81 



with chica and with wine, which, according to their 

 opinions, are necessary to subsist them during their 

 passage to another world. They sometimes even 

 kill a horse and inter it in the same ground. After 

 these ceremonies they take leave with many tears 

 of the deceased, wishing him a prosperous journey, 

 and cover the corpse with earth and stones placed in 

 a pyramidal form, upon which they pour a great 

 quantity of chica. The similarity between these fu- 

 neral rites and those practised by the ancients must 

 be obvious to those acquainted with the customs of 

 tlie latter. 



Immediately after the relations have quitted the 

 deceased, an old woman, called Tempulcague^ comes, 

 as the Araucanians believe, in the shape of a whale, 

 to transport him to the Elysianfields, but before his ar- ' 

 rival there he is obliged to pay a toll for passing a very 

 narrow strait to another malicious old woman who 

 guards it, and who, on failure, deprives the passen- 

 ger of an eye. This fable resembles much that of 

 the ferryman Charon, not that there is any proba- 

 bility that the one was copied from the other, as the 

 human mind, when placed in similar situations, will 

 give birth to the same ideas. The sou), when sepa- 

 rafed from the body, exercises in another life the 

 same functions that it performed in this, with no 

 other diíFerence except that they are unaccompanied 

 with fatigue or satiety. Husbands have there the 

 same wives as they had on earth, but the latter have 

 no children, as that happy country cannot be inhab- 

 ited by any except the spirits of the dead, and every 

 thing there is spiritual or analogous to it. 



-^OL. IT. L 



