Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/47

Rh that endures after death. The truth of the matter appears to be that both protagonists have some degree of right. Man's attitude to the dead is a complex of love and fear: love, perhaps, in so far as the departed are still themselves; awe, or even fear, inasmuch as they are mysteriously changed. Either element may predominate in the psychology of any given people, helping to a corresponding extent to colour its beliefs.

It seems unnecessary, however, to assume that beliefs concerning the ghost, whether it be rather loved or feared, provide the sole or even the principal factor in determining the original rite of burial. The burden of the disposal of his dead was laid upon man at the very dawn of his humanity, and it seems reasonable to suppose that, before he evolved so intellectual a belief as that in the existence of spiritual beings, his burial customs, in so far as they were not shaped by mere necessity, were dictated by emotional response to a situation charged with mystery and dread.

It is true that the anthropologist hesitates to say of any one race that it is entirely without any idea of a future life; nor can we claim to have access to the records of any purely pre-animistic community. Yet, when we find the same elements of ritual explained by those concerned with them, sometimes in terms of a belief in spiritual beings, and at other times simply in terms of pollution and purification, it seems more satisfactory, if causal relationship is to be assumed between the two types of belief, to reverse the reasoning of Sir James Frazer, and argue from the simple to the complex, from the reactions of purblind emotion to the explicit tenets of animistic belief.

Let us, by way of a test, apply this method of reasoning to some specific groups of customs associated with the burial of the dead. Such are the abandonment of property in or on the grave, the immolation of widows, the ceremonial of mourning and the funeral employment of fire and water