Cut hair and nails kept against the resurrection.
Sometimes the severed hair and nails are preserved, not to prevent them from falling into the hands of a magician, but that the owner may have them at the resurrection of the body, to which some races look forward. Thus the Incas of Peru “took extreme care to preserve the nail-parings and the hairs that were shorn off or torn out with a comb; placing them in holes or niches in the walls; and if they fell out, any other Indian that saw them picked them up and put them in their places again. I very often asked different Indians, at various times, why they did this, in order to see what they would say, and they all replied in the same words saying, ‘Know that all persons who are born must return to life’ (they have no word to express resuscitation), ‘and the souls must rise out of their tombs with all that belonged to their bodies. We, therefore, in order that we may not have to search for our hair and nails at a time when there will be much hurry and confusion, place them in one place, that [pg 280] they may be brought together more conveniently, and, whenever it is possible, we are also careful to spit in one place.’ ”[995] In Chili this custom of stuffing the shorn hair into holes in the wall is still observed, it being thought the height of imprudence to throw the hair away.[996] Similarly the Turks never throw away the parings of their nails, but carefully stow them in cracks of the walls or of the boards, in the belief that they will be needed at the resurrection.[997] The Armenians do not throw away their cut hair and nails and extracted teeth, but hide them in places that are esteemed holy, such as a crack in the church wall, a pillar of the house, or a hollow tree. They think that all these severed portions of themselves will be wanted at the resurrection, and that he who has not stowed them away in a safe place will have to hunt about for them on the great day.[998] With the same intention the Macedonians bury the parings of their nails in a hole,[999] and devout Moslems in Morocco hide them in a secret place.[1000] Similarly the Arabs of Moab bestow the parings of their nails in the crannies of walls, where they are sanguine enough to expect to find them when they appear before their Maker.[1001] Some of the Esthonians keep the parings of their finger and toe nails in their bosom, in order to have them at hand when they are asked for them at the day of judgment.[1002] In a like spirit peasants of the Vosges will sometimes bury their extracted teeth secretly, marking the spot well so that they may be able to walk straight to it on the resurrection day.[1003] In the village of Drumconrath, near Abbeyleix, in Ireland, there used to be some old women who, having ascertained from Scripture that the hairs of their heads were all [pg 281] numbered by the Almighty, expected to have to account for them at the day of judgment. In order to be able to do so they stuffed the severed hair away in the thatch of their cottages.[1004] In Abyssinia men who have had their hands or feet cut off are careful to dry the severed limbs over a fire and preserve them in butter for the purpose of being buried with them in the grave. Thus they expect to get up with all their limbs complete at the general rising.[1005] The pains taken by the Chinese to preserve corpses entire and free from decay seems to rest on a firm belief in the resurrection of the dead; hence it is natural to find their ancient books laying down a rule that the hair, nails, and teeth which have fallen out during life should be buried with the dead in the coffin, or at least in the grave.[1006] The Fors of central Africa object to cut any one else's nails, for should the part cut off be lost and not delivered into its owner's hands, it will have to be made up to him somehow or other after death. The parings are buried in the ground.[1007]
Cut hair and nails burnt to prevent them from falling into the hands of sorcerers.
