More generally, the belief was held that the soul remained attached in some way to the bones. These were carefully cleaned and either preserved in the house, or stored in ossuaries. Frequently they were kept as amulets or mascots, in the notion that the friendly spirit which animated the living person would continue to hover around his skeleton or skull, and exert its amicable power. The Peruvians held that the bones of their deceased priests were oracular, speaking good counsel, and the missionaries were obliged to break them into small fragments to dispel this superstition[261]; though they themselves continued to hold it heretical to doubt the efficacy of the bones of the saints! A tribe on the Orinoco was wont to beat the bones of their dead into powder and mix it with their cassava bread, holding that thus their friends and parents lived again in the bodies of the eaters!
After cremation, the ashes were left upon the altar, and the whole covered with earth; or they were preserved in urns with the fragments of the bones; or, as with a tribe of the Amazon, they were cast upon the waters of the great river and floated down to the limitless ocean.
Thus closed the last scene in the existence of the primitive man. From birth to death he had been surrounded and governed by the ceremonies of his religion; and on his passage out of this life, he confidently looked to another in which he should find a compensation and a consolation for the woes of his present condition.
Following these funerary functions came the customs of mourning. They were often excessively protracted and severe, involving self-mutilation, as the lopping of a finger or an ear, scarification, flagellation, fasting, and cutting the hair. These were shared by the friends and relatives of the deceased, and at the death of some famous chief “the whole tribe will prostrate themselves to their woe.”
The psychic explanation of these demonstrations is not wholly clear. By some they have been interpreted as a commutation for cannibalism, and by others as an excuse for not accompanying the corpse into the other world. One writer says: “Barbarism, abandoned to sorrow, finds physical suffering a relief from mental agony.”[262] On the other hand, a recent student of the subject claims that in these rites we perceive “the oldest evidence of active conscience in the human race; the individual laid hands on himself in order to restore the moral equilibrium.”[263] Need we go farther than to see in them merely exaggerated forms of the same emotional outbursts which lead nervous temperaments everywhere to wring the hands and tear the hair in moments of violent grief?