The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future LifeAlger, William Rounseville
Religion
The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life
Alger, William Rounseville
Future life -- Christianity -- Bibliography; Future life -- Christianity -- History of doctrines
and statedly convey food to the grave for the use of the
revisiting spirit. With the body of king Weir of the Cavalla
towns, who was buried in December of 1854, in presence of several
missionaries, was interred a quantity of rice, palm oil, beef, and
rum: it was supposed the ghost of the sable monarch would come
back and consume these articles. The African tribes, where their
notions have not been modified by Christian or by Mohammedan
teachings, appear to have no definite idea of a heaven or of a
hell; but future reward or punishment is considered under the
general conception of an association, in the disembodied state,
with the benignant or with the demoniacal powers.
The New Zealanders imagine that the souls of the dead go to a
place beneath the earth, called Reinga. The path to this region is
a precipice close to the sea shore at the North Cape. It is said
that the natives who live in the neighborhood can at night hear
sounds caused by the passing of spirits thither through the air.
After a great battle they are thus warned of the event long before
the news can arrive by natural means.2 It is a common superstition
with them that the left eye of every chief, after his death,
becomes a star. The Pleiades are seven New Zealand chiefs,
brothers, who were slain together in battle and are now fixed in
the sky, one eye of each, in the shape of a star, being the only
part of them that is visible. It has been observed that the
mythological doctrine of the glittering host of heaven being an
assemblage of the departed heroes of earth never received a more
ingenious version.3 Certainly it is a magnificent piece of insular
egotism. It is noticeable here that, in the Norse mythology, Thor,
having slain Thiasse, the giant genius of winter, throws his eyes
up to heaven, and they become stars. Shungie, a celebrated New
Zealand king, said he had on one occasion eaten the left eye of a
great chief whom he had killed in battle, for the purpose of thus
increasing the glory of his own eye when it should be transferred
to the firmament. Sometimes, apparently, it was thought that there
was a separate immortality for each of the eyes of the dead, the
left ascending to heaven as a star, the right, in the form of a
spirit, taking flight for Reinga.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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