22 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



In a most interesting Paper on " Certain Burial Customs as illus- 

 trative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul," Mr. J. G. Prazer has 

 brought together a host of facts on this subject, from -which I sum- 

 marize the following particulars, referring the reader to the original 

 Paper for authorities^ : — 



The belief is general that the ghosts of the unburied dead haunt 

 the earth. But burial by itself was not sufficient to guard against the 

 return of the ghost. Many precautions were taken by primitive man 

 for the purpose of excluding or barring the dead from the living. 

 Mr. Prazer recounts many customs for the purpose of chasing away 

 the ghost from his late home or barring his return thereto. Some 

 plans of keeping a ghost down are : to nail the dead man to the coffin 

 (the Chuwash6), to tie the feet together (among the Arabs), or hands 

 together (in Voigtland), or neck to legs (among the Troglodytes, 

 Damaras, and New Zealanders). The Wallachians drive a long nail 

 through the skull, and lay a thorny stem of a wild rosebush on the 

 shroud. The Californians and Damaras break the spine. ^ The ghost 

 of a suicide has always been looked on as especially dangerous, hence 

 the custom of driving a stake through the body, and other customs of 

 similar import.^ 



" But," as Mr, Prazer asks, " what happened when the body could 

 not be found, as when the man died at sea or abroad? Here the 

 all- important question was. What could be done to lay the wandering 

 ghost ? Por wander he would till his body was safe under the sod, 

 and by supposition his body was not to be found. The case was a 

 difficult one, but early man was equal to it. He buried the missing 

 man in effigy, and, according to all the laws of primitive logic, an 

 effigy is every bit as good as its original."* 



' Journal Anthopological Institute, Great Britain and Ireland, vol. xv., p. 64. 



* Miss Florence Peacocke, -who has collected burial customs in Lincolnshire, 

 states that skulls are at times dug up with iron nails hammered through them; 

 about 1843 a skull was dug up in Messingham Churchyard with a nail through it, 

 tmd on the authority of "Bygone Lincolnshire" (Ed. by Wm. Andrews) — " That 

 the ' Layer-out ' in some places ties together the feet of the corpse, but it is neces- 

 eaiy that they should be unloosed before the coffin is screwed down, or else the dead 

 will not rise at the first resurrection." — " The Antiquary," November, 1895. 



3 The general subject of the relations of the ghost to the body may be pursued 

 in Tylor's " Primitive Culture," Frazer's " Golden Bough," W. Crooke's " Intro- 

 duction to the Popular Eeligions and Folk-lore of Northern India," and the publi- 

 cations of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution. 



* Frazer, I. c, p. 95. 



