Death is dreadful to most mortals, but particularly so to the Abipones. They cannot even bear the sight of a dying person. Hence, whenever any one's life is despaired of, his fellow inmates immediately forsake the house, or are driven away by the old women who remain to take care of the sick, lest they should be so affected by the mournful spectacle, that fear of death should make them shrink from endangering their lives in battle. They are, therefore, obliged to pass many nights in another person's tent, or in the open air. As they have very little experience of persons dying a natural death, they do not know the signs of it when it draws near. A short abstinence from food, unusual silence, or sleeplessness, makes them presage approaching dissolution. As soon as a report is spread that a man is dying, the old women, who are either related to the person, or famed for medical skill, flock to his house. They stand in a row round the sick man's bed, with dishevelled hair and bare shoulders, striking a gourd, the mournful sound of which they accompany with violent motion of the feet and arms, and loud vociferations. She who excels the rest in age, or fame for medical skill, stands nearest to the dying man's head, and strikes an immense military drum, which returns a horrible bellowing. Another, who is appointed to watch the sick man, removes every now and then the bull's hide with which he is covered, examines his face, and if he seems yet to breathe, sprinkles him plentifully with cold water, a jug of which is placed under the bed. When I first witnessed these things, I pitied the fate of the sick man, who, I feared, would be killed, if not by the disease, at any rate by the howling of the women and the noise of the drum, or else smothered by the weight of the hide, with which the whole body is covered, and which is as hard and as heavy as a board. Under the pretext of compassion, they use all this cruelty to the departing soul, that the women may be spared the sight of his last agonies, and the hearing of his groans.
If the respiration of the dying man be not heard at a distance like a pair of bellows in Vulcan's workshop, and if his breath stop even for a moment, they proclaim with a Stentorian voice, that he has given up the ghost. A great crowd assembles on all sides, exclaiming, he is dead, he is no more. All the married women and widows of the town crowd to the mourning, attired as I have described before, and whilst they are filling the streets with confused wailings, with the rattling of gourds and beating of pans covered with stags' skins, a sudden shout is often heard announcing, that the man whom they mourn for as dead is come to life again. The joyous exclamation, he is revived, is instantly substituted for the mournful howling of the women, some of whom return home, whilst others hasten to the miserable mortal on the confines of life and death, and torment him with their dreadful yellings, till at last they deprive him of life. After his death, the first business of the bystanders is to pull out the heart and tongue of the deceased, boil them, and give them to a dog to devour, that the author of his death may soon die also. The corpse, while yet warm, is clothed according to the fashion of his country, wrapped in a hide, and bound with leathern thongs, the head being covered with a cloth, or any garment at hand. The savage Abipones will not endure the body of a dead man to remain long in the house; while yet warm, it is conveyed on ready horses to the grave. Women are appointed to go forward on swift steeds, to dig the grave, and honour the funeral with lamentations. What, if we say that many of the Abipones are buried because they are thought dead, but that in reality they die, because they are buried? It is not unlikely that these poor wretches are suffocated, either by the hide with which they are bound, or by the earth which is heaped over them. But as they pull out the heart and tongue of the deceased, it cannot be doubted that they are dead when they are buried; though I strongly suspect that the heart is sometimes cut out when they are half alive, and would perhaps revive were they not prematurely deprived of this necessary instrument of life. The savages, who hasten the burying of their dead so much, presumed to censure us for keeping the Christian Indians out of their graves many hours after their decease.
The Abipones think it a great happiness to be buried in a wood under the shade of trees, and grieve for the fate of those that are interred in a chapel, calling them captives of the Father. In the dread of such sepulture, they at first shunned baptism. They dig a very shallow pit to place the body in, that it may not be pressed by too great a weight of earth heaped over it. They fill the surface of the grave with thorny boughs, to keep off tigers, which delight in carcasses. On the top of the sepulchre, they place an inverted pan, that if the dead man should stand in need of water, he may not want a vessel to hold it in. They hang a garment from a tree near the place of interment, for him to put on if he chooses to come out of the grave. They also fix a spear near the graves of men, that an instrument of war and the chase may be in readiness for them. For the same purpose, beside the graves of their Caciques, and men distinguished for military fame, they place horses, slain with many ceremonies; a custom common to most of the equestrian savages in Paraguay. The best horses, those which the deceased used and delighted in most, are generally slain at the grave.
