Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c14.4.3

v2.c14.4.3

And yet the Empêo at any rate among them believe that only women dying in child-bed, and men that have fallen in the fight or been killed by tigers are allowed to go forthwith to the highest god. *Zschr. f. Ethnol.*, Bd. 30, p. 353. This reminds us of the Breton belief: A mother who has died in child-bed need only fly through purgatory, and then goes straight into heaven. Żmigrodski, *Die Mutter*, p. 142. A like belief is found, too, among the Mohammedans, in old Mexico, in Sumatra, in Steiermark, and so on. The uncanny and the holy or the divine are very near akin not in India only. The woman thus snatched away was at that very time highly unclean, and she also suffered an unnatural, premature death, as do for instance the criminal and the soldier, together with whom she often appears. The ghost of a person that has thus died is, however, powerful and often malicious. In India, indeed, the robber or murderer that has been put to death becomes a kind of god. See my *Daçakum.*, pp. 31, 358, and on that *Bhāratiyanātyaçāstra*, iii, 40 ff.; the eerie tale "The Cry from the River" in R. W. Frazer, *Silent Gods and Sun-Steeped Lands*, Lond., 1906, p. 90; Crooke, *Popul. Relig.*, etc., i, p. 228; ii, 199 (also Dubois-Beauchamp, 449; 548; Fuller, *Studies of Indian Life and Sentiment*, p. 95, and especially 96); and Thurston, *Omens and Superstitions*, etc., pp. 162, 178, 179, 209.