THE SUNSET PATH.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 268, 12 November 1928, Page 6

THE SUNSET PATH.

The origin of the expression '"Gone West." which became so tragically familiar during the Great War, is discussed in a new book containing a lecture by the Rev. Dr. Edward Sugden, master of Queen's College, Melbourne University, on survivals of ancient Egyptian beliefs and customs. Dr. Sugden says that all the burial places of the Egyptians were on the western bank of the Nile, while all the towns and villages inhabited by the living were on the east side. The mummies of the dead were ferried aoross the Nile to their final resting places, and from this the Greeks derived their myth of Charon and the ferry across the Styx. The lecturer advanced the theory that there was a connection between this long-ago practice of the Egyptians and the modern expression, and he wondered whether "it may not have been used first by our boys in Egypt and have been started by one of them who knew something of the antiquities of the land of mysteries."

It is an intensely interesting subject for speculation, and Dr. Sugden's suggestion helps us to co-ordinate some of the widely-distributed beliefs in the departed spirit departing in the path of the setting sun. But there is some reason to conclude it was the Scottish Highland soldiers who first used the phrase "gone west" in the war, whatever its remote origin may have been. It is a very ancient Gaelic saying, as some of our old Waipu Highlanders and other clansmen may be able to testify. When the expression was discussed in the Old Country a few years ago a writer pointed out that when Highlanders speak in Gaelic of a death they use a phrase which means literally "gone west," but signifies also up, or upwards. The old expression came to be used by the kilted soldiers in the trenches in speaking of their dead. The Gaelic speakers began its use, and it was turned into English when referring to their English comrades. That most probably began the universal use of the words in the war period and after.

The fancy suggested by the setting sun is familiar enough to our own Maoris and Polynesians just as much as it is to the Highlander and the American Indian. Maori songs employ the idea. "Wait, wait awhile O Sun, and we'll go down together" is an olden lament. The belief in the spirits of the dead taking their flight to the Reinga, near the north-west extremity of New Zealand, and thence to the fatherland Hawaiki embodies this universal westward-bound concept. The destination of the souls is not the lost Hawaiki, the islands of the Eastern Pacific, but the far more ancient fatherland, Indonesia, or Asia, and the imaginary route, north-west, is geographically correct. Further north, towards the Equator, the Polynesian "spirits' flight" is the western point of the land. In Samoa the place from which the departed souls are supposed to take their departure for the Pulotu, or paradise of tradition, is Fale-lupo, the extreme western point of Savaii Island.

Beautifully these Maori-Polynesian folk beliefs link up with those of Brittany in France, of the Scottish Highlands and of the west of Ireland, with its poetic talk of Hy-Brasil far in the west. The Polynesian term "raro," literally meaning "below," probably does not refer to the underworld, as some have taken it, in mythology, but means "westward." Easterly and south-easterly trades being the prevailing winds in the South Pacifip Islands, a westerly direction would really be down to leeward, and easterly up to windward. This explains many apparent references to the underworld when "west" is meant. The pathway of the setting sun is the track of the Polynesian soul, and, as to the Western Islesman and the Irish, west and heaven are synonymous terms in the touching references to the dead, so the islander of the Pacific went west to his happy isles. It may be that the Polynesians and the Celtic peoples derived their belief from Egypt long _ ago, but the natural impulse of every primitive race under the sun would be to associate the death of man with the sun sinking into its ocean grave. j(j