Christian antiquities -- Great Britain; Folklore -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Antiquities
that about 200 cases might support the “face-to-sun” theory.
It would be highly undesirable to press the facts further than is
necessary to appeal for a suspended verdict. The “face-to-sun”
hypothesis was never meant to be more than a possible explanation, but
it has the virtue of accounting for many instances in which the skeleton
lies, not due East and West, or North and South, but obliquely, at some
intermediate horizon. And, at least, the alinement of the head, if not
the face, towards the sun, is not peculiarly a British feature of
prehistoric burials. Among the Tlingits, or Tlinkits, of South Alaska,
the corpse was buried with the head towards the sun, so as to allow the
soul of the deceased person to return; if the body were laid in the
contrary direction, the spirit could never come back. Professor Frazer,
who records this custom, asserts that other totemistic peoples inter
their dead, according to fixed rules, with the head towards particular
points of the compass. Professor E. B. Tylor has also collected abundant
testimony corroborative of such customs. In places widely sundered
geographically there has existed a strong desire to bury the dead “in
the path of the sun[626].” Recently, too, Dr A. W. Howitt has
discovered, just in time, at the Australian station of Wotjo, an
isolated tribe which still preserves the custom. The arrangement of the
head of the corpse is determined by the class and totem of the deceased
person, and the direction is fixed by reference to the rising sun. The
practice is nearing extinction, for, although Dr Howitt was able to
secure sufficient information from the natives to construct a kind of
burial compass, they could give him no reason for the varying
dispositions. The only explanation proffered was: “Oh, that is what our
fathers told us.” Such a man was buried in such a way because he was
“nearer to us” than the others[627]. The folk-memory of this tribe will
soon become a mere echo of tradition, and the task of reconstructing
these primitive burial customs will grow increasingly difficult as each
aboriginal patch of the earth’s surface becomes influenced by
civilization.
Respecting graves themselves, we readily perceive that a round barrow,
from its very nature, cannot be normally oriented. But in the British
long barrows, usually accepted as the earlier kind, the long axis
generally runs East and West. The broader end of the mound, where the
sepulchral deposit is, as a rule, discovered, is directed towards the
East[628]. So that, during the Neolithic period, some broad principle of
orientation was observed, the constraining motive being probably
connected with sun-worship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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