The belief was widely spread that the spirits of the dead went to inhabit the moon. In the East this faith retained a very crude form which certainly went back to a most primitive paganism. We find it in India as well as in Manicheism, which arose in Mesopotamia in the third century, but which admitted many ancient traditions into its doctrine. “All who leave the earth,” says an Upanishad, “go to the moon, which is swollen by their breath during the first half of the month.” The Manicheans similarly affirmed that when the moon was in the crescent its circumference was swelled by souls, conceived as luminous, which it drew up from the earth, and that when it was waning it transferred these souls to the sun. Using an idea much earlier than his time,[223] Mani also stated that the boat of the moon, which plied in the sky, received a load of souls which every month it transferred to the sun’s larger vessel. The association established in Syro-Punic religions between the moon and the idea of immortality is marked by the abundance in Africa of funeral monuments bearing the symbol of the crescent, either alone or associated with the circle of the sun and the star of Venus.[224] These astral symbols are identical with those already used by the Babylonians. But it is not only among the Semitic peoples that we find the crescent on tombs, either alone or accompanied by other figures: it is of frequent occurrence, notably in Celtic countries. Possibly the Druids placed in the moon the other world where men pursued an existence uninterrupted by death. As for the sun, the idea most commonly accepted was that the dead accompanied him on his course and went down with him in the west to an underground world. There, during the night, this enfeebled heavenly body recovered his strength, and there the dead too were revived. The power of this faith in ancient Egypt is known: the souls embarked on the boat of Ra, and with him, after they had accomplished the circle of the heavens, went down through a crevice of the earth or beyond the ocean. This was the first origin of the rôle of “psychopomp” which we shall find attributed to the solar god. Finally many peoples believed that souls, after plying through air and space, inhabited the sky in the form of brilliant stars. The multitude of the stars scintillating in the firmament was that of the innumerable spirits who had left the world. They pressed in a dense crowd, especially in the long luminous track of the Milky Way, which was, _par excellence_, the dwelling of the dead. Other traditions saw in this band across the sky the highroad which the dead travelled to gain the summit of the world.[225] A vestige of this ingenuous conception is retained in the very name, “Milky Way.” * * * * *