[ p. 109 ]
The accepted distinction between soul and spirit is that soul is confined and spirit is free; the hamadryad’s soul ts confined to its tree, the dryad is a spirit in a tree. The physically bound surviving ghost is a soul; when freer or quite free it becomes a spirit. Obviously such a distinction is one of degree only. At one extreme, soul is nothing mo’re than life; at the other, it is a separate quiddity which is endowed with life and is designated ‘spirit.’ Between the two extremes are the churchyard ghost and the soul located in a certain part of the body. Another common distinction is that spirit designates the soul of a non-human iibject, while soul designates the immortal part of a human being and is conceived as a “man within.”
But, as has been said, the idea that a hiunan being has a soul and other beings have none is comparatively modern and even iiow is far from universal. A very common belief is that only special human beings have souls. Some savages ascribe souls to men and not to women; this was the view advocated by "IVeininger. Still another view is that of the Samoans, who hold that women have souls and men have none. In Greenland the belief is current that only some women, who have died in childbirth, live hereafter. In March, 1908, the German Eeichstag was thrown into confusion because of jeers “at a statement used by a member to the effect that negroes also had immortal souls.”[1]
[ p. 110 ]
To reach, the learliest thought in regard to this matter is not difficult if one considers the general assumptions of savage belief. From the earliest period down to the present time it has been customary for men to break up arms and toys and bury them in graves, the reason being that these bbjects were to accompany their owners into deadland hnd in order to do so must be as dead as their owners. The warrior’s bow was broken, i.e., killed, just as his horse and women were killed. They all had a life beyond the grave, man, woman, animal, and material object.
The first conception of soul is that it is a power, not a spirit in a body but a power inherent in body and manifested in life and action. This vital power is conditioned by the body and is at first indistinguishable from it, that is, there is no distinction between body and soul, but there is a body endued with power, the whole object being permeated with power as life. All objects have as much soul as they have life, force, activity. Stream, rock, tree, have each an active personality diffused through the object and expressed in power. The soul-power may not be active, but either active or potential life resides in every object. The savage thus passes indifferently a thousand quiet rocks, but as soon as one of them begins to roll he considers it as, so to speak, awakened and menacing. For it is also inconceivable to him that anything possessed of power and activity is not likewise possessed of the ability to direct thaf; power. In other words, the object’s power, or, to speak, exactly, the object itself, is endowed also with will. The spiritual is what manifests life and the proof of life is activity.
Life is power and power is soul. Hence, though a body is potent all over, the part most ahve is most full of soulpower. Just as a tiger has more soul than a rock, as is manifest in its greater activity, and power, so the more vit^ organs are more alive and become seats of the soul. [ p. 111 ] The power, again, may be physical or mental or emotional. Thus there is a soul-power of the arm distinct from that of the stomach, which to savages is often the seat of the thought-power, and another power or soul of the heart or bowels, obviously because these are most affected by emotion. A. tiger’s claw retains independent power after the beast is dead, not precisely as a dead saint’s finger works cures, but because the power of the whole is retained in the fragment with the added special power of the fragment itself. Thus a cannibal warrior eats by preference another warrior’s strong arm;[2] he avoids the flesh of a 'child or woman, unless, as in America and Dahomey, his religious sense has become debauched by gluttony. So the Polynesian mother eats her dead child as a religious rite and both man and wife eat their parents for the same reason, to gniard in themselves the physical soul-powers belonging by affection to the family.
These powers have been called physical souls and the places where they show themselves may be called soulplaces. For example, blood is the life as weU as a seat of life and life is ‘soul.’ Such physical souls have in common the bond of the body; but the larger organs are naturally more important than the smaller parts or those which show less life. Some scholars think that man has risen from a conception of soul in the smaller soul-places to that of a larger soul of a larger place, for example, from the toenail-soul to the heart-soul. But this is a theory made specious through a phrase. The idea that man has risen to a higher conception commends itself to the scientific mind, but in what is the conception of a heartsoul higher than that of a nail-soul? The conception is not grander because the organ is bigger and it has yet to [ p. 112 ] be shown that any savage believed in a nail- soul first and a heart-soul later.
When it is said that some xVfricans reeog-nize thirty souls, what is meant is tiiat they ascribe a life-principle to thirty parts of the body as vital places. These “ physical souls” must therefore bo distinguished as mere placesouls from the souls also physical but pot identified 'with places or organs, such as the shadow-soul and bush-soul and ghost. The chief soul-places are the eye, blood, hair, and the organs showing great vital power. The fact to be kept in mind is that a part or organ of the body is recognized as a sort of soul or vital element; the details have to do with the survivals of this belief in the various instances and it will be sufficient here to speak of the more important of these.[3]
The Eye : In the mystic philosophy of India it is said that the soul is composed of the divine male being, which is in the right eye, and the divine consort of that being, which is in the left bye. This is a refinement of the very primitive belief in the soul-ship of the pupil, the little figure seen in the eyeball being, as it were, the epitome of the person. Moreover, as the eye flashes in hate and speaks in love more eloquently than the tongue, it seems more than any other organ to express personality. Both savages and barbarians have thus reckoned the eye as a powerful soul-place. The savage eats his foe’s eye as he drinks his blood, believing that he will thus absorb eye [ p. 113 ] power, as differentiated from fleetness and dexterity, and in so far lie believes in a localized soul of the eye-power. The Macusi Indians take the pupil to be the spirit, wliieh is a more advanced belief. The belief in the power of the eye, still surviving among Europeans as well as among Orientals, is a remnant of the belief common to all savages in the peculiar eye-power possessed by certain individuals who have what is called the Evil Eye. In antiquity the interpretation of the eye-power was that something streamed out from the eye, as light streams from the sun, and this was baleful or not, as the case might be. It was conveyed to the object in a glance of hate or love; but in the case of the evil eye the influence is not necessarily inspired by hate. This makes it extremely dangerous, for one wutbout intending it may barm the object of one’s glance, which in itself works mischief. The idea of invidia, or envy, as a baleful looking conveys in addition a voluntary infliction of injury. Since anything which is very perfect of its kind, for example, a beautiful rug, naturally excites envy in the observer, it is customary in India to mutOate one corner to obviate the envious look. For the same reason, to avoid the envious eye, a boy’s parents will give him the name of a girl or of an insect or dress him in girl’s clothes, as is done also to deceive disease-demons, who are spiteful.[4]
The Blood: That the blood streaming from the body takes with it the life of a slaughtered man or auiiu al is as apparent as that his soul passes with his breath. Both ideas result in soul-places, blood and breath as lifepowers. “The blood is the life” (Deut 12 : 23). When the [ p. 114 ] African drinks the blood of a foe he does it to rob his foe and strengthen himself with this escaping life-power. In the heroic tales of civilized antiquity this is done to express hate and glut rage, but in savage life it had less passion and more reason. Probably both motives unite from the beginning and gradually one alone is. left, as when a well-educated Hindu drinks his foe’s blood. The Amerinds drank blood to show hate rather than to imbibe strength or take it from the foe, since they were far past the point v/here they imagined blood to be soul. Moreover, the Amerinds drank blood when extremely exas-. perated and then with the avowed purpose to insult. But who knows what vague shadow of older thought may have lain beside the thought of insult?[5] The squaws were allowed to drink the blood of the English, but this could not have been done to make them brave.
