Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/404

366 homes was very carefully followed; a pair of open scissors laid on the dead person's chest, small pieces of straw laid crosswise under the shroud. The great toes were tied together so that the legs could not be separated. Needles were run into the soles of the feet, and when the coffin was carried out, the bearers, just within the threshold of the door, raised and lowered it three times in different directions so as to form a cross. When the coffin had left the house, all chairs or stools on which it had rested were upset, all jars and saucepans turned upside down, and, when the parson on the churchyard prays for the rest of the dead, "reads into his hat," he is supposed to bind the dead to the grave with magic words, to keep him fast. I don't mean to say that all these ceremonies were observed at every death; amongst others was the custom to strew flax-seed round the house, but in some places one of these customs was observed, in others another, and so by degrees the whole group might be discovered.

What then is the meaning of all this? For a meaning there must have been; it is not likely that funeral customs which have spread all over Scandinavia, including Iceland, should originally have been without any meaning. Moreover, the original meaning has been lost, and the whole has become a rite which is no longer understood, but of which they say: "We have always done so."

In this case it is not so very difficult to find an explanation, when we take into consideration the way in which uncultivated people think and reason. So far as my knowledge goes, one will find, amongst all members of the human race, from the most uncultured up to the highest form of civilisation, this belief pre-eminent, that man does not die with death. The soul lives; bodily death is only the commencement of a new chapter in the history of life. For a longer or shorter period a