Some people burn their loose hair to save it from falling into the hands of sorcerers. This is done by the Patagonians and some of the Victorian tribes.[1008] In the Upper Vosges they say that you should never leave the clippings of your hair and nails lying about, but burn them to hinder the sorcerers from using them against you.[1009] For the same reason Italian women either burn their loose hairs or throw them into a place where no one is likely to look for them.[1010] The almost universal dread of witchcraft induces the West African negroes, the Makololo of South Africa, and the Tahitians to burn or bury their shorn hair.[1011] For the [pg 282] same reason the natives of Uap, one of the Caroline Islands, either burn or throw into the sea the clippings of their hair and the parings of their nails.[1012] One of the pygmies who roam through the gloomy depths of the vast central African forests has been seen to collect carefully the clippings of his hair in a packet of banana leaves and keep them till next morning, when, the camp breaking up for the day's march, he threw them into the hot ashes of the abandoned fire.[1013] Australian aborigines of the Proserpine River, in Queensland, burn a woman's cut hair to prevent it from getting into a man's bag; for if it did, the woman would fall ill.[1014] When an English officer had cut off a lock of hair of a Fuegian woman, the men of her party were angry, and one of them, taking the lock away, threw half of it into the fire and swallowed the rest. “Immediately afterwards, placing his hands to the fire, as if to warm them, and looking upwards, he uttered a few words, apparently of invocation: then, looking at us, pointed upwards, and exclaimed, with a tone and gesture of explanation, ‘Pecheray, Pecheray.’ After which they cut off some hair from several of the officers who were present, and repeated a similar ceremony.”[1015] The Thompson Indians used to burn the parings of their nails, because if an enemy got possession of the parings he might bewitch the person to whom they belonged.[1016] In the Tyrol many people burn their hair lest the witches should use it to raise thunderstorms; others burn or bury it to prevent the birds from lining their nests with it, which would cause the heads from which the hair came to ache.[1017] Cut and combed-out hair is burned in [pg 283] Pomerania and sometimes in Belgium.[1018] In Norway the parings of nails are either burned or buried, lest the elves or the Finns should find them and make them into bullets wherewith to shoot the cattle.[1019] In Corea all the clippings and combings of the hair of a whole family are carefully preserved throughout the year and then burned in potsherds outside the house on the evening of New Year's Day. At such seasons the streets of Seoul, the capital, present a weird spectacle. They are for the most part silent and deserted, sometimes muffled deep in snow; but through the dusk of twilight red lights glimmer at every door, where little groups are busy tending tiny fires whose flickering flames cast a ruddy fitful glow on the moving figures. The burning of the hair in these fires is thought to exclude demons from the house for a year; but coupled with this belief may well be, or once have been, a wish to put these relics out of the reach of witches and wizards.[1020]
Inconsistency in burning cut hair and nails.
This destruction of the hair and nails plainly involves an inconsistency of thought. The object of the destruction is avowedly to prevent these severed portions of the body from being used by sorcerers. But the possibility of their being so used depends upon the supposed sympathetic connexion between them and the man from whom they were severed. And if this sympathetic connexion still exists, clearly these severed portions cannot be destroyed without injury to the man.
Hair is sometimes cut because it is infected with the virus of taboo. In these cases hair-cutting is a form of purification. Hair of mourners cut to rid them of the pollution of death.
Before leaving this subject, on which I have perhaps dwelt too long, it may be well to call attention to the motive assigned for cutting a young child's hair in Rotti.[1021] In that island the first hair is regarded as a danger to the child, and its removal is intended to avert the danger. The reason of this may be that as a young child is almost universally supposed to be in a tabooed or dangerous state, it is necessary, in removing the taboo, to remove also the separable [pg 284] parts of the child's body because they are infected, so to say, by the virus of taboo and as such are dangerous. The cutting of the child's hair would thus be exactly parallel to the destruction of the vessels which have been used by a tabooed person.[1022] This view is borne out by a practice, observed by some Australians, of burning off part of a woman's hair after childbirth as well as burning every vessel which has been used by her during her seclusion.[1023] Here the burning of the woman's hair seems plainly intended to serve the same purpose as the burning of the vessels used by her; and as the vessels are burned because they are believed to be tainted with a dangerous infection, so, we must suppose, is also the hair. Similarly among the Latuka of central Africa, a woman is secluded for fourteen days after the birth of her child, and at the end of her seclusion her hair is shaved off and burnt.