Cutting the flesh and other forms of, sacrifice of blood consist in giving strength, for example, to heroes, or to shades in Hades, or to the dead who are going away. The blood-soul of the victim is offered to friend or god, as in blood-brotherhood two souls are joined in one, and, in the ease of totemism, the blended blood is a conamunion of souls. The offering of the finger with the blood, on the part of the Amerinds, shows that the gift-notion was quite as common as that of the totemic union and strengthincrease.[6]
Many mediaeval superstitions have to do vdth blood as soul. Wlien a dead man is confronted with his murderer, the blood, being conscious of his approach, flows. It is alive; Vox sanguinis fratris tui clamat ad me de terra, [ p. 115 ] says the Lord. Cicero says that Empedocles believed the soul to be the blood suffused about the heart. Socrates wondered whether he thought with the blood: “Often I agitated myself [he says] with the question whether it is the blood with which we think, or the air, or the fire, or none of- these perhaps, but the brain which originates perceptions. . . . Memory and opinion might arise from these (perceptions).” He is not certain; nevertheless, he admits the possibility that one may think with the blood, or, as Empedocles puts it, “the soul is in the systasis of the blood,” in its very composition.”[7]
The Hair : In the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus it js said (vss. 27-28) : “Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard. Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you.” In Deuteronomy 14: 1, “Ye shall not cut. yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead”; and in Leviticus 21: 6, “They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings .in their flesh.” Priests have their hair cut (polled), and it is wrong either to shave their heads or let their locks grow long (Ezek. 44:20).
We have here a survival of the belief that the hair is one of the physical life-seats (or souls) of savage psychology, as that belief is found over various parts of the earth. Among the Abipones, for example, as soon as a child is born the parents call in the priest, who outs off the hair from the forehead, leaving a bald spot, and this baldness is regarded as “a sign of honor paid to the god.”[8]
[ p. 116 ]
In the opinion of other natives, it is said, this baldness is a sign of nationality, but the latter view, if it really reflects native belief, must be due to the national character of the custom, which is religious in origin.
Hair is offered in sacrifice, according to the usual explanation, as a representative or substitute of oneself, but why? How can hair represent a man? No answer is given in the current explanations; we are merely told that it is a substitute, as in New Zealand; or as in India, where i\ man possessed of a devil has a lock of his hair nailed to a tree, ostensibly as a propitiation. In Slavic countries, a’ similar practice of cutting off the hair of children[9] may be compared with the custom of the Bhils, a wild tribe of India, who shave their children between the ages of two and five,[10] and this again with the ancient Brahmanic rite of cutting off the hair of a child in the first and third year, for in this case the cutting is expressly said to be “for long life.” That is, the hair is an offering of the hair-streng-th or hair-soul as a substitute for the whole strength or soul, just as a finger is offered as a substitute for the life. The question now arises, Can the principle be applied elsewhere? What, if any, is the explanation of the various religious phenomena in connection with hair! Herbert 'Spencer long ago derived the religious use of hair from mutilation, a result of trophy-winning,[11] but few today will do him reverence in that explanation. Nevertheless, Bpencer showed, what is often ignored, that hair is- ofifered to human dignitaries and its loss symbolizes loss of power, or, as he says, subordination. The sheared hair marks the person bereft of influence, the slave, often the woman.
Frazer has collected a large number of cases showing [ p. 117 ] the sanctity of hair;[12] but Ms owai examples fail to make his explanation plausible in all instances. For he recognizes, apart from the general sanctity of the head, only the principle of hostile possession, that is, the possibility of a foe or witch operating with one’s hair to the detriment or- death of the owner, and infection through taboo, mourning, etc. For this reason only priests and chiefs are apt to let the hair remain uncut; travellers and warriors keep the hair long till they return; mourners shave otf hair and infection together; hair when cut is kept from birds to prevent headache, and is buried, drowned, or burned to prevent adverse possession; unless there intervene the principle pf resurrection, which makes a man keep his hair for future use. Thus the Nazarite vow (Numbers 6:5) of separation requires uncut hair; the Bechuanas cut their hair after a battle to get rid of pollution, as do the Dyaks, etc.
