Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/62

 52 The Influence of Burial Customs

which had taken unusually long to disappear. Their motive for so revolting an act was that, the critical period being so much extended, the souls of the departed might turn into vampires.^ In all ages and conditions of Greece, nothing was feared so much for the dead as incorrupti- bility ; the boon was a swift and sure dissolution. Hence the popularity of cremation among their rich.

Now there seems little unity of purpose between crema- tion, for instance, and mummification, so different are they in outward result. Yet the underlying idea seems to be not merely to expedite, as in the savage instances, but actually to eliminate the anxious period of dissolution. The Haida say they cremate to liberate the soul,^ the Wayana of French Guiana, that the soul may go up in smoke.^

As for various forms of ' pre-sepulchral decarnation ' or scamitura, such as the tree and platform burial of Aus- tralia and elsewhere, the essential details are the same, and merely reinforce the conclusions at which we have already arrived. For an extreme instance, however, of the religious significance attached to the fluids of the body, those who wish may peruse the account of their use in connection with the tree and platform burial of the Hood Peninsula in British New Guinea,* or may turn to the similar customs of the Wallaroi ^ and Warraminga ^ of Australia, or of the Papuans of Geelvink Bay in New Guinea,' although the study is likely to produce qualms, even, be it said, in the breast of an anthropologist.

In order to establish analogies with the libations of ancient Egypt, the fact must be noted that, as it is precisely

^ Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore, Cambridge, 1913, pp. 540, 541. "Int. Arch. xiii. Supplement, p. 87. ^Jestip Expedition, v. 54.

River, New Guinea, "y.^./. xxviii. p. 211. •' Howitt, Native Tribes, p. 467. ^Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, p. 515. ^Frazer, The Belief in Immortality, p. 313.
 * R. E. Guise, "On the Tribes inhabiting the mouth of the Wanigela