the decease
of one of their number, attempt to make the corpse stand, and put food
into his mouth; that the Peruvians had feasts at which the mummies of
their dead Incas presided, when, as Prescott says, they paid attention
"to these insensible remains as if they were instinct with life;" that
among the Fejees it is believed that every enemy has to be killed twice;
that the Eastern Pagans give extension and figure to the soul, and
attribute to it all the same substances, both solid and liquid, of which
our bodies are composed; and that it is the custom among most barbarous
races to bury food, weapons, and trinkets along with the dead body,
under the manifest belief that it will presently need them.

Lastly, let them remember that the other world, as originally conceived,
is simply some distant part of this world--some Elysian fields, some
happy hunting-ground, accessible even to the living, and to which, after
death, men travel in anticipation of a life analogous in general
character to that which they led before. Then, co-ordinating these
general facts--the ascription of unknown powers to chiefs and medicine
men; the belief in deities having human forms, passions, and behaviour;
the imperfect comprehension of death as distinguished from life; and the
proximity of the future abode to the present, both in position and
character--let them reflect whether they do not almost unavoidably
suggest the conclusion that the aboriginal god is the dead chief; the
chief not dead in our sense, but gone away carrying with him food and
weapons to some rumoured region of plenty, some promised land, whither
he had long intended to lead his followers, and whence he will presently
return to fetch them.

This hypothesis once entertained, is seen to harmonise with all
primitive ideas and practices. The sons of the deified chief reigning
after him, it necessarily happens that all early kings are held
descendants of the gods; and the fact that alike in Assyria, Egypt,
among the Jews, Phoenicians, and ancient Britons, kings' names were
formed out of the names of the gods, is fully explained. The genesis of
Polytheism out of Fetishism, by the successive migrations of the race of
god-kings to the other world--a genesis illustrated in the Greek
mythology, alike by the precise genealogy of the deities, and by the
specifically asserted apotheosis of the later ones--tends further to
bear it out. It explains the fact that in the old creeds, as in th