But, in British Columbia, the reason given by the natives for not cutting their hair at all is that strength wanes with the hair’s weakness and loss; they will grow weak (old) if they cut it. In Ceram, on the other side of the world, the reason given is the same, that men whose hair is cut will grow enervated. Although these examples are ranged by Frazer with the others referred to, they do not seem to illustrate or substantiate his theory. And with these cases may be grouped those which show that one will be a coward if his hair is cut. Por example, the German idea that a boy’s hair must not be cut till he is seven, or he will lose courage,[13] and the older parallel from Tacitus, who says that the Chatti never cut their hair till they had proved their courage. Nor does Frazer’s theory show how hair causes rain and thunderstorms, as in New Zealand, etc.
[ p. 118 ]
There is then lacking in this theory the fundamental unifying principle which explains why hair is treated as it is. Not that infection and adverse possession are to be questioned as producing the effects named. They do produce the effects, but why? Why is the hair an instrument of sympathetic magic, etc.? The hair as part of the head can explain only a part of the phenomena.
The underlying principle is that the hair in itself is a seat of power, a power-place, one of the physical souls known to savages, who, unable to discriminate between the physical and the purely spiritual, regard the various^ places of power as soul-places or as souls. This mixst be the starting-point of the investigation, although Frazer does not even suggest that the hair itself is a power.[14]
But if we start with the right clue, it is not so difficult to adjust the cases of hair-holiness. We may begin with an aspect of the subject which is ignored by both Tylor and Frazer. It is important, because we are all familiar with sacrifices of hair. These Tylor refers to substitution, without explaining the grounds on which hair can be substituted. Such sacrifices are made in mourning, in honor of the dead or for other reasons, such as that of Achilles’ sacrifice of hair, and the question why hair is shaved off at funerals is generally confused with that of these other sacrifices, on the one hand, and with that of hair plucked 3ut at death, on the other. But this confusion makes all explanation impossible. Especially since hair is not necessarily an offering of grief but may he one of joy, we ought to begin by clearing up and separating the uses to. which hair may he put.
To ensure the validity of an oath on the Gold Coast of West Africa, a man may either “eat fetish” or, instead, deposit in the abode of the god by whom he has sworn the equivalent of his life, that is, a lock of hair. The reason [ p. 119 ] can be only that in tliis way the god has possession of the man ’s life, and can punish him through his hair. All sjunpathetic injury is based on the same principle, though it is seldom that a god is the one in charge. Usually it is a mischief-maker, a witch, etc. Hair-cutting, however, ie a serious matter, not only because someone may get possession of the hair, but because of direct loss of vitality through the loss of hair. Again, the practice of mai’king,vith red the parting of the bride’s hair is based on the same principle as that which causes other things to be marked in the same way. Red is a demon-scaring color and the hair, or soul, is exposed to demoniac attacks which shorten life. For this reason those scholars appear to be wrong who see in this practice “a survival of the original blood-covenant, by which she was introduced into the sept of her husband,” as Crooke says of the bride’s marking among the low castes in India.[15] The practice v/as common among the high castes as well, though there it was regarded as merely ornamental. Curiously enough, it does not seem to have been noticed by Sanskrit scholars that exactly the same custom was current in North America. Gatlin (I, p. 58) says that the squaw of the Crow Indian, for example, “divides the hair on the forehead and paints the separation or crease with vermilion or red earth.” He adds that neither the Indian nor himself can tell why it is done.
All those parts of the body which seem to have a life of their own are, as "Wundt has shown, regarded as seats of life, or soul-places, and among these the nails and hair, which continue to grow after death, are particularly apt to be taken as possessing soul-power. The best-known instances are given in the stories of Nisus and Samson, whose looks held their power.[16] But the hair is more than [ p. 120 ] strength, it is life, like the blood, and so in Virgil’s story Dido did not die till her hair was cut. As it holds, so hair retains and imparts power. That is the reason why scalps are worn, as well as taken, and why some Amerinds even believed that the loss of the scalp implicated the loss of ability to find one’s way to the Happy Hunting Grounds.[17]
Why then is hair removed from the head in mourning? To answer this, we must consider the double nature of the removal. There are, in fact, two occasions when hair is removed in mourning. On the first, the hair is plucked out violently; on the second, it is removed formally and with precision. Wundt[18] explains all hairtremoval at the time of a death as being due to a desire to show that the mourner has lost strength; but we must distinguish between the sudden and the studied expression of grief. There is really no reason why the expression of genuine grief by mutilation should be explained religiously. It is a pathological process.[19]
The formal amputation or shardng of hair at a funeral is a different matter. That this is ndt, as Frazer thinks, a head-ceremony but a hair-ceremony is sho-wn by the fact that Negro mourners shave off all the hair of the body. Secondly, it must be remembered that the shaving of the [ p. 121 ] hair does not take place at the moment of death, but when the corpse has been btiried. Usually the ghost of the dead lingers about for some days and then leaves to seek a new habitation. At this critical moment the hair of the imihediate relatives is removed. One reason for this is that the ghost will seek a new human habitation and, as all students know, is very apt, when leaving the corpse for good, to retreat into the hair of the mourners. But there is another reason as well. When the Osage Indian is buried, the hair of an enemy is hung over his grave, that the life of the enemy may thus be transmitted by the hair to theservice of the dead.[20] The hair of friends in the same way is an offering of strength or life-power to the dead.
