The Eternal Belief in Immortality & Worship of the Dead. James George Frazer
people." It was a vain hope. Since then Death has lived on earth and killed everybody who is born into the world; and always, after the deed of murder is done, he escapes into the earth at Tanda in Singo.103
In the preceding story Death is distinctly personified. Death personified in a West African story of the origin of death. Death and the spider and the spider's daughter.
If this curious tale of the origin of death reveals no very deep philosophy, it is at least interesting for the distinctness with which Death is conceived as a personal being, the son of the Lord of Heaven, the brother of the first man's wife. In this personification of Death the story differs from all the others which we have examined and marks an intellectual advance upon them; since the power of picturing abstract ideas to the mind with all the sharpness of outline and vividness of colour which are implied by personification is a faculty above the reach of very low intelligences. It is not surprising that the Baganda should have attained to this power, for they are probably the most highly cultured and intellectual of all the many Bantu tribes of Africa. The same conception of Death as a person occurs in a story of the origin of death which is told by the Hos, a negro tribe in Togoland, a district of West Africa. These Hos belong to the Ewe-speaking family of the true negroes, who have reached a comparatively high level of barbarism in the notorious kingdom of Dahomey. The story which the Hos tell as to the origin of death is as follows. Once upon a time there was a great famine in which even the hunters could find no flesh to eat. Then Death went and made a road as broad as from here to Sokode, and there he set many snares. Every animal that tried to pass that way fell into a snare. So Death had much flesh to eat. One day the Spider came to Death and said to him, "You have so much meat!" and she asked if she might have some to take home with her. Death gave her leave. So the Spider made a basket as long as from Ho to Akoviewe (a distance of about five miles), crammed it full of meat, and dragged it home. In return for this bounty the Spider gave Death her daughter Yiyisa to wife. So when Death had her for his wife, he gave her a hint. He said, "Don't walk on the broad road which I have made. Walk on the footpath which I have not made. When you go to the water, be sure to take none but the narrow way through the wood." Well, some time afterwards it had rained a little; the grass was wet, and Yiyisa wished to go to the watering-place. When she tried to walk on the narrow path through the forest, the tall damp grass wet her through and through, so she thought to herself, "In future I will only go on the broad road." But scarce had she set foot on the beautiful broad road when she fell into a snare and died on the spot. When Death came to the snare and saw his wife in it dead, he cut her up into bits and toasted them on the fire. One day the Spider paid a visit to her son-in-law Death, and he set a good meal before her. When she had eaten and drunk her fill and had got up to go home, she asked Death after her daughter. "If you take that meat from the fire," said Death, "you will see her." So the Spider took the flesh from the fire and there, sure enough, she found her dead daughter. Then she went home in great wrath and whetted her knife till it was so sharp that a fly lighting on the edge was cut in two. With that knife she came back to attack Death. But Death shot an arrow at her. She dodged it, and the arrow whizzed past her and set all the forest on fire. Then the Spider flung her sharp knife at Death, but it missed him and only sliced off the tops of the palms and all the other trees of the wood. Seeing that her stroke had failed, the Spider fled away home and shut herself up in her house. But Death waited for her on the edge of the town to kill her as soon as she ventured out. Next morning some women came out of the town to draw water at the watering-place, and as they went they talked with one another. But Death shot an arrow among them and killed several. The rest ran away home and said, "So and so is dead." Then Death came and looked at the bodies and said, "That is my game. I need go no more into the wood to hunt." That is how Death came into the world. If the Spider had not done what she did, nobody would ever have died.104
Death personified in a Melanesian story of the origin of death.
Again, the Melanesians of the Banks Islands tell a story of the origin of Death, in which that grim power is personified. They say that Death (Mate) used to live underground in a shadowy realm called Panoi, while men on earth changed their skins like serpents and so renewing their youth lived for ever. But a practical inconvenience of immortality was that property never changed hands; newcomers had no chance, everything was monopolised by the old, old stagers. To remedy this state of things and secure a more equitable distribution of property Death was induced to emerge from the lower world and to appear on earth among men; he came relying on an assurance that no harm would be done him. Well, when they had him, they laid him out on a board, covered him with a pall as if he were a corpse, and then proceeded with great gusto to divide his property and eat the funeral feast. On the fifth day they blew the conch shell to drive away the ghost, as usual, and lifted the pall to see what had become of Death. But there was no Death there; he had absconded leaving only his skeleton behind. They naturally feared that he had made off with an intention to return to his home underground, which would have been a great calamity; for if there were no Death on earth, how could men die and how could other people inherit their property? The idea was intolerable; so to cut off the retreat of the fugitive, the Fool was set to do sentinel duty at the parting of the ways, where one road leads down to the underworld, Death's home, and the other leads up to the upper world, the abode of the living. Here accordingly the Fool was stationed with strict orders to keep his eye on Death if he should attempt to sneak past him and return to the nether world. However, the Fool, like a fool as he was, sat watching the road to the upper world, and Death slipped behind him and so made good his retreat. Since then all men have followed Death down that fatal path.105
Thus according to savages death is not a necessary part of the order of nature. A similar view is held by some eminent modern biologists.
So much for savage stories of the origin of death. They all imply a belief that death is not a necessary part of the order of nature, but that it originated in a pure mistake or misdeed of some sort on somebody's part, and that we should all have lived happy and immortal if it had not been for that disastrous blunder or crime. Thus the tales reflect the same frame of mind which I illustrated in the last lecture, when I shewed that many savages still to this day believe all men to be naturally immortal and death to be nothing but an effect of sorcery. In short, whether we regard the savage's attitude to death at the present day or his ideas as to its origin in the remote past, we must conclude that primitive man cannot reconcile himself to the notion of death as a natural and necessary event; he persists in regarding it as an accidental and unnecessary disturbance of the proper order of nature. To a certain extent, perhaps, in these crude speculations he has anticipated certain views of modern biology. Thus it has been maintained by Professor August Weissmann that death is not a natural necessity, that many of the lowest species of living animals do in fact live for ever; and that in the higher animals the custom of dying has been introduced in the course of evolution for the purpose of thinning the population and preventing the degeneration of the species, which would otherwise follow through the gradual and necessary deterioration of the immortal individuals, who, though they could not die, might yet sustain much bodily damage through hard knocks in the hurly-burly of eternal existence on earth.
Weissmann's view that death is not a natural necessity but an adaptation acquired in the course of evolution for the advantage of the race.
On this subject I will quote some sentences from Professor Weissmann's essay on the duration of life. He says, "The necessity of death has been hitherto explained as due to causes which are inherent in organic nature, and not to the fact that it may be advantageous. I do not however believe in the validity of this explanation; I consider that death is not a primary necessity, but that it has been secondarily acquired as an adaptation. I believe that life is endowed with a fixed duration, not because it is contrary to its nature to be unlimited, but because the unlimited existence of individuals would be a luxury without any corresponding advantage. The above-mentioned hypothesis upon the origin and necessity of death leads me to believe that the organism did not finally cease to renew the worn-out cell material because the nature of the cells did not permit them to multiply indefinitely, but because the power of multiplying indefinitely was lost