Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/310

 302 till both Shouka and his brother had been killed in revenge for Mahtocheega's death.

Such general statements as the foregoing concerning the low intellectual stage of the savage may clear the way in showing how he will interpret phenomena of a more complex order, and why he can interpret them only in one way. The central idea of the Punchkin group of stories is the dwelling apart of the soul or heart, as the seat of life, from the body, in some secret place in some animate or inanimate thing, often an egg or a bird, sometimes a tree, flower, or necklace, the fate of the one involving the fate of the other. Now, stripped of all local additions and detail, this notion of the soul existing apart from the body and determining its fortunes is the survival of primitive belief in one or more entities in the body, yet not of it, which may leave that body at will during life, and which perchance leaves it finally, to return not, at death.

It is now generally admitted that this belief is referable to the interpretation of dreams by the barbaric mind as real events. They are of the precise character to excite and sustain that feeling of mystery which attends every endeavour of man to interpret the meaning of his surroundings. Whilst for us they fill an empty moment in the telling, albeit now and again nourishing such remains of superstition as cling to the majority of us, they are to the savage as solid as the experiences of his waking moments, true not only "while they last," but for ever afterwards. The limits of his language only accentuate the confusion within him when he tries to tell what he has seen, and heard, and felt, and where he has been, for the speech cannot transcend the thought, and therefore can represent neither to himself nor to others the difference between the illusions of the night and the realities of the day. The dead relations and friends who appear in dreams and live their old life, with whom he joins in the battle or the chase, with whom, the toils over, he sits down to feast, not like the Psalmist in the presence of his enemies, but on succulent slices of the enemies themselves; the foes with whom he struggles; the wild beasts from whom he flees, or in whose grip he feels himself; the long distances he travels to dream-lands beyond and above—are all real, and no "baseless fabric of a vision." The inference drawn