For we must remember that the formal offering of hair is not necessarily a sign of grief. It may be an offering on a festive occasion. Thus the Gold Coast Negro celebrates the joyful occasion of his own birthday by cutting off his hair and offering it to his own Kra, or genius, and on such a festive occasion as the feast of the gods the hair makes part of the sacrifice, just as other things are sacrificed. This shows that the offering is not one which must be taken as a sign of mourning. On the contrary, it is an offering, both in joy and in sorrow, of strength or part of the life, like a blood-offering. When it is offered to the man’s owm Kra or to the gods, it is like an offering of fowl or fruit to help and please these demonia, and when it is. offered to the dead it is still in the same way an offering of part of one’s own life-power, to help and please this particular demon.[21] In the formal cutting of hair after death, usually at the time of the funeral or gathering of the remains, there are then two distinct principles at work, one based on the idea [ p. 122 ] that the hair is a strength-offering to the spirit of the departed, just as one offers hair when alive to one’s own genius, the other based on the idea that hair is a spiritentry and the pollution or dangerous element associated with death and infecting the hair must be removed. In the former ease the hair is piled upon the corpse, as 'Achilles and his friends heaped the corpse of Patroklos with locks of their hair. In the other case, the hair is burned or buried, as in India, Persia, etc. The practice of savages shows that both of these ideas are equally primitive. The offering to Patroklos is expressly to “speed the soul to Hades,” that is, to give it strength of life, as the Amerind ’s scalp over the grave gives life.[22]
To escape from the ghost of the dead, the Negro mourner cuts off the hair of the dead man himself and hangs it up in a but built especially for the ghost, to whom, in the same place, are offered tempting viands. The ghost, seeing the hair, enters it and thus remains content with its home. In some cases, one of the two principles seems to prevail; in others, there appears to be a confusion of two ideas, the offering to the dead uniting -with the escape from the danger of spirit-entry. But there seems to be no reason to take one as older than the other, [ p. 123 ] or to assume that the offering-idea is derived from the other. On the contrary, the idea of hair representing life seems to be extremely primitive. What of course is late is the conventional hair-offering, as customary among the Q-reeks, for example, after the meaning was lost and the form remained. The offering of life in hair is simply one form of that idea which led to head-offerings and slaveofferings and suttee. Life, strength, attendants, slaves, wives, are sent with the dead, to help and serve the departed. In some cases, they remain objective aiders, as in the ease of slave or Avife. In others, the offering is absorbed by the dead, as when blood (which also is life) strengthens the shades in Hades.
The American Indian could not afford to lose all his hair, but he obliged his squaws to cut all their hair as a sign of mourning, and in some cases even sacrificed his own cherished scalp-lock. That the Indian regarded hair as a seat of power may be seen from the fact that certain tribes elected their chiefs according to the length of their hair, for example, the Crows and Blackfeet. Thus “Longhair,” chief of the Crows, was made chief because his hair was ten feet and seven inches long, and no one could surpass that, although rival claimants had hair which swept the ground as they walked.[23] Other tribes, however, shaved all except the topknot, practical considerations, among which figured probably the fear of spiritentry, making them conserve the hair-strength in one long queue, as did the Chinese and the Brahman ascetics.
The reason why hair is wound in a circle around the head is not merely because that is a convenient way of doing it up. The circle is a protection against spirits, and for the same reason in India the crown of hair is replaced by a crown of flowers, in the case of a bridegroom, or, in [ p. 124 ] the case of a king, by a circlet of other material, preserving the circle-guard as does also the circular tonsure. The persistence of the belief in the hair being a spiritual power in itself, a power able to injure, is seen in modern India, where it is as heinous an offense to “grow the hair” against a man as it is to cast the evil eye at him.[24]
It is taboo to touch the hair of Polynesian priests and kings because of the danger of their power as well as the danger to them, and when cut there must be ceremonies to obviate the danger. It is only as power that hair can produce thunder and lightning. As a sign of spiritual power the Negro priest wears his hair long (except when being admitted into the order), but this sign has its origin in the fact, as understood by him and his countrymen, that hair worn long is power. In the coiffure of all savages these two notions are constantly expressed, first, that hair is power, and second, that spirits are always trying to enter that abode of power. Hence, on the one hand, the wearing of long hair and, on the other, the sha\T.ng of all except one lock. Secondary is the enforced shortening of hair on the part of slaves, women, etc. Here it is a symbol, but a symbol looking back to the same notion that short hair is the result of weakness. Fear of spirits in hair may often be found. Ashanti executioners always had their hair done up in twists (Ellis, op. cit., p. 256). This can be explained as a parallel to their dancing and shouting, that is, as a precaution against the souls or ghosts of their victims entering the hair. The twist or braid keeps off spirits generally, as do knots, and for this reason the Hindus are very particular to wear their hair in bx’aids, some on the right side, some in three braids, etc., while some shave the hair and others wear only one lock on the top of the head. The Brahman student is permitted to conform to family custom, but the latitude is not great, since along [ p. 125 ] with this permission it is enjoined that he shall either shave the head entirely or wear one knot at the top of his head and leave the rest shaved, or wear the one knot witii the rest of his hair loose; that is, he must always shaved entirely or wear a knot. No reason is given, but it mnst be.beeanse these are the two chief guards against spirit-entry, as baldness itself is a guard against the evil eye. That people should habitually have their heads shaved is not unknown. The Hindus themselves say that the outward difference between Scythians, Kambojans, and Persians is that Scythians shave half the head, Kambojans and Yavanas shave all the head, and Persians do not even cut off the beard. The ordinary Hindu householder wore his hair as he or his ancestors pleased, provided he did not neglect the knot at the crown of the head (though he did not expect to be pulled up to heaven by it, like a Mohammedan); but the hermits had to wear braided hair, and Hindu ascetics, like Dacotah Indians, shaved all the head except the topknot.
