Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/64

54 From time immemorial we find the custom of painting with red ochre, or, perhaps, of embedding in it, the fleshless bones of the dead, and it may even be, in the light of the general use of red ochre as a substitute for blood, that we have to do with an intention such as that made explicit in the Pyramid text, namely, of revitalising those who have suffered the greatest of all changes. Of these formulae it may be pointed out that they offer a satisfactory confirmation of what has been deduced, inasmuch as they represent, not the theories of anthropologists, but the indubitable opinions of those concerned, graven on the enduring rock.

We may note, therefore, that there is this other funeral use of water, quite distinct from any idea of the establishment of a barrier, or of any apparent fear or hatred of the dead. On the contrary, the theme we find so often, of an apparent attempt to revitalise him by blood, water, or wine, can only be due to a loving desire to ensure to the departed his future existence.

From the more general question of the assurance of immortality, we may now pass on to give a very cursory glance at the romantic problem of the Home of the Dead and its geographical position as materially conceived by primitive man. There is some evidence to show that inhumation and the idea of the grave as the house of the dead have led on to an enlarged conception of the colourless life of the tomb as a state of continued existence. Thus the Sheol of the Hebrews appears from its very name, meaning a cavernous recess, to be derived directly from the rock tomb itself.

To the home beyond the sky, however, to which the Winnebago ascends by the Path of the Dead which we call the Milky Way, that upper region where the Australian wanders hereafter, we can find but little clue in burial custom. The connection of ideas must be sought