So Periander, to
put a stop to this sad state of spiritual destitution, requisitioned all
the best dresses of the Corinthian ladies, burnt them bodily in a great
trench, and received an immediate answer from the gratified shade, who
was thenceforth enabled to walk about in the principal promenades of
Hades among the best-dressed ghosts of that populous quarter.
The belief which thus survived among the civilised Greeks of the age of
the Despots is shared still by Fijis and Karens, and was derived by all
in common from early ancestors of like faith with the founders of Ogbury
round barrow. The weapons were broken and the clothes burnt, to liberate
their ghosts into the world of spirits, just as now, in Fiji, knives and
axes have their spiritual counterparts, which can only be released when
the material shape is destroyed or purified by the action of fire.
Everything, in such a state, is supposed to possess a soul of its own;
and the fire is the chosen mode for setting the soul free from all
clogging earthly impurities. So till yesterday, in the rite of suttee,
the Hindoo widow immolated herself upon her husband's pyre, in order
that her spirit might follow him unhampered to the world of ghosts
whither he was bound. Thus the twin barrows on Ogbury hillside bridge
over for us two vast epochs of human culture, both now so remote as to
merge together mentally to the casual eyes of modern observers, but yet
in reality marking in their very shape and disposition an immense, long,
and slow advance of human reason.
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