But the Hindu mysteries of sacrifice show that mucb more power is ascribed to hair even than that thus disclosed. Not only are the stars hair-pits of the Lord of’ Creation, but the avatar-gods are made of hairs of Vishnu, and in the horse-sacrifice there are woven into the mane and tail of the sacrificed animal one hundred and one pearls, because these represent the years a man sho,uld live and thus vital power or soul is made the foundation of the years. This is very mystical, but it suffices to show the identity of vital power and soul and hair : “In vital’ power, in soul, he thus [by establishing life in hair] establishes himself.’”[25] Another passage speaks plainly of the well known superstition that possession of the hair ^ves power over the original owner of the hair. Hairs of wild beasts are placed in the libation-cups of Budra to secare [ p. 126 ] to the worshipper the power of the wild beasts and to secure power over them; also, according to another passage, that the God Endra may shoot at the wild beasts and not shoot at the cattie.[^26] Before the inanguratiou of a Miig he must not have his hair cut for a year’ and no one in his kingdom except a priest may have his hair cut; even the animals may not have their hair dipped.[26]
In fact, however, the religion of Brahmanism is too sophisticated .to retain many of these hair-strength ideas, and even in the Samhitas there is little more than allnsioh to dishevelled hair, hair cat when one dies, and the cutting of hair of the dead. Yet the Atharva-V eda seems to hark back to older thought in containing the magical formula, “May the eyes and Gie hair of thee dry up as thou longest for me.”[27]
Where the whole head is involved, and we know that some savages believe in a special spirit of the head, it is not easy to say whether the superstition has to do with head or hair primarily. One of these superstitions is that the soul goes out through the head, for which reason the practice of trepanning the skull is still in vogue in India, as it may have been in Europe in prehistoric times. But the fact that the sktdl was sometimes broken by our Indians merdy to suck out the brains should make us cautious in asserting that all trepanned skulls in prehistoric times indicate a belief in the soul. The soul is collected in the crown of the head when a modem Yogi buries himself alive for forty days, Eicbard Schmidt assures us that the crown is, by actual experiment, the spot that retains the [ p. 127 ] vital heat lon^st, and when the Yogi he describes was hronght to life again after forty days the crown alone retained the heat; in fact, it was “burning hot”[28]
So it is difficult to determine whether the plea&ig Cfond wed’ding custom of knocking the heads of bride and groom togeiher, as practiced in India, is a hair-rite or a head-rite (to drive away spirits). It may be a union of souls.
In conclusion it must be said that the same belief often results in different practices. For example, the belief that demons enter the hair makes the braid and tangled hair in India a sign of spiritual possession as well as a sign of protection, as in Europe matted hair shows the work of spirits. It is also believed that hair may be helpful and may be injurious; sympathetic magic may destroy the owner of the hair and yet the same hair may be burned by the owner without any corresponding harm to himself, a point noticed by Frazer. Despite these illogi^ results of the belief, the belief itself is well established that the hair is a strength or soul-power, or, as explained above, is life. The various practices spring from various ways of meeting this belief. If one set of men let their hair grow long tin tiiey are adult, it is not because they, fear adverse possession but because they vtish to grow strong with the hairrstrength undiminished. On the other han^ cutting the hair is usually inevitable at some time and then precautions must be taken to keep off loss of strength, as when a Fiji chief eats a man every time he has his hair cut, to make up for loss of vitality. Another evidence that hair is strength or soul is the prevalence of the belief that a hair will cure the bite of shake’,; do^, etc. In India, a snake-bite is cured by three fiairs, which are [ p. 128 ] of course trebly eflSicacious, and the bair of an elephant is an amulet of power against disease, as a hair is some’ times used for medicine against light diseases by the peasants of Europe.
But the belief in hair and blood as soul-powers, though hot extinct, fades before the growing concentration of the sotil in other parts of the body. The heart and noidriff of the G-reeks were their especial soul-places because they paid more attention to the emotions as expressed by these organs. So the Psalmist speaks of his heart and Mdneys as seats of emotion (compare “bowels of compassion”). The thinking soul as well as the emotional soul was also located in the larger organs, thought and emotion not being stmdered till late.
The Liver : If we pass the larger organ-souls in review historically we must begin vdth the liver, but only because it is the Babylonian soul-place, not because it is in itself an older soul-place than the heart.[29] The liver was the organ of divination to the Babylonians, Etruscans, and Greeks. But the Greeks, at least in Homer’s day, did not regard the liver as a seat of thought or emotion, only as a vital spot when one wounds it or tears it. The tale of the liver of Prometheus being devoured is scarcely an indication that the liver has sinned, but that it will bear eating longer than the heart in a still living sufferer. Homer nowhere uses liver as he does heart and midriff, of thought and emotion.[30]
In Babylon, the soul (liver) of the sacrificed victim (eitiier as god or as representing a god) showed approval, dislike, warning, etfe, in regard to the worshippers. Likewise in Hebrew poetry, the kabed, liver, is synonymous [ p. 129 ] with soul, nephesh, and this belief remained as late as the Mohammedan era.[31]
The Heart: The heart as a seat of emotion, affection, mentality, morality, is as old as the Rig-Veda and as modem as the latest novel. It is the seat of blood and the airsoul in blood (see below). Nor is there in Greece, or India any indication that there was an anterior liver-soul; in India not even the possibility, as in the later Tityos tale, that the liver was recognized as a seat of thought enough to be sinful. It may be that anatomy, and divination by organs, first centred the Babylonian’s attention on the liver. In India there is no divination by inspection of entrails in the early religion and one of the few indications of a soul other than the heart-soul among the large organs jwints to the kidneys rather than the liver being the soulseat. As with other peoples, the heart is the thinking-organ to the Hindu. In Greece the her is the heart as soul, a winged ghost, which may bring disease. In Hindu philosophy the soul is not the heart but, being “the size of a thumb” (at death), it lives in the heart. The brain is the last place anyone ever thought of as the seat of the mind or soul. The passage from Cicero already referred to contains an epitome of ancient beliefs on the locality of the soul, from which it appears that while Empedocles held the blood to be the soul, Zeno contended that the soul is fire; while others regarded the “heart itself,” cor ip^ sum, as the soul, others denied Qiat the soul is the heart but claimed that it is in the heart, and, similarly, some (cf. Plato, above) held the soul to be part of the brain [ p. 130 ] (this idea may have been derived from Egypt), and some held it to be in the brain: alii in corde alii in cerebra dixerunt animi esse sedem et locum. Moreover, some identified sonl and breath: animum autem alii animam.[32]
