Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/329

 Presidential Address. 21

any features which will enable us to determine the shares taken in the production of this distribution by diffusion and social heritage on the one hand and by heredity and primor- dial thought-images on the other.

It is necessary in the first place to make clear how I propose to use the term "rebirth." In anthropological literature the word is used in two different senses. It is used for the process by which a person is believed during life to undergo the process of being born a second time, this kind of rebirth being the central point of a symbolic ceremony. It is also used for the belief that the soul of a dead person is reincarnated in the body of another human being, and in the form which thebelief takes most frequently, in the body of one of the descendants of the dead person. It is necessary that these two beliefs of mankind should be distinguished. The second form of belief, according to which the soul of a person is re-embodied in another person, may most suitably be termed reincarnation, while I suggest that students of human culture should only use the term " rebirth " when they are referring to the belief in, and ceremonial representation of, the process of being born again during life. It is only in this sense that the term will be used in this address. It is in this sense that the term has been used by the psycho-analytic school of psychology whose work has served to stimulate the comparative study of the subject.

The results of psycho-analysis are said to point to the symbolisation of rebirth by means of water ; going into water and coming out of water are beheved to symbolise the acts of giving birth and of being born, and it is claimed that the comparative study of myth supports this con- clusion. Thus Rank,^ who first studied the subject from this point of view, records a series of myths, of which the finding of Moses is that with which we are most familiar, in which birth and water are closely related. The earliest

^ DeY Myihos von der Geburt des Helden, Leipzig und Wien, 1909.