Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/55

 on the Belief in a Future State. 45

Northern Rhodesia, by whom all the fires in the village are extinguished at a death ? ^ This is quite impossible to explain on the barrier theory ; though we are familiar with the idea that mystic pollution can vitiate the purity of fire itself, necessitating the manufacture of a fresh supply.

It is not suggested, however, that purification furnishes the only or original motive for the world-wide use of these elements in funeral rites. The ceremonial use of fire, for instance, is too well known in its wide diversity to admit of so rash a claim. ^

Fire seems to have been one of the earliest objects of man's religious regard, and, broadly speaking, to the savage it is auspicious and ritually satisfactory. It would naturally suggest itself, therefore, in connection with funeral cere- monies, merely on the good general ground of being a lucky kind of thing to have about at a time that was felt to be critical and unlucky. Reasons of a more definite kind might suggest themselves later. Thus certain Australian natives light a fire to warm the dead, who are cold in the grave ; ^ others have fires kindled nightly to cheer them on their way to the next world. ^ Again, the ghost may wish to revisit the earth and warm himself at the hospitable flame.^ These notions may have had different origins, but they look more like variants on a common theme, and certainly do not suggest fear.

Sometimes the fire at the grave is no other than the fire on the domestic hearth, the dead being interred beneath the floor of the living-room. Fustel dc Coulanges, in his

^Gouldsbury and Sheane, The Great Plateau of N. Rhodesia, London, 191 1, p. 184.

-Miss Blackman, "The Magic and Ceremonial Uses of Y\it" Folk- Lore, vol. xxvii. No. 4.

•^Chalmers, " Natives of Kirwai Is,"/..-/./, xxiii. pp. 119, 120.

■' Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians, London, 1910, p. 442 Ji/y.

5 A. W. llowitt, Natii'e Tribes of S.E. Australia, p. 448.