Oct. 17, 1884.] 



KNOWLEDGE • 



311 



needless to multiply illustrations of a belief which has been 

 persistent in the human mind from the dawn of speculation 

 about the future of the soul to the present day. The bar- 

 barians, who think that the spirits of the dead move and 

 have their being near the living, join them on their journeys, 

 and sit down, unseen visitants, at their feasts (to be driven 

 off, as among the Eskimos, by blowing the breath), are one 

 with the multitudes of folks in Euroj)e and America who, 

 sorrowing over their dead, think of them as ministering 

 with unfelt hands and as keenly interested in their 

 concerns. 



We meet them at the doorway, on the stair, 

 Along the passages they come and go, 

 Impalpable impressions on the air, 

 A sense of something moving to and fro. 



The Ojibway, who detects their tiny voices in the insect's 

 hum, and thinks of them as sheltering themselves from the 

 rain by thousands in a flower, as sporting by myriads on a 

 sunbeam, is one with the Schoolmen who .^peculated on the 

 number of angels that could dance on a needle's point, and 

 with Milton in his poetic rendering of the belief of his time, 

 that 



Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth 

 Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. 



The Hottentot who avoids a dead man's hut lest the ghost 

 be within, is one with the believers in haunted houses, in 

 banshees, wraiths, and spectres. Such as he should not be 

 excluded as " corresponding members " of the Society for 

 Psychical Research in the invitations which its committee 

 issues to folks who have seen apparitions, and slept, or 

 tried to sleep, in the dreaded chamber of some moated hall 

 of mysterjT. 



If we look in vain for any consistency of idea or logical 

 relation in barbaric notions, our wonder ceases at the 

 absence of these when we note the conflicting conceptions 

 entertained among intelligent people. But the underlying 

 thought is identical. The examples given in a foregoing 

 paper on the belief in the passage of the soul into other 

 human bodies, into animals and stone.s, strengthened as 

 this is by the likeness in mind and body between children 

 and dead relatives, by the human expression noted on many 

 a brute, by the human shape of many a stone, show how 

 the theory of the soul as nigh at hand finds manv-sided 

 support. In this belief, too, lie the germs of theories of 

 successive transmigrations elaborated in the faiths of 

 advanced races, when the defects of body and character 

 were explained as the effects of sin committed in a former 

 existence. 



Next in order of conception appears to be that of the 

 soul as living an independent existence, an improved 

 edition of the present, in an tinder or upper world, into 

 which the dead pass without distinction of caste or worth. 



The things dreamed about respecting the land of spirits 

 and their occupations are woven of the materials of daily 

 life. Whether to the sleeping barbarian in his wigwam, or 

 to the seer banished in Patmos ; whether to the Indian 

 travelling in his dreams to the happy hunting-ground, or 

 to the apostle caught up in trance into paradise ; earth, 

 and earth alone, supplies the materials out of which 

 man everywhere has shaped his heaven. Her dinted 

 and furrowed surface ; valleys and mountain-tops; 

 islands sleeping in summer seas, or fretted by winter 

 storms ; cities walled and battlemented ; glories of sunrise 

 and sunset ; gave variety enough for play of the cherished 

 hopes and imaginings of men. If we collect any group of 

 barbaric fancies, we tind, speaking broadly, that a large 

 proportion have jiictured the home of souls as in the west, 

 towards the land of the setting sun. Seen from many a 



standpoint to sink beneath river, lake, or ocean, which 

 for untutored man enclosed his world, it led to the 

 myth of waters of death dividing earth from heaven, 

 which the soul, often at perilous risk, must cross. 

 Such was the Ginnunga-gap of the Vikings, the great water 

 of the Red Indians, the Yaitarani of the Brahmans, the 

 Stygian stream of the Greeks, and the Jordan of the 

 Christians, that flows between us and the Celestial City 

 " where the surges cease to roll." The sinking of the sun 

 below the horizon obviously led to belief in an under- 

 world, whither the ghosts went. Barbaric notions are fuU 

 of this, and the lower culture out of which their beliefs 

 arose is evidenced in the Orcus of the Romans, the Hades 

 of the Greeks, the Helheim of the Norsemen, the Sheol of 

 the Hebrews, and the Amenti of the Egyptians, the solar 

 features of which last are clearly traceable in their doctrine. 

 Among the Hebrews, Sheol (translated, curiously enough, 

 thirty-one times as " grave," and thirty-one times a.s 

 " hell " in our Authorised Version) was a vast cavernous 

 space in which the shades of good and bad alike wandered 

 — "the small and great are there, and the servant is free 

 from his master." It is akin in character to the Greek 

 Hades, where they "wander mid shadows and shade, and 

 waU by impassable streams." As ideas of a Divine Rule 

 of the world grew, its manifestations in justice were looked 

 for, and the mystery of iniquity, the wicked " flourishing 

 like a green bay tree," led to the conception of a future 

 state, in which Lazarus and Abraham would change places. 

 Sheol thus became, on the one hand, a land of delight and 

 repose for the faithful, and, on the other hand, one of 

 punishment for the wicked. 



Persian, and still older, influences had largely leavened 

 Hebrew conceptions, and local conditions in Jtidea added 

 pungent elements. The Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, 

 " the place where lie the corpses of those who have sinned 

 against Jehovah, where their worm shall not die, neither 

 their fire be quenched ; " the dreary volcanic region around 

 the Dead Sea, with its legend of doomed cities, supplied 

 their imagery of hell with its lake of fire and brimstone. 

 And, as the belief travelled westward, it fell into congenial 

 soil. The sulphurous stench around Lacus Avernus, the 

 smoke of Vesuvius, Stromboli, and Etna, wreathed them- 

 selves round the hell of Christianity, and the under-world 

 of barbaric myth, and from Talmudic writer to classic poet, 

 to Dante and to Milton, the imagination exhausted the 

 material of the horrible to describe the several tortures of 

 the damned. The hell of our northern forefathers remained 

 below the flat earth, but the cold, misty Xiflheim melted 

 away before the fiery perdition of Christian dogma. And, 

 in the region bordering thereon, the limbits patriim, the 

 linibus infantiun, ic. , we have the survival of belief in 

 separate hells characteristic of the Oriental religions, and 

 of the sub-division of the lower world in more rudimentary 

 religions. 



Beyond the narrow horizon which bounded the world 

 of the ancients, lay the imaginary land of the immortals, 

 the Blessed, the Happy, the Fortunate Isles. But as 

 that horizon enlarged, the Elysian Fields and Banquet 

 Halls were transferred to an upper sphere. In the wonder 

 aroused by the firmament above, with its solid-looking 

 vault across which sim, stars, and clouds traversed ; in the 

 place it plays in dreams of barbarian and patriarch, when 

 the sleeper is carried thither ; in its brightness of noonday 

 glory as contrasted with the dark sun-set under-world, we 

 may find some of the materials of which the theory of an 

 upper world, a heaven (" the heaved ") is made up. There 

 the barbarian places his paradise to which the rainbow and 

 \ the Milky Way are roads ; there he meets his kindred, and 

 I lives where cold, disease, and age are not, but everlasting 



