ghosts

• fear of ghosts › drove men into society

68:2.4The herd in­stinct in nat­u­ral man is hardly suf­fi­cient to ac­count for the de­vel­op­ment of such a so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion as now ex­ists on Uran­tia. Though this in­nate gre­gar­i­ous propen­sity lies at the bot­tom of hu­man so­ci­ety, much of man’s so­cia­bil­ity is an ac­quire­ment. Two great in­flu­ences which con­tributed to the early as­so­ci­a­tion of hu­man be­ings were food hunger and sex love; these in­stinc­tive urges man shares with the an­i­mal world. Two other emo­tions which drove hu­man be­ings to­gether and held them to­gether were van­ity and fear, more par­tic­u­larly ghost fear.

• fear of ghosts › drove men into society

68:2.6Hunger, van­ity, and ghost fear were con­tin­u­ous in their so­cial pres­sure, but sex grat­i­fi­ca­tion was tran­sient and spas­modic. The sex urge alone did not im­pel prim­i­tive men and women to as­sume the heavy bur­dens of home main­te­nance. The early home was founded upon the sex rest­less­ness of the male when de­prived of fre­quent grat­i­fi­ca­tion and upon that de­voted mother love of the hu­man fe­male, which in mea­sure she shares with the fe­males of all the higher an­i­mals. The pres­ence of a help­less baby de­ter­mined the early dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of male and fe­male ac­tiv­i­ties; the woman had to main­tain a set­tled res­i­dence where she could cul­ti­vate the soil. And from ear­li­est times, where woman was has al­ways been re­garded as the home.

• fear of ghosts › drove men into society

68:3.1Prim­i­tive de­sires pro­duced the orig­i­nal so­ci­ety, but ghost fear held it to­gether and im­parted an ex­trahu­man as­pect to its ex­is­tence. Com­mon fear was phys­i­o­log­i­cal in ori­gin: fear of phys­i­cal pain, un­sat­is­fied hunger, or some earthly calamity; but ghost fear was a new and sub­lime sort of ter­ror.

• fear of ghosts › disciplined and controlled primitives
• fear of ghosts › prepared men’s minds for “fear of the Lord”
• fear of ghosts › senseless superstition
• superstition of g. dream still persists

68:3.3Ex­cept for this ghost fac­tor, all so­ci­ety was founded on fun­da­men­tal needs and ba­sic bi­o­logic urges. But ghost fear in­tro­duced a new fac­tor in civ­i­liza­tion, a fear which reaches out and away from the el­e­men­tal needs of the in­di­vid­ual, and which rises far above even the strug­gles to main­tain the group. The dread of the de­parted spir­its of the dead brought to light a new and amaz­ing form of fear, an ap­palling and pow­er­ful ter­ror, which con­tributed to whip­ping the loose so­cial or­ders of early ages into the more thor­oughly dis­ci­plined and bet­ter con­trolled prim­i­tive groups of an­cient times. This sense­less su­per­sti­tion, some of which still per­sists, pre­pared the minds of men, through su­per­sti­tious fear of the un­real and the super­nat­u­ral, for the later dis­cov­ery of “the fear of the Lord which is the be­gin­ning of wis­dom.” The base­less fears of evo­lu­tion are de­signed to be sup­planted by the awe for De­ity in­spired by rev­e­la­tion. The early cult of ghost fear be­came a pow­er­ful so­cial bond, and ever since that far-dis­tant day man­kind has been striv­ing more or less for the at­tain­ment of spir­i­tu­al­ity.

• fear of ghosts › drove men into society

68:3.4Hunger and love drove men to­gether; van­ity and ghost fear held them to­gether. But these emo­tions alone, with­out the in­flu­ence of peace-pro­mot­ing rev­e­la­tions, are un­able to en­dure the strain of the sus­pi­cions and ir­ri­ta­tions of hu­man in­teras­so­ci­a­tions. With­out help from super­hu­man sources the strain of so­ci­ety breaks down upon reach­ing cer­tain lim­its, and these very in­flu­ences of so­cial mo­bi­liza­tion—hunger, love, van­ity, and fear—con­spire to plunge man­kind into war and blood­shed.

