THE PRIMITIVE GHOST AND HIS RELATIONS. 673 



Persia, when a man is setting out on a journey, he steps out of the 

 house with his face turned toward the door, hoping thereby to secure 

 a safe return.* In Thtiringen and some parts of the north of England 

 it used to be the custom to carry the body to the grave by a round- 

 about way.f 



I venture to conjecture that the old Roman usage of burying by 

 night I may have originally been intended, like the customs I have 

 mentioned, to keep the way to the grave a secret from the dead, and 

 it is possible that the same idea gave rise to the practice of masking 

 the dead a practice common to the prehistoric inhabitants of Greece 

 and to the Aleutian-Islanders.* 



To a desire to deceive the dead man I would also refer the curious 

 custom among the Bohemians of putting on masks and behaving in a 

 strange way as they returned from a burial. | They hoped, in fact, so 

 to disguise themselves that the dead man might not know and there- 

 fore might not follow them. Whether the wide-spread mourning cus- 

 toms of smearing the body with mud or paint, mutilating it by gashes, 

 cutting off the hair or letting it grow, and putting on beggarly attire 

 or clothes of an unusual color (black, white, or otherwise), may not 

 have also originated in the desire to disguise and therefore to protect 

 the living from the dead, I can not here attempt to determine. This 

 much is certain, that mourning customs are always as far as possible 

 the reverse of those of ordinary life. Thus, at a Roman funeral, the 

 sons of the deceased walked with their heads covered, the daughters 

 with their heads uncovered, thus exactly reversing the ordinary usage, 

 which was that women wore coverings on their heads, while men did 

 not. Plutarch, who notes this, observes that in like manner in Greece 

 men and women during a period of mourning exactly inverted their 

 usual habits of wearing the hair the ordinary practice of men being 

 to cut it short, that of women to leave it long. A 



The objection, deeply rooted in many races, to utter the names of 

 deceased persons,^ sprang no doubt from a fear that the dead might 

 hear and answer to his name. In East Prussia, if the deceased is 

 called thrice by his name, he appears. J This reluctance to mention 

 the names of the dead has modified whole languages. Thus among 



* "Hajji Baba," c. \,fin. 

 f F. Schmidt, p. 94. 



I Servius on Virg. Mn., i, 186. Night burial was sometimes practiced in Scotland 

 (C. Rogers, " Social Life in Scotland," i, p. 161), and commonly in Thiiringen (F. Schmidt, 

 p. 96). Cf. Mungo Park, " Travels," p. 414. 



* Schliemann, "Mycenae," pp. 198, 219-223, 311 sq. ; Bancroft, "Native Races," i, p. 

 93. The Aztecs masked their dead kings (Bancroft, ii, 606), and the Siamese do so still 

 (Pallegoix, "Royaume de Siam," i, p. 247). 



| Bastian, ii, p. 328. 



A Plutarch, " Rom. Quaest.," 14. 



() Tylor, " Early History of Mankind," p. 142. 



X Wuttke, 754. 



vol. xxvii 43 



