The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought Part 20

CHAPTER X.

CHILDREN'S SOULS.

The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar.--_Wordsworth_.

And rest at last where souls unbodied dwell In ever-flowing meads of Asphodel.

--_Homer (Pope's Transl_.).

_Baptism_.

With certain Hindu castes, the new-born child is sprinkled with cold water, "in order that the soul, which, since its last existence, has remained in a condition of dreamy contemplation, may be brought to the consciousness that it has to go through a new period of trial in this corporeal world" (326. II. 13). Perhaps, among the myriad rites and ceremonies of immersion and sprinkling to which the infant is submitted with other primitive peoples, some traces of similar beliefs may be found.

When the new world-religion was winning its way among the gentiles, baptism was the great barrier erected between the babe and the power of ill, spirits of air, earth, and water, survivals of old heathenism antagonistic to Christianity. Before that holy rite was performed, the child lay exposed to all their machinations. Baptism was the armour of the infant against the a.s.saults of Satan and his angels, against the cunning of the wanderers from elfin-land, the fairy-sprites, with their changelings and their impish tricks.

Hence, the souls of still-born and unbaptized children came into the power of these evil ones and were metamorphosed into insects, birds, beasts, and the like, whose peculiar notes and voices betray them as having once been little children, or were compelled to join, the train of the wild huntsman, or mingle in the retinue of some other outcast, wandering sprite or devil; or, again, as some deceitful star, or will-o'-the-wisp, mislead and torment the traveller on moor and in bog and swamp, and guide him to an untimely death amid desert solitudes.

Ploss, Henderson, and Swainson have a good deal to say on the subject of Frau Berctha and her train, the Wild Huntsman, the "Gabble Retchet,"

"Yeth Hounds," etc. Mr. Henderson tells us that, "in North Devon the local name is 'yeth hounds,' _heath_ and _heathen_ being both 'yeth' in the North Devon dialect. Unbaptized infants are there buried in a part of the churchyard set apart for the purpose called 'Chrycimers,' i.e. Christianless, hill, and the belief seems to be that their spirits, having no admittance into Paradise, unite in a pack of 'Heathen' or 'yeth' hounds, and hunt the Evil One, to whom they ascribe their unhappy condition" (469. 131, 132). The prejudice against unbaptized children lingers yet elsewhere, as the following extract from a newspaper published in the year 1882 seems to indicate (230. 272):--

"There is in the island of Mull a little burial-ground entirely devoted to unbaptized children, who were thus severed in the grave from those who had been interred in the hope of resurrection to life. Only one adult lies with the little babes--an old Christian woman--whose last dying request it was that she should be buried with the unbaptized children." The Rev. Mr. Thorn has given the facts poetic form and made immortal that mother-heart whose love made holy--if hallowed it needed to be--the lonely burial-ground where rest the infant outcasts:--

"A spot that seems to bear a ban, As if by curse defiled: No mother lies there with her babe, No father by his child."

Among primitive peoples we find a like prejudice against still-born children and children who die very young. The natives of the Highlands of Borneo think that still-born infants go to a special spirit-land called _Tenyn lallu_, and "the spirits of these children are believed to be very brave and to require no weapon other than a stick to defend themselves against their enemies. The reason given for this idea is, that the child has never felt pain in this world and is therefore very daring in the other" (475. 199). In Annam the spirits of children still-born and of those dying in infancy are held in great fear. These spirits, called _Con Ranh_, or _Con Lon_ (from _lon_, "to enter into life"), are ever seeking "to incorporate themselves in the bodies of others, though, after so doing, they are incapable of life."

Moreover, "their names are not mentioned in the presence of women, for it is feared they might take to these, and a newly-married woman is in like manner afraid to take anything from a woman, or to wear any of the clothing of one, who has had such a child. Special measures are necessary to get rid of the _Con Ranh_" (397. 18-19). The Alfurus, of the Moluccas, "bury children up to their waists and expose them to all the tortures of thirst until they wrench from them the promise to hurl themselves upon the enemies of the village. Then they take them out, but only to kill them on the spot, imagining that the spirits of the victims will respect their last promise" (388. 81). On the other hand, Callaway informs us that the Zulu diviner may divine by the _Amatongo_ (spirit) of infants, "supposed to be mild and beneficent" (417. 176).

