The Eternal Belief in Immortality & Worship of the Dead. James George Frazer

were piled together at the head of the corpse before the grave was filled in.²⁰⁸ Among the tribes of Southern Victoria, when the grave has been dug and lined with fresh leaves and twigs so as to make a soft bed, the dead man's property is brought in two bags, and the sorcerer shakes out the contents. They consist of such small articles as pieces of hard stone suitable for cutting or paring skins, bones for boring holes, twine made of opossum wool, and so forth. These are placed in the grave, and the bags and rugs of the deceased are torn up and thrown in likewise. Then the sorcerer asks whether the dead man had any other property, and if he had, it is brought forward and laid beside the torn fragments of the bags and rugs. Everything that a man owned in life must be laid beside him in death.²⁰⁹ Again, among the tribes of the Lower Murray, Lachlan, and Darling rivers in New South Wales, all a dead man's property, including his weapons and nets, was buried with his body in the grave.²¹⁰ Further, we are told that among the natives of Western Australia the weapons and personal property of the deceased are placed on the grave, "so that when he rises from the dead they may be ready to his hand."²¹¹ In the Boulia district of Queensland the things which belonged to a dead man, such as his boomerangs and spears, are either buried with him, destroyed by fire, or sometimes, though rarely, distributed among his tribal brothers, but never among his children.²¹²

      Intention of destroying the property of the dead. The property of the dead not destroyed in Central Australia.

Thus among certain tribes of Australia, especially in the south-eastern part of the continent, it appears that the custom of burying or destroying a dead man's property has been very common. That the intention of the custom in some cases is to supply the supposed needs of the ghost, seems to be fairly certain; but we may doubt whether this explanation would apply to the practice of burning or otherwise destroying the things which had belonged to the deceased. More probably such destruction springs from an overpowering dread of the ghost and a wish to sever all connexion with him, so that he may have no excuse for returning and haunting the survivors, as he might do if his property were either kept by them or deposited in the grave. Whatever the motive for the burial or destruction of a dead man's property may be, the custom appears not to prevail among the tribes of Central Australia. In the eastern Arunta tribe, indeed, it is said that sometimes a little wooden vessel used in camp for holding small objects may be buried with the man, but this is the only instance which Messrs. Spencer and Gillen could hear of in which any article of ordinary use is buried in the grave. Far from wasting property in that way, these economical savages preserve even a man's personal ornaments, such as his necklaces, armlets, and the fur string which he wore round his head; indeed, as we have seen, they go so far as to cut off the hair from the head of the deceased and to keep it for magical uses.²¹³ In the Warramunga tribe all the belongings of a dead man go to the tribal brothers of his mother.²¹⁴

      Property of the dead hung up on trees, then washed and distributed. Economic loss entailed by sacrifices to the dead.

The difference in this respect between the practice of the Central tribes and that of the tribes nearer the sea, especially in Victoria and New South Wales, is very notable. A custom intermediate between the two is observed by some tribes of the Darling River, who hang up the weapons, nets, and other property of the deceased on trees for about two months, then wash them, and distribute them among the relations.²¹⁵ The reason for hanging the things up and washing them is no doubt to rid them of the infection of death in order that they may be used with safety by the survivors. Such a custom points clearly to a growing fear of the dead; and that fear or reverence comes out still more clearly in the practice of either burying the property of the dead with them or destroying it altogether, which is observed by the aborigines of Victoria and other parts of Australia who live under more favourable conditions of life than the inhabitants of the Central deserts. This confirms the conclusion which we have reached on other grounds, that among the aboriginal population of Australia favourable natural conditions in respect of climate, food, and water have exercised a most important influence in stimulating social progress in many directions, and not least in the direction of religion. At the same time, while we recognise that the incipient tendency to a worship of the dead which may be detected in these regions marks a step forward in religious development, we must acknowledge that the practice of burying or destroying the property of the dead, which is one of the ways in which the tendency manifests itself, is, regarded from the side of economic progress, a decided step backward. It marks, in fact, the beginning of a melancholy aberration of the human mind, which has led mankind to sacrifice the real interests of the living to the imaginary interests of the dead. With the general advance of society and the accompanying accumulation of property these sacrifices have at certain stages of evolution become heavier and heavier, as the demands of the ghosts became more and more exacting. The economic waste which the belief in the immortality of the soul has entailed on the world is incalculable. When we contemplate that waste in its small beginnings among the rude savages of Australia it appears insignificant enough; the world is not much the poorer for the loss of a parcel of boomerangs, spears, fur string, and skin rugs. But when we pass from the custom in this its feeble source and follow it as it swells in volume through the nations of the world till it attains the dimensions of a mighty river of wasted labour, squandered treasure, and spilt blood, we cannot but wonder at the strange mixture of good and evil in the affairs of mankind, seeing in what we justly call progress so much hardly earned gain side by side with so much gratuitous loss, such immense additions to the substantial value of life to be set off against such enormous sacrifices to the shadow of a shade.

Footnote 160: (return)

      W. E. Roth, North Queensland Ethnography, Bulletin No. 5, Superstition, Magic, and Medicine (Brisbane, 1903), pp. 18, 23, §§ 68, 83.

Footnote 161: (return)

      Homer, Odyssey, xix. 163.

Footnote 162: (return)

      W. E. Roth, ll. cc.

Footnote 163: (return)

      W. E. Roth, North Queensland Ethnography, Bulletin No. 5 (Brisbane, 1903), p. 29. § 116.

Footnote 164: (return)

      W. E. Roth. op. cit. p. 18, § 68.

Footnote 165: (return)

      W. E. Roth, op. cit. pp. 17, 29, §§ 65, 116.

Footnote 166: (return)

      W. E. Roth, op. cit. p. 17, § 65.

Footnote 167: (return)

      J. Dawson, Australian Aborigines (Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide, 1881), pp. 110 sq.; A. W. Howitt, Native Tribes of South-East Australia (London, 1904), p. 442.

Footnote 168: (return)