom his whole love was garnered, distracted with grief, his faculties unbalanced, his soul a chaos, is of sorrow and fantasy all compact; and he solaces himself with the ideal embodiment of his dreams, half seeing what he thinks, half believing what he wishes. His desires pass through unconscious volition into supposed facts. Before the miraculous power of his grief wielded imagination the world is fluent, and fate runs in the moulds he conceives. The adored form on which corruption now banquets, he sees again, animated, beaming, clasped in his arms. He cries, It cannot be that those holy days are forever ended, that I shall never more realize the blissful dream in which we trod the sunny world together! Oh, it must be that some time God will give me back again that beloved one! the sepulchre closed so fast shall be unsealed, the dead be restored, and all be as it was before! The conception thus once born out of the delirium of busy thought, anguished love, and regnant imagination, may in various ways win a fixed footing in faith.

Thirdly, the notion which we are now contemplating is one link in a chain of thought which, in the course of time and the range of speculation, the theorizing mind could not fail to forge. The concatenation of reflections is this. Death is the separation of soul and body. That separation is repulsive, an evil. Therefore it was not intended by the Infinite Goodness, but was introduced by a foe, and is a foreign, marring element. Finally God will vanquish his antagonist, and banish from the creation all his thwarting interferences with the primitive perfection of harmony and happiness. Accordingly, the souls which Satan has caused to be separated from their bodies are reserved apart until the fulness of time, when there shall be a universal resurrection and restoration. So far as reason is competent to pronounce on this view considered as a sequel to the disembodying doom of man, it is an arbitrary piece of fancy. Philosophy ignores it. Science gives no hint of it.

6 Baumgarten, Beantwortung des Sendschreibens Heyns vom Schlafe der abgeschiedenen Seelen. Chalmers. Astronomical Discourses, iv.

It sprang from unwarranted metaphors, perverted, exaggerated, based on analogies not parallel. So far as it assumes to rest on revelation it will be examined in another place.

Fourthly, after the notion of a great, epochal resurrection, as a reply to the inquiry, What is to become of the soul? a dogma is next encountered which we shall style that of a local and irrevocable conveyance. The disembodied spirit is conveyed to some fixed region,7 a penal or a blissful abode, where it is to tarry unalterably. This idea of the banishment or admission of souls, according to their deserts, or according to an elective grace, into an anchored location called hell or heaven, a retributive or rewarding residence for eternity, we shall pass by with few words, because it recurs for fuller examination in other chapters. In the first place, the whole picture is a gross simile drawn from occurrences of this outward world and unjustifiably applied to the fortunes of the mind in the invisible sphere of the future. The figment of a judicial transportation of the soul from one place or planet to another, as if by a Charon's boat, is a clattering and repulsive conceit, inadmissible by one who apprehends the noiseless continuity of God's self executing laws. It is a jarring mechanical clash thrust amidst the smooth evolution of spiritual destinies. It compares with the facts as the supposition that the planets are swung around the sun by material chains compares with the law of gravitation.

Moral compensation is no better secured by imprisonment or freedom in separate localities than it is, in a common environment, by the fatal working of their interior forces of character, and their relations with all things else. Moreover, these antagonist kingdoms, Tartarean and Elysian, defined as the everlasting habitations of departed souls, have been successively driven, as dissipated visions, from their assumed latitudes and longitudes, one after another, by progressive discovery, until now the intelligent mind knows of no assignable spot for them. Since we are not acquainted with any fixed locations to which the soul is to be carried, to abide there forever in appointed joy or woe, and since there is no scientific necessity nor moral use for the supposition of such places and of the transferrence of the departed to them, we cannot hesitate to reject the associated belief as a deluding mistake. The truth, as we conceive it, is not that different souls are borne by constabulary apparitions to two immured dwellings, manacled and hurried into Tophet or saluted and ushered into Paradise, but that all souls spontaneously pass into one immense empire, drawn therein by their appropriate attractions, to assimilate a strictly discriminative experience. But, as to this, let each thinker form his own conclusion.

The fifth view of the destination of the soul may be called the theory of recurrence.8 When man dies, his surviving spirit is immediately born again in a new body. Thus the souls, assigned in a limited number to each world, continually return, each one still forgetful of his previous lives. This seems to be the specific creed of the Druses, who affirm that all souls were created at once, and that the number is unchanged, while they are born over and over. A Druse boy, dreadfully alarmed by the discharge of a gun, on being asked by a Christian the cause of his fear, replied, "I was born murdered;" that is, the soul of a man who had been shot

7 Lange, Das Land der Herrlichkelt.

8 Schmidius, Diss. de Multiplici Animarum Reditu in Corpora.

passed into his body at the moment of his birth.9 The young mountaineer would seem, from the sudden violence with which he was snatched out of his old house, to have dragged a trail of connecting consciousness over into his new one. As a general rule, in distinction from such an exception, memory is like one of those passes which the conductors of railroad trains give their passengers, "good for this trip only." The notion of an endless succession of lives on the familiar stage of this dear old world, commencing each with clean wiped tablets, possesses for some minds a fathomless allurement; but others wish for no return pass on their ticket to futurity, preferring an adventurous abandonment "to fresh fields and pastures new," in unknown immensity, to a renewed excursion through landscapes already traversed and experiences drained before.

Fourier's doctrine of immortality belongs here. According to his idea, the Great Soul of this globe is a composite being, comprising about ten billions of individual souls. Their connection with this planet will be for nearly eighty thousand years. Then the whole sum of them will swarm to some higher planet, Fourier himself, perhaps, being the old gray gander that will head the flock, pilot king of their flight. Each man is to enjoy about four hundred births on earth, poetic justice leading him successively through all the grades and phases of fortune, from cripplehood and beggary to paragonship and the throne. The invisible residence of spirits and the visible are both on this globe, the former in the Great Soul, the latter in bodies. In the other life the soul becomes a sharer in the woes of the Great Soul, which is as unhappy as seven eighths of the incarnated souls; for its fate is a compound of the fates of the human souls taken collectively. Coming into this outward scene at birth, we lose anew all memory of past existence, but wake up again in the Great Soul with a perfect recollection of all our previous lives both in the invisible and in the visible world. These alternating passages between the two states will continue until the final swooping of total humanity from this exhausted planet in search of a better abode.10

The idea of the recurrence of souls is the simplest means of meeting a difficulty stated thus by the ingenious Abraham Tucker in his "Light of Nature Pursued." "The numbers of souls daily pouring in from hence upon the next world seem to require a proportionable drain from it somewhere or other; for else the country might be overstocked." The objection urged against such a belief from the fact that we do not remember having lived before is rebutted by the assertion that

"Some draught of Lethe doth await, As old mythologies relate, The slipping through from state to state."

The theory associated with this Lethean draught is confirmed by its responsive correspondence with many unutterable experiences, vividly felt or darkly recognised, in our deepest bosom. It seems as if occasionally the poppied drug or other oblivious antidote

9 Churchill, Mount Lebanon, vol. ii. ch. 12.

10 Fourier, Passions of the Human Soul, (Morell's translation,) Introduction, vol. i. pp. 14-18; also pp. 233-236.

administered by nature had been so much diluted that reason, only half baffled, struggles to decipher the dim runes and vestiges of a foregone state;

"And ever something is or seems That touches us with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams."

In those excursive reveries, fed by hope and winged with dream, which scour the glens and scale the peaks of the land of thought, this nook of hypothesis must some time be discovered. And, brought to light, it has much to interest and to please; but it is too destitute of tangible proof to be successfully maintained against assault.11

There is another faith as to the fate of souls, best stated, perhaps, in the phrase perpetual migration. The soul, by successive deaths and births, traverses the universe, an everlasting traveller through the rounds of being and the worlds of space, a transient sojourner briefly inhabiting each.12 All reality is finding its way up towards the attracting, retreating Godhead. Minerals tend to vegetables, these to animals, these to men. Blind but yearning matter aspires to spirit, intelligent spirits to divinity. In every grain of dust sleep an army of future generations. As every thing below man gropes upward towards his conscious estate, "the trees being imperfect men, that seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground," so man himself shall climb the illimitable ascent of creation, every step a star. The animal organism is a higher kind of vegetable, whose development begins with those substances with the production of which the life of an ordinary vegetable ends.13 The fact, too, that embryonic man passes through ascending stages undistinguishable from those of lower creatures, is full of meaning. Does it not betoken a preserved epitome of the long history of slowly rising existence? What unplummeted abysses of time and distance intervene from the primary rock to the Victoria Regia! and again from the first crawling spine to the fetterless mind of a Schelling! But, snail pace by snail pace, those immeasurable separations have been bridged over; and so every thing that now lies at the dark basis of dust shall finally reach the transplendent apex of intellect. The objection of theological prejudice to this developing succession of ascents that it is degrading is an unhealthy mistake. Whether we have risen or fallen to our present rank, the actual rank itself is not altered. And in one respect it is better for man to be an advanced oyster than a degraded god; for in the former case the path is upwards, in the latter it is downwards. "We wake," observes a profound thinker, "and find ourselves on a stair: there are other stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight." Such was plainly the trust of the author of the following exhortation:

"Be worthy of death; and so learn to live That every incarnation of thy soul In other realms, and worlds, and firmaments Shall be more pure and high."

