Other means are also adopted. Among the Andaman Islanders, over a large part of the Southern Ocean, in various districts of America, and perhaps among the Wahuma of East Africa, certain of the bones, either whole or calcined, are worn. Naturally the widow is, above everybody, expected to do this. Among the Mosquitos of Central America and the tribes of Honduras the widow took up the bones after burial for a year and carried them for another year, sleeping with them at night. Not until she had ceased to do this was she permitted to marry again.[315.3] In Australia the Kulin widow seems to have carried the head and arms of her husband for an indefinite time, if not for the rest of her life.[316.1] Among the Kurnai the mummified corpse was carried about by the family in its migrations for years under special charge of the parents, the wife or other near relatives, and finally, after it was buried or stowed away in a hollow tree, the father or mother, if living, would carry the lower jaw “as a memento.”[316.2] The Kiriwina widow in New Guinea hangs from her neck her husband’s lower jaw richly ornamented with glass and shell beads.[316.3] The Mincopie widow is said to wear the entire skull.[316.4] Among the natives of the western districts of Victoria the widow of a chief by his first marriage wears a bag containing some of his calcined bones for two years, or until she marries again; and she also gets the lower bones of the right arm entire, which are carried in an opossum skin for the same period. Conversely, a widower wears his wife’s calcined bones in a bag of opossum-skin for twelve moons, and then buries them.[316.5] The Taw-wa-tins and Tacullies of British Columbia, and the Tolkotins of Oregon, compel a widow to wear her husband’s calcined bones for three years, during which time her life is made a burden to her by his kindred, so that widows marrying again have been known to commit suicide rather than undergo the suffering a second time.[316.6] In many cases the bones are permanently worn by the relatives of the deceased: in other cases, only for a time. Sometimes they are expressly recognised as charms; but always they seem to be something more than mere memorials of the dead.[317.1]
The skull and various other bones are yet more frequently kept in the dwelling.[317.2] The instances to which reference is given in the note are, with the exceptions of the Issedones in antiquity and the Krumen of the Grain Coast and the Andaman Islanders among modern savages, confined to the islanders of the Pacific Ocean, and certain tribes of North America, Honduras, and the northern parts of South America. Where the circumstances permit, as in the case of the Ichthyophagi and other ancient Ethiopian tribes, the old Egyptians, the Chinese, the Solomon Islanders, the Banks’ Islanders, the islanders of Ambrym in the New Hebrides, and the Yorubas of the Slave Coast, the corpse is kept either permanently, or for a lengthened period in the house unburied.[318.1] And after burning, the ashes are similarly kept by several of the aboriginal peoples of Bengal and Assam, until the time arrives when they can be solemnly committed to the river or put into the family grave.[318.2] The Wakonda burn the corpse; and the ashes, collected into a jar are preserved by the family.[318.3] Along the Skeena River in British Columbia the natives cremated their dead, and sometimes hung the ashes in boxes to the family totem-pole.[318.4] Like certain Tibetan tribes, and perhaps the Issedones, some of the native Australians used the skull for a drinking-cup.[319.1]
A custom more widely spread than that of keeping the bones, because attended with much less inconvenience, is that of taking and keeping some of the hair, nails or pieces of garments of the dead. It may, indeed, be said to prevail through the greater part of the world; nor has the custom of preserving a lock of hair cut after death as a memorial of the departed yet vanished from among ourselves. An acute writer in the Contemporary Review some years ago related that in the West Indian island of St. Croix those who washed the dead prior to burial always took a lock of hair, a garment, or at least a fragment of a garment, in order to prevent the spirit from molesting them for venturing to tamper with the place of its late habitation. And he adds: “At first thought, it seems most natural to believe that the surest way to prevent any visit from a dead man is to take nothing of his with you. But not so. A liberty has been taken with his body by one who is probably a total stranger, hired perhaps for the express purpose of preparing him for his coffin. Now, if you take something of his, something that is either a part of him, or has been on his person, you in a sense identify yourself with him; you establish as it were, a kind of relationship, and thus the liberty you take with him must seem much less to him.”[319.2] The reader who has followed the argument of the preceding paragraphs and the preceding chapters will have no difficulty in admitting that here the true theory has been touched. The motive that prompts an English mother to wear in a brooch a lock of hair and the likeness of the darling she will see no more on earth is the same as induces a Friendly Islander to pass a braid of the hair of his dead kinsman through his own ear, and to wear it there for the rest of his life. It is the same as leads a Mosquito widow to carry about her husband’s bones and to sleep with them. Consciously or unconsciously, the idea at the root of these and similar practices is that of sacramental communion with the dead. In the West Indian Negro practice just cited we see the application of this idea to the protection of the person who may perchance have incurred the wrath of the dead. Thus applied, it is analogous to that of counteracting witchcraft by uniting the witch in blood-brotherhood with her victim.
