Section 4. Warriors tabooed.
ONCE more, warriors are conceived by the savage to move, so to say, in
an atmosphere of spiritual danger which constrains them to practise a
variety of superstitious observances quite different in their nature from those
rational precautions which, as a matter of course, they adopt against foes
of flesh and blood. The general effect of these observances is to place the
warrior, both before and after victory, in the same state of seclusion or
spiritual quarantine in which, for his own safety, primitive man puts his
human gods and other dangerous characters. Thus when the Maoris went
out on the war-path they were sacred or taboo in the highest degree, and
they and their friends at home had to observe strictly many curious customs
over and above the numerous taboos of ordinary life. They became, in the
irreverent language of Europeans who knew them in the old fighting days,
"tabooed an inch thick"; and as for the leader of the expedition, he was
quite unapproachable. Similarly, when the Israelites marched forth to war
they were bound by certain rules of ceremonial purity identical with rules
observed by Maoris and Australian blackfellows on the war-path. The
vessels they used were sacred, and they had to practise continence and a
custom of personal cleanliness of which the original motive, if we may
judge from the avowed motive of savages who conform to the same custom,
was a fear lest the enemy should obtain the refuse of their persons, and
thus be enabled to work their destruction by magic. Among some Indian
tribes of North America a young warrior in his first campaign had to conform
to certain customs, of which two were identical with the observances
imposed by the same Indians on girls at their first menstruation: the vessels
he ate and drank out of might be touched by no other person, and he was
forbidden to scratch his head or any other part of his body with his fingers;
if he could not help scratching himself, he had to do it with a stick. The
latter rule, like the one which forbids a tabooed person to feed himself with
his own fingers, seems to rest on the supposed sanctity or pollution,
whichever we choose to call it, of the tabooed hands. Moreover among
these Indian tribes the men on the war-path had always to sleep at night
with their faces turned towards their own country; however uneasy the
posture, they might not change it. They might not sit upon the bare ground,
nor wet their feet, nor walk on a beaten path if they could help it; when they
had no choice but to walk on a path, they sought to counteract the ill effect
of doing so by doctoring their legs with certain medicines or charms which
they carried with them for the purpose. No member of the party was
permitted to step over the legs, hands, or body of any other member who
chanced to be sitting or lying on the ground; and it was equally forbidden
to step over his blanket, gun, tomahawk, or anything that belonged to him.
If this rule was inadvertently broken, it became the duty of the member
whose person or property had been stepped over to knock the other
member down, and it was similarly the duty of that other to be knocked
down peaceably and without resistance. The vessels out of which the
warriors ate their food were commonly small bowls of wood or birch bark,
with marks to distinguish the two sides; in marching from home the Indians
invariably drank out of one side of the bowl, and in returning they drank out
of the other. When on their way home they came within a day's march of
the village, they hung up all their bowls on trees, or threw them away on
the prairie, doubtless to prevent their sanctity or defilement from being
communicated with disastrous effects to their friends, just as we have seen
that the vessels and clothes of the sacred Mikado, of women at childbirth
and menstruation, and of persons defiled by contact with the dead are
destroyed or laid aside for a similar reason. The first four times that an
Apache Indian goes out on the war-path, he is bound to refrain from
scratching his head with his fingers and from letting water touch his lips.
Hence he scratches his head with a stick, and drinks through a hollow reed
or cane. Stick and reed are attached to the warrior's belt and to each other
by a leathern thong. The rule not to scratch their heads with their fingers,
but to use a stick for the purpose instead, was regularly observed by
Ojebways on the war-path. 1
With regard to the Creek Indians and kindred tribes we are told they "will
not cohabit with women while they are out at war; they religiously abstain
from every kind of intercourse even with their own wives, for the space of
three days and nights before they go to war, and so after they return home,
because they are to sanctify themselves." Among the Ba-Pedi and
Ba-Thonga tribes of South Africa not only have the warriors to abstain from
women, but the people left behind in the villages are also bound to
continence; they think that any incontinence on their part would cause
thorns to grow on the ground traversed by the warriors, and that success
would not attend the expedition. 2
Why exactly many savages have made it a rule to refrain from women in
time of war, we cannot say for certain, but we may conjecture that their
motive was a superstitious fear lest, on the principles of sympathetic magic,
close contact with women should infect them with feminine weakness and
cowardice. Similarly some savages imagine that contact with a woman in
childbed enervates warriors and enfeebles their weapons. Indeed the
Kayans of Central Borneo go so far as to hold that to touch a loom or
women's clothes would so weaken a man that he would have no success
in hunting, fishing, and war. Hence it is not merely sexual intercourse with
women that the savage warrior sometimes shuns; he is careful to avoid the
sex altogether. Thus among the hill tribes of Assam, not only are men
forbidden to cohabit with their wives during or after a raid, but they may not
eat food cooked by a woman; nay, they should not address a word even to
their own wives. Once a woman, who unwittingly broke the rule by
speaking to her husband while he was under the war taboo, sickened and
died when she learned the awful crime she had committed. 3