11 Bertram, Prufung der Meinung von der Praexistenz der menechlichen Seele.

12 Nurnberger, Still Leben, oder uber die Unsterblichkeit der Seele.

13 Liebig, Animal Chemistry, ch. ix.

Bulwer likewise has said, "Eternity may be but an endless series of those emigrations which men call deaths, abandonments of home after home, ever to fairer scenes and loftier heights. Age after age, the spirit that glorious nomad may shift its tent, fated not to rest in the dull Elysium of the heathen, but carrying with it evermore its twin elements, activity and desire."

But there is something unsatisfactory, even sad and dreary, in this prospect of incessant migration. Must not the pilgrim pine and tire for a goal of rest? Exhausted with wanderings, sated with experiments, will he not pray for the exempted lot of a contented fruition in repose? One must weary at last of being even so sublime a vagabond as he whose nightly hostelries are stars. And, besides, how will sundered friends and lovers, between whom, on the road, races and worlds interpose, ever over take each other, and be conjoined to journey hand in hand again or build a bower together by the way? A poet of finest mould, in happiest mood, once saw a leaf drop from a tree which overhung a mirroring stream. The reflection of the leaf in the watery sky hollow far below seemed to rise from beneath as swiftly as the object fell from above; and the two, encountering at the surface, became one. Then he sang, touching with his strain the very marrow of deepest human desire,

"How speeds, from in the river's thought, The spirit of the leaf that falls, Its heaven in that calm bosom wrought, As mine among yon crimson walls! From the dry bough it spins, to greet Its shadow on the placid river: So might I my companions meet, Nor roam the countless worlds forever!"

Moreover, some elements of this theory are too grotesque, are the too rash inferences from a too crude induction, to win sober credit to any extent. It is easy to devise and carry out in consistent descriptive details the hypothesis that the soul has risen, through ten thousand transitions, from the condition of red earth or a tadpole to its present rank, and that,

"As it once crawl'd upon the sod, It yet shall grow to be a god;"

but what scientific evidence is there to confirm and establish the supposition as a truth? Why, if it be so, to borrow the humorous satire of good old Henry More,

"Then it will follow that cold stopping curd And harden'd moldy cheese, when they have rid Due circuits through the heart, at last shall speed Of life and sense, look thorough our thin eyes And view the close wherein the cow did feed Whence they were milk'd: grosse pie crust will grow wise, And pickled cucumbers sans doubt philosophize!"

The form of this general outline stalks totteringly on stilts of fancy, and sprawls headlong with a logical crash at the first critical probe.

The final theory of the destination of souls, now left to be set forth, may be designated by the word transition.14 It affirms that at death they pass from the separate material worlds, which are their initiating nurseries, into the common spiritual world, which is everywhere present. Thus the visible peoples the invisible, each person in his turn consciously rising from this world's rudimentary darkness to that world's universal light. Dwelling here, free souls, housed in frames of dissoluble clay,

"We hold a middle rank 'twixt heaven and earth, On the last verge of mortal being stand, lose to the realm where angels have their birth, Just on the boundaries of the spirit land."

Why has God "broken up the solid material of the universe into innumerable little globes, and swung each of them in the centre of an impassable solitude of space," unless it be to train up in the various spheres separate households for final union as a single diversified family in the boundless spiritual world? 15 The surmise is not unreasonable, but recommends itself strongly, that,

"If yonder stars be fill'd with forms of breathing clay like ours, Perchance the space which spreads between is for a spirit's powers."

The soul encased in flesh is thereby confined to one home, its natal nest; but, liberated at death, it wanders at will, unobstructed, through every world and cerulean deep; and wheresoever it is, there, in proportion to its own capacity and fitness, is heaven and is God.16 All those world spots so thickly scattered through the Yggdrasill of universal space are but the brief sheltering places where embryo intelligences clip their shells, and whence, as soon as fledged through the discipline of earthly teaching and essays, the broodlet souls take wing into the mighty airs of immensity, and thus enter on their eternal emancipation. This conjecture is, of all which have been offered yet, perhaps the completest, least perplexed, best recommended by its harmony with our knowledge and our hope. And so one might wish to rest in it with humble trust.

The final destiny of an immortal soul, after its transition into the other world, must be either unending progress towards infinite perfection, or the reaching of its perihelion at last and then revolving in uninterrupted fruition. In the former case, pursuing an infinite aim, with each degree of its attainment the flying goal still recedes. In the latter case, it will in due season touch its bound and there be satisfied,

"When weak Time shall be pour'd out Into Eternity, and circular joys Dance in an endless round."

14 Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life, ch. xii.

15 Taylor, Saturday Evening, pp. 95-111.

16 Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life, ch. xvii.

This result seems the more probable of the two; for the assertion of countless decillions of personalities all progressing beyond every conceivable limit, on, still on, forever, is incredible. If endless linear progress were the destiny of each being, the whole universe would at last become a line! And though it is true that the idea of an ever novel chase attracts and refreshes the imagination, while the idea of a monotonous revolution repels and wearies it, this is simply because we judge after our poor earthly experience and its flagging analogies. It will not be so if that revolution is the vivid realization of all our being's possibilities.

Annihilation, absorption, resurrection, conveyance, recurrence, migration, transition, these seven answers to the question of our fate, and of its relation to the course of nature, are thinkable in words. We may choose from among them, but can construct no real eighth. First, there is a constant succession of growth and decay. Second, there is a perpetual flow and ebb of personal emanation and impersonal resumption. Third, there is a continual return of the same persistent entities. Fourth, all matter may be sublimated to spirit, and souls alone remain to occupy boundless space. Fifth, the power of death may cease, all the astronomic orbs be populated and enjoyed, each by one generation of everlasting inhabitants, the present order continuing in each earth until enough have lived to fill it, then all of them, physically restored, dwelling on it, with no more births or deaths. Sixth, if matter be not transmutable to soul, when that peculiar reality from which souls are developed is exhausted, and the last generation of incarnated beings have risen from the flesh, the material creation may, in addition to the inter stellar region, be eternally appropriated by the spirit races to their own free range and use, through adaptations of faculty unknown to us now; else it may vanish as a phantasmal spectacle. Or, finally, souls may be absolutely created out of nothing by the omnipotence of God, and the universe may be infinite: then the process may proceed forever.

But men's beliefs are formed rather by the modes of thought they have learned to adopt than by any proofs they have tested; not by argumentation about a subject, but by the way of looking at it. The moralist regards all creation as the work of a personal God, a theatre of moral ends, a just Providence watching over the parts, and the conscious immortality of the actors an inevitable accompaniment. The physicist contemplates the universe as constituted of atoms of attraction and repulsion, which subsist in perfect mobility through space, but are concreted in the molecular masses of the planets. The suns are vast engines for the distribution of heat or motion, the equivalent of all kinds of force. This, in its diffusion, causes innumerable circulations and combinations of the original atoms. Organic growth, life, is the fruition of a force derived from the sun. Decay, death, is the rendering up of that force in its equivalents. Thus, the universe is a composite unity of force, a solidarity of ultimate unities which are indestructible, though in constant circulation of new groupings and journeys. To the religious faith of the moralist, man is an eternal person, reaping what he has sowed. To the speculative intellect of the physicist, man is an atomic force, to be liberated into the ethereal medium until again harnessed in some organism. In both cases he is immortal: but in that, as a free citizen of the ideal world; in this, as a flying particle of the dynamic immensity.

PART SECOND.

ETHNIC THOUGHTS CONCERNING A FUTURE LIFE.

CHAPTER I.

BARBARIAN NOTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE.

PROCEEDING now to give an account of the fancies and opinions in regard to a future life which have been prevalent, in different ages, in various nations of the earth, it will be best to begin by presenting, in a rapid series, some sketches of the conceits of those uncivilized tribes who did not so far as our knowledge reaches possess a doctrine sufficiently distinctive and full, or important enough in its historical relations, to warrant a detailed treatment in separate chapters.

We will glance first at the negroes. According to all accounts, while there are, among the numerous tribes, diversities and degrees of superstition, there is yet, throughout the native pagan population of Africa, a marked general agreement of belief in the survival of the soul, in spectres, divination, and witchcraft; and there is a general similarity of funeral usages. Early travellers tell us that the Bushmen conceived the soul to be immortal, and as impalpable as a shadow, and that they were much afraid of the return of deceased spirits to haunt them. They were accustomed to pray to their departed countrymen not to molest them, but to stay away in quiet. They also employed exorcisers to lay these ill omened ghosts. Meiners relates of some inhabitants of the Guinea coast that their fear of ghosts and their childish credulity reached such a pitch that they threw their dead into the ocean, in the expectation of thus drowning soul and body together.