Hitherto we have only considered methods of effecting communion with the dead based on the appropriation by the living of some part of the corpse. This, however, implies the reciprocal possibility of communion formed by means of a gift of some portion of the living body to the dead. Nothing more nor less I take to be the real meaning of the practice, forbidden to the Hebrews, of cutting oneself for the dead.[321.1] We find this practice in its most complete form among the Orang Sakei, a people whose chief seats are about the river Siak on the eastern side of Sumatra. There, at a funeral the kindred, making a cross-cut with a knife on their heads, drop the blood on the face of the corpse. Individuals are found who by repetition of this mutilation have lost all the hair from their heads.[321.2] They have indeed, in the words of the Deuteronomist, made a baldness between their eyes for the dead. At Tahiti, in Captain Cook’s time, mourners were in the habit of wounding themselves with knives and clubs consisting of canes or pieces of wood set with sharks’ teeth, and allowing the blood and tears to drip on small cloths which they threw under the bier. As described by Mr. Ellis, some half century later, the performance was a little different. Both sexes cut themselves. The females wore short aprons of a special kind of cloth, which they held up to catch the blood until it almost saturated them. The aprons were then dried in the sun and given to the nearest surviving relatives as proofs of the affection of the donors, and were preserved by the bereaved family as tokens of the esteem in which the departed had been held.[321.3] It is easy to see that this may have been a modification of the rite as it prevailed in Captain Cook’s day, and that both may have been derived from a rite similar to that of the Orang Sakei. In Australia the rite is found both in its original and its degraded forms. When the body is placed in the ground the practice of several tribes is that the mourners leap into the grave in turn, and are there cut on the head with a boomerang, so as to allow the blood to fall over the corpse. Among the tribes of the Murray river, the kindred of the deceased, assembled round the corpse, or at all events in its presence, used to lacerate their thighs, backs and breasts with shells or flints until the blood flowed in streams. After burial the women visited the grave at stated intervals, by night or in the early morning, there to renew their wailings and lacerations. With other tribes it is enough for the mourners to gash themselves, or be gashed by others, in sign of grief: the process of ceremonial decay has caused the need of bringing the blood into contact with the body of the deceased to be no longer recognised.[322.1] The Mosquito Indians lacerate and bruise themselves until they bleed in the dead man’s hut.[322.2] The Bororó women in Central Brazil, at the festival for a dead man, cause their limbs to be scratched until the blood flows, and allow it to drip into the basket containing the bones.[322.3] Four aborigines executed for murder at Helena, on the head waters of the Missouri, in December 1890, were mourned by two squaws. One of the squaws cut off two of her fingers and threw them into the grave. The other gashed her face. Both caused the blood to flow into the grave, and had previously scalped their children.[322.4] In another case of which a traveller in the early part of the present century was a witness, the mourners’ blood was made to flow over the dead man and over the food that was buried with him. But, though we have sufficient testimony to the archaic form of the custom among the North American peoples, that form is far from universal. More usually they are content with simply wounding themselves, careless where the blood may fall.[323.1] On the occasion of a burial among the Battas the wives of the dead not only weep and howl, but scratch their faces and bodies until the torn skin hangs down in places, and the blood streams on the earth.[323.2] When an Abyssinian corpse is about to be removed to its final resting-place some of the mourners “frantically grasp the bier, as if wishing to retain it by force; others, convulsed by the throes of agony and despair, rend their clothes, tear their hair, lacerate their faces and necks with their nails, so that the blood trickles down in streams.”[323.3] The Abyssinians call themselves Christians; but in this respect they have hardly advanced beyond many benighted pagans, like those already mentioned, or like the Gallinomero of California who burnt the bodies of their dead, and howled and wounded themselves the while in a manner, we are told, too terrible for description.[323.4]
