North African Bird Lore: New Light On Old Problems

In many parts of the world one encounters a disapprobation of living beings, either animals or humans, walking, jumping, or otherwise crossing a corpse. Nearly as widespread as aversion to the act is one supposed consequence: the corpse is believed to become reanimated. Drawing on a variety of cases, this article describes the distribution of the idea both in ritual practice and myth and establishes its fundamental form. Consideration is given to how far the representation can be traced to cross-culturally common features of mortuary ritual and common ideas about spiritual entities and non-human animals. As none of these approaches sufficiently accounts for the disapprobation or the concomitant belief in reanimation, it is then shown how an explanation can be found in equally widespread and possibly universal tendencies of human cognition, including an experience of newly deceased persons as incompletely dead and therefore transitional between life and death, and an association, expressed in many different languages, of traversal with transgression.