Section 5. Manslayers tabooed.
IF THE READER still doubts whether the rules of conduct which we have
just been considering are based on superstitious fears or dictated by a
rational prudence, his doubts will probably be dissipated when he learns
that rules of the same sort are often imposed even more stringently on
warriors after the victory has been won and when all fear of the living
corporeal foe is at an end. In such cases one motive for the inconvenient
restrictions laid on the victors in their hour of triumph is probably a dread of
the angry ghosts of the slain; and that the fear of the vengeful ghosts does
influence the behaviour of the slayers is often expressly affirmed. The
general effect of the taboos laid on sacred chiefs, mourners, women at
childbirth, men on the war-path, and so on, is to seclude or isolate the
tabooed persons from ordinary society, this effect being attained by a
variety of rules, which oblige the men or women to live in separate huts or
in the open air, to shun the commerce of the sexes, to avoid the use of
vessels employed by others, and so forth. Now the same effect is produced
by similar means in the case of victorious warriors, particularly such as
have actually shed the blood of their enemies. In the island of Timor, when
a warlike expedition has returned in triumph bringing the heads of the
vanquished foe, the leader of the expedition is forbidden by religion and
custom to return at once to his own house. A special hut is prepared for
him, in which he has to reside for two months, undergoing bodily and
spiritual purification. During this time he may not go to his wife nor feed
himself; the food must be put into his mouth by another person. That these
observances are dictated by fear of the ghosts of the slain seems certain;
for from another account of the ceremonies performed on the return of a
successful head-hunter in the same island we learn that sacrifices are
offered on this occasion to appease the soul of the man whose head has
been taken; the people think that some misfortune would befall the victor
were such offerings omitted. Moreover, a part of the ceremony consists of a
dance accompanied by a song, in which the death of the slain man is
lamented and his forgiveness is entreated. "Be not angry," they say,
"because your head is here with us; had we been less lucky, our heads
might now have been exposed in your village. We have offered the
sacrifice to appease you. Your spirit may now rest and leave us at peace.
Why were you our enemy? Would it not have been better that we should
remain friends? Then your blood would not have been spilt and your head
would not have been cut off." The people of Paloo in Central Celebes take
the heads of their enemies in war and afterwards propitiate the souls of the
slain in the temple. 1
Among the tribes at the mouth of the Wanigela River, in New Guinea, "a
man who has taken life is considered to be impure until he has undergone
certain ceremonies: as soon as possible after the deed he cleanses himself
and his weapon. This satisfactorily accomplished, he repairs to his village
and seats himself on the logs of sacrificial staging. No one approaches him
or takes any notice whatever of him. A house is prepared for him which is
put in charge of two or three small boys as servants. He may eat only
toasted bananas, and only the centre portion of them-the ends being
thrown away. On the third day of his seclusion a small feast is prepared by
his friends, who also fashion some new perineal bands for him. This is
called ivi poro. The next day the man dons all his best ornaments and
badges for taking life, and sallies forth fully armed and parades the village.
The next day a hunt is organised, and a kangaroo selected from the game
captured. It is cut open and the spleen and liver rubbed over the back of
the man. He then walks solemnly down to the nearest water, and standing
straddle-legs in it washes himself. All the young untried warriors swim
between his legs. This is supposed to impart courage and strength to them.
The following day, at early dawn, he dashes out of his house, fully armed,
and calls aloud the name of his victim. Having satisfied himself that he has
thoroughly scared the ghost of the dead man, he returns to his house. The
beating of flooring-boards and the lighting of fires is also a certain method
of scaring the ghost. A day later his purification is finished. He can then
enter his wife's house." 2
In Windessi, Dutch New Guinea, when a party of head-hunters has been
successful, and they are nearing home, they announce their approach and
success by blowing on triton shells. Their canoes are also decked with
branches. The faces of the men who have taken a head are blackened with
charcoal. If several have taken part in killing the same victim, his head is
divided among them. They always time their arrival so as to reach home in
the early morning. They come rowing to the village with a great noise, and
the women stand ready to dance in the verandahs of the houses. The
canoes row past the room sram or house where the young men live; and as
they pass, the murderers throw as many pointed sticks or bamboos at the
wall or the roof as there were enemies killed. The day is spent very quietly.
