The Ghost Cults

87:1.1Death was feared be­cause death meant the lib­er­a­tion of an­other ghost from its phys­i­cal body. The an­cients did their best to pre­vent death, to avoid the trou­ble of hav­ing to con­tend with a new ghost. They were al­ways anx­ious to in­duce the ghost to leave the scene of death, to em­bark on the jour­ney to dead­land. The ghost was feared most of all dur­ing the sup­posed tran­si­tion pe­riod be­tween its emer­gence at the time of death and its later de­par­ture for the ghost home­land, a vague and prim­i­tive con­cept of pseudo heaven.

87:1.2Though the sav­age cred­ited ghosts with super­nat­u­ral pow­ers, he hardly con­ceived of them as hav­ing super­nat­u­ral in­tel­li­gence. Many tricks and stratagems were prac­ticed in an ef­fort to hood­wink and de­ceive the ghosts; civ­i­lized man still pins much faith on the hope that an out­ward man­i­fes­ta­tion of piety will in some man­ner de­ceive even an om­ni­scient De­ity.

87:1.3The prim­i­tives feared sick­ness be­cause they ob­served it was of­ten a har­bin­ger of death. If the tribal med­i­cine man failed to cure an af­flicted in­di­vid­ual, the sick man was usu­ally re­moved from the fam­ily hut, be­ing taken to a smaller one or left in the open air to die alone. A house in which death had oc­curred was usu­ally de­stroyed; if not, it was al­ways avoided, and this fear pre­vented early man from build­ing sub­stan­tial dwellings. It also mil­i­tated against the es­tab­lish­ment of per­ma­nent vil­lages and cities.

87:1.4The sav­ages sat up all night and talked when a mem­ber of the clan died; they feared they too would die if they fell asleep in the vicin­ity of a corpse. Con­ta­gion from the corpse sub­stan­ti­ated the fear of the dead, and all peo­ples, at one time or an­other, have em­ployed elab­o­rate pu­rifi­ca­tion cer­e­monies de­signed to cleanse an in­di­vid­ual af­ter con­tact with the dead. The an­cients be­lieved that light must be pro­vided for a corpse; a dead body was never per­mit­ted to re­main in the dark. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, can­dles are still burned in death cham­bers, and men still sit up with the dead. So-called civ­i­lized man has hardly yet com­pletely elim­i­nated the fear of dead bod­ies from his phi­los­o­phy of life.

87:1.5But de­spite all this fear, men still sought to trick the ghost. If the death hut was not de­stroyed, the corpse was re­moved through a hole in the wall, never by way of the door. These mea­sures were taken to con­fuse the ghost, to pre­vent its tar­ry­ing, and to in­sure against its re­turn. Mourn­ers also re­turned from a fu­neral by a dif­fer­ent road, lest the ghost fol­low. Back­track­ing and scores of other tac­tics were prac­ticed to in­sure that the ghost would not re­turn from the grave. The sexes of­ten ex­changed clothes in or­der to de­ceive the ghost. Mourn­ing cos­tumes were de­signed to dis­guise sur­vivors; later on, to show re­spect for the dead and thus ap­pease the ghosts.