Death is foreshadowed by the first signals of old age, which appear even today too soon for pleasure. How much sooner in the primitive past! When the woman of forty-five was a hag and the warrior of fifty an arthritic cripple, when, moreover, disease and the accidents of the hunt and of battle were everyone's immediate experience, Death was a mighty presence who had to be faced boldly even within the safest sanctuary, and whose force had to be assimilated.
An East African vision of this great lord of the world emerges from a folktale of the Basumbwa tribe of the Victoria Nyanza district. The tale is of a young man whose dead father appeared to him, driving the cattle of Death, and conducted him along a path going into the ground, as into a burrow. They came to an area with many people, where the father hid his son and left him. In the morning the Great Chief Death appeared. One side of him was beautiful, but the other rotten, with maggots dropping to the ground. Attendants were gathering up the maggots. They washed the sores and, when they had finished, Death said, "The one born today will be robbed if he goes trading. The woman who conceives today will die with the child. The man who works in his garden will lose the crop. The one who goes into the jungle today will be eaten by the lion." But the next morning Death again appeared, his attendants washed and perfumed the beautiful side, massaging it with oil, and, when they had finished, Death pronounced a blessing, "The one born today: may he become rich! May the woman who conceives today give birth to a child who will live [to] be old! Let the one born today go into the market: may he strike good bargains; may he trade with the blind! May the man who goes into the jungle slaughter game; may he discover even elephants! For today I pronounce the benediction."
"If you had arrived today," said father to his son, "many things would have come into your possession, but now poverty has been ordained for you; so much is clear. Tomorrow you had better go." And the son departed, returning to his home.
Very far from Africa, in the mid-Pacific islands of Hawaii, the land of the dead was also thought to be entered through clefts in the earth. These were called "casting-off places," and there was one for every inhabited district. The soul, arriving, found there a tree with a gathering of little children around it, who gave directions. One side of the tree looked fresh and green, but the other dry and brittle, and, according to one version of the adventure, the soul had to climb to the top by the brittle side and descend by the same to a level where the children would direct it; if a green branch were taken, it would break and the soul fall to annihilation. According to a second version, however, it was a branch of the green side that should be grasped, which then would break and hurl the soul quickly into "the labyrinth that leads to the underworld."
It is a telling image, this of the tree with the deceptive branches, standing at the entrance to a realm where what would seem to be dead must be known to be living and what to be alive, dead. It is an image of the hope that has everywhere enabled the old to enter willingly the dark gate. And yet, not all can pass; only those who understand the secret of death—which is that death is the other side of what we know as life, and that, just as we must leave childhood when entering upon the duties of maturity, so life when going on to death.