CHAPTER XXI

THE NEXT LIFE

As to man's future state many very different views have been held and are held by different peoples. To some it appears but a continuation of the present life, for others it involves a retribution for what has been done in this world; and each of these theories has many varieties. The retribution may consist in a simple reversal of this life's lot, so that those who have fared ill here will be well off in the next world, and vice versa; or the better lot in the next world may be reserved either for those who in this were persons of quality, or for those who distinguished themselves by their valour, or by their virtue, or by their piety. Or the next life may be for all men alike a continuance of this, under more pleasant conditions, or under more gloomy conditions, but in either case the rank and occupation of the deceased will be what they were in this life, even the scars and mutilations of the body surviving with the other marks of personal identity. Or, again, life may be continued, but in such a way that personal identity is concealed, as for instance by the transmigration of the soul into an animal body, or is forgotten, as by the souls that drink the waters of Lethe before being reborn, or merged in the divine essence. Or the soul may not survive death at all-only the fruit of its moral or immoral acts may be transmitted.

An equally great variety of opinion prevails as to the situation and topography of the next world. It may be on the earth's surface, or under it or above it. If on it, then it is a far-off land, a garden behind far distant hills, a land beyond a distant river, an island across the sea, a far-off western world. Or it may be above the earth, in the sun,

the moon, the stars, or above the solid firmament of the sky. If below the earth, it may be one vast and gloomy realm, or it may be mapped out into many various divisions. If the retribution theory is held, then the heaven may be above the earth, or it may be underground. If it is underground, then the places of bliss and punishment are topographically distinguished; if the heaven is above the world, then it may or may not be locally distinguished from the abode of the gods. The underground hell may or may not have places of torture; if it has, they too may be more or less numerous. The number of heavens may extend to the third, the seventh, or even go as high as thirty.

Into the mass of bewildering details, of which these are but a few, some order has been introduced by the labour of various writers, especially Professor E. B. Tylor, in his Primitive Culture. He has shown, for instance, that the retribution theory appears generally at a later stage of culture than the continuance theory; and that the conceptions of the next world as a far-off land, a western world, an underground abode, or as located in the sun, moon, stars, or sky, are of common occurrence amongst different peoples, and are conceptions such as might be formed independently by different peoples, and need not have been borrowed by one from another. These conclusions may be regarded as well established, and we shall make them the basis for an attempt to trace the growth of the belief in a future state.

Whether the funeral rites practised by man in the lowest stage of culture known to us, and also in the earliest times from which we have interments, were prompted by love or fear, by the desire to detain the spirit of the one loved and lost, or by the wish to drive off the ghost, may be a disputed question. But that these rites show primitive man to have believed that the ghost lingered for some time in the neighbourhood of the survivors, is universally admitted. Nor can there be any doubt as to the cause of the belief: the memory of the departed is still fresh in the minds of the survivors, and the occasions are frequent which suggest to their minds the picture of the deceased engaged in his familiar guise and occupations. As time goes on, the memory of him is revived less often and at longer and longer intervals, and it is in

occasional dreams that he appears most vividly to mind. Such appearances are regarded by the savage as visits of the dead man; and the fact has to be accounted for that such visits, at first frequent, gradually become separated by longer and longer intervals. The obvious explanation is, in part at any rate, that the ghost is now further off, and it takes him longer to make the journey. Hence the belief in a far-off land on the surface of the earth is, I suggest, the first hypothesis as to the dwelling-place of the dead In Borneo, it is situated, for the Idaan race, on the summit of Kina Balu; in West Java, on the mountain Gungung Danka; the dwellingplace of the dead, according to the Chilians, was Gulcheman beyond the mountains; "hidden among the mountains of Mexico lay the joyous garden of Tlalocan."1

"2

Whether burial is the oldest mode of disposing of corpses, or is later than cremation—as seems indicated by the fact that in the oldest interments known to archæologists the body is always partially burnt-burial is and long has been universally known and practised, and no one doubts that it is the burial of bodies underground which has given rise to the belief that the abode of the dead is also underground. The belief is widely spread: "in North America, the Tacullis held that the soul goes after death into the bowels of the earth. among rude African tribes, it is enough to cite the Zulus, who at death will descend to live among the Abapansi, 'the people underground.' Amongst the Karens, a rude Asiatic tribe, the land of the dead is held to be below the earth. The Aryan peoples undoubtedly held the same view: the Roman Orcus and the Greek Hades are underground. The Babylonians placed " the land whence none return," as it was termed by them, in the bowels of the earth; and the Hebrew Sheol is the name both for the grave and for the subterranean abode of the departed. As to the nature of this realm and the kind of life spent by its inhabitants, there is a unanimity which is a striking illustration of the fact that under similar conditions similar minds will reach similar conclusions. In it, according to the Hurons, " day and night the souls groan and lament";s the region of Mictlan, the subterranean land of Hades in Mexico, "was an abode looked forward to with resignation, 1Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii, 60 and 61. 2 Ibid, 66, 3 Ibid. 79,

