came to the great heroes by drinking of the divine sap of the sacred tree, or partaking of some of its fruit. The ancient Egyptians believed that milk from the breast of the divine mother Isis conferred divinity and immortality upon him who drank of it or imbibed it from the sacred source. Wiedemann aptly compares with this the Greek story of the infancy of Hercules. The great child-hero was the son of the god Jupiter and Alcmena, daughter of Electryon, King of Argos. He was exposed by his mother, but the goddess Athene persuaded Hera to give him her breast (another version says Hermes placed Hercules on the breast of Hera, while she slept) and the infant Hercules drew so lustily of the milk that he caused pain to the goddess, who snatched him away. But Hercules had drunk of the milk of a goddess and had become immortal, and as one of the gods (167. 266).

CHAPTER X.

CHILDREN'S SOULS.

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar. - Wordsworth.

And rest at last where souls unbodied dwell
In ever-flowing meads of Asphodel.

Baptism.

-Homer (Pope's Transl.).

WITH certain Hindu castes, the new-born child is sprinkled with cold water, "in order that the soul, which, since its last existence, has remained in a condition of dreamy contemplation, may be brought to the consciousness that it has to go through a new period of trial in this corporeal world" (326. II. 13). Perhaps, among the myriad rites and ceremonies of immersion and sprinkling to which the infant is submitted with other primitive peoples, some traces of similar beliefs may be found.

When the new world-religion was winning its way among the gentiles, baptism was the great barrier erected between the babe and the power of ill, spirits of air, earth, and water, survivals of old heathenism antagonistic to Christianity. Before that holy rite was performed, the child lay exposed to all their machinations. Baptism was the armour of the infant against the assaults of Satan and his angels, against the cunning of the wanderers from elfin-land, the fairy-sprites, with their changelings and their impish tricks.

Hence, the souls of still-born and unbaptized children came into the power of these evil ones and were metamorphosed into insects, birds, beasts, and the like, whose peculiar notes and voices betray them as having once been little children, or were

compelled to join the train of the wild huntsman, or mingle in the retinue of some other outcast, wandering sprite or devil; or, again, as some deceitful star, or will-o'-the-wisp, mislead and torment the traveller on moor and in bog and swamp, and guide him to an untimely death amid desert solitudes. Ploss, Henderson, and Swainson have a good deal to say on the subject of Frau Beretha and her train, the Wild Huntsman, the "Gabble Retchet," "Yeth Hounds," etc. Mr. Henderson tells us that, "in North Devon the local name is 'yeth hounds,' heath and heathen being both 'yeth' in the North Devon dialect. Unbaptized infants are there buried in a part of the churchyard set apart for the purpose called 'Chrycimers,' i.e. Christianless, hill, and the belief seems to be that their spirits, having no admittance into Paradise, unite in a pack of 'Heathen' or 'yeth' hounds, and hunt the Evil One, to whom they ascribe their unhappy condition" (469. 131, 132). The prejudice against unbaptized children lingers yet elsewhere, as the following extract from a newspaper published in the year 1882 seems to indicate (230. 272) :

an old

"There is in the island of Mull a little burial-ground entirely devoted to unbaptized children, who were thus severed in the grave from those who had been interred in the hope of resurrection to life. Only one adult lies with the little babes Christian woman - whose last dying request it was that she should be buried with the unbaptized children." The Rev. Mr. Thom has given the facts poetic form and made immortal that mother-heart whose love made holy if hallowed it needed to be-the lonely burial-ground where rest the infant outcasts:

--

"A spot that seems to bear a ban,

As if by curse defiled:

No mother lies there with her babe,

No father by his child."

-

Among primitive peoples we find a like prejudice against stillborn children and children who die very young. The natives of the Highlands of Borneo think that still-born infants go to a special spirit-land called Tenyn lallu, and "the spirits of these children are believed to be very brave and to require no weapon other than a stick to defend themselves against their enemies. The reason given for this idea is, that the child has never felt

pain in this world and is therefore very daring in the other" (475. 199). In Annam the spirits of children still-born and of those dying in infancy are held in great fear. These spirits, called Con Ranh, or Con Lôn (from lôn, "to enter into life"), are ever seeking "to incorporate themselves in the bodies of others, though, after so doing, they are incapable of life." Moreover, "their names are not mentioned in the presence of women, for it is feared they might take to these, and a newly-married woman is in like manner afraid to take anything from a woman, or to wear any of the clothing of one, who has had such a child. Special measures are necessary to get rid of the Con Ranh" (397. 18-19). The Alfurus, of the Moluccas, "bury children up to their waists and expose them to all the tortures of thirst until they wrench from them the promise to hurl themselves upon the enemies of the village. Then they take them out, but only to kill them on the spot, imagining that the spirits of the victims will respect their last promise" (388. 81). On the other hand, Callaway informs us that the Zulu diviner may divine by the Amatongo (spirit) of infants, "supposed to be mild and beneficent" (417. 176).

Transmigration.

Wordsworth, in that immortal poem, which belongs to the jewels of the treasure-house of childhood, has sung of the birth of man:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But, trailing clouds of glory, do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy,".

and the humbler bards of many an age, whose names have perished with the races that produced them, have thought and sung of soul-incarnation, metempsychosis, transmigration, and kindred concepts, in a thousand different ways. In their strangely poetical language, the Tupi Indians, of Brazil, term a child pitanga, "suck soul," from piter, "to suck," anga, "soul." The Seminole

Indians, of Florida, "held the baby over the face of the woman dying in child-birth, so that it might receive her parting spirit" (409. 271). A similar practice (with the father) is reported from Polynesia. In a recently published work on "Souls," by Mrs. Mary Alling Aber, we read:

"Two-thirds of all the babies that are born in civilized lands to-day have no souls attached to them. These babies are emanations from their parents, not true entities; and, unless a soul attaches itself, no ordinary efforts can carry one of them to the twentieth year. Souls do attach themselves to babies after birth sometimes so late as the third year. On the other hand, babies who have souls at birth sometimes lose them because the soul finds a better place, or is drawn away by a stronger influence; but this rarely occurs after the third year."

This somewhat outré declaration of modern spiritualism finds kindred in some of the beliefs of primitive peoples, concerning which there is much in Ploss, Frazer, Bastian, etc.

In one of the Mussulman stories of King Solomon, the Angel of Death descends in human form to take the soul of an aged man, whose wish was to die when he had met the mightiest prophet. He dies talking to the wise Hebrew king. Afterwards the Angel says to Solomon:

"He [the angel, whose head reaches ten thousand years beyond the seventh heaven, whose feet are five hundred years below the earth, and upon whose shoulders stands the Angel of Death] it is who points out to me when and how I must take a soul. His gaze is fixed on the tree Sidrat Almuntaha, which bears as many leaves inscribed with names as there are men living on the earth.

"At each new birth a new leaf, bearing the name of the newlyborn, bursts forth; and when any one has reached the end of his life, his leaf withers and falls off, and at the same instant I am with him to receive his soul. . .

"As often as a believer dies, Gabriel attends me, and wraps his soul in a green silken sheet, and then breathes it into a green bird, which feeds in Paradise until the day of the resurrection. But the soul of the sinner I take alone, and, having wrapped it in a coarse, pitch-covered, woollen cloth, carry it to the gates of Hell, where it wanders among abominable vapours until the last day" (547. 213, 214).