The Origin of Belief in the Soul
* * * I had waited at some distance, and as the day grew stronger, saw that this new grave was not the only one upon that lonely height.
On my right was a mound on which lay the betel-box, the pipe, the haversack, and “dah” (or chopper-knife) that in life had been his who lay beneath. I turned to rest on the trunk of a fallen tree, when I heard the sound of footsteps. The childless man and woman were passing. I knew the man, and I spoke to him. He had often been my guide in former visits to his village. He stopped. His wife passed on. I asked, tenderly I hope, as to his child. What was the cause of death?
“Fever.” Then he squatted down, drew out his pipe, filled and lit it.
“Whose grave is that?” I asked, pointing to the mound with the betel-box and “dah.”
“One of the men of my village,” he replied; “he died some months ago.”
“Why do you leave his betel-box, haversack, and ‘dah’ on the grave? What use can it be to him?”
“It is our custom.”
“But why?”
“His ‘lah’ (spirit) will require them.”
“But you see his ‘lah’ has not taken them. They are still there, and they are rotting away.”
“Oh, no!” Very promptly. “What you see are only the forms of the things. Their ‘lahs’ have gone away and are with the man’s ‘lah.’”
“Where?”
“In another world below this.”
“And so people’s ‘lahs’ after death go to another world and work as in this?”
“Yes; and if they had no haversack, and no betel-box, and no ‘dah’ how would they get on? How could they cut down forest and cultivate rice for food if they had no ‘dah’?”
He added after a pause:
“So our people say, but I don’t know. I am ignorant. I am only a poor jungle fowl.”
“But,” I persisted, “how do your people know that it is true—that the betel-box, the haversack, the knife, and other things have ‘lahs,’ or even that the man has a ‘lah’?”
The Karen was silent for a while. Then he said—
“My child is dead—his body is buried there. It can not move and go about; yet I know that in my sleep he will come to me. He will speak, and I shall speak to him. It is not his body but his ‘lah’ that will come. So also I lost an ax long ago. It fell in the forest somewhere. I could not find it, but in my sleep I have seen its ‘lah’ and have held it in my hand.” He paused, and went on: “It must have a ‘lah,’ for iron and handle have rotted away long ago, yet I held them last night in my hand.”
“Then the ‘lah’ lives independently of the body?”
“Yes. Our people say so.”
I was silent. Here among these savages I saw how the germs of belief in a future life are laid, from what delusion they spring.
Then looking back to the far-off times, when the ancestors of our own now civilized race were savages with minds as undeveloped as that of the savage before me, I saw how from the mystery of dream-appearances rose the belief in the dual nature of things. I saw how this belief, extending first to all things animate and inanimate, came in the slow evolution of man’s intellect, by the elimination of the grosser and cruder portion of his thought to hold at length only of living things.
No profound thought—no deep insight into human nature is needed to trace along general lines its further development.
Man in his selfish egoism making himself the center of all nature, has deemed that he alone is thus favored and raised above the rest of the universe.
Moreover it is a belief that with all its uncertainties has an intrinsic attractive beauty in the hope it gives to man, that love and happiness will last beyond the grave.
Above all—fatalest of all, it is a belief that offers to the craft of the priest, power over his fellow man.
Thus, flattering to man’s self-love, useful as an engine of power, affording an easy explanation of mysteries in life and death, this belief in a soul really rising in “the mists and shadows of sleep,” has come down to us as god-revealed from on high.—C. T. Bingham, in “Progress,” London, England.