goes to the land of souls,
where its lot may depend on its rank in this life, its sex, mode of
death or sepulture, on the due observance of funeral ritual, or many
other points (see ESCHATOLOGY). From the belief in the survival of the
dead arose the practice of offering food, lighting fires, &c., at the
grave, at first, maybe, as an act of friendship or filial piety, later
as an act of worship (see ANCESTOR WORSHIP). The simple offering of
food or shedding of blood at the grave develops into an elaborate
system of sacrifice; even where ancestor-worship is not found, the
desire to provide the dead with comforts in the future life may lead
to the sacrifice of wives, slaves, animals, &c., to the breaking or
burning of objects at the grave or to the provision of the ferryman's
toll, a coin put in the mouth of the corpse to pay the travelling
expenses of the soul. But all is not finished with the passage of the
soul to the land of the dead; the soul may return to avenge its death
by helping to discover the murderer, or to wreak vengeance for itself;
there is a widespread belief that those who die a violent death become
malignant spirits and endanger the lives of those who come near the
haunted spot; the woman who dies in child-birth becomes a _pontianak_,
and threatens the life of human beings; and man resorts to magical or
religious means of repelling his spiritual dangers.

_Development of Animism_.--If the phenomena of dreams were, as
suggested above, of great importance for the development of animism,
the belief, which must originally have been a doctrine of human
psychology, cannot have failed to expand speedily into a general
philosophy of nature. Not only human beings but animals and objects
are seen in dreams; and the conclusion would be that they too have
souls; the same conclusion may have been reached by another line of
argument; primitive psychology posited a spirit in a man to account,
amongst other things, for his actions; a natural explanation of
the changes in the external world would be that they are due to the
operations and volitions of spirits.

[v.02 p.0054]

_Animal Souls._--But apart from considerations of this sort, it is
probable that animals must, early in the history of animistic beliefs,
have been regarded as possessing souls. Education has brought with it
a sense of the great gulf between man and animals; but in the lower
stages of culture this distinction is not adequately recognized, if