Some similar custom existed on the coast in ancient times, for these little masks have been found in the huacas (grave mounds). The first reduced heads were exhibited in Lima in 1862 under the rare title, “Heads of the Incas”!
The Macas and Jivaros are believed to have this practice as well, and a tribe exists near the Cusicuari, the Rio Negro, and the Orinoco, reported as able to reduce entire bodies in the same manner.
Some tribes preserve their enemies’ hands, others keep their teeth, and some eat their enemies whole. A man speaking a different dialect is eaten like an animal of a different species. The Amahuacas pulverize the bones and eat the ashes in their food, in order to absorb the physical strength as well as the moral virtues of the person gone before. Although they are never eaten, the women of cannibal tribes are said to be more cannibalistic than the men. Prior to such feasts they fatten the prisoners of war, who “rather enjoy the prospect, and gorge themselves to accommodate their keepers. They occupy themselves tranquilly with their duties as slaves without attempting to escape.”
Another practice of the Aguarunas is making the tundoy, or tunduli, their jungle signal-service. They hollow a tree-trunk and make three holes in it with red-hot stones, then hang it aloft on a high tree, fastening the lower end securely to the ground. Blows upon it with a wooden mallet reverberate as far as ten miles, and form a code, by their swiftness or slowness and their pitch above, between, or below the holes. As a hundred words suffice for a language, so would three tones for a drum of war. Primitive man in the primeval jungle sending blood-curdling signals to reduce the heads of his enemies! Reverberations whose wave-lengths are intercepted on their echoing passage through the forest by the flight of royal butterflies and challenged by the chatter of antediluvian apes!
The weaker tribes are actually, not in name merely, pushed back into the woods. Many traits in us find a literal, physical parallel in them. We speak of “licking the dust;” in the jungle there are tribes of earth-eating savages. A civilized man in the jungle learns their literal ways. He puts gunpowder on the bite of a serpent and cauterizes by igniting it. Having no language adequately to express the venomous thoughts they may feel, they use poisoned arrows. They literally reduce an enemy’s head, and are more humane than we, doing it after death!
The Inje-inje represent the Stone Age, both in their tools and language. They come out of inaccessible hiding-places to perform their primeval rites by full moon and are the least known of all the savage tribes. This small tribe of the Inje-inje, whose name is the sum of their language, need only a word to steer their craft through life. As has been said, the development of language from the primitive Inje-inje to the somewhat developed Aguaruna can be studied in this mysterious place. No tribe can count further than ten; most of them use only a movement of the fingers. Though there are hundreds of “languages,” not one Amazonian tribe can write.
In temperate zones nature is to be relied upon. Roots grow in the ground, branches and leaves in the air, flowers come forth at certain seasons, and fruit follows. Trees give us shade in which no fever lurks. Vegetables do not relieve agony and want, as insects and plants do not cause it. No animals lie in wait to seize us, no snakes to uncurl and engulf us. Rain comes in measurable quantities. We live on a tempered, miniature scale. We can afford to neglect reckoning with nature, for we understand her laws, and we direct her by that understanding.
But what can be said of the jungle? Had we thought of gardens as suitably placed in tree-tops? Or of an edge of wood as sharp as an edge of steel? Here accustomed flowers grow as shrubs, and shrubs as trees. It is a region where insects are mistaken for birds, where animals imitate a flower on the branch where they like to rest; where plants have fragrance, and blossoms burst forth from roots or rough bark; where birds gain protection by assuming the dazzling colors of tropical sunlight, and butterflies by the warning colors of their neighbors. It is a region where roots grow in the air; oils, wax, and honey are secreted by leaves; where the death of anything gives new, vital impulse to something else, and parasites are as significant as their supporters. Curious region, where there are night-flying butterflies and softly-feathered moths to fly in the daytime; where everything is reversed: animals, whose normal is upside down, prefer tree-tops to the ground, birds of prey are frightened by the painting on a butterfly’s wings, caterpillars sting, spiders kill birds, and water is the principal element of the land.
Dramatic indeed is the silent jungle. The insect is imprisoned in the throat of the orchid, whose honey it had been unwarily seeking. Trees distil venom. Plants have fangs. Perfumes affect the brain. Cold, green creepers blister like fire. From vampires which suck your blood as you sleep, to the touch of a vine which paralyzes your entire body, the jungle knows all modes of attack and furnishes the cure for every ill it has created.
What can be taken as the symbol of the jungle? The snake, mysterious, deadly, bound together in savage traditions with lightning, wind, fire-streams of lava, and river-whirlpools, those emblems of serpent treachery? Or butterflies, with their symbolism of life-recurrent? Or the orchid, emblem of wayward unwholesomeness? In the troops of monkeys which skip, swing, bounce from tree to tree, throwing themselves to be caught by prehensile tails, is its exuberance. In the honey dripping from hollow trees and running off unused, is typified its surplus. Iridescence darting from insects and from birds, rainbows glinting over cataracts or caught by the equatorial sunshine from misty hillsides, might be its symbol; or the beneficence of jungle trees and bushes.