That disease should be caused by the dead is not a conception which can belong to the earlier ages of culture. That death was possible was the first difficulty, and a great one, but that death could be caused by a species of warfare between the dead and the living would certainly be even as great a difficulty. To believe that the inanimate body which lay before him was not actually devoid of all the higher attributes of life would not be foreign to the reasoning of a savage, for to suppose that a single blow, a fall, or a mysterious thrust from nature, could at once and for ever cut a man off from his fellows must have been more difficult of credence; but to fear the dying, not because they were going into an unknown country in an incomprehensible manner, but, as some peoples have said, lest a dying man who has not been parted with on friendly terms should return to wreak revenge, must be a comparatively late-born theory. It is more natural to regard the dead ancestors as beneficent minor deities than as devils,—to believe with the Tasmanians that the newly dead exercise their first spiritual powers in curing disease, and with the Malay islanders to look for prosperity and help from those who are now beyond the troubles of earth.
Not improbably the dread of the spirits of the dead in general arose from dread of the spirits of the magicians in particular. Turanian tribes of North Asia, according to Castrén, fear their shamans more when they have quitted earth than when they were in the full exercise of their power on earth; the Patagonians have no doubt of the evil demons who afflict their lives being the spirits of dead wizards. But this fear of particular spirits soon developed. The Chinese have a general dislike of spirits of lepers, beggars, and other outcasts. In Madagascar, among the Sakalava, when a death occurs in one of their villages, the settlement is broken up, and the tribe remove their homes some distance from their former abode, believing that the spirits of the dead will haunt the spot, and do harm to those who remain in the place where it had dwelt. Mr. Conway says that in 1875 he was told by an eminent physician of Chicago, whose name he gives, of a case which, within his personal knowledge, had occurred in that city, in which the body of a woman, who had died of consumption, was taken out of the grave and the lungs burned, under the belief that she was drawing after her into the grave some of her surviving relatives; and he also quotes an account of a Mr. Rose, of Peacedale, Rhode Island, who in the previous year dug up the body of his own daughter, and burned her heart, because, it was believed, she was wasting away the lives of other members of his family. The people of Morzine, in Savoy, in 1857, believed themselves to be actually possessed by the spirits of dead persons whilst they suffered the epidemic called hysterodemonapathy. The natives of the Transvaal, after mutilating, roasting, and partially eating the body of an enemy, mix blood and clay and smear their faces with the mixture in order to protect them from the revenge of the spirit of the man who has been killed. Their regard for the influence of the dead is manifested in many ways. Medicine poured into the wounds of the dead son of a chief would, it was believed, cause the death of those who had killed him, and this seems to be a general practice. The Polynesians speak of departed souls devouring the hearts and entrails of sleepers.
Among ourselves, it is a Devonshire belief that you can give a neighbour ague by burying a dead man's hair under his threshold. Passing over a hidden grave was said, in Aberdeenshire, to produce a rash. In New Jersey, it is said to cause incurable cramps in the foot. If any article from one's person, such as a pin, be buried with a corpse, the man or woman to whom it belonged will also be with the dead before the year is out. Ulster men also speak of dead men's pinches, small discoloured marks on the skin, resembling pinches or bruises, which come in the night in some mysterious way.
In olden England such proceedings mentioned above as having taken place in America would not have been permitted, for it was believed that to exhume any body would be an act followed by death and calamity in the deceased's family, as the following illustrates:—
"Thomas Fludd, of Kent, Esq., told me that it is an old observation which was pressed earnestly to King James I. that he should not remove the Queen of Scots' body from Northamptonshire, where she was beheaded and interred. For that it always bodes ill to the family when bodies are removed from their graves, for some of the family will die shortly after, as did Prince Henry, and I think Queen Anne."
The belief that the dead cause the diseases of the living is strikingly shown in the inhuman dislike manifested alike in China and Scotland to save a drowning man. The government of Hong-Kong has found it necessary to insert a clause in the junk clearances, binding the junkmen to assist to the utmost in saving life. The theory of the Chinese is that the spirits of persons who have died a violent death, may return to earth if they can find a substitute. Thus, if A has just lost his son B, and is mourning his loss, should he see C struggling in the water he naturally will not help him,—he would rather see him quickly drowned, for so will B return to life all the sooner. As for C, it is his fate, and he has only to wait until another person—D, E, or F—comes to the same end. The last man dead is supposed to keep watch and ward over the land of the dead; to save a drowning man would be to defraud him of his substitute, and to incur the serious displeasure of a mysterious enemy.
Mr. Tylor regards the dislike manifested by the Hindu, who will not save a man from drowning in the sacred Ganges, the Malay, the Kamchadal, the Bohemian, and other peoples, as indicating a universal belief that to snatch a victim from the very clutches of the water-spirit is a rash defiance of deity which would hardly pass unavenged. He regards the drowning man as an offering to the spirit of the sea, or river, or lake; a spirit which, if not propitiated in some such manner, will necessarily take revenge in some more terrible way. But although this explanation may he regarded as sufficient in some cases, I cannot regard it as applicable to all these illustrations of the prejudice. On the contrary, the remarkable similarity between the Chinese and the Celtic theories lead me to believe that the conception of a water-deity, who must be duly regaled with sacrifice, is generally subordinate to the belief that the soul of the last dead man is insulted, or done injustice to, by preventing another from taking his place.
The Scotch did not regard the last death of so much consequence as the last burial. "The spirit of the last person buried watches round the churchyard till another is buried, to whom he delivers his charges." "It was the duty of the last person interred to stand sentry at the graveyard gate from sunset until the crowing of the cock every night until regularly relieved. This sometimes, in thinly-inhabited parts of the country, happening to be a tedious and severe duty, and the duration of the faire claidth gave the deceased's surviving friends much uneasiness." The idea that the spirit had to watch the graveyard is a distinctly lower conception than that of the Chinese, who regard him as sentry in the unseen world, and is probably of late and explanatory introduction. Still, we can see clearly why Bryce, the pedlar in Sir Walter Scott's Pirate, refused to aid Mordaunt in saving the sailor from drowning, "Are you mad," he said, "you that have lived sae lang in Zetland, to risk the saving of a drowning man." It is true, he adds, " Wat ye not, if you bring him to life again, he will be sure to do you some capital injury?" But it should be remembered that the Celts were not strangers to a doctrine of possession, and it is easy to imagine that the defrauded spirit on guard, when he at last procured his release, should take the first opportunity of inflicting injury on him who had prevented the shortening of his term, and that most readily through the very man who should have been the substitute.
So terrible was the question, that we hear in Scotland, in the last century, of quarrels as to who should be first buried in the churchyard. In one case, when two burials were appointed for one day, "both parties staggered forward as fast as possible to consign their respective friend in the first place in the dust." If they met at the gate, the dead were thrown aside until the living decided by blows whose ghost should be condemned to porter it. In October, 1876, two men, residing outside of Nenagh, Tipperary, were accidentally drowned together through the upsetting of a cart, in which they were crossing a small river. At the funeral a free fight took place between the two parties of friends, each desiring that its corpse should be the first to enter the graveyard, since it was believed that the last buried would have to act as servitor to the other (i.e. the faire claidth of the Scotch). Mr. Napier's suggestion, that the spirit watched "lest any suicide or unbaptised child should be buried in consecrated ground," is a modern engraftment, an attempt to explain a tradition of great antiquity in accordance with more modern teachings.
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