of a man's own soul which
was supposed to return from the tomb, had a mythical influence on the
mode and ceremonies of sepulture, on the position of corpses, on the
orientation of tombs, and their form. In fact, the mythical ideas of
spirits, and the fanciful place they took in the primitive idea of the
world, produced the custom of burying corpses in an upright, stooping,
or sitting position, and their situation with reference to the four
cardinal points. In America the cross which was placed in very early
times above the tombs is rightly supposed by Brinton to have been a
symbol of the four zones of the earth, relatively to the tomb itself and
to the human remains enclosed in it. One Australian tribe buries its
dead with their faces to the east; the Fijians are buried with the head
and feet to the west, and many of the North American Indians follow the
same custom. Others in South America double up the corpse, turning the
face to the east. The Peruvians place their mummies in a sitting
position, looking to the west; the natives of Jesso also turn the head
to the west. The modern Siamese never sleep with their faces turned to
the west, because this is the attitude in which they place their dead
before burning them on the funeral pile. Finally, the Greeks and all
other peoples, both civilized and barbarous, including ourselves, had
and continue to have special customs in burying their dead.

All the primitive artistic representations of the human form, the
orientation of tombs and temples and their peculiar form, were prompted
by these spiritualist and superstitious ideas; they expressed a
symbolism derived from mythical ideas of the constitution of the world,
of its organism, elements, and cosmic legends. This assertion might be
verified by all funereal, religious, and civil monuments, among all
peoples of the earth, in their most rudimentary form down to those of
our times, and above all in India, China, Central Asia, in Africa, and
particularly in Egypt, in America, in Europe, beginning with the Greeks
and passing through the Latins down to the Christianity of our day; nor
need we exclude the Oceanic races, and those of the two frigid zones.

Doubtless the purest aesthetic sentiment was gratified in the productions
of the plastic arts and of design in general when civilization was at
its highest perfection, among people peculiarly alive to this sentiment.
At the same time, for the great majority of peoples in early a