[1024] Again, we have seen that girls at puberty are strongly infected with taboo; hence it is not surprising to find that the Ticunas of Brazil tear out all the hair of girls at that period.[1025] Once more, the father of twins in Uganda is tabooed for some time after the birth of the children, and during that time he may not dress his hair nor cut his finger nails. This state of taboo lasts until the next war breaks out. When the army is under orders to march, the father of twins has the whole of his body shaved and his nails cut. The shorn hair and the cut nails are then tied up in a ball, which the man takes with him to the war, together with the bark cloth he wore at the ceremonial dances after the birth of the twins. When he has killed a foe, he crams the ball into the dead man's mouth, ties the bark cloth round the neck of the corpse, and leaves them there on the battlefield.[1026] The ceremony appears to be intended to rid the man of the taint of taboo which may be supposed to adhere to his hair, nails, and the garment he wore. Hence we can understand the importance attached by many [pg 285] peoples to the first cutting of a child's hair and the elaborate ceremonies by which the operation is accompanied.[1027] Again, we can understand why a man should poll his head after a journey.[1028] For we have seen that a traveller is often believed to contract a dangerous infection from strangers, and that, therefore, on his return home he is obliged to submit to various purificatory ceremonies before he is allowed to mingle freely with his own people.[1029] On my hypothesis the polling of the hair is simply one of these purificatory or disinfectant ceremonies. Certainly this explanation applies to the custom as practised by the Bechuanas, for we are expressly told that “they cleanse or purify themselves after journeys by shaving their heads, etc., lest they should have contracted from strangers some evil by witchcraft or sorcery.”[1030] The cutting of the hair after a vow may have the same meaning. It is a way of ridding the man of what has been infected by the dangerous state, whether we call it taboo, sanctity, or uncleanness (for all these are only different expressions for the same primitive conception), under which he laboured during the continuance of the vow. Still more clearly does the meaning of the practice come out in the case of mourners, who cut their hair and nails and use new vessels when the period of their mourning is at an end. This was done in ancient India, obviously for the purpose of purifying such persons from the dangerous influence of death and the ghost to which for a time they had been exposed.[1031] Among the Bodos and Dhimals of Assam, when a death has occurred, the family of the deceased is reckoned unclean for three days. At the end of that time they bathe, shave, and are sprinkled with holy water, after which they hold the funeral feast.[1032] Here the act [pg 286] of shaving must clearly be regarded as a purificatory rite, like the bathing and sprinkling with holy water. At Hierapolis no man might enter the great temple of Astarte on the same day on which he had seen a corpse; next day he might enter, provided he had first purified himself. But the kinsmen of the deceased were not allowed to set foot in the sanctuary for thirty days after the death, and before doing so they had to shave their heads.[1033] At Agweh, on the Slave Coast of West Africa, widows and widowers at the end of their period of mourning wash themselves, shave their heads, pare their nails, and put on new cloths; and the old cloths, the shorn hair, and the nail-parings are all burnt.[1034] The Kayans of Borneo are not allowed to cut their hair or shave their temples during the period of mourning; but as soon as the mourning is ended by the ceremony of bringing home a newly severed human head, the barber's knife is kept busy enough. As each man leaves the barber's hands, he gathers up the shorn locks and spitting on them murmurs a prayer to the evil spirits not to harm him. He then blows the hair out of the verandah of the house.[1035] Among the Wajagga of East Africa mourners shear their hair under a fruit-bearing banana-tree and lay their shorn locks at the foot of the tree. When the fruit of the tree is ripe, they brew beer with it and invite all the mourners to partake of it, saying, “Come and drink the beer of those hair-bananas.”[1036] The tribes of British Central Africa destroy the house in which a man has died, and on the day when this is done the mourners have their heads shaved and bury the shorn hair on the site of the house; the Atonga burn it in a new fire made by the rubbing of two sticks.[1037] When an Akikuyu woman has, in accordance with custom, exposed her misshapen or prematurely born infant in the wood for the hyaenas to devour, she is shaved on her return by an old woman and given a magic potion to drink; after which she is regarded as clean.[1038] [pg 287] Similarly at some Hindoo places of pilgrimage on the banks of rivers men who have committed great crimes or are troubled by uneasy consciences have every hair shaved off by professional barbers before they plunge into the sacred stream, from which “they emerge new creatures, with all the accumulated guilt of a long life effaced.”[1039] The matricide Orestes is said to have polled his hair after appeasing the angry Furies of his murdered mother.[1040]