Note 324.1 — Chapter XIII · FUNERAL RITES.

Nor is mere cutting and wounding all. Many savages deem it necessary to inflict permanent mutilations on themselves, like the squaws of Montana just mentioned. Among the Fiji Islanders, when a king died, each of the women cut off a finger-joint. These were hung upon the eaves of the royal house. The amputation of a finger-joint was a common sign of mourning; and poor people made a business of it, receiving payment from the relatives of the dead in exchange for their severed members.324.1 In numerous cases of mutilation, as of laceration, however, the evidence is wanting that the amputated member, like the blood, was brought into contact or proximity with the corpse. In such the rite is probably in a decayed form. The mere wounding or amputation had come to be looked upon as enough. With regard especially to amputation the process is clear. As the totem developed into a god the idea of sacrifice evolved in like measure from sacramental communion into a gift, a present to propitiate an offended being, a substitute for the votary himself who had deserved death, or (as in the instance of Admetos) whom the divinity was calling out of life. To save themselves from death, or from calamity, men offered up something of less value than their own lives, or than that whose loss or injury they dreaded, but still something of value and importance. Thus, as Dr. Tylor recalls, mothers in the southern provinces of India will cut off their own fingers as sacrifices lest they lose their children; and golden fingers are sometimes offered—“the substitute of a substitute.”324.2 At length a virtue is attached to the mere abnegation. To deprive oneself of what is held dear, or what is essential to enjoyment, or even to life, is in itself of merit, quite apart from any thought of benefiting the deity. The shedding of blood, or the amputation of a finger, for the purpose of communion with the dead would follow a parallel course, and would gradually acquire virtue alone as a means of testifying to the affection and the grief of the survivor, without bringing the survivor into ritual union with the departed.