but scarcely with cheerfulness." 1 The Yoruba proverb runs: A corner in this world is better than a corner in the world of spirits." The ghost of Achilles rejected consolation: "Nay! speak not comfortably to me of death, O great Odysseus. Rather would I live on ground as the hireling of another, with a landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead." 2 "The Hades of the Babylonian legends closely resembles the Hades of the Homeric poems. It is the gloomy realm beneath the earth, where the spirits of the dead flit about in darkness, with dust and mud for their food and drink, and from whence they escape at times to feed on the blood of the living. Here the shades of the great heroes of old sit each on his throne, crowned and terrible, rising up only to greet the coming among them of one like unto themselves. . . good and bad, heroes and plebeians, are alike condemned to this dreary lot; a state of future punishments and rewards is as yet undreamed of; moral responsibility ends with death. Hades is a land of forgetfulness and of darkness, where the good and evil deeds of this life are remembered no more; and its occupants are mere shadows of the men who once existed, and whose consciousness is like the consciousness of the spectral figures in a fleeting dream." 3 For the Sheol of the Old Testament we may quote Smith's Dictionary of the Bible: it is "the vast hollow subterranean resting-place which is the receptacle of the dead. It is deep (Job xi. 8) and dark (Job xi. 21, 22); in the centre of the earth (Num. xvi. 30; Deut. xxxii. 22), having within it depths on depths (Prov. ix. 18), and fastened with gates (Isa. xxxviii. 10) and bars (Job xvii. 16). In this cavernous realm are the souls of dead men, the Rephaim and ill-spirits (Ps. lxxxvi. 13, lxxxix. 48; Prov. xxiii. 14; Ezek. xxxi. 17, xxxii. 21). It is all-devouring (Prov. i. 12, xxx. 16), insatiable (Isa. v. 14), and remorseless (Cant. viii. 6). ... . . . Job xi. 8, Ps. cxxxix. 8, and Amos ix. 2 merely illustrate the Jewish notions of the locality of Sheol in the bowels of the earth. . . . Generally speaking, the Hebrews regarded the grave as the final end of all sentient and intelligent existence, 'the land where all things are 2 Od. xi. 486 (Butcher and Lang's trans,).

1 Loc. cit.

3 Sayce, Hibbert Lecture, 364,

forgotten' (Ps. vi. 5, lxxxviii. 10-22; Isa. xxxviii. 9-20; Eccles. ix. 10; Ecclus. xvii. 27, 28)."

In

In this view of the future life there is no room for the retribution theory: all men alike go to Hades or Sheol, the all-devouring. Indeed, the continuance theory is generally clearly involved in it. In the Babylonian underworld, those who were in their lifetime heroes, retain their thrones. the Greek Hades, Achilles is still a king, and the phantom Orion hunts phantom beasts; and "there the soul of the dead Karen, with the souls of his axe and cleaver, builds his house and cuts his rice; the shade of the Algonquin hunter hunts souls of beaver and elk, walking on the souls of his snow-shoes over the soul of the snow; the fur-wrapped Kamchadal drives his dog-sledge; the Zulu milks his cows and drives his cattle to kraal; South American tribes live on, whole or mutilated, healthy or sick, as they left this world, leading their old lives." So, too, in Virgil, the ghost of Deiphobus shows its ghastly wounds to Æneas. In Sheol the kings of the nations have their thrones, and the mighty their weapons of war.3

The idea that, in the underground ghost-land, the soul continues to follow the same pursuits as in life, gave rise to the custom of burying with him the necessary weapons, implements, pottery, clothes, etc.; and, as habits are less easily changed than opinions, this custom continued to be practised even when the continuance theory which originated it had given way to the retribution theory. It was, however, impossible that the custom should continue without affecting belief; and the way in which it affected the retribution theory was twofold: it modified men's conception first of the nature of the blissful state, and second of the means by which it is to be attained. It made, that is

to say, future bliss to consist simply in pursuing earthly occupations under more delightful conditions than exist in this life, or existed in the dreary shadow-land to which the continuance theory first gave birth; and, in the next place, the persistence of ancestor-worship made it appear that the soul's attainment to future bliss depended in part at any rate on something that the survivors could do for it. Thus, 1 Tylor, 75-6. * Isa. xiv. 9. 3 Ezek. xxxii. 27.