Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/61

 on the Belief in a Future State. 5 1

durable parts are reverenced much or little as the case may be ; but the osseous framework is so different from the body in life, so little suggestive of personality, that it cannot produce in the mind of the savage, or indeed of civilised man, the same emotional response as the horrible change wrought by mortality in the flesh that was familiar, nay, perhaps beloved.

Sir Edward Tylor thinks that the savage, asking himself " What is death ? " reasoned that it must be the flight of the soul. One cannot but wonder if it were not rather the decay of the body that struck his imagination as the most characteristic and irrevocable difference. At any rate we find him kindling his fire in an earnest attempt to expedite the processes of nature and to shorten the term of anxiety. At the animistic stage, he emerges with a clearly developed idea that the spirit lingers near the body till the flesh has disappeared,^ and that during this period the soul is liable to accidents. Sometimes a conventional period is assigned for complete dissolution, and this time, which varies locally, may be perhaps several years, perhaps only forty days, as in Eastern Europe.^ Corresponding with this period are the religious observances for the safety of the soul, and it is assumed that at its close nature and the mourners alike have done their duty. Primitive folk, however, are wont to make sure of nature. Mr. Lawson gives an account of some Greek peasants whom he surprised in the act of removing from certain of their dead the flesh

^Lafiteau, in Les Moeurs des Sauva^es Ameriquaines, Paris, 1724, ch. ii. p. 444, says : The Caribs do not believe that the soul can go to the land of the dead till the bones are fleshless. Im Thurn, in his work on The Indians of British Guiana, mentions that the Caribs are said to have removed the flesh by scraping the bones of the dead. Nowadays they light a fire on the grave in the house, possibly to accelerate decomposition. See p. 255 of his work. Kruijt, writing of the Toradja of Celebes, p. 328, says they say, "As long as the soul (?) can be smelt, it is a man."

^Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, Cambridge, 1910, pp. 540, 541.