ther) of Hair, _which bound a corpse to the Bier_, about his Middle
from end to end,' and then look between his legs till he sees a funeral
cross two marches.[31] The Greenland seer is bound 'with his head between
his legs.'[32]

Can it be possible, judging from Australia, Scotland, Egypt, that the
binding, as of a corpse or mummy, is a symbolical way of putting the seer
on a level with the dead, who will then communicate with him? In three
remote points, we find seer-binding and corpse-binding; but we need to
prove that corpses are, or have been, bound at the other points where the
seer is tied up--in a reindeer skin among the Samoyeds, an elk skin in
North America, a bull's hide in the Highlands.

Binding the seer is not a universal Red Indian custom; it seems to cease
in Labrador, and elsewhere, southwards, where the prophet enters a magic
lodge, unbound. Among the Narquapees, he sits cross-legged, and the lodge
begins to answer questions by leaping about.[33] The Eskimo bounds, though
he is tied up.

It would be decisive, if we could find that, wherever the sorcerer is
bound, the dead are bound also. I note the following examples, but the
Creeks do not, I think, bind the magician.

Among the Creeks,

'The corpse is placed in a hole, with a blanket wrapped about it, and the
legs bent under it _and tied together_.'[34] The dead Greenlanders were
'wrapped and sewed up in their best deer-skins.'[35]

Carver could only learn that, among the Indians he knew, dead bodies were
'wrapped in skins;' that they were also swathed with cords he does not
allege, but he was not permitted to see all the ceremonies.

My theory is, at least, plausible, for this manner of burying the dead,
tied tightly up, with the head between the legs (as in the practice of
Scottish and Greenland seers), is very old and widely diffused. Ellis
says, of the Tahitians, 'the body of the dead man was ... placed in a
sitting posture, with the knees elevated, _the face pressed down between
the knees_,... and the whole body tied with cord or cinet, wound repeatedly
round.'[36]

The binding may originally have been meant to keep the corpse, or ghost,
from 'walking.' I do not know that Tahitian prophets were ever tied up, to
await inspiration. But I submit that the frequency of the savage form of
burial with the corpse tied up, or swathed, sometimes with the head
between the legs; and the recurrence of the savage practice of similarly
binding the sorce