_Transmigration_.

Wordsworth, in that immortal poem, which belongs to the jewels of the treasure-house of childhood, has sung of the birth of man:--

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But, trailing clouds of glory, do we come From G.o.d, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy,"--

and the humbler bards of many an age, whose names have perished with the races that produced them, have thought and sung of soul-incarnation, metempsychosis, transmigration, and kindred concepts, in a thousand different ways. In their strangely poetical language, the Tupi Indians, of Brazil, term a child _pitanga_, "suck soul," from _piter_, "to suck," _anga_, "soul." The Seminole Indians, of Florida, "held the baby over the face of the woman dying in child-birth, so that it might receive her parting spirit" (409. 271). A similar practice (with the father) is reported from Polynesia. In a recently published work on "Souls," by Mrs. Mary Ailing Aber, we read:--

"Two-thirds of all the babies that are born in civilized lands to-day have no souls attached to them. These babies are emanations from their parents,--not true ent.i.ties; and, unless a soul attaches itself, no ordinary efforts can carry one of them to the twentieth year. Souls do attach themselves to babies after birth sometimes so late as the third year. On the other hand, babies who have souls at birth sometimes lose them because the soul finds a better place, or is drawn away by a stronger influence; but this rarely occurs after the third year."

This somewhat _outre_ declaration of modern spiritualism finds kindred in some of the beliefs of primitive peoples, concerning which there is much in Ploss, Frazer, Bastian, etc.

In one of the Mussulman stories of King Solomon, the Angel of Death descends in human form to take the soul of an aged man, whose wish was to die when he had met the mightiest prophet. He dies talking to the wise Hebrew king. Afterwards the Angel says to Solomon:--

"He [the angel, whose head reaches ten thousand years beyond the seventh heaven, whose feet are five hundred years below the earth, and upon whose shoulders stands the Angel of Death] it is who points out to me when and how I must take a soul. His gaze is fixed on the tree Sidrat Almuntaha, which bears as many leaves inscribed with names as there are men living on the earth.

"At each new birth a new leaf, bearing the name of the newly-born, bursts forth; and when any one has reached the end of his life, his leaf withers and falls off, and at the same instant I am with him to receive his soul....

"As often as a believer dies, Gabriel attends me, and wraps his soul in a green silken sheet, and then breathes it into a green bird, which feeds in Paradise until the day of the resurrection. But the soul of the sinner I take alone, and, having wrapped it in a coa.r.s.e, pitch-covered, woollen cloth, carry it to the gates of h.e.l.l, where it wanders among abominable vapours until the last day" (547. 213, 214).

According to the belief of the Miao-tse, an aboriginal tribe of the province of Canton, in China, the souls of unborn children are kept in the garden of two deities called "Flower-Grandfather" and "Flower-Grandmother," and when to these have been made by a priest sacrifices of hens or swine, the children are let out and thus appear among men. As a charm against barrenness, these people put white paper into a basket and have the priest make an invocation. The white paper represents the deities, and the ceremony is called _kau fa; i.e._ "Flower Invocation."

In j.a.pan, a certain Lake Fakone, owing its origin to an earthquake, and now surrounded by many temples, is looked upon as the abode of the souls of children about to be born (326. I. 3).

Certain Californian Indians, near Monterey, thought that "the dead retreated to verdant islands in the West, while awaiting the birth of the infants whose souls they were to form" (396. III. 525).

In Calabria, Italy, when a b.u.t.terfly flits around a baby's cradle, it is believed to be either an angel or a baby's soul, and a like belief prevails in other parts of the world; and we have the cla.s.sic personification of Psyche, the soul, as a b.u.t.terfly.

Among the uneducated peasantry of Ireland, the pure white b.u.t.terfly is thought to be the soul of the sinless and forgiven dead on the way to Paradise, whilst the spotted ones are the embodiments of spirits condemned to spend their time of purgatory upon earth, the number of the sins corresponding with the number of spots on the wings of the insect (418. 192).

In early Christian art and folk-lore, the soul is often figured as a dove, and in some heathen mythologies of Europe as a mouse, weasel, lizard, etc.

