when transferred to the sacred human or animal victim (himself, as we shall hereafter see, a slain god), it seems to account for the human heads hung up by the Dyaks and other savages about their houses, as also for the skulls of oxen and other sacred animals habitually displayed on the front of places of {067}worship, whose last relic is the sculptured oxen’s heads which fill the metopes in some Greek and most Roman temples. Much of this, I admit, will be little comprehensible to the reader at the present stage of our argument: but I beg him to bear in mind provisionally this oracular and representative value of the head or skull from this point forth; he will find, as he proceeds, its meaning will become clearer and ever clearer at each successive stage of our exposition. I ought also to add that between complete preservation of the corpse and the practice of burial there seems to have gone another intermediate stage, now comparatively rare, but once very general, if we may judge from the traces it has left behind it--a stage when all the body or part of it was sacramentally eaten by the survivors as an act of devotion. We will consider this curious and revolting practice more fully when we reach the abstruse problem of sacrifice and sacrament; for the present it will suffice to say that in many instances, in Australia, South America, and elsewhere, the body is eaten, while only the bones are burned or buried. Among these savages, again, it usually happens that the head is cleaned of its flesh by cooking, while the skull is ceremonially washed, and preserved as an object of household veneration and an oracular deity. Instances will be quoted in succeeding chapters. Thus, between the care taken to prevent returns of the corpse, and the worship paid to the ghost or shade, primitive races feel no such sense of discrepancy or incongruity as would instantly occur to civilised people. The three stages in human ideas with which this chapter deals may be shortly summed up as corpse-worship, ghost-worship, and shade-worship. CHAPTER IV.--THE ORIGIN OF GODS. |MR. {068}Herbert Spencer has traced so admirably in his _Principles of Sociology_ the progress of development from the Ghost to the God that I do not propose in this chapter to attempt much more than a brief recapitulation of his main propositions, which, however, I shall supplement with fresh examples, and adapt at the same time to the conception of three successive stages in human ideas about the Life of the Dead, as set forth in the preceding argument. But the hasty _resume_ which I shall give at present will be fleshed out incidentally at a later point by consideration of several national religions.