Nor is mere cutting and wounding all. Many savages deem it necessary to inflict permanent mutilations on themselves, like the squaws of Montana just mentioned. Among the Fiji Islanders, when a king died, each of the women cut off a finger-joint. These were hung upon the eaves of the royal house. The amputation of a finger-joint was a common sign of mourning; and poor people made a business of it, receiving payment from the relatives of the dead in exchange for their severed members.[324.1] In numerous cases of mutilation, as of laceration, however, the evidence is wanting that the amputated member, like the blood, was brought into contact or proximity with the corpse. In such the rite is probably in a decayed form. The mere wounding or amputation had come to be looked upon as enough. With regard especially to amputation the process is clear. As the totem developed into a god the idea of sacrifice evolved in like measure from sacramental communion into a gift, a present to propitiate an offended being, a substitute for the votary himself who had deserved death, or (as in the instance of Admetos) whom the divinity was calling out of life. To save themselves from death, or from calamity, men offered up something of less value than their own lives, or than that whose loss or injury they dreaded, but still something of value and importance. Thus, as Dr. Tylor recalls, mothers in the southern provinces of India will cut off their own fingers as sacrifices lest they lose their children; and golden fingers are sometimes offered—“the substitute of a substitute.”[324.2] At length a virtue is attached to the mere abnegation. To deprive oneself of what is held dear, or what is essential to enjoyment, or even to life, is in itself of merit, quite apart from any thought of benefiting the deity. The shedding of blood, or the amputation of a finger, for the purpose of communion with the dead would follow a parallel course, and would gradually acquire virtue alone as a means of testifying to the affection and the grief of the survivor, without bringing the survivor into ritual union with the departed.
In the closest connection with wounding and mutilation for the dead, is the cutting, tearing or shaving of the hair. We have already studied gifts of hair to the dead; and if our conclusions as to them be correct, we must also conclude that the cutting or tearing of the hair as an expression of mourning is a relic of that custom which led Hecuba to lay her grey locks upon Hector’s grave and Achilles to bestrew the body of Patroklos with his shorn tresses. Dr. Wilken contends that the intention alike of wounding, of mutilation and of the gift of hair is the dedication of oneself to the dead, a consecration of the entire person, a pledge of ultimate reunion. That it is so in some cases seems clear. But this dedication must in a far greater number of instances be made repeatedly to quite different personages who have stood during life in a variety of relations to the mourner. Where only wives devote their hair to their dead husbands and are not allowed to marry a second time, things would arrange themselves easily in the next world. But if they shed their blood, or shear their locks also for fathers and brothers, for kindred and friends all round—nay, perhaps for another husband or two,—then one would imagine that even savages might anticipate awkward contingencies yonder. The truth is that the practice has sprung from a lower plane of culture than is supposed in a theory of self-dedication and future reunion. We know little of the belief in a future life entertained by the Tasmanian aborigines. From what little we do know it is safe to say that the Tasmanian woman who threw her hair upon the grave of her mother or her child, had no thought of self-consecration to the dead or of meeting again in another world. But she cherished the belief that by means of her hair she could still be in some sort of union with one she had loved. In short, the radical idea of all the practices we have discussed in the present chapter is the same, however much it may be modified with rising civilisation and the gradual evolution of the conception of deity and spirit and the life after death. It is grounded in the conviction of the continued, though mysterious, oneness of a body with its severed parts, and the absence of any conception of spirit apart from a visible and tangible material existence.
