Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/223

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those who in this world lead wicked lives take the shape of ghosts, and are compelled ever after to remain near the place where they died. (Grinnell : Blackfoot Lodge Tales, 273.) The Tahitans invented a kind of purgatory, and supposed that, in the case of all but the very pure, the spirit of the dying man was scraped with a shell in the dwelling of the gods, served up at their table, and eaten and ejected three times in succession, when it was fit for the Tahitian paradise, to which the very pure are admitted with- out preliminary preparation. (Featherman : Races of Mankind, Division II., 37.) The idea of a future of eternal punishment is not derived from the beliefs of those we are pleased to call savages. When the Egyptian mythologists formed the conception of a judging or weighing of souls, on which their religious system turned, that of the punishment of those who are condemned or found wanting was necessarily involved in it. That punishment appears to have included fiery torment, and was thus the precursor of the Christian hell, though it seems to have ended in annihila- tion, which in their religious ideas was itself a punishment. The evidence of an Assyrian hell is but slight. Brahman hells form a very elaborate system, both as to the offences that lead to them and the forms of torture inflicted in them. He who explains the sacred law to a low-caste person gets very severely handled, and his disciple as well. The Buddhist hell is probably that which has most directly influenced the mediaeval imaginations with which we are familiar ; it contains the elements of boiling in various liquids, worrying by animals, sulphurous and tormenting flame, mutilation, and the other incidents of horror which the church decorators of the Middle Ages used to think edifying. Mr. Mew quotes at some length a Chinese treatise, called '' The Divine Panorama, published by the mercy of Yii Ti, that men and women may repent them of their faults and make atonement for their crimes," describing ten courts, held by infernal judges, in which offenders of various kinds are tried and condemned, with illustrations of the punishments inflicted. The Zoroastrian hell introduces some ingenious varieties of torment. The Classic hell, with its furies, its "gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire," is familiar to us from many fine passages in the classical authors, but is not so startling as that which presented itself to the imagination in the dark ages. The Scandinavian hell and the Hebrew hell probably both contributed some elements to what is described as