In various parts of the world we find that children, at death, go to special limbos, purgatories, or heavens, and the folk-lore of the subject must be read at length in the mythological treatises.

The Andaman Islanders "believe that every child which is conceived has had a prior existence, but only as an infant. If a woman who has lost a baby is again about to become a mother, the name borne by the deceased is bestowed on the fetus, in the expectation that it will prove to be the same child born again. Should it be found at birth that the babe is of the same s.e.x as the one who died, the ident.i.ty is considered to be sufficiently established; but, if otherwise, the deceased one is said to be under the rau- (_Ficus laccifera_), in _cha-itan-_ (Hades)." Under this tree, upon the fruit of which they live, also dwell "the spirits and souls of all children who die before they cease to be entirely dependent on their parents (_i.e._ under six years of age)" (498. 86, 93). There was a somewhat similar myth in Venezuela (448. 297).

Mr. Codrington gives some interesting ill.u.s.trations of this belief from Melanesia (25. 311):--

"In the island of Aurora, Maewo, in the New Hebrides, women sometimes have a notion that the origin, beginning, of one of their children is a cocoanut or a bread-fruit, or something of that kind; and they believe, therefore, that it would be injurious to the child to eat that food. It is a fancy of the woman, before the birth of the child, that the infant will be the _nunu_, which may be translated the echo, of such an object. Women also fancy that a child is the _nunu_ of some dead person. It is not a notion of metempsychosis, as if the soul of the dead person returned in the new-born child; but it is thought that there is so close a connection that the infant takes the place of the deceased.

At Mota, also, in the Banks Islands, there was the belief that each person had a source of his being, his origin, in some animate or inanimate thing, which might, under some circ.u.mstances, become known to him." As Mr. Codrington suggests, such beliefs throw light upon the probable origin of totemism and its development.

_Spirit-World_.

Mrs. Stevenson informs us that "although the Sia do not believe in a return of the spirits of their dead when they have once entered s.h.i.+papo [the lower world], there was once an exception to this." The priestly tale, as told to Mrs. Stevenson, is as follows (538. 143):--

"When the years were new, and this village had been built perhaps three years, all the spirits of our dead came here for a great feast. They had bodies such as they had before death; wives recognized husbands, husbands wives, children parents, and parents children. Just after sundown the spirits began arriving, only a few pa.s.sing over the road by daylight, but after dark they came in great crowds and remained until near dawn. They tarried but one night; husbands and wives did not sleep together; had they done so, the living would have surely died. When the hour of separation came, there was much weeping, not only among the living, but the dead. The living insisted upon going with the dead, but the dead declared they must wait,--that they could not pa.s.s through the entrance to the other world; they must first die or grow old and again become little children to be able to pa.s.s through the door of the world for the departed. It was then that the Sia first learned all about their future home. They learned that the fields were vast, the pastures beautiful, the mountains high, the lakes and rivers clear like crystal, and the wheat and cornfields flouris.h.i.+ng. During the day the spirits sleep, and at night they work industriously in the fields. The moon is father to the dead as the sun is father to the living, the dead resting when the sun travels, for at this time they see nothing; it is when the sun returns to his home at night that the departed spirits work and pa.s.s about in their world below. The home of the departed spirits is in the world first inhabited by the Sia."

We learn further: "It is the aim of the Sia to first reach the intermediate state at the time the body ceases to develop, and then return gradually back to the first condition of infancy; at such periods one does not die, but sleeps to awake in the spirit-world as a little child. Many stories have come to the Sia by those who have died only for a time; the heart becomes still and the lips cold, and the spirit pa.s.ses to the entrance of the other world and looks in, but does not enter, and yet it sees all, and in a short time returns to inhabit its earthly body. Great alarm is felt when one returns in this way to life, but much faith is put in the stories afterwards told by the one who has pa.s.sed over the road of death."

In the belief of these Indians of North America we see some foreshadowing of the declaration of Jesus, a rude expression of the fundamental thought underlying his words:--

"Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of G.o.d. Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of G.o.d as a little child, he shall in nowise enter therein."

Certain Siouan Indians think: "The stars are all deceased men. When a child is born, a star descends and appears on earth in human form; after death it reascends and appears as a star in heaven" (433. 508). How like this is the poet's thought:--

"Our birth, is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar."

CHAPTER XI