Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/51

Rh after death. The Algonquin, after giving food to their dead, found the bones gnawed in the morning. The Zulu, however, know that it is only the spiritual parts that are consumed, and feel at liberty to eat the material parts themselves when the food has been exposed for a proper interval of time. The idea of the soul's share in a funeral feast may be traced to the times of the early Christians, whom we find reproached as follows by Faustus: "Their sacrifices have ye turned into love-feasts, ye appease the dead with wine and meals … verily of their lives ye have changed naught."

Perhaps enough has been said to show that there may be an evolution from the simple conception of a taboo on such rude forms of property as the boomerang and spear-thrower of the dead Australian to those animistic ideas that led to the burying of incalculable treasure in the tombs of by-gone rulers and kings.

There remains for consideration, however, another form of property that may be immolated in the grave. The widow of the savage, with her taboo "an inch thick" upon her, seems to be at one end of a road, at the other end of which we see a multitude of wives and slaves slaughtered wholesale to minister hereafter to some dead monarch, as in ancient Nubia. The extreme degree of taboo attaching to widows, as likewise the stringency of the purifications they must undergo, lends probability to this suggestion. An example taken at random from The History of the Melanesian Society tells us of the widow who is forbidden to remarry, who must hide her face, cut her hair, break the lobes of her ears, remain for a year alone in a hut never seeing the light of day, and wear the tokens of her dead husband for the rest of her life upon her person.

The severity of the taboo on the widow may vary in