The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

26 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

the world; apart from the Parsi“towers of silence,”it is still the
custom in New Guinea to leave the corpse among the branches
[026] of a tree until the flesh is entirely destroyed.^6

Between mummification and secondary burial no

reconciliation is possible. The conceptions upon which the

two practices rest are contradictory one to the other. In the one

case every effort is made to keep the body intact and to preserve

the flesh from decay; in the other case the body is cast forth to the

beasts of the desert and the fowls of the air, and its very skeleton

allowed to be broken up. A people who practised secondary

burial can hardly have believed in a future existence of the body

itself. Their belief must rather have been in the existence of that

shadowy, vapour-like form, comparable to the human breath, in

which so many races of mankind have pictured to themselves the

imperishable part of man. It was the misty ghost, seen in dreams

or detected at night amid the shadows of the forest, that survived

the death of the body; the body itself returned to the earth from

whence it had sprung.

This prehistoric belief left its traces in the official religion of

later Egypt. TheBaor“Soul,”with the figure of a bird and the

head of a man, is its direct descendant. As we shall see, the

conception of theBafits but ill with that of the mummy, and

the harmonistic efforts of a later date were unable altogether to

hide the inner contradiction that existed between them. The soul,

which fled on the wings of a bird to the world beyond the sky,

(^6) “The custom of dismembering the body or stripping it of its flesh is widely
spread: the neolithic tombs of Italy contain skulls and bones which have been
painted red; Baron de Baye has found in the tombs of Champagne skeletons
stripped of their flesh, and the Patagonians and Andamanners as well as the
New Zealanders still practise the custom”(De Morgan,Recherches sur les
Origines de l'Egypte, ii. p. 142). Secondary burial is met with in India among
the Kullens, the Kâthkaris, and the Agariya, as well as in Motu, Melanesia,
Sarawak, the Luchu Islands, Torres Straits, and Ashanti, while“in some of
the English long barrows the bones appear to have been flung in pell-mell”
(Crooke inJournal of the Anthropological Institute, xxix. pp. 284-286 (1899)).