OGBURY BAKEOWS 299 



dog would bear him company, naturally enough had the 

 dog in question killed and buried with him, in order that it 

 might follow him to the happy hunting-grounds. Clearly, 

 you can't hunt without your arrows and your tomahawk ; 

 so the flint weapons and the trusty bow accompanied their 

 owner in his new dwelling-place. The wooden haft, the 

 deer-sinew bow-string, the perishable articles of food and 

 drink have long since decayed within the damp tumulus : 

 but the harder stone and earthenware articles have survived 

 till now, to tell the story of that crude and simple early 

 faith. Very crude and illogical indeed it was, however, 

 for it is quite clear that the actual body of the dead man 

 was thought of as persisting to live a sort of underground 

 life within the barrow. A stone hut was constructed for 

 its use ; real weapons and implements were left by its side ; 

 and slaves and wives were ruthlessly massacred, as still in 

 Ashantee, in order that their bodies might accompany the 

 corpse of the buried master in his subterranean dwelling. 

 In all this we have clear evidence of a very inconsistent, 

 savage, materialistic belief, not indeed in the immortality 

 of the soul, but in the continued underground life of the 

 dead body. 



With the progress of time, however, men's ideas upon 

 these subjects began to grow more definite and more con- 

 sistent. Instead of the corpse, we get the ghost ; instead 

 of the material underground world, we get the idealised 

 and sublimated conception of a shadowy Hades, a world 

 of shades, a realm of incorporeal, disembodied spirits. 

 With the growth of the idea in this ghostly nether world, 

 there arises naturally the habit of burning the dead in order 

 fully to free the liberated spirit from the earthly chains that 

 clog and bind it. It is, indeed, a very noticeable fact that 

 wherever this belief in a world of shades is implicitly 

 accepted, there cremation follows as a matter of course ; 



