spirit-land still continued to exist; and the fact that there were two other - worlds was explained by the retribution theory. The sun was the abode of departed chiefs and warriors among the Apalaches of Florida and the Natchez of the Mississippi; the sun or the bright sky generally was the happy other-world assigned in India to the soma devotee.

The idea that the souls of the righteous went to the sun was one of the many different and inconsistent beliefs for which accommodation was found, somehow or other, in the state-religion of ancient Egypt. But as provision was already made in the blissful fields of Aalu for the departed, an abode in the sun was superfluous; and it never succeeded in displacing the former, because it held out no particular attractions, whereas in Aalu the departed was just as well off as if he were alive. Hence, union with the sun continued to be simply an alternative-not the only alternative, as we shall see to Aalu. Attempts, however, were made to bring the sun theory into organic relation with the other elements of Egyptian religion. In the Middle and New Empires, the Osiris myth gave rise to those ideas of afterdeath torments which find such ample expression on the monuments of the period and in the Book of the Dead;1 and it was by union with the sun, Osiris, by becoming an Osiris, that the deceased was enabled to pass by and triumph over all the horrible monsters and dangers which beset his path through the underworld. Now this provided the Egyptian with a motive for desiring to become an Osiris, but it did not diminish his desire for the earthly and agricultural delights of Aalu, and it did not entirely clear up the relations of these two forms of beatification. Philosophy therefore came to the rescue: all things and beings are made of certain elements, or rather they are but different compounds of one element, different modes of one essence, for there is but one thing real in all the universe, and that is the divine essence, God. Eventually, all things and beings must be resolved into their constituent parts, must revert to the original essence of which they are but transient modes. The divine essence was the god Osiris; to become an Osiris 1 Sayce, loc. cit.

was to be merged in the divine essence. This view afforded a reconciliation of the belief in Aaru and the Osiris doctrine: the soul first went to Aaru, and then became an Osiris; the soul entered "the blissful fields of Aalu, there to be purified from all the stains of its early life, and, after becoming perfect in wisdom and knowledge, to be absorbed into the divine essence."1

Finally, we may note that the happy western world. under certain circumstances shared the fate which overtook the far-off land. As we have seen in the chapter on Mythology, a primitive hypothesis, if detached from the belief or custom, etc., which it was invented to explain, becomes a myth. It may be so detached from its basis, either because the belief, etc., on which it was based has changed or perished, or because it has sufficient romantic interest in itself to be worth telling and hearing, quite apart from its "topical allusions." In this way the far-off land, when it was depopulated, so to speak, by the introduction of the underground world as the abode for the dead, became first a place to which none now go or can go, and then an earthly paradise, and finally a land of Cockaigne, Utopia. Now, though the belief in the happy western world never perished wherever it became known, still it might become detached from its basis, inasmuch as rumours of it as a place of high delight might spread to peoples who had as yet not advanced to the conception of a happy other-world. To such a people, having no conception of the retribution theory, and having only one ghost-land-and that a dreary one-for the reception of all ghosts, righteous or unrighteous, alike, the rumour might penetrate of a happy land in the bright west, the inhabitants of which dwelt in fabulous delights and never died. The wonder and romance of the tale would be heightened by the added fact that all the inhabitants were righteous. And the natural objection of the sceptic, that if there were such a happy land everybody would go there, would be met by the statement, made on the same authority as the original rumour, that the place is over the western sea, an island, a fortunate island, to which only those favoured by the gods are carried, and the Sayce, 345.