Superstitions as gross and lawless still have full sway. Wilson, whose travels and residence there for twenty years have enabled him to furnish the most reliable information, says, in his recent work,1 "A native African would as soon doubt his present as his future state of being." Every dream, every stray suggestion of the mind, is interpreted, with unquestioning credence, as a visit from the dead, a whisper from a departed soul. If a man wakes up with pains in his bones or muscles, it is because his spirit has wandered abroad in the night and been flogged by some other spirit. On certain occasions the whole community start up at midnight, with clubs, torches, and hideous yells, to drive the evil spirits out of the village. They seem to believe that the souls of dead men take rank with good or bad spirits, as they have themselves been good or bad in this life. They bury with the deceased clothing, ornaments, utensils,

1 Western Africa, ch. xii.

and statedly convey food to the grave for the use of the revisiting spirit. With the body of king Weir of the Cavalla towns, who was buried in December of 1854, in presence of several missionaries, was interred a quantity of rice, palm oil, beef, and rum: it was supposed the ghost of the sable monarch would come back and consume these articles. The African tribes, where their notions have not been modified by Christian or by Mohammedan teachings, appear to have no definite idea of a heaven or of a hell; but future reward or punishment is considered under the general conception of an association, in the disembodied state, with the benignant or with the demoniacal powers.

The New Zealanders imagine that the souls of the dead go to a place beneath the earth, called Reinga. The path to this region is a precipice close to the sea shore at the North Cape. It is said that the natives who live in the neighborhood can at night hear sounds caused by the passing of spirits thither through the air. After a great battle they are thus warned of the event long before the news can arrive by natural means.2 It is a common superstition with them that the left eye of every chief, after his death, becomes a star. The Pleiades are seven New Zealand chiefs, brothers, who were slain together in battle and are now fixed in the sky, one eye of each, in the shape of a star, being the only part of them that is visible. It has been observed that the mythological doctrine of the glittering host of heaven being an assemblage of the departed heroes of earth never received a more ingenious version.3 Certainly it is a magnificent piece of insular egotism. It is noticeable here that, in the Norse mythology, Thor, having slain Thiasse, the giant genius of winter, throws his eyes up to heaven, and they become stars. Shungie, a celebrated New Zealand king, said he had on one occasion eaten the left eye of a great chief whom he had killed in battle, for the purpose of thus increasing the glory of his own eye when it should be transferred to the firmament. Sometimes, apparently, it was thought that there was a separate immortality for each of the eyes of the dead, the left ascending to heaven as a star, the right, in the form of a spirit, taking flight for Reinga.

The custom, common in Africa and in New Zealand, of slaying the slaves or the wives of an important person at his death and burying them with him, prevails also among the inhabitants of the Feejee Islands. A chief's wives are sometimes strangled on these occasions, sometimes buried alive. One cried to her brother, "I wish to die, that I may accompany my husband to the land where he has gone. Love me, and make haste to strangle me, that I may overtake him."4 Departing souls go to the tribunal of Ndengei, who either receives them into bliss, or sends them back, as ghosts, to haunt the scenes of their former existence, or distributes them as food to devils, or imprisons them for a period and then dooms them to annihilation. The Feejees are also very much afraid of Samiulo, ruler of a subterranean world, who sits at the brink of a huge fiery cavern, into which he hurls the souls he dislikes. In the road to Ndengei stands an enormous giant, armed with an axe, who tries to maim and murder the passing souls. A powerful chief, whose gun was interred with him, loaded it, and, when

2 Shortland, Traditions of the New Zealanders, ch. vii.

3 Library of Ent. Knowl.: The New Zealanders, pp. 223-237.

4 Wilkes, Narrative of the U. S. Exploring Expedition, vol. iii. ch. 3.

he came near the giant, shot at him, and ran by while the monster was dodging the bullet.

The people of the Sandwich Islands held a confused medley of notions as to another life. In different persons among them were found, in regard to this subject, superstitious terror, blank indifference, positive unbelief. The current fancy was that the souls of the chiefs were led, by a god whose name denotes the "eyeball of the sun," to a life in the heavens, while plebeian souls went down to Akea, a lugubrious underground abode. Some thought spirits were destroyed in this realm of darkness; others, that they were eaten by a stronger race of spirits there; others still, that they survived there, subsisting upon lizards and butterflies.5 What a piteous life they must have led here whose imaginations could only soar to a future so unattractive as this!

The Kamtschadales send all the dead alike to a subterranean elysium, where they shall find again their wives, clothes, tools, huts, and where they shall fish and hunt. All is there as here, except that there are no fire spouting mountains, no bogs, streams, inundations, and impassable snows; and neither hunting nor fishing is ever pursued in vain there. This lower paradise is but a beautified Kamtschatka, freed from discommoding hardships and cleansed of tormenting Cossacks and Russians. They have no hell for the rectification of the present wrong relations of virtue and misery, vice and happiness. The only distinction they appear to make is that all who in Kamtschatka are poor, and have few small and weak dogs, shall there be rich and be furnished with strong and fat dogs. The power of imagination is very remarkable in this raw people, bringing the future life so near, and awakening such an impatient longing for it and for their former companions that they often, the sooner to secure a habitation there, anticipate the natural time of their death by suicide.6

The Esquimaux betray the influence of their clime and habits, in the formation of their ideas of the life to come, as plainly as the Kamtschadales do. The employments and enjoyments of their future state are rude and earthy. They say the soul descends through successive places of habitation, the first of which is full of pains and horrors. The good, that is, the courageous and skilful, those who have endured severe hardships and mastered many seals, passing through this first residence, find that the other mansions regularly improve. They finally reach an abode of perfect satisfaction, far beneath the storms of the sea, where the sun is never obscured by night, and where reindeer wander in great droves beside waters that never congeal, and wherein the whale, the walrus, and the best sea fowls always abound.7 Hell is deep, but heaven deeper still. Hell, they think, is among the roots, rocks, monsters, and cold of the frozen or vexed and suffering waters; but

"Beneath tempestuous seas and fields of ice Their creed has placed a lowlier paradise."

The Greenlanders, too, located their elysium beneath the abysses of the ocean, where the good Spirit Torngarsuk held his reign in a happy and eternal summer. The wizards, who pretended to visit this region at will, described the disembodied souls as pallid, and, if one

5 Jarves, Hist. of the Sandwich Islands, p. 42.

6 Christoph Meiners, Vermischte Philosophische Schriften, 169-173.

7 Prichard, Physical Hist. of Mankind, vol. i. ch. 2.

sought to seize them, unsubstantial.8 Some of these people, however, fixed the site of paradise in the sky, and regarded the aurora borealis as the playing of happy souls. So Coleridge pictures the Laplander

"Marking the streamy banners of the North, And thinking he those spirits soon should join Who there, in floating robes of rosy light, Dance sportively."

But others believed this state of restlessness in the clouds was the fate only of the worthless, who were there pinched with hunger and plied with torments. All agreed in looking for another state of existence, where, under diverse circumstances, happiness and misery should be awarded, in some degree at least, according to desert.9

The Peruvians taught that the reprobate were sentenced to a hell situated in the centre of the earth, where they must endure centuries of toil and anguish. Their paradise was away in the blue dome of heaven. There the spirits of the worthy would lead a life of tranquil luxury. At the death of a Peruvian noble his wives and servants frequently were slain, to go with him and wait on him in that happy region.10 Many authors, including Prescott, yielding too easy credence to the very questionable assertions of the Spanish chroniclers, have attributed to the Peruvians a belief in the resurrection of the body. Various travellers and writers have also predicated this belief of savage nations in Central Africa, of certain South Sea islanders, and of several native tribes in North America. In all these cases the supposition is probably erroneous, as we think for the following reasons. In the first place, the idea of a resurrection of the body is either a late conception of the associative imagination, or else a doctrine connected with a speculative theory of recurring epochs in the destiny of the world; and it is in both instances too subtle and elaborate for an uncultivated people. Secondly, in none of the cases referred to has any reliable evidence been given of the actual existence of the belief in question. It has merely been inferred, by persons to whose minds the doctrine was previously familiar, from phenomena by no means necessarily implying it. For example, a recent author ascribes to the Feejees the belief that there will be a resurrection of the body just as it was at the time of death. The only datum on which he founds this astounding assertion is that they often seem to prefer to die in the full vigor of manhood rather than in decrepit old age! 11 Thirdly, we know that the observation and statements of the Spanish monks and historians, in regard to the religion of the pagans of South America, were of the most imperfect and reckless character. They perpetrated gross frauds, such as planting in the face of high precipices white stones in the shape of the cross, and then pointing to them in proof of their assertion that, before the Christians came, the Devil had here parodied the rites and doctrines of the gospel. 12 They said the Mexican goddess, wife of the sun, was Eve, or

8 Egede, Greenland, ch. 18.

9 Dr. Karl Andree, Gronland.

10 Prescott, Conquest of Peru, vol. i. ch. 3.

11 Erskine, Islands of the Western Pacific, p. 248.

12 Schoolcraft, History, &c. of the Indian Tribes, part v. p. 93.

the Virgin Mary, and Quetzalcoatl was St. Thomas! 13 Such affirmers are to be cautiously followed. Finally, it is a quite significant fact that while some point to the pains which the Peruvians took in embalming their dead as a proof that they looked for a resurrection of the body, Acosta expressly says that they did not believe in the resurrection, and that this unbelief was the cause of their embalming.14 Garcilaso de la Vega, in his "Royal Commentaries of the Peruvian Incas," says that when he asked some Peruvians why they took so great care to preserve in the cemeteries of the dead the nails and hair which had been cut off, they replied that in the day of resurrection the dead would come forth with whatever of their bodies was left, and there would be too great a press of business in that day for them to afford time to go hunting round after their hair and nails.15 The fancy of a Christian is too plain here. If the answer were really made by the natives, they were playing a joke on their credulous questioner, or seeking to please him with distorted echoes of his own faith.

