I Shall Therefore Carefully Ticket The Information I Have Derived
From Him, So That It May Not Be Mixed With My Own.
I may be wrong
in my deductions, but Dr. Nassau's are above suspicion.
He says the origin of these spirits is vague - some of them come into
existence by the authority of Anzam (by which you will understand,
please, the same god I have quoted above as having many names),
others are self-existent - many are distinctly the souls of departed
human beings, "which in the future which is all around them" retain
their human wants and feelings, and the Doctor assures me he has
heard dying people with their last breath threatening to return as
spirits to revenge themselves upon their living enemies. He could
not tell me if there was any duration set upon the existence as
spirits of these human souls, but two Congo Francais natives, of
different tribes, Benga and Igalwa, told me that when a family had
quite died out, after a time its spirits died too. Some, but by no
means all, of these spirits of human origin, as is the case among
the Negro Effiks, undergo reincarnation. The Doctor told me he once
knew a man whose plantations were devastated by an elephant. He
advised that the beast should be shot, but the man said he dare not
because the spirit of his dead father had passed into the elephant.
Their number is infinite and their powers as varied as human
imagination can make them; classifying them is therefore a difficult
work, but Doctor Nassau thinks this may be done fairly completely
into:
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