Excerpt from On Certain Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul Hajji Baba (c. 18) of the man who went through the cere mony of making his entrance over the roof, instead of through the door; for such is the custom when a man who has been thought dead returns home alive. From a passage in. Agathiss we may perhaps infer that the custom is at least as old as the sixth century of our era.3 A custom so remote from our modern ways must necessarily have its roots far back in the history of our race. Imagine a modern Englishman, whom his friends had given up for dead, rejoining the home circle by coming down the chimney, instead of entering by the front door. In this paper I propose to Show that the custom originated in certain primitive beliefs and Observances touching the dead - beliefs and Observances by no means confined to Greece and Rome, but occurring in similar if not identical forms in many parts of the world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.