Other funeral rites point in the same direction. We will confine our attention to one. The custom of burial in a common grave or at least in one general cemetery, is very widespread. It is found in all quarters of the globe. The reason is given by Sir Richard Burton in describing the practices in Sindh. “They believe that by interring corpses close to the dust of their forefathers, the ruha, or souls of the departed, will meet and commune together after death.”[326.1] This is a belief that could not have arisen, save at a time when no sharp division had been drawn between body and spirit. Mr. Crawfurd says: “When a Javanese peasant claims to be allowed to cultivate the fields occupied by his forefathers, his chief argument always is that near them are the tombs of his progenitors. A Javanese, as I have remarked in another place, cannot endure to be removed from these objects of his reverence and affection: and when he is taken ill at a distance, begs to be carried home, at all the hazards of the journey, that he may ‘sleep with his fathers.’ The bodies of some of the princes who died in banishment at Ceylon, I perceive, were, at their dying request, conveyed to their native island.”[327.1] I need not dwell on the practice itself of burying the kindred in one place. It is well known, and even among ourselves is not destitute of force, appealing as it does to our most sacred feelings. As little need I dwell upon the belief underlying it. But some of the modes of giving effect to it may detain us for a few moments.
Even if already buried in another place the Sindhi and their neighbours, the Yusufzais of Afghanistan, will exhume the bones and bring them home for a fresh burial.[327.2] So do the natives of the Gold Coast, even though years have elapsed since the death.[327.3] Dr. Brinton tells us that “the custom of common ossuaries for each gens appears to have prevailed among the Lenâpe”; and he quotes Gabriel Thomas as relating that “if a person of note dies very far away from his place of residence, they will convey his bones home some considerable time after, to be buried there.” The Nanticokes buried their corpses for some months, and then, taking up the bones, they cleaned them and deposited them in a common ossuary. When they removed to another place these bones were carried with them.[327.4] Common ossuaries were very usual among the North American tribes; and in the Ohio mounds is evidence that the custom dates back to a considerable antiquity.[328.1] These are only a few of the examples that might be given. It is thus by no means necessary that the entire body should be buried in the common ground: the bones only were sufficient. But sometimes it is not practicable to bury the whole skeleton; nor is it necessary. If what is done to a detached portion of the body be done to the whole, all that is necessary is to make a selection. The bones usually chosen are those of the skull; the reasons for the choice being probably those which determine the choice of the skull as a keepsake, according to a custom considered a few pages back. When the Samoans made war at a distance from their homes, they brought back, in returning, the skulls of their dead to the ancestral graves.[328.2] Among the villagers of the Wanyika, in the highlands of Eastern Africa, the head is dug up some time after interment and sent to the capital to be buried, for there was formerly the general cemetery of the whole tribe, and there still its councils are held.[328.3] It is the custom of the Greeks and the Orthodox Albanians, as of the Bretons and other European peoples, to dig up the bones after a certain period of burial, wash them in wine, and deposit them in an ossuary. But, because the Albanians lead a migratory life, a large proportion of the male population dies abroad. “The bones of these wanderers are afterwards collected and sent home; or, at any rate, a portion of them—a skull or a single bone—is brought back to their native place.”[328.4] Among the ancient Romans a bone of such as died abroad or in war was sent home to the relatives for burial. This usage was expressly recognised by a law of the Twelve Tables which abolished in all other cases the pre-existing custom of cutting out a bone in order to bury it when the rest of the body was burnt.[329.1] At the cremation the hot ashes were extinguished in wine, collected by the relatives and deposited in an urn in the grave-chamber. At Kalna, near Calcutta, is a place called Samáj Bati, where a bone of every deceased member of the family of the Rajah of Bardwan is deposited.[329.2] Various tribes of Bengal, among which are the Santals, Oraons and Garos, ultimately commit some of the burnt fragments of bone to the river, where they are carried down by the current to the far-off eastern land whence, if we may trust the national traditions, their ancestors originally came, thus “uniting the dead with the fathers.” Instances, we are told, have been known of a Santal “son following up the traces of a wild beast which had carried off his parent, and watching, without food or sleep, during several days for an opportunity to kill the animal, and secure one of his father’s bones to carry to the river.”