Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/417

 Reviews. 391

forms of violent exaggeration, just as in a weak person lauL^hter tends to hysterics. That the fear of the dead, while being a coarser emotion, is also more primeval than the emotion of sorrow or affection in regard to them is not clearly proved by this treatise ; and the not uncommon custom in savage communities of burying within or near the house of the living points to affection rather than fear ; the various rites that appear to aim at effecting a com- munion with the dead are not normally explicable as prompted by fear {e.g. pp. 205, 315).

The sympathetic reader may also note at times a lacuna in Dr. Frazer's theoretic equipment, and may feel that the phenomena could be sometimes explained without the aid of any ghost-theory at all : for instance, the feeling of the im|)urity of death, the horror of bloodshed, which compel the relatives of the dead to be under a tabu, or the warriors returning from a victorious massacre to be purified, do not postulate the presence of the haunting ghost, but may arise from a preanimistic instinct of revulsion and may for long be sustained by it alone.

But from most points of view the exposition is broad-minded and well-balanced. Dr. Frazer emphasises eloquently the grim and devastating results of ghost-faith and ghost-ritual ; but he is fully sensible of its social advantages as a bond of family union and the preservative of family morality {e.g. pp. 134, 175). Even savage eschatology, uncouth and barren of morality as it usually is, has occasionally a moral value ; on one of the Banks' Islands we meet with an ethical theory of rewards and punishments after death higher than that of the Homeric Greek (p. 354). According to some of the Kai in German New Guinea the ghosts must be purified from stain before they enter the happy land ; and we have here the germ of the Orphic-Christian concept of Purgatory.

The present volume already contributes much, either by way of positive or negative evidence, to certain current religious or anthro- pological controversies and problems. Dr. Frazer has collected sufficient evidence to show, {a), that the same people at the same period may practise such different modes of disposing of the dead as cremation and burial ; therefore a certain ethnologic criterion much applied to the Mediterranean races loses its credit : (l>), that the same people at the same period can hold entirely contradictory