Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/165

Rh which plays an important part in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh of a somewhat later date. Hesiod mentions the Isles of the Blest; and the Chinese and Japanese writings, as well as the post-Vedic literature of India, contain accounts of them. In other parts of the world, in Polynesia for example, there are ideas with regard to island paradises in the possession of peoples of the lower culture, but I do not propose to discuss them. The relationship between more civilised and less civilised peoples has not yet been fully determined. To assume that peoples of the lower culture invariably represent an earlier stage in the development of civilisation is, to my mind, to beg the whole question. It can be shown in many cases that such peoples have sprung from those with a more developed culture, and, until the whole matter has been thrashed out in detail, I prefer to ignore the beliefs found among less advanced peoples, beliefs which can be claimed as rudimentary or vestigial according to the point of view, being, as they are, much less developed than those which we shall examine. An immense amount of harm has been done in the past by assuming that what is found among people of lower culture is always rudimentary. It has prevented many an able scholar from seeing the proper relationships of phenomena, and has caused many to expend vast labour and ability in attempting to reconcile what cannot be reconciled. My attitude, therefore, will be that of examining beliefs in the Isles of the Blest which are recorded among the more highly civilised peoples of antiquity, and I shall leave on one side the question of the origin of these beliefs, confining myself to the endeavour to estimate some of their consequences when once they had come into existence among such peoples.

Beginning at the earliest possible point, we find the belief in the Isles of the Blest in the Pyramid Texts of Egypt. The Pyramid Texts represent an amalgamation between two sets of beliefs, one centred round Osiris, and