[TO THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR.")
SIR,—Yon have an article on "the intrusion of the ghost- idea," founded on Lady Welby's paper read at the British Association, and in reading it I am struck by a remarkable omission. You deal with the assertion of anthropologists that savages believe in the continued life of the dead because they dream of the dead as being alive, and mistake their dreams for realities ; but you say nothing of the assertion of Egyptologists that the Egyptians observed the resurrection of the heavenly bodies, and inferred that the destiny of the human soul would be similar. The following sentence from your article is a good epitome of the whole :—" Most illusions are the consequence of a misunderstanding of phenomena ; but in this instance there are no phenomena to misunderstand, nothing whatever of any sort that could even remotely tend to induce the reception of the fallacy."
Taking the " ghost-idea " in the large sense, of a belief in the survival of the human spirit after death, it is not neces- sary to call it a fallacy, even though we should find the phenomena which suggested it. But it was almost certainly suggested by the rerising of the heavenly bodies after their descent into the Tartarus under the earth. The sun rose again each morning in the East ; stars which had been below the horizon for some months, became visible again at another season of the year ; and, most wonderful of all, constellations which had been carried out of view by the slow motion of
precession, falling into the depths on one side of the heavens,. were observed to reappear on the other side, after the lapse of ages. This being the fate of the gods themselves—and sun, moon, and stars were the gods of the ancients—it was believed that the human soul after death would have the like ex- perience, for the soul would go to be with its god. In the Egyptian priestly writings, we have descriptions of the soul's under-world journey, following the course of the sun. To quote an acknowledged authority, M. Maspero :—" In the evening, the soul follows the barque of the sun and its escort of luminary gods into a lower world bristling
with ambuscades and perils At mianight began the upward journey towards the eastern regions of the world The tombs of the Kings were constructed upon the model of the world of night. They had their passages, their doors, their vaulted halls, which plunged down into the depths of the mountain."
I have convinced myself, by independent investigation, that the doctrine of the resurrection, with Egyptians and Baby- lonians, was based on the observation of the reappearance of the stars which had previously descended into Hades or into Tartarus. The phenomena were sufficient to suggest the "ghost-idea," and did suggest it. At the same time, the belief in a future life no longer rests on this fallacious basis, any more than astronomy itself rests on the earliest notions of the ancients.—I am, Sir, &c.,
[The return of the heavenly bodies might suggest the re- turn of men, but not of their spirits. It was not the ghost of a, star which reappeared, but the body of a star.—En. Spectator.'
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