Under the Shadow of a Ghost, by W. D. Gunning 1885
We walk in the light; but shadows from primeval ghosts, cast along the slope of centuries, lie athwart our path. The age is haunted by spectral things and men. The Japanese put the sign of water—a letter of their alphabet—on a house, in the belief that the sign is as efficacious against fire as the thing signified. On the house in Japan falls the most attenuated shadow of the most filmy ghost,—a figment of the child~thought of the race. In our own times, it is not uncommon in Nova Scotia to draw on a barn the form of a woman representing a witch, and shoot it, in the belief that hitting the sign hurts the woman signified.
Max Muller has called attention to the comparisons in the oldest of hymns, the Rig Veda:—
"He runs--not a river,
He roars--not a thunder."
The fathers of our race, men who wrote these Vedic hymns, looked on the world where it is wrinkled into awful grandeur,—domes, spires, serrated ridges robed in eternal snow, and spanned by a heaven whose thunders shook the minds of men, and seemed to shake the very domes of granite. The listening mind called thunder the roarer; wind, the howler; a river, the runner; a mountain, the breather; and the all-investing heaven, the enfolder. All things lived and acted. The mind, uttering itself in prayers and hymns, did not personify objects. It tried to “dispersonate." The Vedic poet, if he had known a ship. would not have written as Byron wrote,—
“It walks the water like a thing of life."
He would have written,—
“It walks the water, not a thing of life."
The form of comparison would show that his ancestors had regarded the ship as a thing of life.
The American Indian calls the bear or the beaver his brother. The Fiji Islander calls man “long pig." The negro thinks the chimpanzee is a man, somewhat damaged in the creation. These phases of thought in arrested races are survivals of a primitive cult common to all races. The movement of the mind has been to separate animate from inanimate things, and then man from other animate forms. Separation in the mind of all but the lowest tribes would seem to be complete; but there lingers a vague feeling that, in some way, the qualities of an object inhere in its symbol or semblance. So Japan would protect against fire by building the symbol of water into her houses. How much wiser are we? We build our temples in Japan, and insure against the fires of sheol with the sign of water. I have heard of a man in the South (colored) who never thoroughly believed the story of the flood and the ark till he saw a little model of Noah and the ark and the animals. “In sacris simulata pro veris accipi." In matters of religion, we accept the symbol for the reality.
Images of oxen sustained the brazen sea in the temple of Jerusalem, and horns of oxen were represented at the angles of the ark. In the wilderness, the Hebrews had worshipped a young ox, in gold. In Dan, they worshipped Jacob as an ox. In Jerusalem, the grossness of the old cult had faded into mere symbolism. The calf of the wilderness and the ox of Dan had all gone but the horns. Today, when the suppliant prays that he may “seize the horns of the altar," his mind is in the penumbra of a shadow cast over the Church by ancient Judaism. We walk in the shadow cast by ancient beliefs, and we walk in the shadow of ancient ghosts.
Do we toll the bells while a funeral procession is passing? From time immemorial, the Chinese have fired crackers and pounded gangs to confuse and bewilder the ghost, so that it could not find its way back to the house of the living. The Romans rang bells at a funeral for the same purpose. Certain savages try to conceal from the ghost the course which led to the grave. In parts of Europe, the procession marches to the grave by a circuitous route. The reason is the attempt of the ancient man to bewilder the ancient ghost.
The ancient man believed that the ghost could not rise from the grave through a stone, and he piled on the grave such stones as he could handle. The tombstone has come to us through a long inheritance, and its function has changed from repression to commemoration. The ancient man thought, and many savages still think, that the ghost cannot jump over a fence. To this though, we may owe the iron gratings and stone walls which mar the cemeteries of Christendom. The ancient man determined that, if the ghost did escape his trammels and wander the earth, he should not disturb him, he should not know him. It is said that the Bohemians to this day mask themselves at a funeral. The Romans, at a funeral, assumed other manners and put on other attire than was their wont. We put on mourning; and—-we shudder at the thought—-the root of the custom may be found in ancient Rome and modern Bohemian-—the wish to disguise ourselves from our dear friend, the ghost.
The ancient man believed that the ghost could not walk over flinty shards. The most ancient graves in England. the barrows, are found to have been covered with sharp stones, to cut the feet of the poor ghost who would wander. Shakespeare makes the priest say that, but for the compulsion of royalty, he would cover the grave of Ophelia with sharp stones. Dr. Holmes, in his ode to Burns, says,—
"I fling my pebbles on the cairn
Of him, though dead, undying."