• fear of ghosts › drove men into society
• fear of ghosts › fountainhead of ethics, religion
• nature and activities of ghosts › punished those who disdained their rules

68:4.3Ghost fear drove prim­i­tive man to en­vi­sion the super­nat­u­ral and thus se­curely laid the foun­da­tions for those pow­er­ful so­cial in­flu­ences of ethics and re­li­gion which in turn pre­served in­vi­o­late the mores and cus­toms of so­ci­ety from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion. The one thing which early es­tab­lished and crys­tal­lized the mores was the be­lief that the dead were jeal­ous of the ways by which they had lived and died; there­fore would they visit dire pun­ish­ment upon those liv­ing mor­tals who dared to treat with care­less dis­dain the rules of liv­ing which they had hon­ored when in the flesh. All this is best il­lus­trated by the pres­ent rev­er­ence of the yel­low race for their an­ces­tors. Later de­vel­op­ing prim­i­tive re­li­gion greatly re­in­forced ghost fear in sta­bi­liz­ing the mores, but ad­vanc­ing civ­i­liza­tion has in­creas­ingly lib­er­ated man­kind from the bond­age of fear and the slav­ery of su­per­sti­tion.

• nature and activities of ghosts › administered justice through medicine men

70:10.5It was very early be­lieved that ghosts ad­min­is­tered jus­tice through the med­i­cine men and priests; this con­sti­tuted these or­ders the first crime de­tec­tors and of­fi­cers of the law. Their early meth­ods of de­tect­ing crime con­sisted in con­duct­ing or­deals of poi­son, fire, and pain. These sav­age or­deals were noth­ing more than crude tech­niques of ar­bi­tra­tion; they did not nec­es­sar­ily set­tle a dis­pute justly. For ex­am­ple: When poi­son was ad­min­is­tered, if the ac­cused vom­ited, he was in­no­cent.

• early peoples associated g. with the sea

84:1.4Many early peo­ples as­so­ci­ated ghosts with the sea; hence vir­gins were greatly re­stricted in their bathing prac­tices; young women were far more afraid of bathing in the sea at high tide than of hav­ing sex re­la­tions. De­formed or pre­ma­ture ba­bies were re­garded as the young of an­i­mals which had found their way into a woman’s body as a re­sult of care­less bathing or through malev­o­lent spirit ac­tiv­ity. Sav­ages, of course, thought noth­ing of stran­gling such off­spring at birth.

• fear of ghosts › produced dread of being alone

84:7.176. Ghost fear pro­duced a dread of be­ing alone.

• supposed human origin of g. gods

85:6.4The ghost gods, who are of sup­posed hu­man ori­gin, should be dis­tin­guished from the na­ture gods, for na­ture wor­ship did evolve a pan­theon—na­ture spir­its el­e­vated to the po­si­tion of gods. The na­ture cults con­tin­ued to de­velop along with the later ap­pear­ing ghost cults, and each ex­erted an in­flu­ence upon the other. Many re­li­gious sys­tems em­braced a dual con­cept of de­ity, na­ture gods and ghost gods; in some the­olo­gies these con­cepts are con­fus­ingly in­ter­twined, as is il­lus­trated by Thor, a ghost hero who was also mas­ter of the light­ning.

• most primitive idea of human souls

86:4.3Early man was also much con­cerned about his breath, es­pe­cially in cold cli­mates, where it ap­peared as a cloud when ex­haled. The breath of life was re­garded as the one phe­nom­e­non which dif­fer­en­ti­ated the liv­ing and the dead. He knew the breath could leave the body, and his dreams of do­ing all sorts of queer things while asleep con­vinced him that there was some­thing im­ma­te­rial about a hu­man be­ing. The most prim­i­tive idea of the hu­man soul, the ghost, was de­rived from the breath-dream idea-sys­tem.

• nature and activities of ghosts › explained the unusual and the inexplicable
• savage believed g. to be breath minus body

86:4.4Even­tu­ally the sav­age con­ceived of him­self as a dou­ble—body and breath. The breath mi­nus the body equaled a spirit, a ghost. While hav­ing a very def­i­nite hu­man ori­gin, ghosts, or spir­its, were re­garded as super­hu­man. And this be­lief in the ex­is­tence of dis­em­bod­ied spir­its seemed to ex­plain the oc­cur­rence of the un­usual, the ex­traor­di­nary, the in­fre­quent, and the in­ex­pli­ca­ble.

86:5.1The non­ma­te­rial part of man has been var­i­ously termed ghost, spirit, shade, phan­tom, specter, and lat­terly soul. The soul was early man’s dream dou­ble; it was in ev­ery way ex­actly like the mor­tal him­self ex­cept that it was not re­spon­sive to touch. The be­lief in dream dou­bles led di­rectly to the no­tion that all things an­i­mate and inan­i­mate had souls as well as men. This con­cept tended long to per­pet­u­ate the na­ture-spirit be­liefs; the Es­ki­mos still con­ceive that ev­ery­thing in na­ture has a spirit.

