Most funeral practices aim at winning the spirit inhabiting the body of the deceased, at pacifying it, and, ultimately, at protecting the community from the misdemeanors that some spirits can perpetrate. From rebel spirits that attempt to escape the perpetual cycle of life and death to avenging spirits that haunt the house where an offense has remained unpaid, the world of the spirits is closely intertwined to that of the living [4].
Examples of practices and rituals that show the way these two worlds are interconnected abound. One of them is the custom to close the eyes of the dead, a custom originally supposed to shut an opened window between the world of the living and that of the dead. In the same way, to cover the face of the dead with a cloth indicates a willingness to stop the spirit from returning into the corpse that it has just left, accessing it through the mouth. Some people will burn the dwelling and things of the deceased in order to destroy everything that could tempt its spirit to want to come back to haunt the place. Elsewhere, for the same reason, the dead's possessions are buried with the body. Others still will open doors and windows to ensure its departure.
In his famous The Golden Bough [1922], James Frazer gathered many funeral traditions intended at chasing the spirits away. To make sure that the spirit leaves, some rinse the body, while others beat the walls (Canada) or the ground of the room (China), especially when bad weather might incite the spirit not to leave the house (Madagascar). In Scotland and in Germany, chairs on which the coffin had been laid were turned upside down to force the spirit to leave. Some people like the Dakota (United States) and the Karen (Thailand) asked the deceased to behave properly, to go to its grave and to remain there. Others, anxious that the deceased might come back to bother the living, went as far as to divert the bed of a river to bury their dead. Of course, once buried, they would return the river to its original bed.
Other solutions have been used, as to bury the deceased with its feet and fists bound, or as the Burmese did, to tie up his thumbs and his big toes, or to tie his neck to his legs, to nail his skull, to surround him with thorns, or to enclose the grave with a high fence. In California (United States) and in Namibia, they simply broke his backbone.
For the spirits, their favorite haunting place is where they died. Therefore, the corpse of the deceased is often moved to an isolated place where it is abandoned. Many people manage to transport their sick relatives outside their house, so that their spirit will not come back and haunt it thereafter. If death occurs before, the house has to be abandoned [5]. If several deaths occur at the same time, the Bakalai (Congo) abandon their village. For the Balonda (Congo), a chief's death also entails the abandonment of the whole village. The Damara (Namibia) act the same way, but reoccupy the village some time after.
Abandoning the place being not always the most convenient, other measures have been thought of to stop the spirits from coming back to haunt the place where they lived. Some have blocked the entry of the house, while others have condemned doors and windows as soon as the body had left the premises. Others still have established that a spirit can only find its way back to the house if it follows the same path it took when it left it. They have therefore practiced an opening in a wall to allow the coffin to leave the house, and closed it afterwards. According to Frazer, this subterfuge is used by many people, from Greenland to Laos, from the Fijian (Fiji) to the Khoikhoi (South Africa). In Thuringia (Germany), the body of a man who was hanged had to leave through a window if one wanted to prevent him from coming back to haunt the house. To avoid that a deceased found its way back, the Araucanian (Chile) spilled ashes on the path followed by the corpse. In the same way, the Kachin (Burma) covered their tracks with rice, and in Tonga (Polynesia), one used sand. Elsewhere, the deceased's eyes were bandaged so that it could not recognize its path. In Persia, someone who went on a journey left home backwards to ensure that he or she would come back. To bring the corpse to its destination, some used a detour; others avoided the center of the village, or did not allow the body to go through the town. Others still transported it at night. In Siberia, to make certain that a refractory spirit would not come back to haunt the village, the shaman went as far as to accompany it to the world of the spirits.
Coming back from a burial, some people made sure they would not be followed by jumping over a fire erected like a gate between the living and the dead (Siberia, Rome, China). Another obstacle frequently used is water: besides throwing water behind the corpse leaving the house, some crossed a river – even if they had to break the ice in winter – to ensure that the spirit would not find its way back. But others went even further: while many people wash or dive into the sea after a funeral ceremony, Frazer relates that the Matamba (Angola) repeatedly plunged a widow all tied up in the water, with the intention of drowning the spirit of the deceased that could still stick to its wife.
In the Mili Atoll (Marshall Islands), when a corpse is buried, a small and frail vessel loaded with coconuts is put out to sea in the hope that it will carry the spirit of the departed away. The idea of using water as a gate that the dead cannot cross is found in numerous cultures. It is the Sanzu River for the Japanese, the Styx for the Greeks and the Romans, while in Vedic writings, the river takes the name of Rasa, and that of Chiuhnahuapan for the Aztecs. For the Egyptians, it is the Noun, the primordial ocean that plays an identical role in two of their cosmogonies.
As clay models found in the tombs of Ur and dating of approximately 2,500 confirm, boats and other vessels were already associated with death in Mesopotamia, and it will be the privilege of the divinities to be able to cross the waters of death: in Lagash toward 2,000, an inscription mentions the construction of the most expensive boat of the time for the mother-goddess Ningirsu, named the ‘boat of the divinity that emerges from the abyss’. In Ugarit, one of the names of the Canaanite goddess Asherah is Athiratu-Yami, ‘the one that crosses waters’. The solar boats preserved in the pyramids and in the temples of Egypt were intended for the divinities to travel on the waters of death.
Another way of using water to separate the world of the living from that of the dead was to bury the dead on an island, like it was the custom in the archipelago of the Cyclades (Greece), but also in the Trobriand Islands. Buried on the island of Tuma, the dead had, however, to come back in order to be born again as child-spirits (Wai Waya). In Russia, during the excavations of Oleneostrovski Mogilnik, Nina Nikolaevna Gurina discovered an island in which some 500 corpses had been buried between 6,700 and 6,000. This custom was prolonged until the 19th century CE by the Sami (Lapland) who occupied the place.
The same methods used to prevent the spirit from coming back are also applied to stop the spirit from leaving the body. The Chinese tried to frighten the spirit of a sick man by making an enormous hubbub with screams and firecrackers to prevent the spirit from leaving the body, and thus the man from dying. Water is also used to block the exit of the patient's spirit. In Argentina, old Abipone women waving rattles surrounded the patient while jumping, shouting, and throwing regularly water in its face. In other places, fire is used to stop the spirit from leaving a living being. In Laos, Thailand, Burma and Ethiopia, a woman having given birth had to remain surrounded by flames during a few days, or even a few weeks, to prevent her spirit from abandoning her.
As Robert Hertz observed in Borneo, and as illustrated by the widespread use of secondary funeral rituals, the transformations that take place in the body of an individual after his or her death indicate that the passage from life to death is a gradual one, the departed staying in an intermediate zone for a certain amount of time. A parallel has therefore been created between the transformations of the body in decomposition and the wanderings of the deceased's spirit that, in its suffering, inflicts all sorts of illnesses and disasters on the living. Mortuary rituals are aimed at pacifying the spirit during this tormented period and at bringing it to rest. One will provide food and drink for the dead, while a mother will give milk to her deceased infant. And under less lenient skies, an umbrella will be placed beside the corpse.
When the process of decomposition is finished and all life has definitely left the body, the spirit can at last reintegrate the world of spirits. A big feast puts an end to this period, since the malevolent conditions that had arisen at the moment of death have now disappeared: “Generally, the spirits leave their parents in peace, once they have fulfilled their last duties towards them.” [Hertz, 1928]
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