Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/65

Rh ; perhaps in the ecstatic phenomenon of levitation, perhaps in the solid appearance in a cloudless land of "that inverted bowl we call the sky"; or perhaps it was suggested by the free flight of birds, so often taken as the symbol of the homing spirit. Again, it may be due to the association between spirit and air, in which case a definitely animistic origin must be assigned to it.

As to the home of the dead situated on the same earth as ourselves, as in some blessed isle, or on some conspicuous mountain, we are again at a loss for precise reasons. Sir Edward Tylor thinks that the spectacle of the setting sun drew like a magnet a great tide of souls to the West. Thus Procopius writes of the boats laden with souls that crossed from France to the blessed Western Isle that is no other than our own familiar England. Yet the home is not always in the West; for many another point of the compass is chosen, and the orientation of the dead does not invariably correspond to it; though in many cases it does appear to suggest the direction in which the soul is to go. But then, we must ask, what are the causes that suggest any particular orientation? Mr, Perry has made an attempt in the Indonesian area to establish a connection between the orientation of houses, a corresponding orientation of graves, and a mythical home of the dead on earth. He believes that such a myth may have an actual historical foundation, since it is certainly customary in some instances to send bodies of the dead back to the land from which the ancestors had wandered.

Another line of enquiry, however, suggests itself. Mr. Crooke, in a lecture delivered recently at Oxford on the subject of Indian House-Life, mentioned incidentally several examples which seem to indicate a rationalistic