86:5.2The ghost soul could be heard and seen, but not touched. Grad­u­ally the dream life of the race so de­vel­oped and ex­panded the ac­tiv­i­ties of this evolv­ing spirit world that death was fi­nally re­garded as “giv­ing up the ghost.” All prim­i­tive tribes, ex­cept those lit­tle above an­i­mals, have de­vel­oped some con­cept of the soul. As civ­i­liza­tion ad­vances, this su­per­sti­tious con­cept of the soul is de­stroyed, and man is wholly de­pen­dent on rev­e­la­tion and per­sonal re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence for his new idea of the soul as the joint cre­ation of the God-know­ing mor­tal mind and its in­dwelling di­vine spirit, the Thought Ad­juster.

86:5.3Early mor­tals usu­ally failed to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the con­cepts of an in­dwelling spirit and a soul of evo­lu­tion­ary na­ture. The sav­age was much con­fused as to whether the ghost soul was na­tive to the body or was an ex­ter­nal agency in pos­ses­sion of the body. The ab­sence of rea­soned thought in the pres­ence of per­plex­ity ex­plains the gross in­con­sis­ten­cies of the sav­age view of souls, ghosts, and spir­its.

86:5.4The soul was thought of as be­ing re­lated to the body as the per­fume to the flower. The an­cients be­lieved that the soul could leave the body in var­i­ous ways, as in:

86:5.51. Or­di­nary and tran­sient faint­ing.

86:5.62. Sleep­ing, nat­u­ral dream­ing.

86:5.73. Coma and un­con­scious­ness as­so­ci­ated with dis­ease and ac­ci­dents.

86:5.84. Death, per­ma­nent de­par­ture.

86:5.9The sav­age looked upon sneez­ing as an abortive at­tempt of the soul to es­cape from the body. Be­ing awake and on guard, the body was able to thwart the soul’s at­tempted es­cape. Later on, sneez­ing was al­ways ac­com­pa­nied by some re­li­gious ex­pres­sion, such as “God bless you!”

86:5.10Early in evo­lu­tion sleep was re­garded as prov­ing that the ghost soul could be ab­sent from the body, and it was be­lieved that it could be called back by speak­ing or shout­ing the sleeper’s name. In other forms of un­con­scious­ness the soul was thought to be far­ther away, per­haps try­ing to es­cape for good—im­pend­ing death. Dreams were looked upon as the ex­pe­ri­ences of the soul dur­ing sleep while tem­porar­ily ab­sent from the body. The sav­age be­lieves his dreams to be just as real as any part of his wak­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. The an­cients made a prac­tice of awak­ing sleep­ers grad­u­ally so that the soul might have time to get back into the body.

86:5.11All down through the ages men have stood in awe of the ap­pari­tions of the night sea­son, and the He­brews were no ex­cep­tion. They truly be­lieved that God spoke to them in dreams, de­spite the in­junc­tions of Moses against this idea. And Moses was right, for or­di­nary dreams are not the meth­ods em­ployed by the per­son­al­i­ties of the spir­i­tual world when they seek to com­mu­ni­cate with ma­te­rial be­ings.

86:5.12The an­cients be­lieved that souls could en­ter an­i­mals or even inan­i­mate ob­jects. This cul­mi­nated in the were­wolf ideas of an­i­mal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. A per­son could be a law-abid­ing cit­i­zen by day, but when he fell asleep, his soul could en­ter a wolf or some other an­i­mal to prowl about on noc­tur­nal depre­da­tions.

86:5.13Prim­i­tive men thought that the soul was as­so­ci­ated with the breath, and that its qual­i­ties could be im­parted or trans­ferred by the breath. The brave chief would breathe upon the new­born child, thereby im­part­ing cour­age. Among early Chris­tians the cer­e­mony of be­stow­ing the Holy Spirit was ac­com­pa­nied by breath­ing on the can­di­dates. Said the Psalmist: “By the word of the Lord were the heav­ens made and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.” It was long the cus­tom of the el­dest son to try to catch the last breath of his dy­ing fa­ther.

