If the idea of life within the mother's womb is in this way closely associated with the desire for cessation of toil and striving, it is not surprising that we frequently find it brought into connection with the most striking example of such cessation with which we are acquainted, _i. e._ the complete stoppage of all vital activities at death. As a matter of fact, the unconscious identification of the state after death with the state before birth would seem to be one of frequent and widespread occurrence, the idea of the mysterious intra-uterine life before birth furnishing, through this identification, one of the causes of belief in a continuance of life after death--life of a kind, however, in which, as in the life before birth, all our desires and needs are fulfilled without the necessity for toilsome and unpleasant effort. It is not only in our general attitude towards death that the influence of this identification may be traced, but also in many of the details as regards the beliefs and ceremonies connected with the dead. The parallelism here referred to may be seen for instance in the fact that we place our dead in coffins and bury them in _graves_ or _vaults_ in _churches_ (all of which are womb symbols) or under the _earth_ (itself among the most frequent of mother symbols); or that in many places the dead have been placed on small islands[50] caves, mountain tops, or other secluded spots, or deposited (like King Arthur) in boats and pushed out to sea. In this last practice we may probably trace the influence of an identification of the _process_ of death with that of birth--the conception that at death we pass away by the same road that we traversed when we entered into life at birth[51]. For not only is the sea a frequent mother symbol, but the idea of water is closely connected with that of birth, occurring as it does in a great number of symbolic representations of the latter[52]. A similar identification is chiefly responsible for the belief that the dead pass across a lake or river on the way to their new home. (_Cp._ Lethe, Styx and Acheron in classical mythology or the river across which Christian passes to the Celestial City in Pilgrim's progress). [Sidenote: Birth phantasies]