the arms had been tied
behind the back.[1164] All this suggests, taken in connection with
classical evidence regarding burial customs, that the future life was
life in the body, and that it was a _replica_ of this life, with the
same affections, needs, and energies. Certain passages in Irish texts
also describe burials, and tell how the dead were interred with
ornaments and weapons, while it was a common custom to bury the dead
warrior in his armour, fully armed, and facing the region whence enemies
might be expected. Thus he was a perpetual menace to them and prevented
their attack.[1165] Possibly this belief may account for the elevated
position of many tumuli. Animals were also sacrificed. Hostages were
buried alive with Fiachra, according to one text, and the wives of
heroes sometimes express their desire to be buried along with their dead
husbands.[1166]

The idea that the body as well as the soul was immortal was probably
linked on to a very primitive belief regarding the dead, and one shared
by many peoples, that they lived on in the grave. This conception was
never forgotten, even in regions where the theory of a distant land of
the dead was evolved, or where the body was consumed by fire before
burial. It appears from such practices as binding the dead with cords,
or laying heavy stones or a mound of earth on the grave, probably to
prevent their egress, or feeding the dead with sacrificial food at the
grave, or from the belief that the dead come forth not as spirits, but
in the body from the grave. This primitive conception, of which the
belief in a subterranean world of the dead is an extension, long
survived among various races, e.g. the Scandinavians, who believed in
the barrow as the abiding place of the dead, while they also had their
conception of Hel and Valhalla, or among the Slavs, side by side with
Christian conceptions.[1167] It also survived among the Celts, though
another belief in the _orbis alius_ had arisen. This can be shown from
modern and ancient folk-belief and custom.

In numerous Celtic folk-tales the dead rise in the body, not as ghosts,
from the grave, which is sometimes described as a house in which they
live. They perform their ordinary occupations in house or field; they
eat with the living, or avenge themselves upon them; if scourged, blood
is drawn from their bodies; and, in one curious Breton tale, a dead
husband visits his wife in bed and she then has a child by him, because,
as