86:5.14The shadow came, later on, to be feared and revered equally with the breath. The re­flec­tion of one­self in the wa­ter was also some­times looked upon as proof of the dou­ble self, and mir­rors were re­garded with su­per­sti­tious awe. Even now many civ­i­lized per­sons turn the mir­ror to the wall in the event of death. Some back­ward tribes still be­lieve that the mak­ing of pic­tures, draw­ings, mod­els, or im­ages re­moves all or a part of the soul from the body; hence such are for­bid­den.

86:5.15The soul was gen­er­ally thought of as be­ing iden­ti­fied with the breath, but it was also lo­cated by var­i­ous peo­ples in the head, hair, heart, liver, blood, and fat. The “cry­ing out of Abel’s blood from the ground” is ex­pres­sive of the one­time be­lief in the pres­ence of the ghost in the blood. The Semites taught that the soul resided in the bod­ily fat, and among many the eat­ing of an­i­mal fat was taboo. Head hunt­ing was a method of cap­tur­ing an en­emy’s soul, as was scalp­ing. In re­cent times the eyes have been re­garded as the win­dows of the soul.

86:5.16Those who held the doc­trine of three or four souls be­lieved that the loss of one soul meant dis­com­fort, two ill­ness, three death. One soul lived in the breath, one in the head, one in the hair, one in the heart. The sick were ad­vised to stroll about in the open air with the hope of re­cap­tur­ing their strayed souls. The great­est of the med­i­cine men were sup­posed to ex­change the sick soul of a dis­eased per­son for a new one, the “new birth.”

86:5.17The chil­dren of Bado­nan de­vel­oped a be­lief in two souls, the breath and the shadow. The early Nod­ite races re­garded man as con­sist­ing of two per­sons, soul and body. This phi­los­o­phy of hu­man ex­is­tence was later re­flected in the Greek view­point. The Greeks them­selves be­lieved in three souls; the veg­e­ta­tive resided in the stom­ach, the an­i­mal in the heart, the in­tel­lec­tual in the head. The Es­ki­mos be­lieve that man has three parts: body, soul, and name.

86:6.1Man in­her­ited a nat­u­ral en­vi­ron­ment, ac­quired a so­cial en­vi­ron­ment, and imag­ined a ghost en­vi­ron­ment. The state is man’s re­ac­tion to his nat­u­ral en­vi­ron­ment, the home to his so­cial en­vi­ron­ment, the church to his il­lu­sory ghost en­vi­ron­ment.

86:6.2Very early in the his­tory of man­kind the re­al­i­ties of the imag­i­nary world of ghosts and spir­its be­came uni­ver­sally be­lieved, and this newly imag­ined spirit world be­came a power in prim­i­tive so­ci­ety. The men­tal and moral life of all man­kind was mod­i­fied for all time by the ap­pear­ance of this new fac­tor in hu­man think­ing and act­ing.

86:6.3Into this ma­jor premise of il­lu­sion and ig­no­rance, mor­tal fear has packed all of the sub­se­quent su­per­sti­tion and re­li­gion of prim­i­tive peo­ples. This was man’s only re­li­gion up to the times of rev­e­la­tion, and to­day many of the world’s races have only this crude re­li­gion of evo­lu­tion.

86:6.4As evo­lu­tion pro­gressed, good luck be­came as­so­ci­ated with good spir­its and bad luck with bad spir­its. The dis­com­fort of en­forced adap­ta­tion to a chang­ing en­vi­ron­ment was re­garded as ill luck, the dis­plea­sure of the spirit ghosts. Prim­i­tive man slowly evolved re­li­gion out of his in­nate wor­ship urge and his mis­con­cep­tion of chance. Civ­i­lized man pro­vides schemes of in­sur­ance to over­come these chance oc­cur­rences; mod­ern sci­ence puts an ac­tu­ary with math­e­mat­i­cal reck­on­ing in the place of fic­ti­tious spir­its and whim­si­cal gods.

86:6.5Each pass­ing gen­er­a­tion smiles at the fool­ish su­per­sti­tions of its an­ces­tors while it goes on en­ter­tain­ing those fal­la­cies of thought and wor­ship which will give cause for fur­ther smil­ing on the part of en­light­ened pos­ter­ity.

86:6.6But at last the mind of prim­i­tive man was oc­cu­pied with thoughts which tran­scended all of his in­her­ent bi­o­logic urges; at last man was about to evolve an art of liv­ing based on some­thing more than re­sponse to ma­te­rial stim­uli. The be­gin­nings of a prim­i­tive philo­sophic life pol­icy were emerg­ing. A super­nat­u­ral stan­dard of liv­ing was about to ap­pear, for, if the spirit ghost in anger vis­its ill luck and in plea­sure good for­tune, then must hu­man con­duct be reg­u­lated ac­cord­ingly. The con­cept of right and wrong had at last evolved; and all of this long be­fore the times of any rev­e­la­tion on earth.

