Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/41

Rh objects found in Australia, that they may have subserved some religious purpose. Further inferences, in the present stage of our knowledge, are hazardous in the extreme. It has even been doubted whether the dead were, in this period, deliberately interred; but the most recent excavations show that some of the corpses found in the caves were ceremonially buried.

Even in the case of neolithic man our information is very scanty. To quote Dr. Rice Holmes again :—"Even the fancy that an ethereal soul survived bodily death may not have been universal; and as the Tonga islanders and the Virginians are said to have believed that only the souls of chiefs would live again, so it is conceivable that the slaves by whose sweat were built the barrows in which their lords were to be interred were regarded as doomed to annihilation. And when we are told that some quaint superstition which the folklorist discovers in Devonshire or the Highlands is non-Aryan, and must therefore be traceable to the people who were here before the first Celtic invader arrived, we may ask how it is possible to disprove that it had been inherited from the Celt from remote ancestors or had been borrowed by him from non-Aryan tribes while he was still a wanderer. We must be content, if we can but catch something of the spirit of the neolithic religion, to remain in blank ignorance of its details. We must keep in mind that in unnumbered centuries it cannot have remained the same, and that in diverse regions its manifestations must have been various." That their beliefs were probably of the animistic type, that, like all savages and barbaric peoples, they were slaves to custom, fettered by taboos, and compelled, when they were driven by necessity to violate them, to expiate their offence by complex rites, that a change from the nomadic and pastoral to agricultural