The conceits as to a future life entertained by the Mexicans varied considerably from those of their neighbors of Peru. Souls neither good nor bad, or whose virtues and vices balanced each other, were to enter a medium state of idleness and empty content. The wicked, or those dying in any of certain enumerated modes of death, went to Mictlan, a dismal hell within the earth. The souls of those struck by lightning, or drowned, or dying by any of a given list of diseases, also the souls of children, were transferred to a remote elysium, Tlalocan. There was a place in the chief temple where, it was supposed, once a year the spirits of all the children who had been sacrificed to Tlaloc invisibly came and assisted in the ceremonies. The ultimate heaven was reserved for warriors who bravely fell in battle, for women who died in labor, for those offered up in the temples of the gods, and for a few others. These passed immediately to the house of the sun, their chief god, whom they accompanied for a term of years, with songs, dances, and revelry, in his circuit around the sky. Then, animating the forms of birds of gay plumage, they lived as beautiful songsters among the flowers, now on earth, now in heaven, at their pleasure.16 It was the Mexican custom to dress the dead man in the garb appropriated to the guardian deity of his craft or condition in life. They gave him a jug of water. They placed with him slips of paper to serve as passports through guarded gates and perilous defiles in the other world. They made a fire of his clothes and utensils, to warm the shivering soul while traversing a region of cold winds beyond the grave.17 The following sentence occurs in a poem composed by one of the old Aztec monarchs: "Illustrious nobles, loyal subjects, let us aspire to that heaven where all is eternal and corruption cannot come. The horrors of the tomb are but the cradle of the sun, and the shadows of death are brilliant lights for the stars." 18

13 Squier, Serpent Symbol in America, p. 13.

14 Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, book v. ch. 7.

15 Book ii. ch. 7.

16 Clavigero, History of Mexico, book vi. sect. 1.

17 Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, vol. i. ch. 6.

18 Ibid. sect. 39.

Amidst the mass of whimsical conceptions entering into the faith of the widely spread tribes of North America, we find a ruling agreement in the cardinal features of their thought concerning a future state of existence. In common with nearly all barbarous nations, they felt great fear of apparitions. The Sioux were in the habit of addressing the deceased at his burial, and imploring him to stay in his own place and not come to distress them. Their funeral customs, too, from one extremity of the continent to the other, were very much alike. Those who have reported their opinions to us, from the earliest Jesuit missionaries to the latest investigators of their mental characteristics, concur in ascribing to them a deep trust in a life to come, a cheerful view of its conditions, and a remarkable freedom from the dread of dying. Charlevoix says, "The best established opinion among the natives is the immortality of the soul." On the basis of an account written by William Penn, Pope composed the famous passage in his "Essay on Man:"

Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind Sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind. His soul proud Science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk or milky way: Yet simple nature to his faith hath given, Behind the cloud topp'd hill, an humbler heaven, Some safer world in depth of woods embraced, Or happier island in the watery waste. To be, contents his natural desire: He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire, But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company."

Their rude instinctive belief in the soul's survival, and surmises as to its destiny, are implied in their funeral rites, which, as already stated, were, with some exceptions, strikingly similar even in the remotest tribes.19

In the bark coffin, with a dead Indian the Onondagas buried a kettle of provisions, a pair of moccasins, a piece of deer skin and sinews of the deer to sew patches on the moccasins, which it was supposed the deceased would wear out on his journey. They also furnished him with a bow and arrows, a tomahawk and knife, to procure game with to live on while pursuing his way to the land of spirits, the blissful regions of Ha wah ne u.20 Several Indian nations, instead of burying the food, suspended it above the grave, and renewed it from time to time. Some writers have explained this custom by the hypothesis of an Indian belief in two souls, one of which departed to the realm of the dead, while the other tarried by the mound until the body was decayed, or until it had itself found a chance to be born in a new body.21 The supposition seems forced and extremely doubtful. The truth probably lies in a simpler explanation, which will be offered further on.

19 Baumgarten, Geschichte der Volker von America, xiii. haupts.: vom Tod, Vergribniss, und Trauer.

20 Clarke, Onondaga, vol. l. p. 51.

21 Muller, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, sect. 66.

The Winnebagoes located paradise above, and called the milky way the "Road of the Dead." 22 It was so white with the crowds of journeying ghosts! But almost all, like the Ojibways, imagined their elysium to lie far in the West. The soul, freed from the body, follows a wide beaten path westward, and enters a country abounding with all that an Indian covets. On the borders of this blessed land, in a long glade, he finds his relatives, for many generations back, gathered to welcome him.23 The Chippewas, and several other important tribes, always kindled fires on the fresh graves of their dead, and kept them burning four successive nights, to light the wandering souls on their way.24 An Indian myth represents the ghosts coming back from Ponemah, the land of the Hereafter, and singing this song to the miraculous Hiawatha:

"Do not lay such heavy burdens On the graves of those you bury, Not such weight of furs and wampum, Not such weight of pots and kettles; For the spirits faint beneath them. Only give them food to carry, Only give them fire to light them. Four days is the spirit's journey To the land of ghosts and shadows, Four its lonely night encampments. Therefore, when the dead are buried, Let a fire, as night approaches, Four times on the grave be kindled, That the soul upon its journey May not grope about in darkness." 25

The subject of a future state seems to have been by far the most prominent one in the Indian imagination. They relate many traditions of persons who have entered it, and returned, and given descriptions of it. A young brave, having lost his betrothed, determined to follow her to the land of souls. Far South, beyond the region of ice and snows, he came to a lodge standing before the entrance to wide blue plains. Leaving his body there, he embarked in a white stone canoe to cross a lake. He saw the souls of wicked Indians sinking in the lake; but the good gained an elysian shore, where all was warmth, beauty, ease, and eternal youth, and where the air was food. The Master of Breath sent him back, but promised that he might at death return and stay. 26 The Wyandots tell of a dwarf, Tcha ka bech, who climbed a tree which grew higher as often as he blew on it. At last he reached heaven, and discovered it to be an excellent place. He descended the tree, building wigwams at intervals in the branches. He then returned with his sister and nephew, resting each night in one of the wigwams.

22 Schoolcraft, History, &c. of the Indian Tribes, part iv. p. 240.

23 Ibid. part ii. p. 135.

24 Ibid. part v. p. 64; part iv. p. 55.

25 Longfellow, Song of Hiawatha, xix.: The Ghosts.

26 Schoolcraft, Indian in his Wigwam. p 79.

He set his traps up there to catch animals. Rising in the night to go and examine his traps, he saw one all on fire, and, upon approaching it, found that he had caught the sun!