86:6.7With the emer­gence of these con­cepts, there was ini­ti­ated the long and waste­ful strug­gle to ap­pease the ever-dis­pleased spir­its, the slav­ish bond­age to evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gious fear, that long waste of hu­man ef­fort upon tombs, tem­ples, sac­ri­fices, and priest­hoods. It was a ter­ri­ble and fright­ful price to pay, but it was worth all it cost, for man therein achieved a nat­u­ral con­scious­ness of rel­a­tive right and wrong; hu­man ethics was born!

• cults were insurance against hazards of bad luck
• rites designed to avoid, expel, or coerce

87:0.1The ghost cult evolved as an off­set to the haz­ards of bad luck; its prim­i­tive re­li­gious ob­ser­vances were the out­growth of anx­i­ety about bad luck and of the in­or­di­nate fear of the dead. None of these early re­li­gions had much to do with the rec­og­ni­tion of De­ity or with rev­er­ence for the super­hu­man; their rites were mostly neg­a­tive, de­signed to avoid, ex­pel, or co­erce ghosts. The ghost cult was noth­ing more nor less than in­sur­ance against dis­as­ter; it had noth­ing to do with in­vest­ment for higher and fu­ture re­turns.

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.

• nature and activities of ghosts › credited with supernatural powers, but not supernatural intelligence
• stratagems to hoodwink

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.

• stratagems to hoodwink

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.

• placation long preceded coercion and supplication

87:2.1In re­li­gion the neg­a­tive pro­gram of ghost pla­ca­tion long pre­ceded the pos­i­tive pro­gram of spirit co­er­cion and sup­pli­ca­tion. The first acts of hu­man wor­ship were phe­nom­ena of de­fense, not rev­er­ence. Mod­ern man deems it wise to in­sure against fire; so the sav­age thought it the bet­ter part of wis­dom to pro­vide in­sur­ance against ghost bad luck. The ef­fort to se­cure this pro­tec­tion con­sti­tuted the tech­niques and rit­u­als of the ghost cult.

• nature and activities of ghosts › angered g. caused misfortune, unhappiness

87:2.2It was once thought that the great de­sire of a ghost was to be quickly “laid” so that it might pro­ceed undis­turbed to dead­land. Any er­ror of com­mis­sion or omis­sion in the acts of the liv­ing in the rit­ual of lay­ing the ghost was sure to de­lay its prog­ress to ghost­land. This was be­lieved to be dis­pleas­ing to the ghost, and an an­gered ghost was sup­posed to be a source of calamity, mis­for­tune, and un­hap­pi­ness.

• nature and activities of ghosts › took pleasure in discomfort of living

87:2.4Si­lence or mourn­ing was ob­served af­ter a death so that the ghost would not be at­tracted back home. Self-tor­ture—wounds—was a com­mon form of mourn­ing. Many ad­vanced teach­ers tried to stop this, but they failed. Fast­ing and other forms of self-de­nial were thought to be pleas­ing to the ghosts, who took plea­sure in the dis­com­fort of the liv­ing dur­ing the tran­si­tion pe­riod of lurk­ing about be­fore their ac­tual de­par­ture for dead­land.

• nature and activities of ghosts › expected at least one slave wife be buried alive with

87:2.7The an­cients were so anx­ious to get rid of a ghost that they of­fered it ev­ery­thing which might have been de­sired dur­ing life. Ghosts wanted wives and ser­vants; a well-to-do sav­age ex­pected that at least one slave wife would be buried alive at his death. It later be­came the cus­tom for a widow to com­mit sui­cide on her hus­band’s grave. When a child died, the mother, aunt, or grand­mother was of­ten stran­gled in or­der that an adult ghost might ac­com­pany and care for the child ghost. And those who thus gave up their lives usu­ally did so will­ingly; in­deed, had they lived in vi­o­la­tion of cus­tom, their fear of ghost wrath would have de­nuded life of such few plea­sures as the prim­i­tives en­joyed.

• fear of ghosts › savages lived in fear of g.