Now and then they drum or blow on the conch; at other times they beat the
walls of the houses with loud shouts to drive away the ghosts of the slain.
So the Yabim of New Guinea believe that the spirit of a murdered man
pursues his murderer and seeks to do him a mischief. Hence they drive
away the spirit with shouts and the beating of drums. When the Fijians had
buried a man alive, as they often did, they used at nightfall to make a great
uproar by means of bamboos, trumpet-shells, and so forth, for the purpose
of frightening away his ghost, lest he should attempt to return to his old
home. And to render his house unattractive to him they dismantled it and
clothed it with everything that to their ideas seemed most repulsive. On the
evening of the day on which they had tortured a prisoner to death, the
American Indians were wont to run through the village with hideous yells,
beating with sticks on the furniture, the walls, and the roofs of the huts to
prevent the angry ghost of their victim from settling there and taking
vengeance for the torments that his body had endured at their hands.
"Once," says a traveller, "on approaching in the night a village of Ottawas,
I found all the inhabitants in confusion: they were all busily engaged in
raising noises of the loudest and most inharmonious kind. Upon inquiry, I
found that a battle had been lately fought between the Ottawas and the
Kickapoos, and that the object of all this noise was to prevent the ghosts of
the departed combatants from entering the village." 3
Among the Basutos "ablution is specially performed on return from battle. It
is absolutely necessary that the warriors should rid themselves, as soon as
possible, of the blood they have shed, or the shades of their victims would
pursue them incessantly, and disturb their slumbers. They go in a
procession, and in full armour, to the nearest stream. At the moment they
enter the water a diviner, placed higher up, throws some purifying
substances into the current. This is, however, not strictly necessary. The
javelins and battle-axes also undergo the process of washing." Among the
Bageshu of East Africa a man who has killed another may not return to his
own house on the same day, though he may enter the village and spend
the night in a friend's house. He kills a sheep and smears his chest, his
right arm, and his head with the contents of the animal's stomach. His
children are brought to him and he smears them in like manner. Then he
smears each side of the doorway with the tripe and entrails, and finally
throws the rest of the stomach on the roof of his house. For a whole day he
may not touch food with his hands, but picks it up with two sticks and so
conveys it to his mouth. His wife is not under any such restrictions. She
may even go to mourn for the man whom her husband has killed, if she
wishes to do so. Among the Angoni, to the north of the Zambesi, warriors
who have slain foes on an expedition smear their bodies and faces with
ashes, hang garments of their victims on their persons, and tie bark ropes
round their necks, so that the ends hang down over their shoulders or
breasts. This costume they wear for three days after their return, and rising
at break of day they run through the village uttering frightful yells to drive
away the ghosts of the slain, which, if they were not thus banished from the
houses, might bring sickness and misfortune on the inmates. 4
In some of these accounts nothing is said of an enforced seclusion, at
least after the ceremonial cleansing, but some South African tribes certainly
require the slayer of a very gallant foe in war to keep apart from his wife
and family for ten days after he has washed his body in running water. He
also receives from the tribal doctor a medicine which he chews with his
food. When a Nandi of East Africa has killed a member of another tribe, he
paints one side of his body, spear, and sword red, and the other side white.
For four days after the slaughter he is considered unclean and may not go
home. He has to build a small shelter by a river and live there; he may not
associate with his wife or sweetheart, and he may eat nothing but porridge,
beef, and goat's flesh. At the end of the fourth day he must purify himself by
taking a strong purge made from the bark of the segetet tree and by drinking
goat's milk mixed with blood. Among the Bantu tribes of Kavirondo, when a
man has killed an enemy in warfare he shaves his head on his return
home, and his friends rub a medicine, which generally consists of goat's
dung, over his body to prevent the spirit of the slain man from troubling him.
Exactly the same custom is practised for the same reason by the Wageia of
East Africa. With the Ja-Luo of Kavirondo the custom is somewhat different.
