With the progress of time, however, men's ideas upon these subjects
began to grow more definite and more consistent. Instead of the corpse,
we get the ghost; instead of the material underground world, we get the
idealised and sublimated conception of a shadowy Hades, a world of
shades, a realm of incorporeal, disembodied spirits. With the growth of
the idea in this ghostly nether world, there arises naturally the habit
of burning the dead in order fully to free the liberated spirit from the
earthly chains that clog and bind it. It is, indeed, a very noticeable
fact that wherever this belief in a world of shades is implicitly
accepted, there cremation follows as a matter of course; while wherever
(among savage or barbaric races) burial is practised, there a more
materialistic creed of bodily survival necessarily accompanies it. To
carry out this theory to its full extent, not only must the body itself
be burnt, but also all its belongings with it. Ghosts are clothed in
ghostly clothing; and the question has often been asked of modern
spiritualists by materialistic scoffers, 'Where do the ghosts get their
coats and dresses?' The true believer in cremation and the shadowy world
has no difficulty at all in answering that crucial inquiry; he would say
at once, 'They are the ghosts of the clothes that were burnt with the
body.' In the gossiping story of Periander, as veraciously retailed for
us by that dear old grandmotherly scandalmonger, Herodotus, the shade of
Melissa refuses to communicate with her late husband, by medium or
otherwise, on the ground that she found herself naked and shivering with
cold, because the garments buried with her had not been burnt, and
therefore were of no use to her in the world of shades.
Pages:
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364