Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/817

Rh sufficient that it does exist, and that the kra is believed to be essentially distinct from the soul or ghost, which, at the death of the body, proceeds to Dead-land, and there continues the life that the man led in the world.

I am unaware if American anthropologists have considered this third element of man, and its bearing upon the theory of animism, or even if instances of the belief being held, other than that mentioned by Dr. Washington Matthews, have been recorded; but in Europe it seems quite to have escaped notice, and the belief is not referred to in any one of the text-books of anthropology that I have examined. This is doubtless in consequence of the German missionaries in "West Africa having translated the words kra, kla, and luivo as "soul" a term which is not at all applicable, and which has led to the third element being confused with the soul proper.

It is in its bearing upon that branch of animism which is termed Nature-worship that this third element seems most important. The negroes of the Gold and Slave Coasts, like every other people low in the stage of civilization, believe that inanimate as well as animate objects have souls or ghosts—a belief which is proved by the practice of burying arms, implements, utensils, etc., for the use of the dead in Dead-land. The soul or ghost of the dead hunter goes to Dead-land, and there continues the former pursuit of the man, using the souls or ghosts of the weapons buried with him; but the negroes have gone beyond this, and, just as they believe man to possess a third element or indwelling spirit, so do they believe that every natural object, everything not made by human hands, has, in addition to its soul or ghost, a third element or spiritual individuality. They hold that just as, when the man dies, the kra of the man enters a new-born child, and the soul or ghost-man goes to Dead-land; so, when the tree dies, the kra, so to speak, of the tree enters a seedling, and the ghost-tree goes to join the ranks of the shadowy forest in Deadland. And it is these animating or spiritual tenants of natural objects and natural features that the negro fears, and consequently worships.

The process is something like this: Some day a man falls into a river and is drowned. The body is recovered by the man's comrades, and is found to present no sign of external injury which, in their experience, would account for death. Being necessarily ignorant of the processes by which life is maintained, and seeking for a cause to which to attribute the disaster, they conceive the spiritual tenant or spiritual individuality of the river to have killed their comrade. And to this day, when a negro is drowned, his friends say, "So-and-so" (the spirit or god of the river) "has taken him down." Whether it was with the design of accounting