Laugh as much as you please at the sepulchral rites of the Abipones; you cannot deny them to be a proof of their believing in the immortality of the soul. They know that something of them will survive after death, which will last to all eternity, and never die; but what becomes of that immortal thing, which we call the soul, and they the image, shade, or echo, when it is separated from the body, and whether it will enjoy pleasures or receive punishments, they never think of enquiring. The southern savages believe that it dwells under the earth in tents, and employs itself in hunting, and that the spirits of dead emus descend along with it to the same subterranean abode. The Abipones, who do not credit such idle tales, believe that some part of them survives the death of the body, and that it exists somewhere, but they openly confess themselves ignorant of the place and other circumstances. They fear the manes or shades of the defunct, and believe that they become visible to the living when invoked by a magic incantation, to be interrogated concerning future things. As I was passing the night on the banks of the Parana, the Abipones, my companions, hearing their voices re-echoed against the trees, and windings of the shores, attributed the circumstance to ghosts and disembodied spirits wandering in these solitudes, till I explained to them the nature of an echo. They call little ducks, which fly about in flocks at night uttering a mournful hiss, the shades of the dead. These, and other circumstances, which I have related elsewhere, prove that the Abipones believe in the immortality of the soul.
It is incredible how religiously the Abipones perform the sepulchral honours of their friends. If they see one of their comrades fall in battle they snatch the lifeless body from the midst of the enemies to bury it properly in its native soil. To lessen the burden, they strip off the flesh and bury it in the ground; the bones they put into a hide, and carry home on a horse, a journey not unfrequently of two hundred leagues. But if the enemy presses on them, and they are forced to leave the body on the field of battle, the relations seek for the bones on the first opportunity, and take no rest till they find them, however much risk and labour must be encountered in accomplishing this. Moreover, the Abipones are not content with any sepulchre, but take especial care that fathers may lie with their sons, wives with their husbands, grandchildren with their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and that every family should have its own burying-place. This nation, having formerly inhabited more towards the north, know that their ancestors' monuments exist there, and venerate them as something divine. They feel the most lively pleasure in mingling the bones of their countrymen, wherever, amidst their perpetual peregrinations, they may have been buried, with the bones of their ancestors. Hence it is that they dig them up and remove them so often, and carry them over immense tracts of land, till at length they repose in the ancient and woody mausoleum of their forefathers; which they distinguish by certain marks cut in the trees, and by other signs taught them by their ancestors. The Brazilians and Guaranies formerly disliked the trouble of digging pits for sepulchres. These hungry anthropophagi buried within their own bowels the flesh of those that yielded to fate. It must be confessed however that the Guaranies of after-times, more humane than their ancestors, placed dead bodies in clay pitchers. Seeking the savages in Mbaeverà in the midst of the woods, I met with a plain artificially made, the trees being cut down for the purpose, and there I found three pitchers of this kind, each of which would contain a man, but all empty. The bottoms of the pitchers were placed toward the sky, the mouth towards the ground. But from sepulchres, let us hasten to funeral obsequies.
CHAPTER XXVI.
OF THE MOURNING, THE EXEQUIES, AND FUNERAL CEREMONIES
OF THE ABIPONES.
Of those things which the Abipones do to testify their grief, according to the customs established by their ancestors, some tend to obliterate the memory of the defunct, others to perpetuate it. All the utensils belonging to the lately deceased are burnt on a pile. Besides the horses killed at the tomb, they slay his small cattle if he have any. The house which he inhabited they pull entirely to pieces. His widow, children, and the rest of his family remove elsewhere; and having no house of their own, reside for a time in that of some other person, or lodge miserably under mats. They had rather endure the injuries of the weather, than, contrary to the laws of their countrymen, inhabit a commodious house that has been saddened by the death of the dear master of it. To utter the name of a lately deceased person is reckoned a nefarious offence amongst the Abipones; if, however occasion requires that mention should be made of that person, they say, "The man that does not now exist," making use of a paraphrase. But if the name of the defunct be derived from an appellative noun, the word is abolished by proclamation, and a new one substituted. It is the prerogative of the old women to invent these new names, which are quickly divulgated amongst the widely-scattered hordes of the Abipones, and are so firmly imprinted on their minds, that no one individual is ever heard to utter a proscribed word.
All the friends and relations of the deceased change the names they formerly bore. In the colony of the Rosary, the wife of the chief Cacique dying of the small-pox, her husband changed his name of Revachigi to that of Oahari. His mother and brother and captive, as well as all the brothers of the deceased, had new names given them with various ceremonies. The old mother of the Cacique was extremely fond of a lank, scraggy dog, unworthy of the very air it breathed. When this change of names was made, I asked the old woman what name would be given her dog, to show them that we held their absurd rites in ridicule, though unable at that time to prevent them. On the death of a Cacique, all the men under his authority shave their long hair as a sign of grief. Widows also have their hair shaven, and wear a kind of cloak made of the caraquatà, stained black and red, which covers the head like a hood, and flows down from the shoulders to the breast. Widows use this cloak all their lives, unless a new marriage frees them from the unpleasant law of perpetual mourning. An Abiponian husband when he loses his wife shaves his hair in like manner, and wears a small woollen cap, which he publicly receives from the hands of an old woman, the priestess of the ceremonies, whilst the other women are engaged in lamenting, and the men in drinking together, and which he throws off when his hair begins to grow.
