Note 123.2 — PSYCHE’S TASK

Means taken by manslayers in Africa to rid themselves of the ghosts of their victims. Among the Bantu tribes of Kavirondo, in British East Africa, when a man has killed an enemy in warfare he shaves his head on his return home, and his friends rub a medicine, which generally consists of cow’s dung, over his body to prevent the spirit of the slain man from troubling him.123.2 Here cow’s dung serves these negroes as a detergent of the ghost, just as pig’s blood served the ancient Greeks. Among the Wawanga, about Mount Elgon in British East Africa, “a man returning from a raid, on which he has killed one of the enemy, may not enter his hut until he has taken cow-dung and rubbed it on the cheeks of the women and children of the village and purified himself by the sacrifice of a goat, a strip of skin from the forehead of which he wears round the right wrist during the four following nights.”123.3 With the Ja-Luo of Kavirondo the custom is somewhat different. Three days after his return from the fight the warrior shaves his head. But before he may enter his village he has to hang a live fowl, head uppermost, round his neck; then the bird is decapitated and its head left hanging round his neck. Soon after his return a feast is made for the slain man, in order that his ghost may not haunt his slayer.123.4 In some of these cases the slayer shaves his head, precisely as the matricide Orestes is said to have shorn his hair when he came to his senses.123.5 From this Greek tradition we may infer with some probability that the hair of Greek homicides, like that of these African warriors, was regularly cropped as one way of ridding them of the ghostly infection. Among the Ba-Yaka, a Bantu people of the Congo Free State, “a man who has been killed in battle is supposed to send his soul to avenge his death on the person of the man who killed him; the latter, however, can escape the vengeance of the dead by wearing the red tail-feathers of the parrot in his hair, and painting his forehead red.”124.1 Perhaps, as I have suggested elsewhere, this costume is intended to disguise the slayer from his victim’s ghost.124.2 Precautions taken by the Natchez Indians. Among the Natchez Indians of North America young braves who had taken their first scalps were obliged to observe certain rules of abstinence for six months. They might not sleep with their wives nor eat flesh; their only food was fish and hasty-pudding. If they broke these rules they believed that the soul of the man they had killed would work their death by magic.124.3