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836
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
(NOVEMBER, 1894.
New Caledonians worship dead and more remote ancestors as gods.56 The people of the Marian Group, or Philippine Islands, have an extraordinary veneration for ancestors, not out of love, but out of fear. They keep their skulls in their houses and call on them in time of need.57 The people of the Solomon Islands say all spirits were men. In Melanesia one great class of spirits is the ghosts of men.60
Some tribes in Central South Africa pray to the departed chiefs and relations.co. In Africa the spirits of men are the Zulus' deities.61 In East Africa graves of chiefs strewn with broken earthenware, and also with huts built over them with a centre post of cactus tree, are common.62 The Bongos of the White Nile make images in wood of their dead chiefs and of their wives and children, and adore them. The only god of the Shiliooks of the White Nile is an ancestor who brought them to their present settlement.64 In Madagascar a divinity is ascribed to ancestors. They are said to have gone to be gods, and are invoked in prayers immediately after the Supreme Being.66 The god of the Hottentots is their great chief, 66 and when they are in trouble they pray at their ancestors' graves.67 The worship of ancestors is found both in North and in South America.69 Some tribes eat the ashes of their fathers to whom they pay divine honours.co The Romans worshipped their house-fathers and their tribe-fathers as Lares and Manes, and in their honour held the Parentilia Festival.70
A main ground for the belief in the return of ancestors was the likeness of children to the dead. The Kônkan Kunbis and even Brahmans believe that the dead ancestors sometimes come into children, and so in many cases children are named after their grandfathers or grandmothers. Among Gujarat Musalmûns, if a child is naughty or peevish, its mother or nurse says: "Its kind has come on its head."71 It is the belief of the Khonds that an ancestor comes back in a child.72 Among the American Indians, when a man dies the medium puts his hands on the head of one of the mourners, and the spirit of the dead enters him, ready to appear in his next offspring.7 Among the Laplanders of Europe, an ancestral spirit tells the mother that he has come into the child, and directs her to call the child by his name.7
2. Ancestors become Guardians.
1. Spirits as Guardians. If the first feeling towards the ghostly dead was fear, the war between rival families and rival tribes must have given rise to the idea that the gallant dead were the guardians of the living.75 Visions of warriors, as in later tames, would appear and turn the scale in a fight. From faith in the family head, or in the chief of the clan, flowed the great body of guardian
66 Spencer's Princ. of Sociology, Vol. I. p. 308. 87 Careri in Churchill, Vol. IV. p. 463. 88 Jour. Anthrop. Inst. Vol. X. p. 808.
6 Op. cit. Vol. X. pp. 267, 900. 60 Livingstone's Travels in South Africa, p. 605. 61 Tylor's Primitire Culture, Vol. II. pp. 21, 113, 114 67 Cameron's Across Africa, Vol. I. P. 49.
6 Schweinfurth's Heart of Africa, Vol. I. p. 286. 6 Op. cit. p. 91.
* Sibree's Madagascar, p. 249. 66 Hahn'e Touni Goam, p. 89.
.67 Op. cit. p. 118. 68 Bancroft, Vol. III. p. 517; Tylor's Primitive Culture, Vol. II. pp. 118, 114. Bancroft, Vol. III. p. 316. 70 Pliny's Natural History.
H From M8. notes. 71 Macpherson's Khonds, p. 56.
13 Bancroft, Vol. III. p. 517. T4 Tylor's Primitive Culture, Vol. II. p. 4. [Før the spread of belief and in ancestor and spirit worabip among Indian Muhammadans see that admirahle little book, Crooke's Introd, to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, p. 118 ff. : and my Legends of the Panjab, possim, wherever a saint-legend cccurs. - ED.]
76 The idea of guardian spirito sa perhape due to the earliest belief that the dead aght with the living against their enemies. Compare the Portuguese, who, in their Indian fights, often saw crosses in the air, and at different times Moorish persons asked who the beautiful young women and the venerable old men were, who appeared in the front of the Portuguese squadrons. The Portuguese, who saw no such persons, were thus taught to believe tbemselves under the particular care of the Virgin and St. Joseph (Mickle's Lusiad, Vol. I. p. clxiii.). So the guardian God of the Jews, when they went into Canaan, went with them to fight for them against their enemies (Deuter, U.).