If these lines had been written in Europe a few hundred years ago, they would have meant: “I conform to custom. When I pass the cemetery, I throw a pebble on the grave of the man whose name I sing. I do this to bruise his feet, if he attempts to wander forth.”
The ancient man believed that a ghost could not pass through fire. He attempted to bar the spirit by encircling the grave with fire, cinders, ashes. The Romans, returning from a grave, walked over fire. It is said that the Euthenian today, on returning from a funeral, looks at fire. This is the highest attenuation of a superstition.
The man of ancient times believed that a ghost could-not cross sunlit water. A sunless river he could pass, and Hindu and Greek mythology had their Styx. The same river reappears in Norse mythology; and, in Christian hymnology, we have
“Death's cold stream."
Living water was a bar to the primitive ghost. The idea of barring the ghost by water still lives in the mind of the savage and in the folk-lore of the Christian:—
“Now do thy speedy utmost, Meg,
And win the key-stane o’ the brig:
There at them thou thy tail may toss,
A running stream they dare na cross."
Alaric, the Goth, played havoc among men, and sent thousands prematurely over the Styx. The historian tells us that, when he died, his countrymen turned the course of the Busento, buried him in its bed, and then turned the river back into its channel. It is as if they had said: “The world has had enough of you. You are dead; and, by all the gods of Gothland, you shall stay dead." Pathetic was the effort of a nation to lay the ghost of a king. Equally pathetic is the effort of a Metamba woman to lay the ghost of a husband. The widow plunges into water to drown or drive away the ghost of the husband who may still be clinging to her.
The ancient man seems to have found that the ghost was often too much for him. Neither crackers nor gougs nor bells nor fire nor water nor shards of flint would always keep the ghost in the grave. Men resorted to bribery. Money was given to the ghost to keep him down. The very ancient Greek put a coin in the mouth of the dead to pay Charon for ferrage over the Styx. The Chinese still give money to the ghost; but—-shame on these sons of the Sun!-—it is counterfeit. The Greeks gave bread and wine and fruit to the ghost, to induce him to stay in the grave; but, in time, the Greek, too, learned how to cheat. The poor ghost wanted bread, and they gave him a stone. Loaves and fruit in terra cotta have lately been found in Greek graves. What is very strange is that, in some of these graves, we find beautiful terra-cotta women with their heads broken off! Regnet’s explanation is the only plausible one. As, in very early times, real bread and fruit were buried with the dead, so real women were killed and buried with a dead chief. In later times, when terracotta bread was imposed on the common dead, the mighty dead were cheated with terracotta women. The women were properly slain. They were decapitated. I know of nothing in the ancient man quite so mean as the attempt to cheat a ghost with a stone woman.
This is a dismal story,-—this of the ancient man contending against the ancient ghost. It would have no place on any page of mine but for the lesson it teaches. How did man come by his belief in an afterlife? This belief, we have been saying, was born of hope. We were wrong. At the portals of the tomb sat, not the winged form of Hope, but the grim dragon of Dread. The earliest Greek did not dream of Elysian fields for the dead. He thought of the dead as doomed
“To wander ‘mid shadows a shadow,
And wail by impassable streams."
As dismal as Erebus was sheol. We have gained nothing by taking sheol for hell. Better an eternity of nothingness than an hour of sheol or Erebus. So tristful (sad) to the ancient man seemed the dead that his chief thought was to bar them, and so prevent the gloom of the underworld from devouring this. So tristful was the life of the dead that the very thought of it quenched the light of love in the living. A mother who had followed a child to the grave would return and place before the door a blade or vessel of water, to cut the feet or drown the body of the returning “loved one." She believed that a dead child or husband might be standing at her door day and night, in summer heat or winter storm, and, with chilled limbs and bleeding feet, might be wailing and howling to get back once more into the house; but dread had killed pity, and the ghost might shiver and bleed and howl forever. In “Measure for Measure," Claudio says,—
“Death is a fearful thing,"
And Isabella,—
"And shamed life a hateful."
Then, Claudio, preferring a shameful life to death, expresses, save in the first line which is agnostic,—expresses the feeling of the ancient man:—
"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice,
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling—'tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death."
Men believed in what they did not want. They believed in an after life of unspeakable horror,— the doom of all men, good as well as bad. The ancient man believed this because he was haunted by the ancient ghost.
