Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/509

 Reviews. 463

is equivalent to a sacrilege and implies the intervention of powers of the same order as himself, but hostile, negative. Hence when a savage community sees in a death no merely natural phenomenon but the action of spiritual influences, we must consider that view not as merely a coarse and persistent blunder but as the naive expression of a permanent social necessity. Society in fact communicates to the individuals who compose it its own perennial character. Because it feels itself and wishes to be immortal it cannot normally believe its members destined to die : their destruction can only be the effect of sinister machinations. Doubtless the reality gives a brutal contradiction to this prejudice ; but the contradiction is always received with the same movement of indignant stupor and despair. Such an outrage must have an author on whom the anger of the group can be discharged. Thus when a man dies society does not merely lose its unity : it is outraged in the very principle of its life, in its faith in itself. To read the descriptions given by ethnographers of the scenes of furious distress which take place at or immediately after a death, it seems as if the entire community felt itself lost, or at least directly threatened by the presence of antagonistic forces : the very base of its existence is shaken. The dead man, at once victim and prisoner of the evil powers, is cast violently out of the community, dragging with him his nearest relatives.

But this exclusion is not definitive. Just as the collective conscience does not believe in the necessity of death it refuses to consider it as irrevocable. Because it has faith m itself a healthy society cannot admit that an individual, who has made part of its own substance, on whom it has impressed its mark, is lost for ever. Life must have the last word. Under different forms the deceased will issue from the terrors of death to re-enter into the peace of human communion. This deliver- ance and reintegration constitute one of the most solemn acts of the collective life in the least advanced societies of which we have any knowledge. They are the object of the most important ceremonies. But the dead man does not return simply to the life he has quitted : the separation has been too profound to be thus instantly abolished. He will be