87:3.3The cus­tom of adopt­ing chil­dren was to make sure that some­one would pro­vide of­fer­ings af­ter death for the peace and prog­ress of the soul. The sav­age lived in fear of the ghosts of his fel­lows and spent his spare time plan­ning for the safe con­duct of his own ghost af­ter death.

• fear of ghosts › fountainhead of ethics, religion

87:4.1Ghost fear was the foun­tain­head of all world re­li­gion; and for ages many tribes clung to the old be­lief in one class of ghosts. They taught that man had good luck when the ghost was pleased, bad luck when he was an­gered.

87:4.2As the cult of ghost fear ex­panded, there came about the rec­og­ni­tion of higher types of spir­its, spir­its not def­i­nitely iden­ti­fi­able with any in­di­vid­ual hu­man. They were grad­u­ate or glo­ri­fied ghosts who had pro­gressed be­yond the do­main of ghost­land to the higher realms of spir­it­land.

87:4.3The no­tion of two kinds of spirit ghosts made slow but sure prog­ress through­out the world. This new dual spiritism did not have to spread from tribe to tribe; it sprang up in­de­pen­dently all over the world. In in­flu­enc­ing the ex­pand­ing evo­lu­tion­ary mind, the power of an idea lies not in its re­al­ity or rea­son­able­ness but rather in its vivid­ness and the uni­ver­sal­ity of its ready and sim­ple ap­pli­ca­tion.

87:4.4Still later the imag­i­na­tion of man en­vi­sioned the con­cept of both good and bad super­nat­u­ral agen­cies; some ghosts never evolved to the level of good spir­its. The early monospiritism of ghost fear was grad­u­ally evolv­ing into a dual spiritism, a new con­cept of the in­vis­i­ble con­trol of earthly af­fairs. At last good luck and bad luck were pic­tured as hav­ing their re­spec­tive con­trol­lers. And of the two classes, the group that brought bad luck were be­lieved to be the more ac­tive and nu­mer­ous.

87:4.5When the doc­trine of good and bad spir­its fi­nally ma­tured, it be­came the most wide­spread and per­sis­tent of all re­li­gious be­liefs. This du­al­ism rep­re­sented a great re­li­gio-philo­sophic ad­vance be­cause it en­abled man to ac­count for both good luck and bad luck while at the same time be­liev­ing in super­mor­tal be­ings who were to some ex­tent con­sis­tent in their be­hav­ior. The spir­its could be counted on to be ei­ther good or bad; they were not thought of as be­ing com­pletely tem­per­a­men­tal as the early ghosts of the monospiritism of most prim­i­tive re­li­gions had been con­ceived to be. Man was at last able to con­ceive of super­mor­tal forces that were con­sis­tent in be­hav­ior, and this was one of the most mo­men­tous dis­cov­er­ies of truth in the en­tire his­tory of the evo­lu­tion of re­li­gion and in the ex­pan­sion of hu­man phi­los­o­phy.

87:4.6Evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion has, how­ever, paid a ter­ri­ble price for the con­cept of dual spiritism. Man’s early phi­los­o­phy was able to rec­on­cile spirit con­stancy with the vi­cis­si­tudes of tem­po­ral for­tune only by pos­tu­lat­ing two kinds of spir­its, one good and the other bad. And while this be­lief did en­able man to rec­on­cile the vari­ables of chance with a con­cept of un­chang­ing super­mor­tal forces, this doc­trine has ever since made it dif­fi­cult for re­li­gion­ists to con­ceive of cos­mic unity. The gods of evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion have gen­er­ally been op­posed by the forces of dark­ness.

87:4.7The tragedy of all this lies in the fact that, when these ideas were tak­ing root in the prim­i­tive mind of man, there re­ally were no bad or dishar­mo­nious spir­its in all the world. Such an un­for­tu­nate sit­u­a­tion did not de­velop un­til af­ter the Cali­gas­tic re­bel­lion and only per­sisted un­til Pen­te­cost. The con­cept of good and evil as cos­mic co-or­di­nates is, even in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, very much alive in hu­man phi­los­o­phy; most of the world’s re­li­gions still carry this cul­tural birth­mark of the long-gone days of the emerg­ing ghost cults.

