Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/165

Rh the mourner among ourselves who goes to weep at the grave of one beloved, imagination keeps together the personality and. the relics of the dead. Here, then, is a course of thought open to the animistic thinker, leading him on from fancied association to a belief in the real presence of a spiritual being in a material object. Thus there is no difficulty in understanding how the Karens thought the spirits of the dead might come back from the other world to reanimate their bodies; nor how the Marian islanders should have kept the dried bodies of their dead ancestors in their huts as household gods, and even expected them to give oracles out of their skulls; nor how the soul of a dead Carib might be thought to abide in one of his bones, taken from the grave and carefully wrapped in cotton, in which state it could answer questions, and even bewitch an enemy if a morsel of his property were wrapped up with it; nor how the dead Santal should be sent to his fathers by the ceremony of committing to the sacred river morsels of his skull from the funeral-pile. Such ideas are of great interest in studying the burial rites of mankind, especially the habit of keeping relics of the dead as vehicles of superhuman power, and of even preserving the whole body as a mummy, as in Peru and Egypt. The conception of such human relics becoming fetishes, inhabited or at least acted through by the souls which formerly belonged to them, will give a rational explanation of much relic-worship otherwise obscure.

A further stretch of imagination enables the lower races to associate the souls of the dead with mere objects, a practice which may have had its origin in the merest childish make-believe, but which would lead a thorough savage animist straight on to the conception of the soul entering