Magic Science and Religion 49 



prevalent in Australia and Papuasia is, perhaps, but a variety of 

 this custom. 



In all such rites, there is a desire to maintain the tie and the 

 parallel tendency to break the bond. Thus the funerary rites are 

 considered as unclean and soiling, the contact with the corpse as 

 defiling and dangerous, and the performers have to wash, cleanse 

 their body, remove all traces of contact, and perform ritual lustra- 

 tions. Yet the mortuary ritual compels man to overcome the 

 repugnance, to conquer his fears, to make piety and attachment 

 triumphant, and with it the belief in a future life, in the survival 

 of the spirit. 



And here we touch on one of the most important functions 

 of religious cult. In the foregoing analysis I have laid stress on 

 the direct emotional forces created by contact with death and with 

 the corpse, for they primarily and most powerfully determine the 

 behaviour of the survivors. But connected with these emotions 

 and born out of them, there is the idea of the spirit, the belief in 

 the new life into which the departed has entered. And here we 

 return to the problem of animism with which we began our 

 survey of primitive religious facts. What is the substance of a 

 spirit, and what is the psychological origin of this belief ? 



The savage is intensely afraid of death, probably as the result 

 of some deep-seated instincts common to man and animals. He 

 does not want to realise it as an end, he cannot face the idea of 

 complete cessation, of annihilation. The idea of spirit and of 

 spiritual existence is near at hand, furnished by such experiences 

 as are discovered and described by Tylor. Grasping at it, man 

 reaches the comforting belief in spiritual continuity and in the 

 life after death. Yet this belief does not remain unchallenged 

 in the complex, double-edged play of hope and fear which sets in 

 always in the face of death. To the comforting voice of hope, 

 to the intense desire of immortality, to the difficulty, in one's own 

 case, almost the impossibility, of facing annihilation there are 

 opposed powerful and terrible forebodings. The testimony of 

 the senses, the gruesome decomposition of the corpse, the visible 

 disappearance of the personality — certain apparently instinctive 

 suggestions of fear and horror seem to threaten man at all stages 

 of culture with some idea of annihilation, with some hidden fears 

 and forebodings. And here into this play of emotional forces, 

 into this supremfe dilemma of life and final death, religion steps in, 



