Note 319.2 — Chapter XIII · FUNERAL RITES.

A custom more widely spread than that of keeping the bones, because attended with much less inconvenience, is that of taking and keeping some of the hair, nails or pieces of garments of the dead. It may, indeed, be said to prevail through the greater part of the world; nor has the custom of preserving a lock of hair cut after death as a memorial of the departed yet vanished from among ourselves. An acute writer in the Contemporary Review some years ago related that in the West Indian island of St. Croix those who washed the dead prior to burial always took a lock of hair, a garment, or at least a fragment of a garment, in order to prevent the spirit from molesting them for venturing to tamper with the place of its late habitation. And he adds: “At first thought, it seems most natural to believe that the surest way to prevent any visit from a dead man is to take nothing of his with you. But not so. A liberty has been taken with his body by one who is probably a total stranger, hired perhaps for the express purpose of preparing him for his coffin. Now, if you take something of his, something that is either a part of him, or has been on his person, you in a sense identify yourself with him; you establish as it were, a kind of relationship, and thus the liberty you take with him must seem much less to him.”319.2 The reader who has followed the argument of the preceding paragraphs and the preceding chapters will have no difficulty in admitting that here the true theory has been touched. The motive that prompts an English mother to wear in a brooch a lock of hair and the likeness of the darling she will see no more on earth is the same as induces a Friendly Islander to pass a braid of the hair of his dead kinsman through his own ear, and to wear it there for the rest of his life. It is the same as leads a Mosquito widow to carry about her husband’s bones and to sleep with them. Consciously or unconsciously, the idea at the root of these and similar practices is that of sacramental communion with the dead. In the West Indian Negro practice just cited we see the application of this idea to the protection of the person who may perchance have incurred the wrath of the dead. Thus applied, it is analogous to that of counteracting witchcraft by uniting the witch in blood-brotherhood with her victim.