Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/503

 CHAPTER V.

CREMATION AND INHUMATION.

The discussion of those abnormal cases of after-death existence, to which the last chapter has been devoted, has disclosed to us the fact that in all ages of Greece the condition most to be dreaded by the dead has been incorruptibility and the boon most to be desired a sure and quick dissolution; and that of the two methods by which the living might promote the disintegration of the dead, cremation and inhumation, the former alone has been accounted infallible. What benefit in the future existence was in old time thought to accrue to those whose bodies had been duly dissolved, and to be withheld from revenants, is a question which may conveniently be adjourned for a while. First we must verify the results obtained from the study of the abnormal by consideration of the normal; we must see whether ordinary funeral usage has had for its sole object the dissolution of the dead in the interests of the dead; and what, if any, distinction has been made between inhumation and cremation as a means of securing that object.

Now diverse methods of disposing of the dead, especially among a primitive folk, would naturally suggest diverse religious purposes to be served thereby, diverse conceptions of the future estate of the dead, or of their future abode, or of their future relations with the living; and for my part I do not doubt that, if our eyes could pierce the darkness of a long distant past which neither history nor even archaeology has illumined, we should see that the peoples who first used cremation and inhumation side by side in Greece were in so doing animated by diverse religious sentiments. But I hold also that in no period of which we have any cognisance have the Greeks regarded inhumation