These advanced views need not detain ns. Bnt it may be remarked that the sonl as a light in the heart is recognized in the Rig-Veda, “this light in my heart” (RV., 6, 9, 6); and the later Hindu philosophy recognizes “sonl consisting of light,” as it has “sonl consisting of thonght.” We may compare, not “the spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord” (Prov. 20:27), bnt the Gnostic “spark of life” the sonl fire-like” and “light-like^’ of (Greek) philosophy, and the “life was light” of John 1 : 4. The poet of the Rig-Veda says “my mind speaks to my heart” (8, 100, 5), but this does not imply that they are different pagans, rather lhat the mind is the mentality of the heart and in it, as in i, 73, 10, “May these songs be agreeable to thy mind ’ and heart.” It is the man’s mind as a power, which in contemplation “goes afar.”[33]
[ p. 131 ]
In the second century after Christ, according to Galen (cited by Windiseh), there was a popular psychic distinction to the effect that the thinking part of the soul is cerebral, the courageous part cardiac,[34] and the passionate and sensual part hepatic. Not l^at there are three souls, but the soul- has three parts thus distributed. An important distinction in this regard is to be observed between Greek and Hiudu thought. To the Greek, the spirit’s highest attribute is thought and the divine animating principle or cosmic spirit is Nous. That soul is mental was also a Yedic conception; but the Hindu rejected the idea of a physical spirit; and mind to him, like sight or hearing, was only an organ, a superior controlling organ, but nevertheless material, whereas spirit when pure was devoid of sense and the thinking process.
The Breath: Among the various seats of tihe-physical soul the breath is generally regarded as primitive, and perhaps it is so, in the mesming “life” or “life-power.” At any irate, it has a respectable antiquity in the Hebrew ruah, (the reflection of the nephesh), the Greek psyche, the Latin animus, -ima, and perhaps the Sanskrit atman. Nevertheless, the Ihdo-Buropean diversity makes it doubtful whether there was any original breath-soul of the Indo-Hellenico-Germanic group.[35] Our words “soul” and “ghost” point rather to what is expressed by the Greek Θνμος, ^passion, ebullition, excitement. Plato correctly refers Θνμος (Crat. 419 B) to the “thysis and zesis” of the soul, that is, to the unrest or agitation which, [ p. 132 ] in the parallel Sanskrit word dhuma, makes the meaning to he “smoke” (fumus), a connection brought out in Lithuanian, where the same word, dumà and dúmai, “thought” and “smoke,” depends only on the accent for the differentiated meaning. The word soul is probably related to “sea” (the restless) and ghost to “geyser,” also agitation on the physical side. So too Latin saevus may be etymologically connected with the word “soul,” and “gust” to ghost.[36] In Sanskrit, the words cognate with animus have usually the physical meaning, breath of life; but “breath,” ana or pro-ana, is the intelligential soul in philosophical works. Sanskrit atman is merely life-power when, for example, it is said that “Soma is Indra’s atman” and “the sun is the atman of the world”; ayus, life, is a synonym of prana. In Greece, Chrysippus says that “the soul is breath”; he adds that it is “born in us and extends continuously through the whole body,” that is to say, the soul is not the lung-breath but a more ethereal substance diffused all over the body. Hindu philosophy also takes this view of the soul and regards it as diffused by means of tiny veins or canals (as if by the nervous system) from its original location at the base of the spinal column, which is called the seat of the soul. Gfhe seat of the soul in general is, then, the vertebral column or spinal cord. The mystics have a system. of urging the soul up from the foot of the column to the brain (which is said to be a painful process); of this soul in [ p. 133 ] the spine the “breath-soul” and the mind are organs. Since in this view the mind is an organ of soul, the general theory is that mentality begins in the spinal cord, not in the brain of the skull, and “soul” is diffused, not locally fixed. A savage parallel to the diffused soul may be found in the Tonga statement that “soul is to the body as perfume to a flower.” But most savagss take breath not only as the vehicle of soul but as the soul itself. Thus Australian wang is breath and spirit and Mohawk atonritz, soul, derives from atonrion, to breathe. The soul in each case is, however, the life-power, not a separate quiddity. It was this life-power which the Grreek and Eoman caught from the mouth of the dying as his “last breath,” though perhaps neither of them distinguished very carefully between breath and souL
The Aztecs regarded the vital power or soul as the divine breath breathed into man by Tezcatlipoca, the Wind-god.[37] But a savage differentiates these various souls jme does not regard the breath-soul as the shadowsoul; sometimes he omits the breath as soul. Thus the Calabar Negroes have four souls, self, shadow, dreamsoul, and bush-soul (the beast-representative).[38] The shadow is distinguished from the dream-soul, which some writers carelessly call the “shadow-soul.”
The Shadow: The real shadow as soul is a co mm on aspect of soul-belief. The New England Amerinds called the soul chemung, shadow, and the natub (soul) of theQuichds in the South had the same meaning. In India, Shadow her [ p. 134 ] self is a divinity. To step on the shadow is to injure the souL Gods and ghosts cast no shadows, ^osts being themselves shades and gods not having mortal qualities (they dp not sweat; their garlands dd not wither). Most savages regard a picture as a sort of shadowy double of themselves and hence fear loss of identiiy, if they are painted or photographed. Catlin and Curtis were both held responsible for the sickness and death of Mandan and Zuhi Indians whom they had thus weakened by portraiture. The savage sees himself in a pool of water and regards it as a natural double; but in a picture he regards his image as unnatural, stolen from him. Something of the sitter was put into the picture and would by so much curtail his life, the Mandans told Catlin. They added that the person so robbed would also sleep uneasily in his grave, so that death was not the worst of the robbery. Harm to the portrait, they also believed, injured the sitter, so that it put a dangerous weapon into tiie hfmds of the owner of the picture.[39]
It might be supposed that an echo would also be regarded as a double self or soul; but, though this has been 6aid to be the case, authority seems to be lacking. The savage, like the civilized man, regards the echo as the voice of a moeking spirit (in Greece Mid India, it is a personified spirit).
