=3. Occasions Which Involve Some Special Danger or Crisis.=--Such occasions call for the greatest attention to secure success or avoid disaster. Under this head we note as typical (a) the occasions of birth, marriage, death; (b) seed time and harvest, or other seasons important for the maintenance of the group; (c) war; (d) hospitality. =(a) Birth and Death Customs.=--The entrance of a new life into the world and the disappearance of the animating breath (_spiritus_, _anima_, _psyche_), might well impress man with the mysteries of his world. Whether the newborn infant is regarded as a reincarnation of an ancestral spirit as with the Australians, or as a new creation from the spirit world as with the Kafirs, it is a time of danger. The mother must be "purified,"[37] the child, and in some cases the father, must be carefully guarded. The elaborate customs show the group judgment of the importance of the occasion. And the rites for the dead are yet more impressive. For as a rule the savage has no thought of an entire extinction of the person. The dead lives on in some mode, shadowy and vague, perhaps, but he is still potent, still a member of the group, present at the tomb or the hearth. The preparation of the body for burial or other disposition, the ceremonies of interment or of the pyre, the wailing, and mourning costumes, the provision of food and weapons, or of the favorite horse or wife, to be with the dead in the unseen world, the perpetual homage paid--all these are eloquent. The event, as often as it occurs, appeals by both sympathy and awe to the common feeling, and brings to consciousness the unity of the group and the control exercised by its judgments.