Page:Bierce - Collected Works - Volume 03.djvu/119

Rh rather a sense of the supernatural- in which he did not at all believe.

"I have inherited it," he said to himself. "I suppose it will require a thousand ages- perhaps ten thousand- for humanity to outgrow this feeling. Where and when did it originate? Away back, probably, in what is called the cradle of the human race- the plains of Central Asia. What we inherit as a superstition our barbarous ancestors must have held as a reasonable conviction. Doubtless they believed themselves justified by facts whose nature we cannot even conjecture in thinking a dead body a malign thing endowed with some strange power of mischief, with perhaps a will and a purpose to exert it. Possibly they had some awful form of religion of which that was one of the chief doctrines, sedulously taught by their priesthood, as ours teach the immortality of the soul. As the Aryans moved slowly on, to and through the Caucasus passes, and spread over Europe, new conditions of life must have resulted in the formulation of new religions. The old belief in the malevolence of the dead body was lost from the creeds and even perished from tradition, but it left its heritage of terror, which is transmitted from generation to generation