Where the Indian is found believing in a Devil and a hell, it is the result of his intercourse with Europeans. These elements of horror were foreign to his original religion.27 There are in some quarters faint traces of a single purgatorial or retributive conception. It is a representation of paradise as an island, the ordeal consisting in the passage of the dark river or lake which surrounds it. The worthy cross with entire facility, the unworthy only after tedious struggles. Some say the latter are drowned; others, that they sink up to their chins in the water, where they pass eternity in vain desires to attain the alluring land on which they gaze.28 Even this notion may be a modification consequent upon European influence. At all events, it is subordinate in force and only occasional in occurrence. For the most part, in the Indian faith mercy swallows up the other attributes of the Great Spirit. The Indian dies without fear, looking for no punishments, only for rewards.29 He regards the Master of Breath not as a holy judge, but as a kind father. He welcomes death as opening the door to a sweet land. Ever charmingly on his closing eyes dawns the prospect of the aboriginal elysium, a gorgeous region of soft shades, gliding streams, verdant groves waving in gentle airs, warbling birds, herds of stately deer and buffalo browsing on level plains. It is the earth in noiseless and solemn metamorphosis.30

We shall conclude this chapter by endeavoring to explain the purport and origin of the principal ceremonies and notions which have now been set forth pertaining to the disembodied state. The first source of these particulars is to be sought, not in any clear mental perceptions, or conscious dogmatic belief, but in the natural workings of affection, memory, and sentiment. Among almost every people, from the Chinese to the Araucanians, from the Ethiopians to the Dacotahs, rites of honor have been paid to the dead, various offerings have been placed at their graves. The Vedas enjoin the offering of a cake to the ghosts of ancestors back to the third generation. The Greeks were wont to pour wine, oil, milk, and blood into canals made in the graves of their dead. The early Christians adopted these "Feasts of the Dead" as Augustine and Tertullian call them from the heathen, and Celebrated them over the graves of their martyrs and of their other deceased friends. Such customs as these among savages like the Shillooks or the Choctaws are usually supposed to imply the belief that the souls of the deceased remain about the places of sepulture and physically partake of the nourishment thus furnished. The interpretation is farther fetched than need be, and is unlikely; or, at all events, if it be true in some cases, it is not the whole truth. In the first place, these people see that the food and drink remain untouched, the weapons and utensils are left unused in the grave. Secondly, there are often certain features in the barbaric ritual obviously metaphorical, incapable of literal acceptance. For instance, the Winnebagoes light a small fire on the grave of a deceased warrior to light him on his journey to the land of souls,

27 Loskiel, Hist. Mission of United Brethren to N. A. Indians, part i. ch. 3.

28 Schoolcraft, Indian in his Wigwam, p. 202. History, &c. of Indian Tribes, part iv. p. 173.

29 Schoolcraft, History of Indian Tribes, part ii. p. 68.

30 Ibid. pp. 403, 404.

although they say that journey extends to a distance of four days and nights and is wholly invisible. They light and tend that watch fire as a memorial of their departed companion and a rude expression of their own emotions; as an unconscious emblem of their own struggling faith, not as a beacon to the straying ghost. Again, the Indian mother, losing a nursing infant, spurts some of her milk into the fire, that the little spirit may not want for nutriment on its solitary path.31 Plato approvingly quotes Hesiod's statement that the souls of noble men become guardian demons coursing the air, messengers and agents of the gods in the world. Therefore, he adds, "we should reverence their tombs and establish solemn rites and offerings there;" though by his very statement these places were not the dwellings or haunts of the freely circuiting spirits.32

Not by an intellectual doctrine, but by an instinctive association, when not resisted and corrected, we connect the souls of the dead in our thoughts with the burial places of their forms. The New Zealand priests pretend by their spells to bring wandering souls within the enclosed graveyards.33 These sepulchral folds are full of ghosts. A sentiment native to the human breast draws pilgrims to the tombs of Shakspeare and Washington, and, if not restrained and guided by cultivated thought, would lead them to make offerings there. Until the death of Louis XV., the kings of France lay in state and were served as in life for forty days after they died.34 It would be ridiculous to attempt to wring any doctrinal significance from these customs. The same sentiment which, in one form, among the Alfoer inhabitants of the Arru Islands, when a man dies, leads his relatives to assemble and destroy whatever he has left, which, in another form, causes the Papist to offer burning candles, wreaths, and crosses, and to recite prayers, before the shrines of the dead saints, which, in still another form, moved Albert Durer to place all the pretty playthings of his child in the coffin and bury them with it, this same sentiment, in its undefined spontaneous workings, impelled the Peruvian to embalm his dead, the Blackfoot to inter his brave's hunting equipments with him, and the Cherokee squaw to hang fresh food above the totem on her husband's grave post. What should we think if we could foresee that, a thousand years hence, when the present doctrines and customs of France and America are forgotten, some antiquary, seeking the reason why the mourners in Pere la Chaise and Mount Auburn laid clusters of flowers on the graves of their lamented ones, should deliberately conclude that it was believed the souls remained in the bodies in the tomb and enjoyed the perfume of the flowers? An American traveller, writing from Vienna on All Saints' Day, in 1855, describes the avenues of the great cemetery filled with people hanging festoons of flowers on the tombstones, and placing burning candles of wax on the graves, and kneeling in devotion; it being their childish belief, he says, that their prayers on this day have efficacy to release their deceased relatives from purgatory, and that the dim taper flickering on the sod lights the unbound soul to its heavenly home. Of course these rites are not literal expressions of literal beliefs, but are

31 Andree, North America, p. 246.

32 Republic, book v. ch. 15.

33 R. Taylor, New Zealand, ch. 7.

34 Meiners, Kritische Geschichte der Religionen, buch iii. absch. 1.

symbols of ideas, emblems of sentiments, figurative and inadequate shadows of a theological doctrine, although, as is well known, there is, among the most ignorant persons, scarcely any deliberately apprehended distinction between image and entity, material representation and spiritual verity.

If a member of the Oneida tribe died when they were away from home, they buried him with great solemnity, setting a mark over the grave; and whenever they passed that way afterwards they visited the spot, singing a mournful song and casting stones upon it, thus giving symbolic expression to their feelings. It would be absurd to suppose this song an incantation to secure the repose of the buried brave, and the stones thrown to prevent his rising; yet it would not be more incredible or more remote from the facts than many a commonly current interpretation of barbarian usages. An amusing instance of error well enforcing the need of extreme caution in drawing inferences is afforded by the example of those explorers who, finding an extensive cemetery where the aborigines had buried all their children apart from the adults, concluded they had discovered the remains of an ancient race of pigmies! 35

The influence of unspeculative affection, memory, and sentiment goes far towards accounting for the funeral ritual of the barbarians. But it is not sufficient. We must call in further aid; and that aid we find in the arbitrary conceits, the poetic associations, and the creative force of unregulated fancy and imagination. The poetic faculty which, supplied with materials by observation and speculation, constructed the complex mythologies of Egypt and Greece, and which, turning on its own resources, composed the Arabian tales of the genii and the modern literature of pure fiction, is particularly active, fertile, and tyrannical, though in a less continuous and systematic form, in the barbarian mind. Acting by wild fits and starts, there is no end to the extravagant conjectures and visions it bodies forth. Destitute of philosophical definitions, totally unacquainted with critical distinctions or analytic reflection, absurd notions, sober convictions, dim dreams, and sharp perceptions run confusedly together in the minds of savages. There is to them no clear and permanent demarcation between rational thoughts and crazy fancies. Now, no phenomenon can strike more deeply or work more powerfully in human nature, stirring up the exploring activities of intellect and imagination, than the event of death, with its bereaving stroke and prophetic appeal. Accordingly, we should expect to find among uncultivated nations, as we actually do, a vast medley of fragmentary thoughts and pictures plausible, strange, lovely, or terrible relating to the place and fate of the disembodied soul. These conceptions would naturally take their shaping and coloring, in some degree, from thescenery, circumstances, and experience amidst which they were conceived and born. Sometimes these figments were consciously entertained as wilful inventions, distinctly contemplated as poetry. Sometimes they were superstitiously credited in all their grossness with full assent of soul. Sometimes all coexisted in vague bewilderment. These lines of separation unquestionably existed: the difficulty is to know where, in given instances, to draw them. A few examples will serve at once to illustrate the

35 Smithsonian Contributions, vol. ii. Squier's Aboriginal Monuments, appendix, pp. 127-131.

operation of the principle now laid down, and to present still further specimens of the barbarian notions of a future life.

Some Indian tribes made offerings to the spirits of their departed heroes by casting the boughs of various trees around the ash, saying that the branches of this tree were eloquent with the ghosts of their warrior sires, who came at evening in the chariot of cloud to fire the young to deeds of war.36 There is an Indian legend of a witch who wore a mantle composed of the scalps of murdered women. Taking this off, she shook it, and all the scalps uttered shrieks of laughter. Another describes a magician scudding across a lake in a boat whose ribs were live rattlesnakes.37 An exercise of mind virtually identical with that which gave these strokes made the Philippine Islanders say that the souls of those who die struck by lightning go up the beams of the rainbow to a happy place, and animated Ali to declare that the pious, on coming out of their sepulchres, shall find awaiting them white winged camels with saddles of gold. The Ajetas suspended the bow and arrows of a deceased Papuan above his grave, and conceived him as emerging from beneath every night to go a hunting.38 The fisherman on the coast of Lapland was interred in a boat, and a flint and combustibles were given him to light him along the dark cavernous passage he was to traverse. The Dyaks of Borneo believe that every one whose head they can get possession of here will in the future state be their servant: consequently, they make a business of "head hunting," accumulating the ghastly visages of their victims in their huts.39 The Caribs have a sort of sensual paradise for the "brave and virtuous," where, it is promised, they shall enjoy the sublimated experience of all their earthly satisfactions; but the "degenerate and cowardly" are threatened with eternal banishment beyond the mountains, where they shall be tasked and driven as slaves by their enemies.40 The Hispaniolians locate their elysium in a pleasant valley abounding with guava, delicious fruits, cool shades, and murmuring rivulets, where they expect to live again with their departed ancestors and friends.41 The Patagonians say the stars are their translated countrymen, and the milky way is a field where the departed Patagonians hunt ostriches. Clouds are the feathers of the ostriches they kill.42 The play is here seen of the same mythological imagination which, in Italy, pictured a writhing giant beneath Mount Vesuvius, and, in Greenland, looked on the Pleiades as a group of dogs surrounding a white bear, and on the belt of Orion as a company of Greenlanders placed there because they could not find the way to their own country. Black Bird, the redoubtable chief of the O Ma Haws, when dying, said to his people, "Bury me on yonder lofty bluff on the banks of the Missouri, where I can see the men and boats passing by on the river." 43 Accordingly, as soon as he ceased

