Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/511

Rh In the light of these considerations we can understand why death is conceived as a state of transition having a certain duration. Every change of state of an individual who passes from one group to another implies a profound modification in the mental attitude of the society in regard to him, a modification which is accomplished gradually and takes time. The raw fact of physical death does not suffice to consummate death in the consciousness of the survivors. The image of him who is dead made but lately part of the system of things in this world. It is only detached little by little, by a series of internal rendings. We do not all at once think of the dead as dead; our participation in one and the same social life with him creates bonds which are not broken in a day. The fact only imposes itself upon us little by little, and it is not until the end of a prolonged conflict that we consent, that we believe in the separation as real. It is this painful psychological process which is expressed under an objective and mystical form in the belief that the soul only breaks progressively the bonds which attach it to the world; and the soul cannot again find a stable existence before the representation of the dead has taken in the consciousness of the survivors a definitive and pacified character. Between the persistent image of a man familiar and like ourselves and the image of an ancestor sometimes venerated and always distant, the opposition is too profound to enable the latter immediately to take the place of the former. Hence the notion of an intermediate state during which the soul is thought to free itself from the mortuary impurity or the sin which remained clinging to it. If, then, a certain time is necessary to banish the dead from the land of the living, it is because society, shaken by the blow, must recover its equilibrium gradually, and because the double mental labour of severance and synthesis, which the integration of the individual in a new world supposes, is only accomplished by degrees, and demands time for its completion.

This period of trouble and rending is expressed concretely by the gradual destruction of the old earthly body. When the corpse is reduced to bones no longer subject to corruption, over which death has no more power, the condition and the sign of the final deliverance is reached. Now that the body of