Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare

“ The same repugnance to naming the dead exists all over the world, and leads survivors who share the dead man’s name to adopt another, at least for a time. If the dead man’s name was that of a plant, tree, animal or stream, that too is changed. Here is a potent cause of linguistic change, that also renders any historical tradition impossible. The survivors seem to fear that the ghost will come when he hears his name called; but it also hangs together with the taboo which hedges round the dead as it does kings, chieftains and priests. ”

“ Every great event in the life of a Hindu seems to be regarded as leading up to and bearing on these solemnities. If he marries, it is to have children who may celebrate them after his death; if he has no children, he lies under the strongest obligation to adopt them from another family, ‘with a view,’ writes the Hindu doctor, ‘to the funeral cake, the water and the solemn sacrifice’ ” “May there be born in our lineage,” so the Indian Manes are supposed to say, “a man to offer to us, on the thirteenth day of the moon, rice boiled in milk, honey and ghee.” ”

“ Their tenets were as follows:—The evil god, Satan, who inspired the malevolent parts of the Old Testament, is god and lord of this world, of the things that are seen and are temporal, and especially of the outward man which is decaying, of the earthen vessel, of the body of death, of the flesh which takes us captive under the law of sin and desire. This world is the only true purgatory and hell, being the antithesis of the world eternal, of the inward man renewed day by day, of Christ’s peace and kingdom which are not of this world. ”

“ Motives drawn from homoeopathic magic may thus explain the occasional disuse and prohibition of pictorial and plastic art in cult; they may equally explain its genesis and rise in certain ages and countries. Prayer is much more hopeful and efficacious for a worshipper who has means of bringing near to himself, and even coercing the god he worships. An image fashioned like a god, and which has this advantage over a mere stock and stone that it declares itself and reveals at a glance to what god it is sacred, must surely attract and influence the god to choose it as his home and tenement. ”

“ The dead man’s body is shorn and the nails cut for a kindred reason; for it must be purified as much as can be before it is burned as an offering on the pyre and before he enters on a new sphere of existence. ”

“ The Roman church then had early precedents for separating confirmation from baptism. It would also appear that in the primitive age confirmation and ordination were one and the same rite; and so they continued to be among the dissident believers of the middle ages, who, however, often dropped the water rite altogether. (See Cathars.) More than one sect of the 2nd century rejected water baptism on the ground that knowledge of the truth in itself makes us free, and that external material washing of a perishable body cannot contribute to the illumination of the inner man, complete without it. ”

“ Everything that is sexually begotten is impure. Fish were supposed to be born in the water without sexual connexion, and on the basis of this old physiological fallacy the Cathars equally with the Catholic framed their rule of fasting. And there was yet another reason why the Perfect should not eat animals, for a human soul might be doing time in its body. Nor might a Perfect or one in course of probation kill anything, for the Mosaic commandment applies to all life. He might not lie nor take an oath, for the precept “Swear not at all” was, like the rest of the gospel, taken seriously. ”

“ Lastly, the restriction to aniconic worship saved them from much superstition, for there is nothing which so much stimulates the growth of a mythology as the manufacture of idols. The artist must indeed start with imaginative types, revealed to him in visions or borrowed from current myths. But the tendency of his art is to give rise to new tales of the gods. There is perpetual action and reaction between picture and myth; and a legislator desiring to purify and raise his countrymen’s religion must devote no less attention to their plastic art than to their hymnology. ”

“ The life of a Perfect was so hard, and, thanks to the inquisitors, so fraught with danger, that most Believers deferred the rite until the death-bed, as in the early centuries many believers deferred baptism. The rule imposed complete chastity. A husband at initiation left his wife, committing her “to God and the gospel”; a wife her husband. A male Perfect could not lay his hand on a woman without incurring penance of a three-days’ fast. All begetting of children is evil, for Adam’s chambering with Eve was the forbidden fruit. It is good for a man not to touch a woman ”

