began to grow more definite and more consistent. Instead of the corpse,
we get the ghost; instead of the material underground world, we get the
idealised and sublimated conception of a shadowy Hades, a world of
shades, a realm of incorporeal, disembodied spirits. With the growth of
the idea in this ghostly nether world, there arises naturally the habit
of burning the dead in order fully to free the liberated spirit from the
earthly chains that clog and bind it. It is, indeed, a very noticeable
fact that wherever this belief in a world of shades is implicitly
accepted, there cremation follows as a matter of course; while wherever
(among savage or barbaric races) burial is practised, there a more
materialistic creed of bodily survival necessarily accompanies it. To
carry out this theory to its full extent, not only must the body itself
be burnt, but also all its belongings with it. Ghosts are clothed in
ghostly clothing; and the question has often been asked of modern
spiritualists by materialistic scoffers, 'Where do the ghosts get their
coats and dresses?' The true believer in cremation and the shadowy world
has no difficulty at all in answering that crucial inquiry; he would say
at once, 'They are the ghosts of the clothes that were burnt with the
body.' In the gossiping story of Periander, as veraciously retailed for
us by that dear old grandmotherly scandalmonger, Herodotus, the shade of
Melissa refuses to communicate with her late husband, by medium or
otherwise, on the ground that she found herself naked and shivering with
cold, because the garments buried with her had not been burnt, and
therefore were of no use to her in the world of shades. So Periander, to
put a stop to this sad state of spiritual destitution, requisitioned all
the best dresses of the Corinthian ladies, burnt them bodily in a great
trench, and received an immediate answer from the gratified shade, who
was thenceforth enabled to walk about in the principal promenades of
Hades among the best-dressed ghosts of that populous quarter.

The belief which thus survived among the civilised Greeks of the age of
the Despots is shared still by Fijis and Karens, and was derived by all
in common from early ancestors of like faith with the founders of Ogbury
round barrow. The weapons were broken and the clothes burnt, to liberate
their ghosts into the world of spirits, just as now, in Fiji, knives and
axes have their spiritual counterparts, which can only be