The Ghost World. Dyer Thomas Firminger Thiselton
have left on earth.’ A similar notion of substantiality prevailed among the Hebrews, and, as Herbert Spencer points out, ‘the stories about ghosts accepted among ourselves in past times involved the same thought. The ability to open doors, to clank chains, and make other noises implies considerable coherence of the ghost’s substance.’31 That this conception of the soul was not only received but taught, may be gathered from Tertullian, who says: ‘The soul is material, composed of a substance different to the body, and particular. It has all the qualities of matter, but it is immortal. It has a figure like the body. It is born at the same time as the flesh, and receives an individuality of character which it never loses.’ He further describes32 a vision or revelation of a certain Montanist prophetess, of the soul seen by her corporeally, thin and lucid, aerial in colour, and human in form. It is recorded, too, as an opinion of Epicurus, that ‘they who say the soul is incorporeal talk folly, for it could neither do nor suffer anything were it such.’ It was the idea of materiality that caused the superstitious folk in years gone by to attribute to ghosts all kinds of weird and eccentric acts which could not otherwise be explained. And yet it has always been a puzzle in Animistic philosophy, how a ghost could be possessed at one moment of a corporeal body, and immediately afterwards vanish into immateriality, escaping sight and touch. But this strange ghost phenomenon is clearly depicted in sacred history, where we find substantiality, now insubstantiality, and now something between the two, described. Thus, as Herbert Spencer remarks,33 ‘the resuscitated Christ was described as having wounds that admitted of tactual examination, and yet as passing unimpeded through a closed door or through walls.’ And, as he adds, the supernatural beings of the Hebrews generally, ‘whether revived dead or not, were similarly conceived: here, angels dining with Abraham, or pulling Lot into the house, apparently possess complete corporeity; there, both angels and demons are spoken of as swarming invisibly in the surrounding air, thus being incorporeal; while elsewhere they are said to have wings, implying motion by mechanical action, and are represented as rubbing against, and wearing out, the dresses of Rabbis in the Synagogue.’ All kinds of strange theories have been suggested by perplexed metaphysicians to account for this duplex nature of the disembodied soul; Calmet having maintained that ‘immaterial souls have their own vaporous bodies, or occasionally have such vaporous bodies provided for them by supernatural means to enable them to appear as spectres, or that they possess the power of condensing the circumambient air into phantom-like bodies to invest themselves in.’34
In Fiji the soul is regarded quite as a material object, subject to the same laws as the living body, and having to struggle hard to gain the paradisaical Bolotu. Some idea, too, of the hardships it has to undergo in its material state may be gathered from the following passage in Dr. Letourneau’s ‘Sociology’ (p. 251): ‘After death the soul of the Fijian goes first of all to the eastern extremity of Vanna Levou, and during this voyage it is most important that it should hold in its hand the soul of the tooth of a spermaceti whale, for this tooth ought to grow into a tree, and the soul of the poor human creature climbs up to the top of this tree. When it is perched up there it is obliged to await the arrival of the souls of his wives, who have been religiously strangled to serve as escort to their master. Unless all these and many other precautions are taken, the soul of the deceased Fijian remains mournfully seated upon the fatal bough until the arrival of the good Ravuyalo, who kills him once and for all, and leaves him without means of escape.’
According to another popular and widely accepted doctrine, the soul was supposed to be composed of a peculiar subtle substance, a kind of vaporous materiality. The Choctaws have their ghosts or wandering spirits which can speak and are visible, but not tangible.35 The Tongans conceived it as the aeriform part of the body, related to it as the perfume and essence of a flower; and the Greenlanders speak of it as pale and soft, without flesh and bone, so that he who tries to grasp it feels nothing he can take hold of. The Siamese describe the soul as consisting of some strange matter, invisible and untouchable. While Dr. Tylor quotes a curious passage from Hampole,36 in which the soul, owing to the thinness of its substance, suffers all the more intense suffering in purgatory:
The soul is more tendre and nesche (soft)
Than the bodi that hath bones and fleysche;
Thanne the soul that is so tendere of kinde,
Mote nedis hure penaunce hardere y-finde,
Than eni bodi that evere on live was.
Then there is the idea of the soul as a shadow, a form of superstition which has given rise to many quaint beliefs among uncultured tribes. The Basutos, when walking by a river, take care not to let their shadow fall on the water, lest a crocodile seize it, and draw the owner in. The Zulu affirms that at death the shadow of a man in some mysterious way leaves the body, and hence, it is said, a corpse cannot cast a shadow. Certain African tribes consider that ‘as he dies, man leaves a shadow behind him, but only for a short time. The shade, or the mind, of the deceased remains, they think, close to the grave where the corpse has been buried. This shadow is generally evil-minded, and they often fly away from it in changing their place of abode.’37 The Ojibways tell how one of their chiefs died,38 but while they were watching the body on the third night, his shadow came back into it. He sat up, and told them how he had travelled to the River of Death, but was stopped there, and sent back to his people.
Speaking of the human shadow in relation to foundation sacrifices, we are reminded39 how, according to many ancient Roumenian legends, ‘every new church or otherwise important building became a human grave, as it was thought indispensable to its stability to wall in a living man or woman, whose spirit henceforward haunts the place. In later times this custom underwent some modifications, and it became usual, in place of a living man, to wall in his shadow. This is done by measuring the shadow of a person with a long piece of cord, or a ribbon made of strips of reed, and interring this measure instead of the person himself, who, unconscious victim of the spell thrown upon him, will pine away and die within forty days. It is an indispensable condition to the success of this proceeding that the chosen victim be ignorant of the part he is playing, therefore careless passers by near a building may often hear the cry, warning, “Beware, lest they take thy shadow!” So deeply engrained is this superstition, that not long ago there were professional shadow-traders, who made it their business to provide architects with the necessary victims for securing their walls.’ ‘Of course, the man whose shadow is thus interred must die,’ argues the Roumenian, ‘but as he is unaware of his doom, he does not feel any pain or anxiety, and so it is less cruel than walling in a living man.’
At the present day in Russia, as elsewhere, a shadow is a common metaphor for the soul,40 whence it arises that there are persons there who object to having their silhouettes taken, fearing that if they do, they will die before the year is out. In the same way, a man’s reflected image is supposed to be in communion with his inner self, and, therefore, children are often forbidden to look at themselves in a glass, lest their sleep should be disturbed at night. It may be added, too, as Mr. Clodd points out, that in the barbaric belief of the loss of the shadow being baleful, ‘we have the germ of the mediæval legends of shadowless men, and of tales of which Chamisso’s “Story of Peter Schlemihl” is a type.’41 Hence the dead in purgatory recognised that Dante was alive when they saw that, unlike theirs, his figure cast a shadow on the ground. But, as Mr. Fiske observes,42 ‘the theory which identifies the soul with the shadow, and supposes the shadow to depart with the sickness and death of the body, would seem liable to be attended with some difficulties in the way of verification, even to the dim intelligence of the savage.’
Again, another doctrine promulgated under various forms in Animistic philosophy is, that the existence and condition of the soul depend upon the manner of death. The Australian, for instance, not
See Tylor’s
Dorman’s
Tylor’s
Letourneau’s
See Tylor’s
Ralston’s