36 Browne, Trees of America, p. 328.

37 Schoolcraft, Hist. &c part i. pp. 32-34.

38 Earl, The Papuans, p. 132.

39 Earl, The Eastern Seas, ch. 8.

40 Edwards, Hist. of the West Indies, book i. ch. 2.

41 Ibid. ch. 3.

42 Falkner, Patagonia, ch. 5.

43 Catlin, North American Indians, vol. ii. p. 6.

to breathe, they set him there, on his favorite steed, and heaped the earth around him. This does not imply any believed doctrine, in our sense of the term, but is plainly a spontaneous transference for the moment, by the poetic imagination, of the sentiments of the living man to the buried body.

The unhappy Africans who were snatched from their homes, enslaved and cruelly tasked in the far West India islands, pined under their fate with deadly homesickness. The intense longing moulded their plastic belief, just as the sensation from some hot bricks at the feet of a sleeping man shaped his dreams into a journey up the side of Atna. They fancied that if they died they should immediately live again in their fatherland. They committed suicide in great numbers. At last, when other means had failed to check this epidemic of self destruction, a cunning overseer brought them ropes and every facility for hanging, and told them to hang themselves as fast as they pleased, for their master had bought a great plantation in Africa, and as soon as they got there they would be set to work on it. Their helpless credulity took the impression; and no more suicides occurred.44

The mutual formative influences exerted upon a people's notions concerning the future state, by the imagination of their poets and the peculiarities of their clime, are perhaps nowhere more conspicuously exhibited than in the case of the Caledonians who at an early period dwelt in North Britain. They had picturesque traditions locating the habitation of ghosts in the air above their fog draped mountains. They promised rewards for nothing but valor, and threatened punishments for nothing but cowardice; and even of these they speak obscurely. Nothing is said of an under world. They supposed the ghosts at death floated upward naturally, true children of the mist, and dwelt forever in the air, where they spent an inane existence, indulging in sorrowful memories of the past, and, in unreal imitation of their mortal occupations, chasing boars of fog amid hills of cloud and valleys of shadow. The authority for these views is Ossian, "whose genuine strains," Dr. Good observes, "assume a higher importance as historical records than they can claim when considered as fragments of exquisite poetry."

"A dark red stream comes down from the hill. Crugal sat upon the beam; he that lately fell by the hand of Swaran striving in the battle of heroes. His face is like the beam of the setting moon; his robes are of the clouds of the hill; his eyes are like two decaying flames; dark is the wound on his breast. The stars dim twinkled through his form, and his voice was like the sound of a distant stream. Dim and in tears he stood, and stretched his pale hand over the hero. Faintly he raised his feeble voice, like the gale of the reedy Lego. 'My ghost, O'Connal, is on my native hills, but my corse is on the sands of Ullin. Thou shalt never talk with Crugal nor find his lone steps on the heath. I am light as the blast of Cromla, and I move like the shadow of mist. Connal, son of Colgar, I see the dark cloud of death. It hovers over the plains of Lena. The sons of green Erin shall fall. Remove from the field of ghosts.' Like the darkened moon, he retired in the midst of the whistling blast."

We recognise here several leading traits in all the early unspeculative faiths, the vapory form, the echoless motion, the marks of former wounds, the feeble voice, the memory

44 Meiners, Geschichte der Religionen, buch xiv. sect. 765.

of the past, the mournful aspect, and the prophetic words. But the rhetorical imagery, the scenery, the location of the spirit world in the lower clouds, are stamped by emphatic climatic peculiarities, whose origination, easily traceable, throws light on the growth of the whole mass of such notions everywhere.

Two general sources have now been described of the barbarian conceptions in relation to a future state. First, the natural operation of an earnest recollection of the dead; sympathy, regret, and reverence for them leading the thoughts and the heart to grope after them, to brood over the possibilities of their fate, and to express themselves in rites and emblems. Secondly, the mythological or arbitrary creations of the imagination when it is set strongly at work, as it must be by the solemn phenomena associated with death. But beyond these two comprehensive statements there is, directly related to the matter, and worthy of separate illustration, a curious action of the mind, which has been very extensively experienced and fertile of results. It is a peculiar example of the unconscious impartation of objective existence to mental ideas. With the death of the body the man does not cease to live in the remembrance, imagination, and heart of his surviving friends. By an unphilosophical confusion, this internal image is credited as an external existence. The dead pass from their customary haunts in our society to the imperishable domain of ideas. This visionary world of memory and fantasy is projected outward, located, furnished, and constitutes the future state apprehended by the barbarian mind. Feuerbach says in his subtle and able Thoughts on Death and Immortality, "The Realm of Memory is the Land of Souls." Ossian, amid the midnight mountains, thinking of departed warriors and listening to the tempest, fills the gale with the impersonations, of his thoughts, and exclaims, "I hear the steps of the dead in the dark eddying blast."

The barbarian brain seems to have been generally impregnated with the feeling that every thing else has a ghost as well as man. The Gauls lent money in this world upon bills payable in the next. They threw letters upon the funeral pile to be read by the soul of the deceased.45 As the ghost was thought to retain the scars of injuries inflicted upon the body, so, it appears, these letters were thought, when destroyed, to leave impressions of what had been written on them. The custom of burning or burying things with the dead probably arose, in some cases at least, from the supposition that every object has its mancs. The obolus for Charon, the cake of honey for Cerberus, the shadows of these articles would be borne and used by the shadow of the dead man. Leonidas saying, "Bury me on my shield: I will enter even Hades as a Lacedamonian," 46 must either have used the word Hades by metonymy for the grave, or have imagined that a shadowy fac simile of what was interred in the grave went into the grim kingdom of Pluto. It was a custom with some Indian tribes, on the new made grave of a chief, to slay his chosen horse; and when he fell they supposed

"That then, upon the dead man's plain, The rider grasp'd his steed again."

45 Pomponius Mela, De Orbis Situ, iii. 2.

46 Translation of Greek Anthology, in Bohn's Library, p. 58.

The hunter chases the deer, each alike a shade. A Feejee once, in presence of a missionary, took a weapon from the grave of a buried companion, saying, "The ghost of the club has gone with him." The Iroquois tell of a woman who was chased by a ghost. She heard his faint war whoop, his spectre voice, and only escaped with her life because his war club was but a shadow wielded by an arm of air. The Slavonians sacrificed a warrior's horse at his tomb.47 Nothing seemed to the Northman so noble as to enter Valhalla on horseback, with a numerous retinue, in his richest apparel and finest armor. It was firmly believed, Mallet says, that Odin himself had declared that whatsoever was burned or buried with the dead accompanied them to his palace.48 Before the Mohammedan era, on the death of an Arab, the finest camel he had owned was tied to a stake beside his grave, and left to expire of hunger over the body of his master, in order that, in the region into which death had introduced him, he should be supplied with his usual bearer.49 The Chinese who surpass all other people in the offerings and worship paid at the sepulchres of their ancestors make little paper houses, fill them with images of furniture, utensils, domestics, and all the appurtenances of the family economy, and then burn them, thus passing them into the invisible state for the use of the deceased whom they mourn and honor.50 It is a touching thought with the Greenlanders, when a child dies, to bury a dog with him as a guide to the land of souls; for, they say, the dog is able to find his way anywhere.51 The shadow of the faithful servant guides the shadow of the helpless child to heaven. In fancy, not without a moved heart, one sees this spiritual Bernard dog bearing the ghost child on his back, over the spectral Gothard of death, safe into the sheltering hospice of the Greenland paradise.

It is strange to notice the meeting of extremes in the rude antithetical correspondence between Plato's doctrine of archetypal ideas, the immaterial patterns of earthly things, and the belief of savages in the ghosts of clubs, arrows, sandals, and provisions. The disembodied soul of the philosopher, an eternal idea, turns from the empty illusions of matter to nourish itself with the substance of real truth. The spectre of the Mohawk devours the spectre of the haunch of roast venison hung over his grave. And why should not the two shades be conceived, if either?

"Pig, bullock, goose, must have their goblins too, Else ours would have to go without their dinners: If that starvation doctrine were but true, How hard the fate of gormandizing sinners!"

