Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/74

64 The Iroquois and Hurons believed in a country for the souls of the dead, which they called the "country of ancestors." This is to the west, from which direction their traditions told that they had migrated. Spirits must go there after death by a very long and painful journey, past many rivers, and at the end of a narrow bridge fight with a dog like Cerberus, and some may fall into the water and be carried away over precipices. This road is all on the earth; but several of the Indian tribes consider the Milky Way to be the path of souls, those of human beings forming the main body of the stars, and their dogs, which also have souls, running on the sides. In their next world the Indians do the same as they customarily do here, but without life's troubles.

The Israelites believed in a doubling of the person by a shadow, a pale figure, which after death descended under the earth and there led a sad and gloomy existence. The abode of these poor beings was called Sheol. There was no recompense, no punishment. The greatest comfort was to be among ancestors and resting with them. There were some very virtuous men whom God carried up that they might be with him. Apart from these elect, dead men went into torpor. Man's good fortune was to be accorded a long term of years, with children to perpetuate his family and respect for his memory after death.

The Indians did not believe in existence after death in a positive and independent state. The spirit does not wholly leave the body and the body is not resurrected. Perhaps a good commentary upon their belief is furnished by a tribe of Oregon Indians who, hearing missionaries preach on the resurrection, immediately repaired to an old battle-field and built great heaps of stones on the graves of their fallen foes to prevent their coming up again. They did not want any of that.

Among the Israelites the resurrection of the body was a foreign idea imbibed during the captivities in Assyria and Babylonia. Perhaps the first reference made to it is in the prophet Daniel. It was not fully believed in so late as the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate.

Among the Indians privation of burial and funeral ceremonies was a disgraceful stigma and cruel punishment. There was trouble about children who died shortly after their birth, and also about those whose corpses were lost, as in the snow or in the waters. In ordinary cases of death the neglect of full and elaborate ceremonies caused misfortune to the tribe.

The story of the "happy hunting-ground" among the Indians has not been generally apprehended. As regards what we now consider to be moral conduct there was no criterion. A good Indian was one who was useful to his clan and family, and at the time of his death was not under charges of violating the clan rules,