Animism, the Seed of Religion

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ... tion of the living to the spirits of the dead. The deification of men during their lifetime, of which ancient Greece and Rome furnish examples, does not fall within the present purpose. 17 Deifi-e belief m spirits and in their cation and survival after death is shown to have Worship... of sufficing cause of origin m dreams about them, and to be strengthened by the phenomena of shadows, reflections and echoes, and by sundry kinds of disease, all of which, like death itself, are attributed to maleficent agents, theories of natural causes being impossible to the savage mind. "Man after man dies in the same way, but it never occurs to the savage that there is one constant and explicable cause to account for all cases. Instead of this, he regards each successive death as an event wholly by itself, apparently unexpected, and only to be explained by some supernatural agency."" One thing is clear, that at death the spirit does not return to the body. What, then, becomes of it? Ask the Archbishop of Canterbury, as our highest representative of the orthodox creed, what happens to the soul in the intervening period between death and the resurrection and final judgment? His answer will probably be as nebulous as that of the natives of Obubura Hill, in Nigeria, concerning whom Mr. Partridge says: "They all believe in a future life of some kind or another--that death is only the passing from one to another sphere of environment--Mors Janua Vitce. The life and whereabouts of the soul after 'death' depends upon a variety of circumstances which they believe that they can more or less control. Sometimes the soul or spirit goes up to the sky to live with the Big God, sometimes it passes into the great tree that predominates over their central...