The conception of ghosts has been still further introduced also into the realm of mathematics in an amusing manner. Bishop Berkeley, bantered on his idealism by Halley, retorted that he too was an idealist; for his ultimate ratios terms only appearing with the

47 Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro, vol. i. ch. 1.

48 Northern Antiquities, ch. 10.

49 Lamartine, History of Turkey, book i. ch. 10.

50 Kidd, China, sect. 3.

51 Crantz, History of Greenland, book iii. ch. 6, sect. 47.

disappearance of the forms in whose relationship they consist were but the ghosts of departed quantities! It may be added here that, according to the teachings of physiological psychology, all memories or recollected ideas are literally the ghosts of departed sensations.

We have thus seen that the conjuring force of fear, with its dread apparitions, the surmising, half articulate struggles of affection, the dreams of memory, the lights and groups of poetry, the crude germs of metaphysical speculation, the deposits of the inter action of human experience and phenomenal nature, now in isolated fragments, again, huddled indiscriminately together conspire to compose the barbarian notions of a future life.

CHAPTER II.

DRUIDIC DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.

THAT strange body of men, commonly known as the Druids, who constituted what may, with some correctness, be called the Celtic priesthood, were the recognised religious teachers throughout Gaul, Armorica, a small part of Germany on the southern border, all Great Britain, and some neighboring islands. The notions in regard to a future life put forth by them are stated only in a very imperfect manner by the Greek and Roman authors in whose surviving works we find allusions to the Druids or accounts of the Celts. Several modern writers especially Borlase, in his Antiquities of Cornwall1 have collected all these references from Diodorus, Strabo, Procopius, Tacitus, Casar, Mela, Valerius Maximus, and Marcellinus. It is therefore needless to cite the passages here, the more so as, even with the aid of all the analytic and constructive comments which can be fairly made upon them, they afford us only a few general views, leaving all the details in profound obscurity. The substance of what we learn from these sources is this. First, that the Druids possessed a body of science and speculation comprising the doctrine of immortality, which they taught with clearness and authority. Secondly, that they inculcated the belief in a future life in inseparable connection with the great dogma of metempsychosis. Thirdly, that the people held such cheerful and attractive views of the future state, and held them with such earnestness, that they wept around the newborn infant and smiled around the corpse; that they encountered death without fear or reluctance. This reversal of natural sentiments shows the tampering of a priesthood who had motives.

A somewhat more minute conception of the Druidic view of the future life is furnished us by an old mythologic tale of Celtic origin.2 Omitting the story, as irrelevant to our purpose, we derive from it the following ideas. The soul, on being divested of its earthly envelop, is borne aloft. The clouds are composed of the souls of lately deceased men. They fly over the heads of armies, inspiring courage or striking terror. Not yet freed from terrestrial affections, they mingle in the passions and affairs of men. Vainly they strive to soar above the atmosphere; an impassable wall of sapphire resists their wings. In the moon, millions of souls traverse tremendous plains of ice, losing all perception but that of simple existence, forgetting the adventures they have passed through and are about to recommence. During eclipses, on long tubes of darkness they return to the earth, and, revived by a beam of light from the all quickening sun, enter newly formed bodies, and begin again the career of life. The disk of the sun consists of an assemblage of pure souls swimming in an ocean of bliss. Souls sullied with earthly impurities are to be purged by repeated births and probations till the last stain is removed, and they are all finally fitted to ascend to a succession of spheres still higher than the sun, whence they can never sink again to reside in the circle of the lower globes and grosser atmosphere.

1 Book ii. ch. 14.

2 Davies, Celtic Researches, appendix, pp. 558-561.

These representations are neither Gothic nor Roman, but Celtic.

But a far more adequate exposition of the Druidic doctrine of the soul's destinies has been presented to us through the translation of some of the preserved treasures of the old Bardic lore of Wales. The Welsh bards for hundreds of years were the sole surviving representatives of the Druids. Their poems numerous manuscripts of which, with apparent authentication of their genuineness, have been published and explained contain quite full accounts of the tenets of Druidism, which was nowhere else so thoroughly systematized and established as in ancient Britain.3 The curious reader will find this whole subject copiously treated, and all the materials furnished, in the "Myvyrian Archaology of Wales," a work in two huge volumes, published at London at the beginning of the present century. After the introduction and triumph of Christianity in Britain, for several centuries the two systems of thought and ritual mutually influenced each other, corrupting and corrupted.4 A striking example in point is this. The notion of a punitive and remedial transmigration belonged to Druidism. Now, Taliesin, a famous Welsh bard of the sixth century, locates this purifying metempsychosis in the Hell of Christianity, whence the soul gradually rises again to felicity, the way for it having been opened by Christ! Cautiously eliminating the Christian admixtures, the following outline, which we epitomize from the pioneer5 of modern scholars to the Welsh Bardic literature, affords a pretty clear knowledge of that portion of the Druidic theology relating to the future life.

There are, says one of the Bardic triads, three circles of existence. First, the Circle of Infinity, where of living or dead there is nothing but God, and which none but God can traverse. Secondly, the Circle of Metempsychosis, where all things that live are derived from death. This circle has been traversed by man. Thirdly, the Circle of Felicity, where all things spring from life. This circle man shall hereafter traverse. All animated beings originate in the lowest point of existence, and, by regular gradations through an ascending series of transmigrations, rise to the highest state of perfection possible for finite creatures. Fate reigns in all the states below that of humanity, and they are all necessarily evil. In the states above humanity, on the contrary, unmixed good so prevails that all are necessarily good. But in the middle state of humanity, good and evil are so balanced that liberty results; and free will and consequent responsibility are born. Beings who in their ascent have arrived at the state of man, if, by purity, humility, love, and righteousness, they keep the laws of the Creator, will, after death, rise into more glorious spheres, and will continue to rise still higher, until they reach the final destination of complete and endless happiness. But if, while in the state of humanity, one perverts his reason and will, and attaches himself to evil, he will, on dying, fall into such a state of animal existence as corresponds with the baseness of his soul. This baseness may be so great as to precipitate him to the lowest point of being; but he shall climb thence through a series of births best fitted to free him from his evil propensities. Restored to the probationary state, he may fall again; but, though this should occur again and again

3 Sketch of British Bardism, prefixed to Owen's translation of the Heroic Elegies of Llywarch Hen.

4 Herbert, Essay on the Neo Druidic Heresy in Britannia.

5 Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, by Edward Williams, vol. ii. notes, pp. 194-256.

for a million of ages, the path to happiness still remains open, and he shall at last infallibly arrive at his preordained felicity, and fall nevermore. In the states superior to humanity, the soul recovers and retains the entire recollection of its former lives.

We will quote a few illustrative triads. There are three necessary purposes of metempsychosis: to collect the materials and properties of every nature; to collect the knowledge of every thing; to collect power towards removing whatever is pernicious. The knowledge of three things will subdue and destroy evil: knowledge of its cause, its nature, and its operation. Three things continually dwindle away: the Dark, the False, the Dead. Three things continually increase: Light, Truth, Life.

These will prevail, and finally absorb every thing else. The soul is an inconceivably minute particle of the most refined matter, endowed with indestructible life, at the dissolution of one body passing, according to its merits, into a higher or lower stage of existence, where it expands itself into that form which its acquired propensities necessarily give it, or into that animal in which such propensities naturally reside. The ultimate states of happiness are ceaselessly undergoing the most delightful renovations, without which, indeed, no finite being could endure the tedium of eternity. These are not, like the death of the lower states, accompanied by a suspension of memory and of conscious identity. All the innumerable modes of existence, after being cleansed from every evil, will forever remain as beautiful varieties in the creation, and will be equally esteemed, equally happy, equally fathered by the Creator. The successive occupation of these modes of existence by the celestial inhabitants of the Circle of Felicity will be one of the ways of varying what would otherwise be the intolerable monotony of eternity. The creation is yet in its infancy. The progressive operation of the providence of God will bring every being up from the great Deep to the point of liberty, and will at last secure three things for them: namely, what is most beneficial, what is most desired, and what is most beautiful. There are three stabilities of existence: what cannot be otherwise, what should not be otherwise, what cannot be imagined better; and in these all shall end, in the Circle of Felicity.

Such is a hasty synopsis of what here concerns us in the theology of the Druids. In its ground germs it was, it seems to us, unquestionably imported into Celtic thought and Cymrian song from that prolific and immemorial Hindu mind which bore Brahmanism and Buddhism as its fruit. Its ethical tone, intellectual elevation, and glorious climax are not unworthy that free hierarchy of minstrel priests whose teachings were proclaimed, as their assemblies were held, "in the face of the sun and in the eye of the light," and whose thrilling motto was, "THE TRUTH AGAINST THE WORLD."

