etributive additional discord. Benignant nature meant her
children should live on in happy contentment here forever; but sin
and Satan came in, and death was the vengeance that followed their
doings. The Persians fully developed this speculation. The Hebrews
either also originated it, or borrowed it from the Persians; and
afterwards the Christians adopted it. Traces of the same
conception appear among the remotest and rudest nations. The
Caribbeans have a myth to the effect that the whole race of men
were doomed to be mortal because Carus, the first man, offended
the great god Tiri. The Cherokees ascribe to the Great Spirit the
intention of making men immortal on earth; but, they say, the sun
when he passed over told them there was not room enough, and that
people had better die! They also say that the Creator attempted to
make the first man and woman out of two stones, but failed, and
afterwards fashioned them of clay; and therefore it is that they
are perishable.9 The

7 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 314.

8 Logan, Scottish Gael, ch. xiv.

9 Squier, Serpent Symbol, p. 67, note c.

Indians of the Oronoco declare that the Great Spirit dwelt for a
while, at first, among men. As he was leaving them, he turned
around in his canoe and said, "Ye shall never die, but shall shed
your skins." An old woman would not believe what he said; he
therefore recalled his promise and vowed that they should die.

The thought of more than one death that the composite man is
simplified by a series of separating deaths has repeatedly found
place. The New Testament speaks of "the second death;" but that is
a metaphorical phrase, descriptive, as there employed, of
condemnation and suffering. It is a thought of Plato that the
Deity put intellect in soul, and soul in a material envelope.
Following this hint, Plutarch says, in his essay on the Face in
the Moon, that the earth furnishes the body, the moon the soul,
the sun the mind. The first death we die, he continues, makes us
two from three; the second makes us one from two. The Feejees tell
how one of their warriors, seeing the spectre of a recently
deceased enemy of his, threw his war club at it and killed it.
They believed the spirit itself was thus destroyed. There is
something pathetic in this accumulation of dissolution upon
dissolution, this pursuit of death after death. We seem to hear,
in this thin succession of the ghosts of ghosts, the fainter
growing echoes of the body fad