1

road to which no living man ever yet discovered. A tale so romantic would be readily caught up by story-tellers, ever as eager as their hearers for some new thing, and by them be worked into their tales. In some such way as this, I suggest, the rumour of the blissful fields of Aalu spread from Egypt to Greece. The resemblance of the name of the Egyptian fields to that of the Elysian" plains of Homer may be accidental, but it is perhaps more than fortuitous. that it was in Egypt that Menelaus heard for the first and only time of the Elysian plains to which he was ultimately to be carried by the deathless gods, according to Proteus.1 Be this as it may, there are other imaginary and romantic happy lands in Greek literature, and all are what we should expect on the hypothesis sketched above: there is the isle of Syria, at the turning-place of the sun, where death never enters and sickness is unknown; there is the land of the Hyperboreans (west as well as north), to which man never found his way by sea or land;2 there are the islands of the Hesperides, the islands of the Blest, and the dwellings, in the east and in the west, of the righteous Ethiopians, who once more bring us to the neighbourhood of Egypt. From the Greeks the rumour of this wonderland spread to the Celts; and Irish literature is full of tales telling, as The Voyage of Bran tells,3 of a happy island from which the man who discovers it cannot return-an island in which, according to the Adventures of Connla, there was no death and no sin; and, according to the tale of Cuchulinn's Sick Bed, there are all manner of delights. When, however, the western world has thus become a mere wonderland, it inevitably becomes confused with the far-off land, which also in course of time becomes a merely romantic conception; and fairy islands and enchanted mountains become the scene of exactly the same kind of romantic. adventures.

1 Homer, Od. xv. 403.

2 Pindar, Pyth. x. 30.

K. Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, 142; cf. Classical Review, x. ii. 121-5 (March 1896).

CHAPTER XXII

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THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS

THUS far we have been engaged in tracing the evolution of the primitive philosophical theory of a ghost-land, and have seen it successively assume the shapes of a far-off land, an underground world, a western island or other abode of the blessed, a happy other-world in the sun or sky, until at last ghosts and ghost-land alike are dissolved by an advanced philosophy into the ocean of divine essence. It is time, therefore, to recall to mind that, even when the belief in ghost-land first arose, there was another view as to man's future state, inconsistent indeed but coexistent nevertheless with the ghost-land theory: it was that after death man rejoined his totem and assumed the shape of the plant or animal that he worshipped. We have therefore now to trace the career of this view. In most, the vast majority, of cases it had no career. The people which held the view were either progressive or they were not. If they were not, then ex hypothesi no development in their views took place: the two views as to the future state remained, as amongst the Zulus, inconsistent and coexistent. On the other hand, if the people were progressive, then everything in totemism that was capable of being taken up into the higher forms of religion which supervened was so transformed, and the restincluding this particular feature of totemism-lingered on as a mere survival, in the shape of tales of men being changed into animals, and, in out-of-the-way and backward places, in the belief that such changes still take place. It may therefore seem at first sight as though in no case could there be any development of this particular feature of totemism, namely, a belief in the posthumous transformation of man into a

plant or animal (a different belief from that in metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls-as different as an acorn is from an oak). As a matter of fact, there is only one combination of circumstances under which the development in question has ever taken place; that is, the contact of a more advanced religion, holding the doctrine of retribution \ in a developed form, with a less advanced religion, adhering to the belief that after death man rejoins his totem. That contact, moreover, must take place under peculiar circumstances: the two religions must exist side by side in the same community, political or social; and the higher religion must be one bent on finding room within itself for the beliefs of all sections of the social or political community in which it is the dominant force. Now, in the ancient world there were, from the nature of the case, only two countries in which this peculiar combination could occur. They were Egypt and India. Let us begin with Egypt.

Ancient religions knew no dogma and consequently no heresies. The only one which was an exclusive religion and whose God was a "jealous" God, was the Hebrew religion. To this exclusiveness and jealousy is due the fact that the Jews remained monotheists; while the toleration which. other peoples showed to foreign worships, though it led to polytheism, facilitated political growth by means of synoikismos.1 In any large community, and particularly in a state formed, like Egypt, by the amalgamation of many small states, there will be found various strata of belief, from the lowest superstition to the highest form of religion capable of existing in the given time and place. The beliefs which are held by the wealthiest and most cultured classes will find expression in the literature and on the monuments of the nation; the beliefs of the masses will go unrecorded. Thus, the monuments of ancient Egypt express the hopes, the fears, the beliefs of the ruling classes. Those beliefs might or might not be shared by the common people; they certainly would not and could not be forced on them either by a Church-which did not exist or by the State. And if the fellaheen had beliefs and rites of their own, they would find no place on the monuments, but they would not therefore 1 Supra, Ch. XVIII. "Syncretism and Polytheism."