Note 321.1 — Chapter XIII · FUNERAL RITES.

Hitherto we have only considered methods of effecting communion with the dead based on the appropriation by the living of some part of the corpse. This, however, implies the reciprocal possibility of communion formed by means of a gift of some portion of the living body to the dead. Nothing more nor less I take to be the real meaning of the practice, forbidden to the Hebrews, of cutting oneself for the dead.321.1 We find this practice in its most complete form among the Orang Sakei, a people whose chief seats are about the river Siak on the eastern side of Sumatra. There, at a funeral the kindred, making a cross-cut with a knife on their heads, drop the blood on the face of the corpse. Individuals are found who by repetition of this mutilation have lost all the hair from their heads.321.2 They have indeed, in the words of the Deuteronomist, made a baldness between their eyes for the dead. At Tahiti, in Captain Cook’s time, mourners were in the habit of wounding themselves with knives and clubs consisting of canes or pieces of wood set with sharks’ teeth, and allowing the blood and tears to drip on small cloths which they threw under the bier. As described by Mr. Ellis, some half century later, the performance was a little different. Both sexes cut themselves. The females wore short aprons of a special kind of cloth, which they held up to catch the blood until it almost saturated them. The aprons were then dried in the sun and given to the nearest surviving relatives as proofs of the affection of the donors, and were preserved by the bereaved family as tokens of the esteem in which the departed had been held.321.3 It is easy to see that this may have been a modification of the rite as it prevailed in Captain Cook’s day, and that both may have been derived from a rite similar to that of the Orang Sakei. In Australia the rite is found both in its original and its degraded forms. When the body is placed in the ground the practice of several tribes is that the mourners leap into the grave in turn, and are there cut on the head with a boomerang, so as to allow the blood to fall over the corpse. Among the tribes of the Murray river, the kindred of the deceased, assembled round the corpse, or at all events in its presence, used to lacerate their thighs, backs and breasts with shells or flints until the blood flowed in streams. After burial the women visited the grave at stated intervals, by night or in the early morning, there to renew their wailings and lacerations. With other tribes it is enough for the mourners to gash themselves, or be gashed by others, in sign of grief: the process of ceremonial decay has caused the need of bringing the blood into contact with the body of the deceased to be no longer recognised.322.1 The Mosquito Indians lacerate and bruise themselves until they bleed in the dead man’s hut.322.2 The Bororó women in Central Brazil, at the festival for a dead man, cause their limbs to be scratched until the blood flows, and allow it to drip into the basket containing the bones.322.3 Four aborigines executed for murder at Helena, on the head waters of the Missouri, in December 1890, were mourned by two squaws. One of the squaws cut off two of her fingers and threw them into the grave. The other gashed her face. Both caused the blood to flow into the grave, and had previously scalped their children.322.4 In another case of which a traveller in the early part of the present century was a witness, the mourners’ blood was made to flow over the dead man and over the food that was buried with him. But, though we have sufficient testimony to the archaic form of the custom among the North American peoples, that form is far from universal. More usually they are content with simply wounding themselves, careless where the blood may fall.323.1 On the occasion of a burial among the Battas the wives of the dead not only weep and howl, but scratch their faces and bodies until the torn skin hangs down in places, and the blood streams on the earth.323.2 When an Abyssinian corpse is about to be removed to its final resting-place some of the mourners “frantically grasp the bier, as if wishing to retain it by force; others, convulsed by the throes of agony and despair, rend their clothes, tear their hair, lacerate their faces and necks with their nails, so that the blood trickles down in streams.”323.3 The Abyssinians call themselves Christians; but in this respect they have hardly advanced beyond many benighted pagans, like those already mentioned, or like the Gallinomero of California who burnt the bodies of their dead, and howled and wounded themselves the while in a manner, we are told, too terrible for description.323.4