But let me now discourse upon what entirely consoles the Abipones for the loss of their friends, and renders the very necessity of mourning so pleasant to them. Leaving the care of inhuming the body and lamenting for it to the women, they seek for honey in the woods to serve as materials for the public drinking-party, to which they all flock at sun-set. At any report of the death of an Abipon we always pitied the women, upon whom devolved all the trouble of the exequies, the care of the funeral, and the labour of making the grave, and of mourning. For besides that the corpse was to be carried to the grave, and inhumed by them, all standing in a row, and uttering repeated lamentations, the widowers were to be shaved, the widows veiled, the names of the relations of the deceased to be changed, the funeral drinking-party to be attended, and the houses to be demolished; in short, they had to go through the trouble of a public mourning of nine days' continuance. This is of two kinds. One which is held by day in the streets by all but the unmarried women, and another carried on at night in houses appointed for the purpose, and which none but those that are specially invited attend. At stated hours, both in the forenoon and afternoon, all the women in the town assemble in the market-place, with their hair scattered about their shoulders, their breast and back naked, and a skin hanging from their loins. The expression of their faces inspires I can hardly tell whether most of melancholy or terror. Picture to yourself a set of Bacchanals or infernal furies, and you will have a good idea of them. They do not lament in one place by day. They go up and down the whole market-place, like supplicants, walking separately but all in one very long row. You may sometimes count as many as two hundred. They go leaping like frogs. The motion of their feet is accompanied by a continual tossing about of their arms. Each strikes a gourd containing various seeds to the measure of her voice; but some, instead of a gourd, beat a pan covered with does' skins, which makes the most ridiculous noise you can conceive. To every three or four gourds one of these drums answers. But what offends the ear most is the shouting of the mourners. They modulate their voices, like singers, and make trills and quavers mingled with groans. After chaunting some mournful staves in this manner they all cease at intervals, and, changing their voices from the highest to the lowest key, suddenly utter a very shrill hissing. You would swear that a knife had been laid to their throats. By this sudden howl they signify that they are seized with rage, uttering all sorts of imprecations on the author of the death, whoever he be. Sometimes, intermitting this chaunt, they recite a few verses in a declamatory tone, in which they extol the good qualities and deeds of the deceased, and in a querulous voice endeavour to excite the compassion and vengeance of the survivors. At other times they mingle tears with their wailings, tears extorted not by grief, but by habit, or, perhaps, by exhaustion. Most of them carry about some little gift or remembrance of the deceased, as emu feathers, glass-beads, a knife, or a dagger. I will now describe their method of lamenting by night. About evening, all the women that are invited assemble in a hut, one of the female jugglers presiding over the party, and regulating the chaunting and other rites. It is her business to strike two large drums alternately, and to sing the doleful funeral song, the rest observing the same measure of voice. This infernal elegy, accompanied with the rattling of gourds and bellowing of drums, lasts till morning. The same method is observed for eight days without variation; on the ninth night, if they be mourning for a woman, the pans are broken, not without proper ceremonies. The tragic howl, which they uttered on the preceding nights, now gives place to a more festive chaunt, which the old female drummeress interrupts at intervals with out-stretched jaws and a deep, and, as it were, threatening voice, seemingly to exhort her singing companions to hilarity and louder notes. These nocturnal lamentations, which continue nine days, are commenced at the setting and concluded at the rising of the sun. The patience displayed by the women in enduring so many sleepless nights is truly astonishing, but still more so is that of the men who can sleep soundly whilst the air is filled with confused shouts, and the noise of gourds and drums. Nor are funeral rites alone conducted in this manner. The sacred anniversaries to the memory of their ancestors are religiously celebrated with the same rites and ceremonies. Should the memory of her dead mother enter a woman's mind, she immediately loosens her hair, seizes a gourd, paces up and down the street with some women whom she calls to partake in her mourning, and fills the air with lamentation. Few nights pass that you do not hear women mourning. This they do upon their feet, with their bodies turned towards the spot where the deceased is buried, always accompanying their lamentations with the sound of gourds. Women find weeping easier than silence, and this is the reason why the nights are so seldom passed in quietness. The vociferation, however, always grows more violent as the day approaches; for when one begins to lament another follows her example, then a third comes, and then a fourth, till, by day-break, the number of mourners seems greater than that of sleepers. The men meantime are by no means idle. The grief which the women express with tears and shrieks, they testify by shedding the blood of enemies or their own. The nearest of kin to the deceased immediately assembles all the fellow-soldiers he can raise, and leads them against the foreign foes by whose hands his relation perished. It is his business to make the first attack against the author of the death, and not to return home till he has fully revenged it; though these savage heroes sometimes make an inglorious retreat, without obtaining vengeance on their enemies.