The Making of Religion by Andrew Lang
page 84 of 453 (18%)
page 84 of 453 (18%)
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were known to be material word-counters for the conception of life.[1]
Whether the earliest thinkers identified heart, breath, shadow, with life, or whether they consciously used words of material origin to denote an immaterial conception, of course we do not know. But the word in the latter case would react on the thought, till the Roman inhaled (as his life?) the last breath of his dying kinsman, he well knowing that the Manes of the said kinsman were elsewhere, and not to be inhaled. Subdivisions and distinctions were then recognised, as of the Egyptian _Ka_, the 'double,' the Karen _kelah_, or 'personal life-phantom' (_wraith_), on one side, and the Karen _thah_, 'the responsible moral soul,' on the other. The Roman _umbra_ hovers about the grave, the _manes_ go to Orcus, the _spiritus_ seeks the stars. We are next presented with a crowd of cases in which sickness or lethargy is ascribed by savages to the absence of the patient's spirit, or of one of his spirits. This idea of migratory spirit is next used by savages to explain certain proceedings of the sorcerer, priest, or seer. His soul, or one of his souls is thought to go forth to distant places in quest of information, while the seer, perhaps, remains lethargic. Probably, in the struggle for existence, he lost more by being lethargic than he gained by being clairvoyant! Now, here we touch the first point in Mr. Tylor's theory, where a critic may ask, Was this belief in the wandering abroad of the seer's spirit a theory not only false in its form (as probably it is), but also wholly unbased on experiences which might raise a presumption in favour of the existence of phenomena really supernormal? By 'supernormal' experiences I here mean such as the acquisition by a human mind of knowledge which could not be obtained by it through the recognised channels of sensation. Say, |
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