“ Red earth was probably chosen as a medium in which to lay a corpse because demons flee from red. Sacred trees and stones are painted red, and for the most solemn of their rites savages bedaub themselves with red clay. It is a favourite taboo colour.
4. A feast is an essential feature of every primitive funeral, and in the Irish “wake” it still survives. A dead man’s soul or double has to be fed at the tomb itself, perhaps to keep it from prowling about the homes of the survivors in search of victuals; and such food must also be supplied to the dead at stated intervals for months or years. ”

“ The iconoclasts proper, who not only condemned image worship in the sense just explained but rejected all religious art whatever. Fleeting matter to their mind was not worthy to embody or reflect heavenly supersensuous energies denoted by the names of Christ and the saints. For the same reason they rejected relics and, as a rule, the worship of the cross. Statues of Christ, especially of him hanging on the cross, inspired the greatest horror and indignation; and this is why none of the graven images of Christ, common before the outbreak of the movement, survive. ”

“ Priests and magistrates in Rome might not meet or look on a corpse, for they were thereby rendered unclean and incapable of fulfilling their official duties without undergoing troublesome rites of purification. At a Roman funeral, when the remains had been laid in the tomb, all present were sprinkled with lustral water from a branch of olive or laurel called aspergillum; and when they had gone home they were asperged afresh and stepped over a fire. The house was also swept out with a broom, probably lest the ghost of the dead should be lying about the floor. ”

“ Having in their possession bits of the dead, and being so far in communion with him, the survivors are surer of his friendship. They have ensured themselves against ghosts who are apt to be by nature envious and mischievous. But whatever their original significance, the tearing of cheeks and hair and garments and cutting with knives are mostly expressions of real sorrow, and, as Robertson Smith remarks, of deprecation and supplication to an angry god or spirit. It must not be supposed that the savage or ancient man feels less than ourselves the poignancy of loss. ”

“ All will admit who study the post-Nicene Church, that the Christian sacraments have stolen the clothes of the pagan mysteries, dethroned and forbidden by the Christian emperors. The catechumenate, an old institution, older in most regions than the mysteries themselves, suggested and rendered feasible such wholesale theft, especially in an age in which the sacerdotal class wished to be pre-eminent, and left nothing undone to enhance in the eyes of the multitude the importance and solemnity of rites which it was their prerogative to administer. ”

“ In the course of a very few years, as the recollection of the man’s personality becomes misty, his origin grows mysterious, his career takes a legendary hue, his birth and death were both supernatural; in the next generation the names of the elder gods get introduced into the story, and so the marvellous tradition works itself into a myth, until nothing but a personal incarnation can account for such a series of prodigies. ”

“ Here we have the savage analogue to Christian relics. So the Australian natives make pointing sticks out of the small bones of the arm, with which to bewitch enemies.
We may conclude then that in the most primitive societies, where blood-kinship is the only social tie and root of social custom it is the shades, not of kinsmen, but of strangers, who as such are enemies, that are dangerous and uncanny. In more developed societies, however, all ghosts alike are held to be so; and if a ghost walks it is because its body has not been properly interred or because its owner was a malefactor. ”

“ The Benediction of bread is thus performed by the Cathars. They all, men and women, go up to a table, and standing up say the ‘Our Father.’ [4] And he who is prior among them, at the close of the Lord’s Prayer, shall take hold of the bread and say: 'Thanks be to the God of our Jesus Christ. May the Spirit be with us all.' And after that he breaks and distributes to all. And such bread is called bread blessed, although no one believes that out of it is made the body of Christ. ”

“ No more solemn duty weighs upon the Chinaman than that of tending the spirits of his dead forefathers. Confucius, it is recorded, sacrificed to the dead, as if they were present, and to the spirits, as if they were there. In view of such Chinese sacrifices the names of the dead are inscribed on wooden plaques called spirit-tablets, into which the spirits are during the ceremony supposed to enter, having quitted the very heaven and presence of God in order to commune with posterity. ”