[330.1] The Khási of Assam, on the other hand, place the ashes in the family bone-receptacle; and it is worthy of note that those of husband and wife are never placed in the same, because they belong to different clans, and the ashes of the children are put in that of their mother. Major Godwin-Austen says “that the collection of the bones into one vault, as it may be termed, is done under the impression that the souls of the departed may all mingle together again in one large family without trouble or suffering. The idea of a member of a family being a wanderer in the other world, cut off from, and unable to join, the circle of the spirits of his own clan is most repugnant to the feelings of a Khási or Sinteng.” Consequently great efforts are made to recover, even after the lapse of many years, the calcined bones of any member of the gens who may have died at a distance.[330.2] Some of the Garos, neighbours of the Khási, seem to follow this custom, while others put the ashes into the river like the Santals.[330.3] The Bhumij of Bengal inter some of the unconsumed fragments of bone at the foot of a tulsi-plant in the courtyard of the dead man’s house, and the rest in the original cemetery of the family. “The theory is that the bones should be taken to the village in which the ancestors of the deceased had the status of bhuinhárs, or first clearers of the soil; but this is not invariably acted up to, and the rule is held to be sufficiently complied with if a man’s bones are buried in a village where he or his ancestors have been settled for a tolerably long time.”[330.4]
Dr. Henrici brought from the Little Popo region of West Africa to Berlin some Negroes, among whom was one who was a great favourite in the explorer’s family. Unfortunately he died; and his brother, who was with him, cut off, before burial, “a lock of hair and some finger-nail of the dead man to send to his parents in Africa in proof of his death.”[331.1] Not merely in proof of his death was this done, as the newspaper reports; for here we have what is called “the Yoruba custom of Ettá.” It is practised by the tribes of the Slave Coast. When a man dies away from home the greatest exertions are made by his family to obtain something belonging to him, to be buried with the usual rites in his native place. Clippings of the hair and nails are usually carried home by his companions, if he have any. But these do not constitute an irreducible minimum; for if they cannot be obtained, a portion of his clothing is, as we might expect from our study of other superstitions, enough.[331.2] So among the Dyaks (who, it will be remembered, have family mortuaries), if any one be murdered, eaten by a crocodile, or suffer some such misfortune, so that his body cannot be found, all his clothing obtainable is tied up in a bundle and buried.[331.3] Similarly, if a Khási corpse cannot be recovered, as would happen, for example, if he were drowned in one of the large rivers in the plains, his kinsmen assemble on some prominent rock or hill overlooking the low country. One of them, taking in his hand some money-cowries, “and looking towards the site of the accident, shouts out the name of the deceased and calls on him to return; his spirit having been supposed to do so, they proceed to burn the cowries, which are symbolical of his bones, and any clothes of the deceased they may possess.” The ashes are placed in the bone-depository.[332.1] When a Chinaman dies in battle, or at a distance from home, and his body cannot be obtained, an effigy of paper or wood is made, his soul is summoned to enter it, and it is then buried by his family with all the usual obsequies, as if it were his body.[332.2] In Samoa, if it were impossible to recover the body, or at least (as we have seen) the skull, there was still a method left of performing the all-important rites for the dead. The relatives would go to the battle-field, or, if the man had died at sea, to the shore, and, spreading a cloth or fine mat, would watch until some reptile or insect crawled upon it. They would then quickly enclose the creature, take up the mat and bury it in the proper manner, as if they had the corpse.[332.3] The luckless insect is, in fact, identified with the departed, in accordance with the beliefs discussed in an earlier chapter.
Here, though the subject be far from exhausted, we may terminate our inquiry concerning funeral ceremonies based on the conception of sacramental union, on the one side with the survivors, on the other side with the forefathers of the clan. They afford ample evidence that death, as the most solemn and mysterious fact of our existence, has exercised the thoughts of men from the remotest ages. When they arose the idea of a soul or spirit, as distinct from its corporeal tenement, had hardly yet been evolved. Reason, as well as feeling, could do no otherwise than cling to the bodily relics of the dead. And still it clings, even in the highest plane of culture. And still—whatever hopes may linger in the recesses of the mind of reunion, in some brighter and more lasting state of being, with those whom we have loved—we cannot but cherish the relics left to us of their bodily presence and think of the departed as yet about us while we hold these treasures; and there is consolation, albeit a dreary one, in the expectation that when we can hold these treasures no longer, the dust which has been dearest will be that which mingles with our own.