• nature and activities of ghosts › enjoyed unlimited rights but no duties
• nature and activities of ghosts › levied continuous tribute for noninterference

87:5.1Prim­i­tive man viewed the spir­its and ghosts as hav­ing al­most un­lim­ited rights but no du­ties; the spir­its were thought to re­gard man as hav­ing man­i­fold du­ties but no rights. The spir­its were be­lieved to look down upon man as con­stantly fail­ing in the dis­charge of his spir­i­tual du­ties. It was the gen­eral be­lief of man­kind that ghosts levied a con­tin­u­ous trib­ute of ser­vice as the price of non­in­ter­fer­ence in hu­man af­fairs, and the least mis­chance was laid to ghost ac­tiv­i­ties. Early hu­mans were so afraid they might over­look some honor due the gods that, af­ter they had sac­ri­ficed to all known spir­its, they did an­other turn to the “un­known gods,” just to be thor­oughly safe.

• superghost doctrine not yet wholly rejected

87:5.8Un­der the spirit cult, life was at best a gam­ble, the re­sult of spirit con­trol. One’s fu­ture was not the re­sult of ef­fort, in­dus­try, or tal­ent ex­cept as they might be uti­lized to in­flu­ence the spir­its. The cer­e­monies of spirit pro­pi­ti­a­tion con­sti­tuted a heavy bur­den, ren­der­ing life te­dious and vir­tu­ally un­en­durable. From age to age and from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion, race af­ter race has sought to im­prove this super­ghost doc­trine, but no gen­er­a­tion has ever yet dared to wholly re­ject it.

• stratagems to hoodwink

87:6.3Man’s first ef­forts at de­fense were di­rected against the ghosts. As the ages passed, the liv­ing be­gan to de­vise meth­ods of re­sist­ing the dead. Many tech­niques were de­vel­oped for fright­en­ing ghosts and driv­ing them away, among which may be cited the fol­low­ing:

87:6.41. Cut­ting off the head and ty­ing up the body in the grave.

87:6.52. Ston­ing the death house.

87:6.63. Cas­tra­tion or break­ing the legs of the corpse.

87:6.74. Bury­ing un­der stones, one ori­gin of the mod­ern tomb­stone.

87:6.85. Cre­ma­tion, a later-day in­ven­tion to pre­vent ghost trou­ble.

87:6.96. Cast­ing the body into the sea.

87:6.107. Ex­po­sure of the body to be eaten by wild an­i­mals.

• nature and activities of ghosts › frightened by noise

87:6.11Ghosts were sup­posed to be dis­turbed and fright­ened by noise; shout­ing, bells, and drums drove them away from the liv­ing; and these an­cient meth­ods are still in vogue at “wakes” for the dead. Foul-smelling con­coc­tions were uti­lized to ban­ish un­wel­come spir­its. Hideous im­ages of the spir­its were con­structed so that they would flee in haste when they be­held them­selves. It was be­lieved that dogs could de­tect the ap­proach of ghosts, and that they gave warn­ing by howl­ing; that cocks would crow when they were near. The use of a cock as a weather vane is in per­pet­u­a­tion of this su­per­sti­tion.

• nature and activities of ghosts › preferred to indwell objects they owned when alive

88:2.1It was a sup­posed pref­er­ence of ghosts to in­dwell some ob­ject which had be­longed to them when alive in the flesh. This be­lief ex­plains the ef­fi­cacy of many mod­ern relics. The an­cients al­ways revered the bones of their lead­ers, and the skele­tal re­mains of saints and heroes are still re­garded with su­per­sti­tious awe by many. Even to­day, pil­grim­ages are made to the tombs of great men.

• nature and activities of ghosts › took pleasure in discomfort of living

89:0.2The sav­age was early pos­sessed with the no­tion that spir­its de­rive su­preme sat­is­fac­tion from the sight of hu­man mis­ery, suf­fer­ing, and hu­mil­i­a­tion. At first, man was only con­cerned with sins of com­mis­sion, but later he be­came ex­er­cised over sins of omis­sion. And the whole sub­se­quent sac­ri­fi­cial sys­tem grew up around these two ideas. This new rit­ual had to do with the ob­ser­vance of the pro­pi­ti­a­tion cer­e­monies of sac­ri­fice. Prim­i­tive man be­lieved that some­thing spe­cial must be done to win the fa­vor of the gods; only ad­vanced civ­i­liza­tion rec­og­nizes a con­sis­tently even-tem­pered and benev­o­lent God. Pro­pi­ti­a­tion was in­sur­ance against im­me­di­ate ill luck rather than in­vest­ment in fu­ture bliss. And the rit­u­als of avoid­ance, ex­or­cism, co­er­cion, and pro­pi­ti­a­tion all merge into one an­other.