We walk in the light; but shadows from primeval ghosts, cast along the slope of centuries, lie athwart our path. The age is haunted by spectral things and men. The Japanese put the sign of water—a letter of their alphabet—on a house, in the belief that the sign is as efficacious against fire as the thing signified. On the house in Japan falls the most attenuated shadow of the most filmy ghost,—a figment of the child~thought of the race. In our own times, it is not uncommon in Nova Scotia to draw on a barn the form of a woman representing a witch, and shoot it, in the belief that hitting the sign hurts the woman signified.
Max Muller has called attention to the comparisons in the oldest of hymns, the Rig Veda:—
"He runs--not a river,
He roars--not a thunder."
The fathers of our race, men who wrote these Vedic hymns, looked on the world where it is wrinkled into awful grandeur,—domes, spires, serrated ridges robed in eternal snow, and spanned by a heaven whose thunders shook the minds of men, and seemed to shake the very domes of granite. The listening mind called thunder the roarer; wind, the howler; a river, the runner; a mountain, the breather; and the all-investing heaven, the enfolder. All things lived and acted. The mind, uttering itself in prayers and hymns, did not personify objects. It tried to “dispersonate." The Vedic poet, if he had known a ship. would not have written as Byron wrote,—
“It walks the water like a thing of life."
He would have written,—
“It walks the water, not a thing of life."
The form of comparison would show that his ancestors had regarded the ship as a thing of life.
The American Indian calls the bear or the beaver his brother. The Fiji Islander calls man “long pig." The negro thinks the chimpanzee is a man, somewhat damaged in the creation. These phases of thought in arrested races are survivals of a primitive cult common to all races. The movement of the mind has been to separate animate from inanimate things, and then man from other animate forms. Separation in the mind of all but the lowest tribes would seem to be complete; but there lingers a vague feeling that, in some way, the qualities of an object inhere in its symbol or semblance. So Japan would protect against fire by building the symbol of water into her houses. How much wiser are we? We build our temples in Japan, and insure against the fires of sheol with the sign of water. I have heard of a man in the South (colored) who never thoroughly believed the story of the flood and the ark till he saw a little model of Noah and the ark and the animals. “In sacris simulata pro veris accipi." In matters of religion, we accept the symbol for the reality.
Images of oxen sustained the brazen sea in the temple of Jerusalem, and horns of oxen were represented at the angles of the ark. In the wilderness, the Hebrews had worshipped a young ox, in gold. In Dan, they worshipped Jacob as an ox. In Jerusalem, the grossness of the old cult had faded into mere symbolism. The calf of the wilderness and the ox of Dan had all gone but the horns. Today, when the suppliant prays that he may “seize the horns of the altar," his mind is in the penumbra of a shadow cast over the Church by ancient Judaism. We walk in the shadow cast by ancient beliefs, and we walk in the shadow of ancient ghosts.
Do we toll the bells while a funeral procession is passing? From time immemorial, the Chinese have fired crackers and pounded gangs to confuse and bewilder the ghost, so that it could not find its way back to the house of the living. The Romans rang bells at a funeral for the same purpose. Certain savages try to conceal from the ghost the course which led to the grave. In parts of Europe, the procession marches to the grave by a circuitous route. The reason is the attempt of the ancient man to bewilder the ancient ghost.
The ancient man believed that the ghost could not rise from the grave through a stone, and he piled on the grave such stones as he could handle. The tombstone has come to us through a long inheritance, and its function has changed from repression to commemoration. The ancient man thought, and many savages still think, that the ghost cannot jump over a fence. To this though, we may owe the iron gratings and stone walls which mar the cemeteries of Christendom. The ancient man determined that, if the ghost did escape his trammels and wander the earth, he should not disturb him, he should not know him. It is said that the Bohemians to this day mask themselves at a funeral. The Romans, at a funeral, assumed other manners and put on other attire than was their wont. We put on mourning; and—-we shudder at the thought—-the root of the custom may be found in ancient Rome and modern Bohemian-—the wish to disguise ourselves from our dear friend, the ghost.
The ancient man believed that the ghost could not walk over flinty shards. The most ancient graves in England. the barrows, are found to have been covered with sharp stones, to cut the feet of the poor ghost who would wander. Shakespeare makes the priest say that, but for the compulsion of royalty, he would cover the grave of Ophelia with sharp stones. Dr. Holmes, in his ode to Burns, says,—
"I fling my pebbles on the cairn
Of him, though dead, undying."
