Imagine Adam huddled in his mammoth fur, finishing his meal by the light of a dying fire. He falls asleep and, in his dreams, he travels to another world—a world at once real and unfamiliar, a world whose edges are soft with reverie. Say he runs into a dead relative in his dream—a father or sister. How, Tylor asked, would he interpret their continued presence? Would he not simply assume that they weren’t actually dead? That they exist in another realm as tangible and true as this one? Would Adam not then conclude that the souls of the dead could exist as spirits long after the destruction of
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