ISRAELITE AND INDIAN. 71 



Pollution and Purification. The subject of pollution and puri- 

 fication has been much and properly insisted upon as affording a 

 striking parallel between the Israelites and the Indians. The In- 

 dians made special huts for the women, at certain periods, when 

 they were considered so unclean that nothing which they touched 

 could be used. A Muskoki woman, after delivery of a child, was 

 separated from her husband for three moons (eighty-four days). 

 This may be compared with the Levitical law by which the mother 

 of a female child was to be separated eighty days and of a male 

 forty days. Dr. Boudinot says that in some Indian tribes there was 

 similar distinction between male and female children. 



Among the southern Indians wounded persons having running 

 sores were confined beyond the village, and kept strictly separate, 

 as by the Levitical law. An Israelite dying in any house or tent 

 polluted all who were in it and all the furniture in it, and this 

 pollution continued for seven days. All who touched a corpse or 

 a grave were impure for the same time. Similarly, many of the 

 Indians burned down the house where there had been a death. 



Many writers have asserted, as one of the excellences of the 

 Israelite customs, that the " purification " imposed upon those who 

 had been engaged in a burial was a sanitary regulation, a measure 

 rendered expedient in a hot country. As no great proportion of 

 the Israelites generally inhabited a country hot to the degree 

 indicated, and as none of them had any conception of disease or 

 the cause of death, this explanation is hardly sufficient. Much 

 later the compilers might have gained some sanitary knowledge 

 by which the old superstition was utilized. Its true explanation 

 is from supernatural, not from natural, concepts. It is probably 

 connected with a point mentioned before i. e., the avoidance of 

 corpses from the fear of the spirit of the dead and of the bad spirit 

 which had caused the death, and the purificatory ceremony was 

 for the daimon, not for the disease. The neglect of sanitation is 

 well illustrated among the Navajo, who are little affected by civ- 

 ilization. Upon the death of one of their members they block 

 up the shelter containing the corpse, and, from fear of the spook 

 or of the agent of death, or of both, not from fear of the corpse 

 itself, they never again visit it. Other tribes simply piled stones on 

 the corpse, which prevented its disturbance by beasts, but did not 

 absorb the effluvium. Still others exposed the dead on scaffolds. 

 To leave corpses to putrefy freely is certainly not a sanitary meas- 

 ure, yet it was a practice existing together with the mortuary 

 rites before mentioned, though many of the tribes practiced earth- 

 burial, and a few used cremation. 



On a broad examination of the topic of " pollution," so styled 

 by most writers, it seems to be best explained by our recent under- 

 standing of tabu. 



