Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/58

 48 The Influence of Burial Customs

expensive method is that of building the dead man a small hut on the grave, now removed from the dwelling; as on the Congo,^ and also in Australia, where the mourner enters the flimsy structure of boughs, saying: "I sit in his hut."2

This conception of the grave as the dwelling of the dead leads on to the notion of accommodating him after death in the same way in which he lived in this world. M. Junod explains that the oval cavity in the side of the rectangular grave made for the Thonga represents the hut in which he will lie down and sleep, while the rectangle is the village square, whither he will come out in the evening, as he did erstwhile in life.^

From the simple earth grave of South Africa, with its reminiscence of the wattled hut, we may turn to the great rock tombs of the North, derived, as some think, from the cave dwellings found near the Mediterranean coast, and we shall find in the elaborate chamber tombs of Egypt all the paraphernalia of daily life carefully depicted as though to reproduce the details and routine of the dead man's actual home. That he was considered as dwelling therein is clear from the belief that one of his multiple souls had its residence in the grave.

We have now to consider the practice of preserving the more durable portions of the body. It should not be doubted that the original motives prompting the attempt to keep something that survives decay were largely those of natural affection. Among ourselves a lock of hair is a tenderly cherished keepsake. We need not deny similar feelings to the savage, nor express too much surprise at the relative grotesqueness of his fancy for turning such

^Hilton Simpson, Laws and Peoples of the Kasai, London, 191 1, p. 176. See also Torday, Camp and Tramp in the African Wilds, London, 1913, P- 137-

"Sir George Grey, Journal of Two Expeditions of Discovery.

"Junod, op. cit. vol. i. pp. 134, 136.