“ As many as are persuaded and believe that what we teach and say is true, and undertake to be able to live accordingly, are instructed to pray and entreat God with fasting, for the remission of their sins that are past, we praying and fasting with them. Then they are brought by us where there is water, and are regenerated in the same manner in which we were ourselves regenerated. For in the name of God, the Father and Lord of the universe, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit, they then receive the washing with water. ”

“ Usually two sponsors made themselves responsible for the past life of the candidate and for the sincerity of his faith and repentance. The essential thing was that a man should come to baptism of his own free will and not under compulsion or from hope of gain. Macarius of Jerusalem (op. cit.) declares that the grace of the spirit is given in answer to our prayers and entreaties for it, and that even a font is not needful, but only the wish and desire for grace. Tertullian, however, in his work On Baptism, holds that even that is not always enough. ”

“ At a later period, however, the difficulty of screening the rites of baptism and Eucharist from the eyes of catechumens and from their ears the creeds and liturgies—a difficulty which had ever been formidable and which after the overthrow of paganism must have become insurmountable—seems to have provoked not only a great outpouring on the part of the Christian rhetors, like Basil, Chrysostom, the Gregories and the Cyrils, of phrases borrowed from the Greek mysteries, but perhaps an actual use of precautions. ”

“ The slaying and eating of animal victims, however, at the tomb is universal and bears several meanings, separately or all at once. The animals may be slain in order that their ghosts may accompany the deceased in his new life. This significance we have already dwelt upon. Or it is believed that the shade feeds upon them, as the shades came up from Hades and lapped up out of a trench the blood of the animals slain by Ulysses. The survivors by eating the flesh of a victim, whose blood and soul the dead thus consume, sacramentally confirm the mystic tie of blood kinship with the dead. ”

“ In most primitive societies the chief sources of ritual pollution are birth, death, bloodshed, blood, especially menstruous blood. Numberless other things are or have been taboo among different peoples, such as trees, colours, foods and drinks, persons, places, seasons. Persons and things brought even involuntarily into contact or association with these are tabooed, and only recover their normal condition by some rite of purification or catharsis. Such rites operate by the transference elsewhere of the stain or impurity contracted. ”

“ Some of the rites described under the previous heads may be really inspired by the fear of the dead haunting the living, but it must be kept in mind that the taboo attaching to a dead body is one thing and fear of a ghost another. A corpse is buried or burned, or scaffolded on a tree, a tower or a house-top, in order to get it out of the way and shield society from the dangerous infection of its taboo ”

“ How far the Christian feeling of the 4th and 5th centuries was from being settled in favour of the employment of the fine arts is shown by such a case as that of Eusebius of Caesarea, who, in reply to a request of Constantia, sister of Constantine, for a picture of Christ, wrote that it was unlawful to possess images pretending to represent the Saviour either in his divine or in his human nature, and added that to avoid the reproach of idolatry he had actually taken away from a lady friend the pictures of Paul and of Christ which she had. ”

“ In relation to the publicans and soldiers who, smitten with remorse, sought out John in the wilderness, his baptism was a purification from their past and so far identical with the proselyte’s bath; but so far as it raised them up to be children unto Abraham and filled them with the Messianic hope, it advanced them further than that bath could do, and assured them of a place in the kingdom of God, soon to be established—this, without imposing circumcision on them; for the ordinary proselyte was circumcised as well as baptized. ”

“ Nor among modern savages are funeral feasts off the flesh of the dead unknown, and they seem to be intended to effect and renew a sacramental union or kinship of the living with the dead. The Uaupes in the Amazons incinerate a corpse a month after death, pound up the ashes, and mix them with their fermented drink. They believe that the virtues of the dead will thus be passed on to his survivors. The life of the tribe is kept inside the tribe and not lost. ”