omen, some of them died and the moon used to say, "You
up-again," whereupon they came to life again. But once on a time an old
man said, "Let them remain dead"; and since then nobody has ever come to
life again except the moon, which still continues to do so down to this
very day.[75] The Chams of Annam and Cambodia say that the goddess of
good luck used to resuscitate people as fast as they died, till the
sky-god, tired of her constant interference with the laws of nature,
transferred her to the moon, where it is no longer in her power to bring
the dead to life again.[76]

[Sidenote: Cycle of death and resurrection after three days, like the
monthly disappearance and reappearance of the moon.]

These stories which associate human immortality with the moon are
products of a primitive philosophy which, meditating on the visible
changes, of the lunar orb, drew from the observation of its waning and
waxing a dim notion that under a happier fate man might have been
immortal like the moon, or rather that like it he might have undergone
an endless cycle of death and resurrection, dying then rising again from
the dead after three days. The same curious notion of death and
resurrection after three days is entertained by the Unmatjera and
Kaitish, two savage tribes of Central Australia. They say that long ago
their dead used to be buried either in trees or underground, and that
after three days they regularly rose from the dead. The Kaitish tell how
this happy state of things came to an end. It was all through a man of
the Curlew totem, who finding some men of the Little Wallaby totem
burying a Little Wallaby man, fell into a passion and kicked the body
into the sea. Of course after that the dead man could not come to life
again, and that is why nowadays nobody rises from the dead after three
days, as everybody used to do long ago.[77] Although no mention is made
of the moon in this Australian story, we may conjecture that these
savages, like the Nandi of East Africa, fixed upon three days as the
normal interval between death and resurrection simply because three days
is the interval between the disappearance of the old and the
reappearance of the new moon. If that is so, the aborigines of Central
Australia may be added to the many races of mankind who have seen in the
waning and waxing moon an emblem of human immortality. Nor does this
association of ideas end with a mere tradition that in some former age
men used to die with