The Bemaining Souls: These “souls” are small parts of the body, iaduding nails and excrements, to which it seems absurd -to ^ve the name soul but from whieh.it is difficult to distinguish the souls of higher type. Here at least organs of vitality rather than souls would appear more appufopriate than Wundt’s designation.[40] The bestknown of these powers is saliva, which all over the world [ p. 135 ] is regarded as curative and myaticaUy powerfol; but some savages, and even people calling themselves civilized, like the Hindus, operate with sweat and urine also as psychical powers. To sweat is not only to cast off evil but to eject a power, which another man may receive. A chief or i^iritual leader is so powerful that his sweat and nrine are regarded as soul-powers in the same way that hair is regarded. Urine was used as medidne and guarded property. More general is the ritual implying salivapower, To spit thrice is to avert evil or a spirit; one wards it off with a sacrifice of a small power instead of suffering the loss of greater power by not warding it off. Curative power in saliva is instinctively used by animals licking hot sores. ^‘Marduk’s saliva” is an element in the Babylonian physidan-ritual; it is the “spittle of life.” In preparing sacrificial food or even ordinary food, the South American Indians used spittle as an ingr^ent of safety and power. Tacitus says that Vespasian restored a man’s eyesight by anointing the sufferer’s eyes with earth mixed with spitfle.[41] In Egypt, sjntfle cured, purified, and prevented old age and disease; in India, it cures sores, wounds, sore eyes, and wards off the evil eye. In Ireland, it keeps off evil spirits and fairies. To spit on a new possession is to ma¥e it one’s own. To spit on a person is ordinarily to exercise soul-power against him. One keeps an abhorred person away just as one keeps evil persons off one’s property. But in some African tribes the host spits on his departing guest as a compliment, as who should say “I bestow bn you some power.” Sin is spat gut just as it is sweated out, and disease, as evil, is also spat out. A noxious person is sometimes spat upon with the understanding that, like a scapegoat, he may carry off siiL In a Jataka tale (522) it is expressly said that an evil woman spits on a man to cast her sin upon him.
[^26] Shat. Brah., 7, 8, 8.
Press dispatches of March 21, 1908. ↩︎
The savage queen who, visiting Queen Victoria, said, “I too am partly English, for my ancestor ate Captain Cook,” expressed the general Polynesian attitude. ↩︎
In the following paragraphs the more elaborate treatment of hair is not because this is more important than the other bodily parts, but because it has been less carefully considered in previous discussions and therefore calls for fuller explanation. Instead of “soul” (as used by Wundt) the word “ power” is in some regards preferable, but in respect of the higher forms of the “physical soul” the retention of the word soul has the advantage of showing that the physical part is really soul. For example, breath is conceived not only as a soul-place or power but as the soul itself, psyche anima. ↩︎
Both reasons have been given. See S. Seligman, Der Böse Blick und Verwandtes (1910); also Jahn in the Ber. d. Sachs. Gesell. d. Wiss., (Phil, hist. Klaase, 7), pp. 28 f.; Bartel, Die Medizin der Naturvölker, pp. 43 f; and Wundt, Mythus and Religion II, p. 395. The tenth Commandment may have originally implied the voluntary use of a malignant and harmful look, a physical injury, not merely a moral sin. ↩︎
Such descriptions as that of the eyewitness Henry do not prove either view: “From the bodies of some, ripped open, their butchers were drinking the blood, scooped up in the hollow of joined hands and quailed amid shouts of rage and victory” (cited by Parkman, Pontiac, p. 301). ↩︎
Compare, for these customs, Chilla, The North American Indians, I, p. 194; Parkman, Conspiracy of Pontiac, pp, 18, 207; Trumbull, The Blood Covenant; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites; Wellbaiisen, Reste Arabischen Heidenthums. ↩︎
Plato, Phaedo, 96 B; Cicero, Tusc. Disp., 1, 9, 18. The Greek original is εν τη του αιματος συστασει. Compare Windisch, Sitz der denkenden Secle, Ber. d. Sachs, Gesell d. Wiss., 1891 (voL 43, pp. 155 ff.). ↩︎
Dobrizhoffer, Gesch. d. Abiponer, II, p. 31. ↩︎
Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 401. ↩︎
Crooke, Folk-lore II, p. 66. ↩︎
Principles of Sociology, Pt. 4, ch. III. ↩︎
Golden Bough, pp. 362 f. ↩︎
In the Greek Church, children must be baptized before their hair is cut. ↩︎
To E. B. Tylor, the hair is only a substitute sacrifice. ↩︎
^15 ↩︎
The interpretation of Samson, as (Shamash) the sun does not materially affect the fact that the hero’s hair is the seat of his strength. Compare Steinthal in Goldziher’s Mythology, p. 414: “There must have been a time in Israel when hair and fulness of physical energy formed one identical idea,” and “The hair itself is the strength.” The inhabitants of the Greek island Zante still believe that the strength of a man is conserved in the hair of the chest (“three hairs on the breast,” op. cit.), and this may be the reason why the Hindus reckon the strength and ability of a horse to be measurable by the whorls or tuits of hair which mark his body. The weight of Absalom’s hair (two hundred shekels after a year’s growth, 2 Sam. 14: 26) seems to be regarded as one of the perfections of that very perfect young man. ↩︎
See Foster, Sequoyah, pp. 28 f. For Dido’s death, see Aeneid, 4, 704. ↩︎
Wundt, Mythus und Religion, 11, p. 38. ↩︎
Bee below on Sacrifice (chapter XI). ↩︎
Tylor, Primitive Culture, I, p. 460. ↩︎
