Magic is employed both to defend against it and to deliver it to others, and the dead themselves are regarded as dangerous spirits, resenting their dispatch to the other world and now seeking revenge for their miserable state on those still alive.

Indeed, as Frobenius formulates the attitude: 'The power exercised by the living individual for good, the dead exercises for evil, so that the better he was, the worse will he become; and the mightier he was in life, the greater must be the restraining weight of bonds and stones upon his corpse. In short: the better and stronger the living, the more dangerous his ghost.'

Frobenius gives a considerable series of examples from Africa and antiquity of corpses bound in ropes, bandages, or nets to keep the ghosts inside, buried under heaps of stones to keep them down, or simply tossed to the wolves and hyenas, with the hope that they will be consumed that very night."

"For the planting folk of the fertile steppes and tropical jungles, on the other hand, death is a natural phase of life, comparable to the moment of the planting of the seed, for rebirth.

As an example of the attitude, we may take the composite picture presented by Frobenius of the sort of burial and reliquary rites that he observed everywhere among the horticulturists of South and East Africa:

When an old kinsman of the sib dies, a cry of joy immediately fills the air. A banquet is arranged, during which the men and women discuss the qualities of the deceased, tell stories of his life, and speak with sorrow of the ills of old age to which he was subject in his last years.

Somewhere in the neighorhood - preferably in a shady grove - a hollow has been dug in the earth, covered with a stone. It now is opened and there within lie the bones of earlier times. These are pushed aside to make room for the new arrival. The corpse is carefully bedded in a particular posture, facing a certain way, and left to itself then for a certain season, with the grave again closed.

But when time enough has passed for the flesh to have decayed, the old men of the sib open the chamber again, climb down, take up the skull, and carry it to the surface and into the farmstead, where it is cleaned, painted red and, after being hospitably served with grain and beer, placed in a special place along with the crania of other relatives.

From now on no spring will pass when the dead will not participate in the offerings of the planting time; no fall when he will not partake of the offerings of thanks brought in at harvest: and in fact, always before the planting commences and before the wealth of the harvest is enjoyed by the living.

Moreover, the silent old fellow participates in everything that happens in the farmstead. If a leopard kills a woman, a farmboy is bitten by a snake, a plague strikes, or the blessing of rain is withheld, the relic is always brought into connection with the matter in some way.

Should there be a fire, it is the first thing saved; when the puberty rites of the youngsters are to commence, it is the first to enjoy the festival beer and porridge.

If a young woman marries into the sib, the oldest member conducts her to the urn or shelf where the earthly remains of the past are preserved and bids her take from the head of an ancestor a few kernels of holy grain to eat. And this, indeed, is a highly significant custom; for when this young, new vessel of the spirit of the sib becomes pregnant, the old people of the community watch to see what similarities will exist between the newly growing and the faded life ... '

Frobenius terms the attitude of the first order 'magical', and the latter 'mystical', observing that whereas the plane of reference of the first is physical, the ghost being coceived as physical, the second renders a profound sense of a communion of death and life in the entity of the sib. And anyone trying to express in words the sense or feeling of this mystic communion would soon learn that words are not enough: the best is silence, or the silent rite.

Not all the rites conceived in this spirit of the mystic community are as gentle, however, as those just described. Many are appalling, as will soon be shown. But through all there is rendered, whether gently or brutally, an awesome sense of this dual image, variously turned, of death in life and life in death: as in the form of the Basumbwa Chief Death, one of whose sides was beautiful, but the other rotten, with maggots dropping to the ground; or in the Hawaiian tree with the deceptive branches at the casting-off place to the other world, one side of which looked fresh and green but the other dry and brittle."

(Campbell)