The Ghost World. Dyer Thomas Firminger Thiselton

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СКАЧАТЬ the germ of the mediæval legends of shadowless men, and of tales of which Chamisso’s “Story of Peter Schlemihl” is a type.’41 Hence the dead in purgatory recognised that Dante was alive when they saw that, unlike theirs, his figure cast a shadow on the ground. But, as Mr. Fiske observes,42 ‘the theory which identifies the soul with the shadow, and supposes the shadow to depart with the sickness and death of the body, would seem liable to be attended with some difficulties in the way of verification, even to the dim intelligence of the savage.’

      Again, another doctrine promulgated under various forms in Animistic philosophy is, that the existence and condition of the soul depend upon the manner of death. The Australian, for instance, not content with slaying his enemy, cuts off the right thumb of the corpse, so that the departed soul may be incapacitated from throwing a spear; and even the half-civilised Chinese prefer the punishment of crucifixion to that of decapitation, that their souls may not wander headless about the spirit world. Similarly the Indians of Brazil ‘believe that the dead arrive in the other world wounded or hacked to pieces, in fact, just as they left this.’ European folk-lore has preserved, more or less, the same idea, and the ghost of the murdered person often appears displaying the wounds which were the cause of the death of the body. Many a weird and ghastly ghost tale still current in different parts of the country gives the most blood-curdling details of such apparitions; and although, in certain cases, a century or so is said to have elapsed since they first made their appearance, they still bear the marks of violence and cruelty which were done to them by a murderous hand when in the flesh. An old story tells how, when the Earl of Cornwall met the fetch of William Rufus carried on a very large black goat, all black and naked, across the Bodmin moors, he saw that it was wounded through the breast. Robert adjured the goat, in the name of the Holy Trinity, to tell what it was he carried so strangely. He answered, ‘I am carrying your king to judgment; yea, that tyrant, William Rufus, for I am an evil spirit, and the revenger of his malice which he bore to the Church of God. It was I that did cause this slaughter.’ Having spoken, the spectre vanished. Soon afterwards Robert heard that at that very hour the king had been slain in the New Forest by the arrow of William Tirell.43 This idea corresponds with what was believed in early times, for Ovid44 tells us how

      Umbra cruenta Remi visa est assistere lecto.

      Again, some modes of death are supposed to kill not only the body but also the soul. ‘Among all primitive peoples,’ writes Mr. Dorman,45 ‘where a belief in the renewal of life, or the resurrection, exists, the peace and happiness of the spirit, which remains in or about the body, depend upon success in preventing the body, or any part of it, from being devoured or destroyed in any manner.’ The New Zealanders believed that the man who was eaten was annihilated, both body and soul; and one day a bushman, who was a magician, having put to death a woman, dashed the head of the corpse to pieces with large stones, buried her, and made a large fire over the grave, for fear, as he explained, lest she should rise again and trouble him. The same idea, remarks Sir John Lubbock,46 evidently influenced the Californian, who did not dispute the immortality of the whites, who buried their dead, but could not believe the same of his own people, because they were in the habit of burning them, maintaining that when they were burnt they became annihilated.

      It may be added, too, that the belief underlying the burial customs of most American tribes was to preserve the bones of the dead, the opinion being that the soul, or a part of it, dwelt in the bones. These, indeed, were the seeds which, planted in the earth, or preserved unbroken in safe places, would in time put on once again a garb of flesh, and germinate into living human beings.47 This Animistic belief has been amply illustrated by mythology and superstition. In an Aztec legend, after one of the destructions of the world, Zoloti descended to the realm of the dead, and brought thence a bone of the perished race. This, sprinkled with blood, grew on the fourth day into a youth, the father of the present race. The practice of pulverising the bones of the dead, practised by some tribes, and of mixing them with the food, was defended by asserting that the souls of the dead remained in the bones, and lived again in the living.48 The Peruvians were so careful lest any of the body should be lost, that they preserved even the parings of the nails and clippings of the hair – expecting the mummified body to be inhabited by its soul; while the Choctaws maintain that the spirits of the dead will return to the bones in the bone mounds, and flesh will knit together their loose joints. Even the lower animals were supposed to follow the same law. ‘Hardly any of the American hunting-tribes,’ writes Mr. Brinton, ‘before their original manners were vitiated by foreign influence, permitted the bones of game slain in the chase to be broken, or left carelessly about the encampment; they were collected in heaps, or thrown into the water.’ The Yuricares of Bolivia carried this belief to such an inconvenient extent that they carefully put by even small fish bones, saying that unless this was done the fish and game would disappear from the country. The traveller on the western prairies often notices the buffalo skulls, countless numbers of which bleach on those vast plains, arranged in circles and symmetrical piles by the careful hands of the native hunters. The explanation for this practice is that these osseous relics of the dead ‘contain the spirits of the slain animals, and that some time in the future they will rise from the earth, re-clothe themselves with flesh, and stock the prairies anew.’

      As a curious illustration of how every spiritual conception was materialised in olden times, may be quoted the fanciful conception of the weight of the soul. Thus in mediæval literature the angel in the Last Judgment ‘was constantly represented weighing the souls in a literal balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavoured to disturb the equilibrium.’49 But how seriously such tests of the weight of the soul have been received, may be gathered from the cases now and then forthcoming of this materialistic notion of its nature. These, writes Dr. Tylor,50 range from the ‘conception of a Basuto diviner that the late queen had been bestriding his shoulders, and he never felt such a weight in his wife, to Glanvil’s story of David Hunter, the neatherd, who lifted up the old woman’s ghost, and she felt just like a bag of feathers in his arms; or the pathetic superstition that the dead mother’s coming back in the night to suckle the baby she has left on earth, may be known by the hollow pressed down in the bed where she lay, and at last down to the alleged modern spiritualistic reckoning of the weight of a human soul at from three to four ounces.’ But the heavy tread which occasionally makes the stairs creak and boards resound has been instanced as showing that, whatever may be the real nature of the soul, it is capable of materialising itself at certain times, and of displaying an amount of force and energy in no way dissimilar to that which is possessed when living in the flesh.

      Just, too, as souls are possessed of visible forms, so they are generally supposed to have voices. According to Dr. Tylor,51 ‘men who perceive evidently that souls do talk when they present themselves in dream or vision, naturally take for granted at once the objective reality of the ghostly voice, and of the ghostly form from which it proceeds;’ and this principle, he adds, ‘is involved in the series of narratives of spiritual communications with living men, from savagery onward to civilisation.’ European folk-lore represents ghostly voices as resembling their material form during life, although less audible. With savage races the spirit voice is described ‘as a low murmur, chirp, or whistle.’ Thus, when the ghosts of the New Zealanders address the living, they speak in whistling tones. The sorcerer among the Zulus ‘hears the spirits who speak by whistlings speaking to him.’ Whistling is the language of the Caledonians, and the Algonquin Indians of North America ‘could hear the shadow souls of the dead chirp like crickets.’ As far back as the time of Homer, the ghosts make a similar sound, ‘and even as bats flit gibbering in the secret place of a wonderful cavern, even so the souls gibbered as they fared together.’52

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