Three days after his return from the fight the warrior shaves his head. But
before he may enter his village he has to hang a live fowl, head uppermost,
round his neck; then the bird is decapitated and its head left hanging round
his neck. Soon after his return a feast is made for the slain man, in order
that his ghost may not haunt his slayer. In the Pelew Islands, when the men
return from a warlike expedition in which they have taken a life, the young
warriors who have been out fighting for the first time, and all who handled
the slain, are shut up in the large council-house and become tabooed.
They may not quit the edifice, nor bathe, nor touch a woman, nor eat fish;
their food is limited to coco-nuts and syrup. They rub themselves with
charmed leaves and chew charmed betel. After three days they go together
to bathe as near as possible to the spot where the man was killed. 5
Among the Natchez Indians of North America young braves who had
taken their first scalps were obliged to observe certain rules of abstinence
for six months. They might not sleep with their wives nor eat flesh; their only
food was fish and hasty-pudding. If they broke these rules, they believed
that the soul of the man they had killed would work their death by magic,
that they would gain no more successes over the enemy, and that the least
wound inflicted on them would prove mortal. When a Choctaw had killed an
enemy and taken his scalp, he went into mourning for a month, during
which he might not comb his hair, and if his head itched he might not
scratch it except with a little stick which he wore fastened to his wrist for the
purpose. This ceremonial mourning for the enemies they had slain was not
uncommon among the North American Indians. 6
Thus we see that warriors who have taken the life of a foe in battle are
temporarily cut off from free intercourse with their fellows, and especially
with their wives, and must undergo certain rites of purification before they
are readmitted to society. Now if the purpose of their seclusion and of the
expiatory rites which they have to perform is, as we have been led to
believe, no other than to shake off, frighten, or appease the angry spirit of
the slain man, we may safely conjecture that the similar purification of
homicides and murderers, who have imbrued their hands in the blood of a
fellow-tribesman, had at first the same significance, and that the idea of a
moral or spiritual regeneration symbolised by the washing, the fasting, and
so on, was merely a later interpretation put upon the old custom by men
who had outgrown the primitive modes of thought in which the custom
originated. The conjecture will be confirmed if we can show that savages
have actually imposed certain restrictions on the murderer of a
fellow-tribesman from a definite fear that he is haunted by the ghost of his
victim. This we can do with regard to the Omahas of North America. Among
these Indians the kinsmen of a murdered man had the right to put the
murderer to death, but sometimes they waived their right in consideration of
presents which they consented to accept. When the life of the murderer
was spared, he had to observe certain stringent rules for a period which
varied from two to four years. He must walk barefoot, and he might eat no
warm food, nor raise his voice, nor look around. He was compelled to pull
his robe about him and to have it tied at the neck even in hot weather; he
might not let it hang loose or fly open. He might not move his hands about,
but had to keep them close to his body. He might not comb his hair, and it
might not be blown about by the wind. When the tribe went out hunting, he
was obliged to pitch his tent about a quarter of mile from the rest of the
people "lest the ghost of his victim should raise a high wind, which might
cause damage." Only one of his kindred was allowed to remain with him at
his tent. No one wished to eat with him, for they said, "If we eat with him
whom Wakanda hates, Wakanda will hate us." Sometimes he wandered at
night crying and lamenting his offence. At the end of his long isolation the
kinsmen of the murdered man heard his crying and said, "It is enough.
Begone, and walk among the crowd. Put on moccasins and wear a good
robe." Here the reason alleged for keeping the murderer at a considerable
distance from the hunters gives the clue to all the other restrictions laid on
him: he was haunted and therefore dangerous. The ancient Greeks
believed that the soul of a man who had just been killed was wroth with his
slayer and troubled him; wherefore it was needful even for the involuntary
homicide to depart from his country for a year until the anger of the dead
man had cooled down; nor might the slayer return until sacrifice had been
offered and ceremonies of purification performed. If his victim chanced to be
a foreigner, the homicide had to shun the native country of the dead man
as well as his own. The legend of the matricide Orestes, how he roamed
from place to place pursued by the Furies of his murdered mother, and
none would sit at meat with him, or take him in, till he had been purified,
reflects faithfully the real Greek dread of such as were still haunted by an
angry ghost. 7