If these lines had been written in Europe a few hundred years ago, they would have meant: “I conform to custom. When I pass the cemetery, I throw a pebble on the grave of the man whose name I sing. I do this to bruise his feet, if he attempts to wander forth.”
The ancient man believed that a ghost could not pass through fire. He attempted to bar the spirit by encircling the grave with fire, cinders, ashes. The Romans, returning from a grave, walked over fire. It is said that the Euthenian today, on returning from a funeral, looks at fire. This is the highest attenuation of a superstition.
The man of ancient times believed that a ghost could-not cross sunlit water. A sunless river he could pass, and Hindu and Greek mythology had their Styx. The same river reappears in Norse mythology; and, in Christian hymnology, we have
“Death's cold stream."
Living water was a bar to the primitive ghost. The idea of barring the ghost by water still lives in the mind of the savage and in the folk-lore of the Christian:—
“Now do thy speedy utmost, Meg,
And win the key-stane o’ the brig:
There at them thou thy tail may toss,
A running stream they dare na cross."
Alaric, the Goth, played havoc among men, and sent thousands prematurely over the Styx. The historian tells us that, when he died, his countrymen turned the course of the Busento, buried him in its bed, and then turned the river back into its channel. It is as if they had said: “The world has had enough of you. You are dead; and, by all the gods of Gothland, you shall stay dead." Pathetic was the effort of a nation to lay the ghost of a king. Equally pathetic is the effort of a Metamba woman to lay the ghost of a husband. The widow plunges into water to drown or drive away the ghost of the husband who may still be clinging to her.
The ancient man seems to have found that the ghost was often too much for him. Neither crackers nor gougs nor bells nor fire nor water nor shards of flint would always keep the ghost in the grave. Men resorted to bribery. Money was given to the ghost to keep him down. The very ancient Greek put a coin in the mouth of the dead to pay Charon for ferrage over the Styx. The Chinese still give money to the ghost; but—-shame on these sons of the Sun!-—it is counterfeit. The Greeks gave bread and wine and fruit to the ghost, to induce him to stay in the grave; but, in time, the Greek, too, learned how to cheat. The poor ghost wanted bread, and they gave him a stone. Loaves and fruit in terra cotta have lately been found in Greek graves. What is very strange is that, in some of these graves, we find beautiful terra-cotta women with their heads broken off! Regnet’s explanation is the only plausible one. As, in very early times, real bread and fruit were buried with the dead, so real women were killed and buried with a dead chief. In later times, when terracotta bread was imposed on the common dead, the mighty dead were cheated with terracotta women. The women were properly slain. They were decapitated. I know of nothing in the ancient man quite so mean as the attempt to cheat a ghost with a stone woman.
This is a dismal story,-—this of the ancient man contending against the ancient ghost. It would have no place on any page of mine but for the lesson it teaches. How did man come by his belief in an afterlife? This belief, we have been saying, was born of hope. We were wrong. At the portals of the tomb sat, not the winged form of Hope, but the grim dragon of Dread. The earliest Greek did not dream of Elysian fields for the dead. He thought of the dead as doomed
“To wander ‘mid shadows a shadow,
And wail by impassable streams."
As dismal as Erebus was sheol. We have gained nothing by taking sheol for hell. Better an eternity of nothingness than an hour of sheol or Erebus. So tristful (sad) to the ancient man seemed the dead that his chief thought was to bar them, and so prevent the gloom of the underworld from devouring this. So tristful was the life of the dead that the very thought of it quenched the light of love in the living. A mother who had followed a child to the grave would return and place before the door a blade or vessel of water, to cut the feet or drown the body of the returning “loved one." She believed that a dead child or husband might be standing at her door day and night, in summer heat or winter storm, and, with chilled limbs and bleeding feet, might be wailing and howling to get back once more into the house; but dread had killed pity, and the ghost might shiver and bleed and howl forever. In “Measure for Measure," Claudio says,—
“Death is a fearful thing,"
And Isabella,—
"And shamed life a hateful."
Then, Claudio, preferring a shameful life to death, expresses, save in the first line which is agnostic,—expresses the feeling of the ancient man:—
"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice,
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling—'tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death."
Men believed in what they did not want. They believed in an after life of unspeakable horror,— the doom of all men, good as well as bad. The ancient man believed this because he was haunted by the ancient ghost.
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