Note 224.1 — Chapter XI · SACRED WELLS AND TREES.

These practices all explain themselves in the same way. The dedication of the hair at a temple, or the placing of it in the hand of a corpse, or on the grave, effects union with the divinity, or with the departed friend. The tress is more than a symbol of devotion; it is more than a gage of fidelity. The owner of the head whence it has been taken, and the holder of the severed lock are in actual, though invisible, union. This accounts for the efficacy of the practice in healing disease: this accounts for its value as a guard of fidelity to an oath. In the last chapter we saw that not only hair but nail-parings, teeth and other things previously part of the patient, or in contact with him, were plugged into trees, or hung from their branches, for the purpose of uniting him with a living healthy body, which was believed to react upon him. Much more powerful would be the action of an object regarded as the abode of a supernatural being, even if only a departed friend,—or rather, the action of the supernatural being himself, thus linked through that object with his worshipper, patient or friend. Abruzzian girls put themselves in the hands of the saint when they hide their hairs in his sanctuary, and doubtless feel abundantly satisfied that he will perform the blessing or the ban they invoke upon themselves in their rustic ritual. We had occasion in the last chapter to consider the disposal of the hair when ceremonially cut off. It will be recollected that the Grihya-Sûtra of Hiranyakesin directs the clippings of hair, beard and nails, made up into a lump with bull’s dung, to be buried in a cow-stable, or near an Udumbara-tree, or in a clump of Darbha-grass. It is true that the words accompanying the act of burial were: “Thus I hide the sin of N. N.” These words were probably not primitive, for the real intention of the rite is revealed by the places prescribed for the burial. Had it been meant simply to hide the lump of dung and hair, any secret place would have sufficed. But the cow-stable, the Udumbara-tree and the Darbha-grass were all sacred; and the object of placing these clippings of the person in, or adjacent to, them must have been that the man from whom the clippings had been taken might be blessed by the hallowed influences which would surround those portions of himself, severed indeed to outward appearance, but still subtly connected with his frame. So also something more than a desire for safety leads the sponsors of the Japanese boy to deposit his forelock on the family shrine. And when the Omaha children received the tonsure, the first-fruits (if I may so call them) of their heads, wrapped in the sacred buffalo-hide, not merely secured the heads themselves from harm, but kept them in a perpetual environment of positive good. For the same reason in Tahiti the child’s navel-string was buried in the marae, or temple.224.1 In Mecklenburgh and Thuringia the navel-string, or a piece of it, is taken by the mother to her churching and laid down behind the altar or elsewhere in the church. This will keep the child continually surrounded with such holy influences that he will grow up god-fearing and pious. If, on the other hand, it be left in a shop, he will—at least in Thuringia—become courteous and clever in business.224.2