Note 123.1 — PSYCHE’S TASK

With some savages temporary insanity seems to be really caused by the sight or even thought of blood. The accounts of the madness which is apt to befall slayers seem too numerous and too consistent to be dismissed as pure fictions of the savage imagination. However we may reject the native explanation of such fits of frenzy, the reports point to a real berserker fury or unbridled thirst for blood which comes over savages when they are excited by combat, and which may prove dangerous to friends as well as to foes. The question is one on which students of mental disease might perhaps throw light. Meantime it deserves to be noticed that even the people who have staid at home and have taken no share in the bloody work are liable to fall into a state of frenzy when they hear the war-whoops which proclaim the approach of the victorious warriors with their ghastly trophies. Thus we are told that among the Bare’e-speaking Toradjas of Central Celebes, when these notes of triumph were heard in the distance the whole population of the village would turn out to meet and welcome the returning braves. At the mere sound some of those who had remained at home, especially women, would be seized with a frenzy, and rushing forth would bite the severed heads of the slain foes, and they were not to be brought to their senses till they had drunk palm wine or water out of the skulls. If the warriors returned empty-handed, these furies would fall upon them and bite their arms. There was a regular expression for this state of temporary insanity excited by the sight or even the thought of human blood; it was called merata lamoanja or merata raoa, “the spirit is come over them,” by which was probably meant that the madness was caused by the ghosts of the slaughtered foes. When any of the warriors themselves suffered from this paroxysm of frenzy, they were healed by eating a piece of the brains or licking the blood of the slain.123.1