The latest publication on the subject of old Welsh literature is "Taliesin; or, The Bards and Druids of Britain." The author, D. W. Nash, is obviously familiar with his theme, and he throws much light on many points of it. His ridicule of the arbitrary tenets and absurdities which Davies, Pughe, and others have taught in all good faith as Druidic lore and practice is richly deserved. But, despite the learning and acumen displayed in his able and valuable volume, we must think Mr. Nash goes wholly against the record in denying the doctrine of metempsychosis to the Druidic system, and goes clearly beyond the record in charging Edward Williams and others with forgery and fraud in their representations of ancient Bardic doctrines.6 In support of such grave charges direct evidence is needed; only suspicious circumstances are adduced. The non existence of public documents is perfectly reconcilable with the existence of reliable oral accounts preserved by the initiated few, one of whom Williams, with seeming sincerity, claimed to be.

6 Taliesin, ch. iv.

CHAPTER III.

SCANDINAVIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.

MANY considerations combine to make it seem likely that at an early period a migration took place from Southern Asia to Northern Europe, which constituted the commencement of what afterwards grew to be the great Gothic family. The correspondence of many of the leading doctrines and symbols of the Scandinavian mythology with well known Persian and Buddhist notions notions of a purely fanciful and arbitrary character is too peculiar, apparently, to admit of any other explanation.1 But the germs of thought and imagination transplanted thus from the warm and gorgeous climes of the East to the snowy mountains of Norway and the howling ridges of Iceland, obtained a fresh development, with numerous modifications and strange additions, from the new life, climate, scenery, and customs to which they were there exposed. The temptation to predatory habits and strife, the necessity for an intense though fitful activity arising from their geographical situation, the fierce spirit nourished in them by their actual life, the tremendous phenomena of the Arctic world around them, all these influences break out to our view in the poetry, and are reflected by their results in the religion, of the Northmen.

From the flame world, Muspelheim, in the south, in which Surtur, the dread fire king, sits enthroned, flowed down streams of heat. From the mist world, Niflheim, in the north, in whose central caldron, Hvergelmir, dwells the gloomy dragon Nidhogg, rose floods of cold vapor. The fire and mist meeting in the yawning abyss, Ginungagap, after various stages of transition, formed the earth. There were then three principal races of beings: men, whose dwelling was Midgard; Jotuns, who occupied Utgard; and the Asir, whose home was Asgard. The Jotuns, or demons, seem to have been originally personifications of darkness, cold, and storm, the disturbing forces of nature, whatever is hostile to fruitful life and peace. They were frost giants ranged in the outer wastes around the habitable fields of men. The Asir, or gods, on the other hand, appear to have been personifications of light, and law, and benignant power, the orderly energies of the universe. Between the Jotuns and the Asir there is an implacable contest.2 The rainbow, Bifrost, is a bridge leading from earth up to the skyey dwelling place of the Asir; and their sentinel, Heimdall, whose senses are so acute that he can hear the grass spring in the meadows and the wool grow on the backs of the sheep, keeps incessant watch upon it. Their chief deity, the father Zeus of the Northern pantheon, was Odin, the god of war, who wakened the spirit of battle by flinging his spear over the heads of the people, its inaudible hiss from heaven being as the song of Ate let loose on earth. Next in rank was Thor, the personification of the exploding tempest. The crashing echoes of the thunder are his chariot wheels rattling through the cloudy halls of Thrudheim. Whenever the lightning strikes a cliff or an iceberg, then Thor has flung his hammer, Mjolnir, at Joton's head.

1 Vans Kennedy, Ancient and Hindu Mythology, pp. 452, 463-464.

2 Thorpe, Northern Mythology, vol. ii.

Balder was the god of innocence and gentleness, fairest, kindest, purest of beings. Light emanated from him, and all things loved him. After Christianity was established in the North, Jesus was called the White Christ, or the new Balder. The appearance of Balder amidst the frenzied and bloody divinities of the Norse creed is beautiful as the dew cool moon hanging calmly over the lurid storm of Vesuvius. He was entitled the "Band in the Wreath of the Gods," because with his fate that of all the rest was bound up. His death, ominously foretold from eldest antiquity, would be the signal for the ruin of the universe. Asa Loki was the Momus Satan or Devil Buffoon of the Scandinavian mythology, the half amusing, half horrible embodiment of wit, treachery, and evil; now residing with the gods in heaven, now accompanying Thor on his frequent adventures, now visiting and plotting with his own kith and kin in frosty Jotunheim, beyond the earth environing sea, or in livid Helheim deep beneath the domain of breathing humanity.3

With a Jotun woman, Angerbode, or Messenger of Evil, Loki begets three fell children. The first is Fenris, a savage wolf, so large that nothing but space can hold him. The second is Jormungandur, who, with his tail in his mouth, fills the circuit of the ocean. He is described by Sir Walter Scott as

"That great sea snake, tremendous curl'd, Whose monstrous circle girds the world."

The third is Hela, the grim goddess of death, whose ferocious aspect is half of a pale blue and half of a ghastly white, and whose empire, stretching below the earth through Niflheim, is full of freezing vapors and discomfortable sights. Her residence is the spacious under world; her court yard, faintness; her threshold, precipice; her door, abyss; her hall, pain; her table, hunger; her knife, starvation; her man servant, delay; her handmaid, slowness; her bed, sickness; her pillow, anguish; and her canopy, curse. Still lower than her house is an abode yet more fearful and loathsome. In Nastrond, or strand of corpses, stands a hall, the conception of which is prodigiously awful and enormously disgusting. It is plaited of serpents' backs, wattled together like wicker work, whose heads turn inwards, vomiting poison. In the lake of venom thus deposited within these immense wriggling walls of snakes the worst of the damned wade and swim.

High up in the sky is Odin's hall, the magnificent Valhalla, or temple of the slain. The columns supporting its ceiling are spears. It is roofed with shields, and the ornaments on its benches are coats of mail. The Valkyrs are Odin's battle maids, choosers of heroes for his banquet rooms. With helmets on their heads, in bloody harness, mounted on shadowy steeds, surrounded by meteoric lightnings, and wielding flaming swords, they hover over the conflict and point the way to Valhalla to the warriors who fall. The valiant souls thus received to Odin's presence are called Einheriar, or the elect. The Valkyrs, as white clad virgins with flowing ringlets, wait on them in the capacity of cup bearers. Each morning, at the crowing

3 Oehlenschlager, Gods of the North. This celebrated and brilliant poem, with the copious notes in Frye's translation, affords the English reader a full conception of the Norse pantheon and its salient adventures.

of a huge gold combed cock, the well armed Einheriar rush through Valhalla's five hundred and forty doors into a great court yard, and pass the day in merciless fighting. However pierced and hewn in pieces in these fearful encounters, at evening every wound is healed, and they return into the hall whole, and are seated, according to their exploits, at a luxurious feast. The perennial boar Sehrimnir, deliciously cooked by Andrimnir, though devoured every night, is whole again every morning and ready to be served anew. The two highest joys these terrible berserkers and vikings knew on earth composed their experience in heaven: namely, a battle by day and a feast by night. It is a vulgar error, long prevalent, that the Valhalla heroes drink out of the skulls of their enemies. This notion, though often refuted, still lingers in the popular mind. It arose from the false translation of a phrase in the death song of Ragnar Lodbrok, the famous sea king, "Soon shall we drink from the curved trees of the head," which, as a figure for the usual drinking horns, was erroneously rendered by Olaus Wormius, "Soon shall we drink from the hollow cups of skulls." It is not the heads of men, but the horns of beasts, from which the Einheriar quaff Heidrun's mead.4

No women being ever mentioned as gaining admission to Valhalla or joining in the joys of the Einheriar, some writers have affirmed that, according to the Scandinavian faith, women had no immortal souls, or, at all events, were excluded from heaven. The charge is as baseless in this instance as when brought against Mohammedanism. Valhalla was the exclusive abode of the most daring champions; but Valhalla was not the whole of heaven. Vingolf, the Hall of Friends, stood beside the Hall of the Slain, and was the assembling place of the goddesses.5 There, in the palace of Freya, the souls of noble women were received after death. The elder Edda says that Thor guided Roska, a swift footed peasant girl who had attended him as a servant on various excursions, to Freya's bower, where she was welcomed, and where she remained forever. The virgin goddess Gefjone, the Northern Diana, also had a residence in heaven, and all who died maidens repaired thither.6 The presence of virgin throngs with Gefjone, and the society of noble matrons in Vingolf, shed a tender gleam across the carnage and carousal of Valhalla. More is said of the latter the former is scarcely visible to us now because the only record we have of the Norse faith is that contained in the fragmentary strains of ferocious Skalds, who sang chiefly to warriors, and the staple matter of whose songs was feats of martial prowess or entertaining mythological stories. Furthermore, there is above the heaven of the Asir a yet higher heaven, the abode of the far removed and inscrutable being, the rarely named Omnipotent One, the true All Father, who is at last to come forth above the ruins of the universe to judge and sentence all creatures and to rebuild a better world. In this highest region towers the imperishable gold roofed hall, Gimle, brighter than the sun. There is no hint anywhere in the Skaldic strains that good women are repulsed from this dwelling.