300 OGBURY BARROWS 



while wherever (among savage or barbaric races) burial is 

 practised, there a more materialistic creed of bodily survival 

 necessarily accompanies it. To carry out this theory to its 

 full extent, not only must the body itself be burnt, but also 

 all its belongings with it. Ghosts are clothed in ghostly 

 clothing ; and the question has often been asked of modern 

 spiritualists by materialistic scoffers, ' Where do the ghosts 

 get their coats and dresses ? ' The true believer in crema- 

 tion and the shadowy world has no difficulty at all in 

 answering that crucial inquiry ; he would say at once, 

 ' They are the ghosts of the clothes that were burnt with 

 the body.' In the gossiping story of Periander, as vera- 

 ciously retailed for us by that dear old grandmotherly 

 scandalmonger, Herodotus, the shade of Melissa refuses to 

 communicate with her late husband, by medium or other- 

 wise, on the ground that she found herself naked and 

 shivering with cold, because the garments buried with her 

 had not been burnt, and therefore were of no use to her in 

 the world of shades. So Periander, to put a stop to this 

 sad state of spiritual destitution, requisitioned all the best 

 dresses of the Corinthian ladies, burnt them bodily in a 

 great trench, and received an immediate answer from the 

 gratified shade, who was thenceforth enabled to walk about 

 in the principal promenades of Hades among the best- 

 dressed ghosts of that populous quarter. 



The belief which thus survived among the civilised 

 Greeks of the age of the Despots is shared still by Fijis and 

 Karens, and was derived by all in common from early 

 ancestors of like faith with the founders of Ogbury round 

 barrow. The weapons were broken and the clothes burnt, 

 to liberate their ghosts into the world of spirits, just as 

 now, in Fiji, knives and axes have their spiritual counter- 

 parts, which can only be released when the material shape 

 destroyed or purified by the action of fire. Everything, 



