Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/450

432 The act of breathing, so characteristic of the higher animals during life, and coinciding so closely with life in its departure, has been repeatedly and naturally identified with the life or soul itself. Laura Bridgman showed in her instructive way the analogy between the effects of restricted sense and restricted civilization, when one day she made the gesture of taking something away from her mouth: 'I dreamed,' she explained in words, 'that God took away my breath to heaven.' It is thus that West Australians used one word waug for 'breath, spirit, soul;' that in the Netela language of California, piuts means 'life, breath, soul;' that certain Greenlanders reckoned two souls to man, namely his shadow and his breath; that the Malays say the soul of the dying man escapes through his nostrils, and in Java use the same word ñawa for 'breath, life, soul.' How the notions of life, heart, breath, and phantom unite in the one conception of a soul or spirit, and at the same time how loose and vague such ideas are among barbaric races, is well brought into view in the answers to a religious inquest held in 1528 among the natives of Nicaragua. 'When they die, there comes out of their mouth something that resembles a person, and is called julio [Aztec yuli=to live]. This being goes to the place where the man and woman are. It is like a person, but does not die, and the body remains here.' Question. 'Do those who go up on high keep the same body, the same face, and the same limbs, as here below?' Answer. 'No; there is only the heart.' Question. 'But since they tear out their hearts [i.e. when a captive was sacrificed], what happens then?' Answer. 'It is not precisely the heart, but that in them which makes them live, and that quits the body when they die.' Or, as stated in another