• nature and activities of ghosts › caused disease by enticing soul out of body

90:3.41. Ghosts—di­rect spirit in­flu­ences. The ear­li­est hy­poth­e­sis ad­vanced in ex­pla­na­tion of dis­ease and death was that spir­its caused dis­ease by en­tic­ing the soul out of the body; if it failed to re­turn, death en­sued. The an­cients so feared the malev­o­lent ac­tion of dis­ease-pro­duc­ing ghosts that ail­ing in­di­vid­u­als would of­ten be de­serted with­out even food or wa­ter. Re­gard­less of the er­ro­neous ba­sis for these be­liefs, they did ef­fec­tively iso­late af­flicted in­di­vid­u­als and pre­vent the spread of con­ta­gious dis­ease.

• shamans howled away g. responsible for disease

90:4.3The more prim­i­tive tribes greatly feared the sick, and for long ages they were care­fully avoided, shame­fully ne­glected. It was a great ad­vance in hu­man­i­tar­i­an­ism when the evo­lu­tion of shaman­craft pro­duced priests and med­i­cine men who con­sented to treat dis­ease. Then it be­came cus­tom­ary for the en­tire clan to crowd into the sick­room to as­sist the shaman in howl­ing the dis­ease ghosts away. It was not un­com­mon for a woman to be the di­ag­nos­ing shaman, while a man would ad­min­is­ter treat­ment. The usual method of di­ag­nos­ing dis­ease was to ex­am­ine the en­trails of an an­i­mal.

• Moses sought to uproot ghost cults

92:5.113. The post-Mel­chiz­e­dek era. Though Amen­emope and Ikh­na­ton both taught in this pe­riod, the out­stand­ing re­li­gious ge­nius of the post-Mel­chiz­e­dek era was the leader of a group of Lev­an­tine Bed­ou­ins and the founder of the He­brew re­li­gion—Moses. Moses taught mono­the­ism. Said he: “Hear, O Is­rael, the Lord our God is one God.” “The Lord he is God. There is none be­side him.” He per­sis­tently sought to up­root the rem­nants of the ghost cult among his peo­ple, even pre­scrib­ing the death penalty for its prac­ti­tion­ers. The mono­the­ism of Moses was adul­ter­ated by his suc­ces­sors, but in later times they did re­turn to many of his teach­ings. The great­ness of Moses lies in his wis­dom and sagac­ity. Other men have had greater con­cepts of God, but no one man was ever so suc­cess­ful in in­duc­ing large num­bers of peo­ple to adopt such ad­vanced be­liefs.

• spirits of departed humans do not return or communicate

112:3.7Upon death the Thought Ad­juster tem­porar­ily loses per­son­al­ity, but not iden­tity; the hu­man sub­ject tem­porar­ily loses iden­tity, but not per­son­al­ity; on the man­sion worlds both re­unite in eter­nal man­i­fes­ta­tion. Never does a de­parted Thought Ad­juster re­turn to earth as the be­ing of for­mer in­dwelling; never is per­son­al­ity man­i­fested with­out the hu­man will; and never does a dis-Ad­jus­tered hu­man be­ing af­ter death man­i­fest ac­tive iden­tity or in any man­ner es­tab­lish com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the liv­ing be­ings of earth. Such dis-Ad­jus­tered souls are wholly and ab­so­lutely un­con­scious dur­ing the long or short sleep of death. There can be no ex­hi­bi­tion of any sort of per­son­al­ity or abil­ity to en­gage in com­mu­ni­ca­tions with other per­son­al­i­ties un­til af­ter com­ple­tion of sur­vival. Those who go to the man­sion worlds are not per­mit­ted to send mes­sages back to their loved ones. It is the pol­icy through­out the uni­verses to for­bid such com­mu­ni­ca­tion dur­ing the pe­riod of a cur­rent dis­pen­sa­tion.

• spirits of departed humans do not return or communicate

146:7.2Je­sus fur­ther ex­plained to his apos­tles that the spir­its of de­parted hu­man be­ings do not come back to the world of their ori­gin to com­mu­ni­cate with their liv­ing fel­lows. Only af­ter the pass­ing of a dis­pen­sa­tional age would it be pos­si­ble for the ad­vanc­ing spirit of mor­tal man to re­turn to earth and then only in ex­cep­tional cases and as a part of the spir­i­tual ad­min­is­tra­tion of the planet.

• spirits of departed humans do not return or communicate

150:3.53. The spir­its of the dead do not come back to com­mu­ni­cate with their fam­i­lies or their one­time friends among the liv­ing.