Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/217

Rh APPARITIONS 203 in dreams. Has lie then two selves 1 The problem is that which Hartley Coleridge resolved when a child &quot; There is a dream Hartley, a shadow Hartley, a picture Hartley, a hold-me-fast Hartley.&quot; &quot; When I sleep/ then the savage may conclude, &quot; one of my selves leaves the other to rest, and goes about its business. And in death, also, one self flies away, but it will not return it is homeless, hungry, wandering. Above all, it is a very strange thing, and, as strange, to be feared.&quot; A priori reasoning goes as far as this, and then confirmatory facts support the hypo thesis. In dreams he meets the dead warrior, and some of his friends have the same experience. And there is one of the tribe, the diviner or shaman, whose opinion they revere in these matters. He is thus described by a Zulu con vert &quot; When he is awake he sees things which he would not see if he were not in a trance.&quot; He knows how to produce trances by fasting, by inhaling the smoke of herbs, and by the use of strange oils. He sees things before they happen, and tells how, when awake, he beheld the slain warrior, and promised to appease his hunger with sacrifice of cattle. There can scarcely be any other conclusion from these facts, as far as they are known to the savage, except that the dead yet live, and appear to the living, and keep their old passions and their old wants. Now this belief in apparitions, thus stated, is capable of much development. The favourite ancestral spirit of the strongest tribe will tend to absorb the lion s share of sacri fice and hymns, and to become such a hero as Theseus was to the Athenians. Many other influences produce a still higher religion, a circle of Olympian gods, a philosophic and intellectual monotheism. The family of the seer will perhaps become a sacred caste, like the Eumolpidse at Athens. An early civilisation is formed, with its philoso phers, holding in secret a monotheism of their own, with its city population pleased by stately temples and hieratic splendours, but we must remember that all this time the pagani, the rural people of the hills and the coast, come very little under the influence of philosophy or of ritual. They still retain the old dread of the ghosts of the departed, and still people the woods and wells with wandering spirits. As slaves and nurses they enter the cultivated families, their old wives fables impress the awakening imagination of childhood, and the earliest of all forms of belief in the supernatural finds its way back into the circle of culture. At last there comes a time of decadence, when the abstract notion of Deity seems too vague and distant, when the Olympian gods are no longer credible, and philosophy falls back in despair on the traditional ghosts of the nursery and of the Oriental slaves. Thus Neo-Platonism reinstated apparitions as demons, angels, powers ; and thus Henry More and Joseph Glanvil combated the scepticism of the seventeenth century with stories of haunted houses, and of the mysterious drummer of Ted worth. - If this theory of the origin of the belief in apparitions be correct, it tends to explain what certainly is a difficulty the identity of ghost stories in all lands and times, the conservatism of that great majority, the dead. For the further we go back in the history of civilisation, as in the works of nature, the simpler, the more identical, the more widely diffused are all its productions. The earliest im plements for lighting fires, the earliest weapons, are not more alike than the earliest guesses of speculation and the earliest efforts of fancy. These oldest fancies dream of apparitions of the dead, and are preserved below the level of advancing culture, and insinuated into the ideas of the cultivated classes by the classes which are unprogressive, unaffected on the whole by religious or social changes. It is for this reason that magical rites are everywhere the same, as M. Maury has observed that the Scotch witch had the same spells as the Kaffir witch, that Balzac s description of a Parisian sorceress in Le Cousin Pons might serve as an account of a Finnish wise-woman. It is not strange that superstition and ignorance should always tell the same baseless tale if they have always treasured and still repeat the earliest and crudest fancies of the race. Nothing shows more clearly the purity of ancient culture than the absence of superstition in the Greek as compared with our Teutonic classics. Supposing the origin of the belief in apparitions, and its identity in different peoples, to be thus accounted for, it remains to ask if the surviving forms of the creed can be traced back to a primitive source. In entering the cloud- land of folk-lore it is impossible to advance too cautiously. Xhis is a realm where nothing is fixed and definite ; where all is vague, floating, confused. He who would call up and try the spirits here must not place himself within too narrow a magic circle, but extend his view as far as pos sible to the beliefs of the most alien and distant races. The apparitions of popular superstition fall into classes which always tend to be merged in each other, but which are not so indistinct that they cannot be considered apart. No form is better known than the belief in fairies. All Fairies over Europe fireside tradition tells of women who haunt lonely places, where they are seen to dance, to spin, to comb their long hair. They cause inexplicable nervous diseases epilepsy and St Vitus s dance ; they have a king dom underground, whither they alhire their lovers ; they appear with fatal gifts at children s birth ; they steal the children of mortals away, and leave changelings of their own. Our fathers dreaded them as the good folk, in Tweeddale and Ettrickdale ; the Highlanders call them the folk of peace ; in Greece they are nereids ; in Servia, tvilis; in Bretagne, korrigans; in Russia, rusalkas. They ought, if our hypothesis is correct, to be traceable to the lower spirits who in pagan times informed woods and wastes, and dwelt by the hearth ; who had no temples to be overthrown or changed into Christian churches. The forests sheltered them when the fane of Jupiter fell, and the house of Theseus became the church of St George. The women concealed the hearth-spirit, as Rachel did Laban s gods, in the furniture of their houses. Rude and rustic people kept up the traditional belief, and the scant offering by the haunted well that the Highlanders of Perthshire still do not care to withhold. The capitularies of Liutbrand for bade such sacrifices ; a series of councils repeated the prohibition. The result of these ecclesiastical allusions to &quot; the lesser people of the skies &quot; is that we can trace the French fees back to the fata of classical mythology. Fees in old French is faes ; faes is the fadce of Gervase of Til bury in his Otia Imperialia (1220) ; fadce is a corruption of fata, who are named with bonai, les bonnes dames (the good ladies) among the superstitions of the Gauls. Such is the pedigree of the fe&quot;es, as traced by M. Maury in his interesting tract, Les Fees du, Hoy en Age. Further infor mation, to show the identity of the superstition, will be found in Scott s essay in the Border Minstrelsy, in Bern- hard von Schmidt s Peasant Life in Modern Greece, in Pashley s Travels in Greece, in Ralston s Folk-Songs of Russia, and in the Barzaz Breiz of the Marquis de la Villemarque. Now turn to Kaffir superstition. Dr Call- away, in the Religious System of the Amazalu, p. 226, writes thus : &quot; It may be worth while to note the curious coincidence of thought among the Amazalu regarding the amatongo or abapansi (ancestral spirits), and that of the Scotch or Irish regarding the fairies or good people. For instance, the good people of the Irish have ascribed to them, in many respects, the same motives and actions as the amatongo. They call the living to join them, that is, by death ; they cause diseases .which common doctors cannot understand nor cure. The common people call