Narratives about hallucinations coincident with a death, narratives well
attested, are abundant in modern times, so abundant that one need only
refer the curious to Messrs. Gurney and Myers's two large volumes,
'Phantasms of the Living,' and to the S.P.R 'Report of Census of
Hallucinations' (1894). Mr. Tylor says: 'The spiritualistic theory
specially insists on cases of apparitions, where the person's death
corresponds more or less nearly with the time when some friend perceives
his phantom.' But visionaries, he remarks truly, often see phantoms of
living persons when nothing occurs. That is the case, and the question
arises whether more such phantoms are viewed (_not_ by 'visionaries')
in connection with the death or other crisis of the person whose
hallucinatory appearance is perceived, than ought to occur, if there be no
connection of some unknown cause between deaths and appearances. As Mr.
Tylor observes, 'Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, came to
associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be
connected in fact.'[13] Did early man, then, find _in experience_ that
apparitions of his friends were 'connected in fact' with their deaths?
And, if so, was that discovered connection in fact the origin of his
belief that an hallucinatory appearance of an absent person sometimes
announced his death?
That the belief exists in New Zealand we saw, and find confirmed by this
instance, one of 'many such relations,' says the author. A Maori chief was
long absent on the war-path. One day he entered his wife's hut, and sat
mute by the hearth. She ran to bring witnesses, but on her return the
phantasm was no longer visible. The woman soon afterwards married again.
Her husband then returned in perfect health, and pardoned the lady, as
she had acted on what, to a Maori mind, seemed good legal evidence of
his decease. Of course, even if she fabled, the story is evidence to the
existence of the belief.[14]
What, then, is the cause of the belief that a phantom of a man is a token
of his death? On the theory of savage philosophy, as explained by Mr.
Tylor himself, a man's soul may leave his body and become visible to
others, not at death only, but on many other occasions, in dream, trance,
lethargy. All these are much more frequent conditions, in every man's
career, than the fact of dying. Why, then, is the phantasm supposed by
savages to announce death? Is it because, in a sufficient ratio of cases
to provoke remark, early man has found the appearance and the death to be
'things connected in fact'?
I give an instance in which the philosophy of savages would lead them
_not_ to connect a phantasm of a living man with his death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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