Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/416

 390 Reviews.

Cherokee Indians (p. 77) is interesting as showing the type to which the Hesiodic story of Pandora's box belongs. Only, it is well worth remarking that the Hesiodic version is different from these aboriginal stories that were floating round the world \ Pan- dora's opened box let out a number of evils, but not death, which had always been in the world of men, even in Hesiod's sinless and happiest generation of the golden men, to whom death comes as a sleep. There is no recorded Greek myth that explains the origin of death or that reveals such an illusion in the mythopoeic mind of Hellas as that death was not part of the cosmic human plan but came in as an unintended accident. Greek folklore possessed, long before Euripides, a personal Thanatos, such a figure as plays a part in the stories of the Baganda, the Bantu tribe, and the Melanesians of Banks' Island ; and it could imagine a clever man like Sisyphos botthng up Death for a few years, during which time nobody died ; but it rose above the savage level in that it did not delude itself about the general lot of mortality.

Nearly all the myths reflect the pathetic feeling that death is an evil. Only one, in vogue among the Melanesians of the Banks' Islands, rises in this respect to a higher point of view, and reflects the idea expressed by our most modern science, that death is a social-economic advantage to our species (p. 83).

The greater number of the funeral ceremonies, which are generally quaint and elaborate and occasionally most repulsive, are attributed by Dr. Frazer to one ruling motive, the fear of the ghost. This is certainly a very widespread, perhaps the predominating, sentiment in the savage mind. But sometimes it seems quite inadequate to explain the ceremony which he supposes it to inspire ; for instance, the strange custom of the women scourging the men at the funeral of the Fijian chief (p. 452). Also, the critical reader may feel that he attributes too much to it as the ruling motive, and too little to affection and real sorrow. The violent and morbid outbursts of lamentation accompanied with self- laceration need not be due to the hypocritical desire to persuade a formidable ghost that the relatives were really very sorry for him and loved him deeply in life, so that he may refrain from haunting them now : in view of the unstable emotional equilibrium of the savage, a simple feeling of sorrow may manifest itself in ritual