and temples, an eternity is passed. The young are
nurtured and taught, the undeveloped of the earth matured,
the old rejuvenated, and every individual taste and desire
gratified; spirits flirt, get married, and
have families of children.5
Verily, verily we can exclaim with Paul, "O
death where is thy sting; O grave, where is- thy
victory!" Belief in the survival of the ancestors is the
oldest and most time honoured of all beliefs.
Travellers tell us all the Mongolian, Tartar, Finnish,
and Tungusic tribes, besides the spirits of nature,
deify also their ancestral spirits. The Chinese historians,
treating of the Turanians, the Huns and the Tukui--the
forefathers of the modern Turks--show them as worshipping "the
spirits of the sky, of the earth, and the spirits
of the departed." Medhurst enumerates the various
classes of the Chinese spirits thus: The principal are
the celestial spirits (tien shin); the terrestrial
(ti-ki); and the ancestral or wandering spirits
(jin kwei). Among these, the spirits of the
late Emperors, great philosophers, and sages,
are revered the most. They are the public property of the
whole nation, and are a part of the state religion,
"while each family has, besides this, its own
manes, which are treated with great regard;
incense is burned before their relics, and many superstitious
rites performed."
But if all nations equally believe in, and many worship,
their dead, their views as to the desirability of a direct
intercourse with these late citizens differ widely. In
fact, among the educated, only the modern Spiritualists
seek to communicate constantly with them. We will take
a few instances from the most widely separated peoples.
The Hindus, as a rule, hold that no pure spirit,
of a man who died reconciled to his fate, will ever come
back bodily to trouble mortals. They maintain that it is
only the bhutas--the souls of those who depart this life,
unsatisfied, and having their terrestrial desires unquenched,
in short, bad, sinful men and women--who become
"earth-bound." Unable to ascend at once to Moksha,
they have to linger upon earth until either their next transmigration
or complete annihilation; and thus take every opportunity
to obsess people, especially weak women. So undesirable
is to them the return or apparition of such ghosts, that
they use every means to prevent it. Even in the case of
the most holy feeling--the mother's love for her infant--they
adopt measures to prevent her return to it. There is a
belief among some of them that whenever a woman dies in childbirth,
she will return to see and watch over her child. Therefore,
on their way back from the ghaut, after the burning of
the body,--the mourners thickly strew mustard seeds all
along the road leading from the funeral pile to the defunct's
home. For some unconceivable reasons they think that the
ghost will feel obliged to pick up, on its way back,
every one of these seeds. And, as the labor is slow
and tedious, the poor mother can never reach her home before
the cock crows, when she is obliged--in accordance with
the ghostly laws--to vanish, till the following night,
dropping back all her harvest. Among the Tchuvashes,
a tribe inhabiting Russian domains (Castren's "Finaische
Mythologie," p. 122), a son,
whenever, offering sacrifice to the spirit of his father,
uses the following exorcism: "We honour thee with
a feast; look, here is bread for thee, and
various kinds of food; thou hast all thou canst desire:
but do not . trouble us, do not come back near us."
Among the Lapps and Finns, those departed spirits,
which make their presence visible and tangible, are supposed
to be very mischievous and "the most mischievous are the
spirits of the priests." Everything is done to keep
them away from the living. The agreement we find between
this blind popular instinct and the wise conclusions of some of
the great philosophers, and even modern specialists,
is very remarkable. "Respect the spirits and--keep
them at a distance" said Confucius, six centuries
B.C. Nine centuries later,
Porphyry, the famous anti-theurgist, writing upon
the nature of various spirits, expressed his opinion upon
the spirits of the departed by saying that he knew of no evil
which these pestilent demons would not be ready to do.
And, in our own century, a kabalist, the
greatest magnetizer living, Baron Dupotet, in his
"Magie Devoileè," warns the spiritists
not to trouble the rest of the dead. For "the evoked
shadow can fasten itself upon, follow, and
for ever afterwards influence you; and we can appease it
but through a pact which will bind us to it--till death!"
But all this is a matter of individual opinion; what we
are concerned with now is merely to learn how the basic fact of
belief in soul-survival could have so engrafted itself upon every
succeeding age,--despite the extravagances woven into it--if
it be but a shadowy and unreal intellectual conception originating
with "primitive man." Of all modern men of science,
although he does his best in the body of the work to present the
belief alluded to as a mere "superstition"--the only
satisfactory answer is given by Prof. Max Müller,
in his "Introduction to the Science of Religion."
And by his solution, we have to abide for want of a better
one. He can only do it, however, by overstepping
the boundaries of comparative philology, and boldly invading
the domain of pure metaphysics; by following, in
short, a path forbidden by exact science. At one
blow he cuts the Gordian knot which Herbert Spencer and his school
have tied under the chariot of the "Unknowable."
He shows us that: "there is a philosophical discipline
which examines into the conditions of sensuous or intuitional
knowledge," and "another philosophical discipline
which examines into the conditions of rational or conceptual knowledge";
and then defines for us a third faculty. . . . "The
faculty of apprehending the Infinite, not only in religion
but in all things; a power independent of sense and reason,
a power in a certain sense contradicted by sense and reason,
but yet a very real power, which has held its own from
the beginning of the world, neither sense nor reason being
able to overcome it, while it alone is able to overcome
both reason and sense."
The faculty of Intuition--that which lies entirely beyond
the scope of our modern biologists--could hardly be better defined.
And yet, when closing his lecture upon the superstitious
rites of the Chinese, and their temples devoted to the
worship of the departed ancestors, our great philologist
remarks: "All this takes place by slow degrees;
it begins with placing a flower on the tomb; it ends--with
worshipping the Spirits. . . ."
Theosophist, December, 1879
1 "Suppose a person is dying," says
the Poughkeepsie Seer: "The clairvoyant sees right
over the head what may be called a magnetic halo--an ethereal
emanation, in appearance golden and throbbing as though
conscious. . . . The person has ceased to breathe,
the pulse is still, and the emanation is elongated and
fashioned in the outline of the human form! Beneath it,
is connected the brain. . . . owing to the brain's momentum.
I have seen a dying person, even at the last feeble pulse-beat,
rouse impulsively and rise up in bed to converse, but the
next instant he was gone--his brain being the last to yield up
the life-principles. The golden emanation . .
. is connected with the brain by a very fine life-thread,
When it ascends, there appears something white and
shining like a human head; next, a faint
outline of the face divine; then the fair neck
and beautiful shoulders; then, in rapid succession
come all parts of the new body, down to the feet--a bright
shining image, a little smaller than the physical body,
but a perfect prototype . . . in all except
its disfigurements. The fine life-thread continues attached
to the old brain. The next thing is the withdrawal of the
electric principle. When this thread snaps, the
spiritual body is free (!) and prepared to accompany its guardian
to the Summer Land."