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COMMUNION WITH THE UNSEEN

WORLD.

Sepulchral Rites.

A BELIEF in the persistence of life after death, and the observation of religious practices founded upon this belief, may be discovered in every part of the world, in every age, and among men representing every degree and variety of culture. Classical scholars are familiar with the terms of Inferiæ and Parentalia, names given by the Romans to the propitiatory offerings which they presented to the manes of their departed ancestors. The Greeks had their évayíoμara. The worship of the Fravashis by the Iranians, and that of the Pitris by the Hindu, are evidences of the antiquity in the Indo-European family of this form of religion, many traces of which remain to this day in the practices of European nations. And the celebration of rites in honour of their ancestors is perhaps the most ancient institution of the oldest civilization now in existence, that of China.

The habits of savages without a history are not in themselves evidence which can in any way be depended upon. To take for granted that what the savages now are, perhaps after millenniums of degradation, all other people must have been, and that modes of thought through which they are now passing have been passed through by others, is a most unscientific assumption, and you will seldom meet with it in any essay or book without also finding proof that the writer did not know how to deal with historical evidence. Authorities are sure to be quoted which the historian knows to be worthless, and evidence in itself irreproachable will be completely misunderstood. The universality of a belief or practice, even among savages, would of course, if proved, be a very weighty fact, tending to prove that the belief or practice in question had its origin either in reason or in tradition. It is, however, impossible to exaggerate the value of Sir Henry Maine's protest against "the very slippery testimony concerning savages which is gathered from travellers' tales." "Much," he says, "which I have personally heard in India bears out the caution which I gave as to the reserve with which all speculations on the antiquity of human usage should be received. Practices represented as of immemorial antiquity and universally characteristic of the infancy of mankind, have been described to me as having been for the first time

resorted to in our days through the mere pressure of external circumstances or novel temptations."1

Far more important than any single instance from the descriptions of modern savages is the ancient tomb of Aurignac. "If the fossil memorials," says Sir Charles Lyell, "have been correctly interpreted-if we have before us at the northern base of the Pyrenees a sepulchral vault, with skeletons of human beings consigned by friends and relatives to their last restingplace-if we have also at the portal of the tomb the relics of funeral feasts, and within it indications of viands destined for the use of the departed on their way to a land of spirits, while among the funeral gifts are weapons wherewith in other fields to chase the gigantic deer, the cave lion, the cave bear and woolly rhinoceros-we have at last succeeded in tracing back the sacred rites of burial, and, more interesting still, a belief in a future state, to times long anterior to those of history or tradition."2

But if from pre-historic we pass to historic times, we at once meet on Egyptian ground with an entire system

1 66 'Village Communities," p. 17.

2 "Antiquity of Man," p. 193, 1863. I leave the words of the above passage as they were delivered. I was not aware at the time that the evidence of M. Lartet had been contested, and that Sir Charles Lyell had in his last edition admitted this evidence to be doubtful. See the article of Mr. W. B. Dawkins, on "The Date of the Interment in the Aurignac Cave," in Nature, Vol. IV. p. 208.

of notions wonderfully (indeed, almost incredibly) similar to those entertained by our Indo-European ancestors. There is, however, no confirmation of Mr. Herbert Spencer's hypothesis, that the rudimentary form of all religion is the propitiation of dead ancestors. If the Egyptians passed through such a rudimentary form of religion, they had already got beyond it in the age of the Pyramids, for their most ancient propitiation of ancestors is made through prayer to Anubis, Osiris, or some other gods. The deceased is already described in the funereal inscription as "faithful to the great God." And in no case can it be proved that the propitiation of departed ancestors preceded a belief in divinity of some other kind.

The Tombs and their Inscriptions.

"The Egyptians," we are told by Diodoros, "call their houses hostelries, on account of the short time during which they inhabit them, but the tombs they call eternal dwelling-places." The latter part of this is strictly and literally true; pa t'eta, "eternal dwelling-place," is an expression which is met with at every instant in the inscriptions of the earliest period, descriptive of the tomb. The word unchiu, which literally signifies the "living," is in innumerable places used emphatically for the "departed," who are enjoying everlasting life. The notion of everlasting life,

unch t'eta, is among the few words written upon the wooden coffin, now in the British Museum, of king Mykerinos, of the third pyramid. Neb anch, "Lord of life," is one of the names given to the sarcophagus. In the very ancient inscription of Una, the coffin is called hen en unchiu, "the chest of the living." It is only evil spirits who are spoken of in the sacred writings of the Egyptians as "the dead."

The ancient Egyptian tomb1 consisted of three essential parts: (1) a chamber above ground, entered by a door, which appears to have always remained open; (2) a corridor, now commonly known as the serdab, in the interior of the masonry, containing statues of the deceased; and (3) a pit, sunk to a considerable depth through the rock, and communicating with the sepulchral vault hollowed in the rock, and containing the sarcophagus of the dead. The chamber (which sometimes consisted of several rooms) was the only part accessible to human foot. Its walls were often covered with pictures, but the most essential portion of it was a tablet invariably facing the east. At the foot of this,

1 The most complete account of early Egyptian tombs is found in M. Mariette's article, "Sur les tombes de l'ancien empire qu'on trouve à Saqqarah," in the Revue Archéologique, 1869, Vol. I. pp. 7-22, 81-89, much of which is repeated in his admirable description of the Museum of Bulaq. See also Duemichen, "Ueber die Tempel und Gräber im alten Aegypten," the very interesting text of his Photographische Resultate, and Brugsch, "Die Aegyptische Gräberwelt."

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