Oe the funeral and festive cutting of hair among the Negroes, see Ellis; The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, pp. 156, 237, f241. ↩︎
There as another funeral practice which may be touched on here, that of putting dirt upon the head. This also is to be compared with the practice of paroxysmal grief, as when a child rolls in the dirt in rage or grief, rather than as a sacrifice, a disguise, or a symbolic burial, as it has been explained by W. R. Smith, Frazer, and Jastrow, respectively. Achilles humiliates himself literally, putting dirt and ashes on his head, just as he roars with grief and lies full-length on the ground. The first impulse is to hurt oneself, the second is to show that one feels hurt, and to do this one shows that he is cast down in the most obvious way. That heaping dirt on the head is nothing but a sign of being cast down (“low in the mind”) is proved by the fact that the attendants of African chiefs perpetually express their humility by covering the head with dirt even on festive occasions. Among the Ashantis this was the recognized sign of inferiority on the part of attendants, quite apart from occasions of grief. ↩︎
Catlin, North American Indians, I, p. 57. ↩︎
See Crooke, op. cit., I. p. 239. ↩︎
Shat. Brah., 13, 2, 6, 8. ↩︎
Ibid., 5, 5, 3, 2; cf. Professor Eggeling’s notes on this passage. ↩︎
AV., 6, 9, 1. In AV., 19, 32, 2, are described women beating their breasts for the dead whose hair they cut off. The few charms for growth of hair show only, that thick black hair is desired. Red hair is taboo, according to Manu; perhaps, as in Scotland, it is associated with the evil eye. ↩︎
Richard Schmidt, Fakire und Fakirtum in altem und modernen Indien. The Upanishads make thee suture of the skull the exit of the soul, the brahmarandhra. ↩︎
Otherwise Professor Jastrow, op. cit., below. Jastrow believed that the liver has everywhere preceded the heart soul-place. ↩︎
Seymour, Homeric Age, p. 489. ↩︎
Compare the essay of Professor Morris Jastrow, Jr., The Liver in Antiquity and the Beginnings of Anatomy (Univ. of Penna. Medical Bulletin, Jan., 1908). To the examples of liver-souls there given may be added two from Micronesia and Russia, respectively. The Malay Oti (Micronesian ate) is “liver, mind, heart” that is, it is the thinking and emotional soul. In Russian Shamanism, when a man dies it is said that Father Erlik “takes his liver.” See also on the soul of the messenger-pig, chapter XI. ↩︎
The opposition to the view that the soul is in the brain is tersely justified by Zeno and shows how opposed to reason seemed the brain as a seat of soul even in comparetively late times: “Reason (the thinking soul) cannot be in the brain, because speech derives from reason, while at the same time speech issues with the voice from the throat” (hence the road through the throat must be the one leading to the soul). Descartes, it may be remembered, says that the soul has its principal seat in the brain, where alone it understands and imagines and perceives, but it is diffused over the body in a less rational state, for “the human soul is united to whole body.” Of the views referred to above, that which identifies soul with fire is as old as Heraclitus; the soul as air was taught by Anaximander and Diogenes of Apollonia; but it is really a popular belief. ↩︎
Here mind is ‘power’ as soul, Sk. mamas (mind), Grk. nemos (Minerva). Noticeable is the Vedic use of heart in the sense of stomach as well as seat of understanding. Thus in RV. 8, 2, 12, “the Soma-draughts when quaffed contend with each other in the heart” (stomach); ibid., 1, 179, “the Soma quaffed, within, in the heart, I address.” The Soma is regarded as a “cordial”. The understanding is “in the heart” (Rig-Veda, 5, 85, 2). ↩︎
This is also savage belief, for which reason the heart is so often eaten by warriors, though to our Redskins it was merely a gastronomic dainty. In 1667, the savages described by Greenholgh in his Journal feasted on the hearts of boys and women. ↩︎
That is, there was no one word for breath in the sense of soul, but different Indo-European peoples expressed soul by breath and even the idea of god as spiritus is so expressed in Θεος, Slavic dusa; Keltic dusii, spirits; compare Norse Asen and Asura (in Ormuzd) as (breath) spirit. ↩︎
Words for soul revert to the meaning “breath” in several Indo-European languages; other words in the same group of languages give to soul the etymologieal sense of “thinker” (measurer, estimater), “vivifier” “power” as well as the physical notions conveyed in “follower” and “shadow”. Every one of these notions is duplicated in languages not Indo-European, as has^recently been shovm for the languages of the Eastern Archipelago by B. Brandstetter, Die Indonesische u. d. Indog, Volkseele (Luzern, 1921). Soul as breath is known also in China, America, etc. The equivalents given above (sea, soul; gust, ghost) are probable but not certain. ↩︎
For other examples of the sipiritus idea, see Tylor, Primitive Culture, I, p. 432. The Wind-god is not a soul but Harpies and Yalkyries as forms of souls are spirits of the wind. “Evil winds” and “good winds” are known in Vedic literature, but not as souls, only as breezes bringing great heat, disease, or refreshment ↩︎
Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, p. 452. Bush in the expression bush-soul means the jungle or forest and the bush-soul is the animal-soul; the savage deposits his soul in an animal as an ark of safety. ↩︎
Catlin, North American Indians, I, pp. 122, 255. THe picture is thus eaxactly like a shadow, injury to which injures the owner of the shadow. ↩︎
Wundt, op. cit., II, p. 21. ↩︎
Hist., 4, 81; cf. Suet. Vesp., 7. ↩︎