Section 8. Disposal of Cut Hair and Nails.
BUT even when the hair and nails have been safely cut, there
remains the difficulty of disposing of them, for their owner believes
himself liable to suffer from any harm that may befall them. The
notion that a man may be bewitched by means of the clippings of
his hair, the parings of his nails, or any other severed portion of his
person is almost world-wide, and attested by evidence too ample,
too familiar, and too tedious in its uniformity to be here analysed at
length. The general idea on which the superstition rests is that of
the sympathetic connexion supposed to persist between a person
and everything that has once been part of his body or in any way
closely related to him. A very few examples must suffice. They
belong to that branch of sympathetic magic which may be called
contagious. Dread of sorcery, we are told, formed one of the most
salient characteristics of the Marquesan islanders in the old days.
The sorcerer took some of the hair, spittle, or other bodily refuse of
the man he wished to injure, wrapped it up in a leaf, and placed
the packet in a bag woven of threads or fibres, which were knotted
in an intricate way. The whole was then buried with certain rites,
and thereupon the victim wasted away of a languishing sickness
which lasted twenty days. His life, however, might be saved by
discovering and digging up the buried hair, spittle, or what not; for
as soon as this was done the power of the charm ceased. A Maori
sorcerer intent on bewitching somebody sought to get a tress of his
victim's hair, the parings of his nails, some of his spittle, or a shred
of his garment. Having obtained the object, whatever it was, he
chanted certain spells and curses over it in a falsetto voice and
buried it in the ground. As the thing decayed, the person to whom it
had belonged was supposed to waste away. When an Australian
blackfellow wishes to get rid of his wife, he cuts off a lock of her
hair in her sleep, ties it to his spear-thrower, and goes with it to a
neighbouring tribe, where he gives it to a friend. His friend sticks
the spear-thrower up every night before the camp fire, and when it
falls down it is a sign that the wife is dead. The way in which the
charm operates was explained to Dr. Howitt by a Wirajuri man.
"You see," he said, "when a blackfellow doctor gets hold of
something belonging to a man and roasts it with things, and sings
over it, the fire catches hold of the smell of the man, and that settles
the poor fellow." 1
The Huzuls of the Carpathians imagine that if mice get a person's
shorn hair and make a nest of it, the person will suffer from
headache or even become idiotic. Similarly in Germany it is a
common notion that if birds find a person's cut hair, and build their
nests with it, the person will suffer from headache; sometimes it is
thought that he will have an eruption on the head. The same
superstition prevails, or used to prevail, in West Sussex. 2
Again it is thought that cut or combed-out hair may disturb the
weather by producing rain and hail, thunder and lightning. We
have seen that in New Zealand a spell was uttered at hair-cutting
to avert thunder and lightning. In the Tyrol, witches are supposed to
use cut or combed-out hair to make hailstones or thunderstorms
with. Thlinkeet Indians have been known to attribute stormy weather
to the rash act of a girl who had combed her hair outside of the
house. The Romans seem to have held similar views, for it was a
maxim with them that no one on shipboard should cut his hair or
nails except in a storm, that is, when the mischief was already
done. In the Highlands of Scotland it is said that no sister should
comb her hair at night if she have a brother at sea. In West Africa,
when the Mani of Chitombe or Jumba died, the people used to run
in crowds to the corpse and tear out his hair, teeth, and nails,
which they kept as a rain-charm, believing that otherwise no rain
would fall. The Makoko of the Anzikos begged the missionaries to
give him half their beards as a rain-charm. 3
If cut hair and nails remain in sympathetic connexion with the
person from whose body they have been severed, it is clear that
they can be used as hostages for his good behaviour by any one
who may chance to possess them; for on the principles of
contagious magic he has only to injure the hair or nails in order to
hurt simultaneously their original owner. Hence when the Nandi
have taken a prisoner they shave his head and keep the shorn hair
as a surety that he will not attempt to escape; but when the captive
is ransomed, they return his shorn hair with him to his own
people. 4
To preserve the cut hair and nails from injury and from the
dangerous uses to which they may be put by sorcerers, it is
necessary to deposit them in some safe place. The shorn locks of a
Maori chief were gathered with much care and placed in an
adjoining cemetery. The Tahitians buried the cuttings of their hair at
the temples. In the streets of Soku a modern traveller observed
cairns of large stones piled against walls with tufts of human hair
inserted in the crevices. On asking the meaning of this, he was told
that when any native of the place polled his hair he carefully
gathered up the clippings and deposited them in one of these
cairns, all of which were sacred to the fetish and therefore
inviolable. These cairns of sacred stones, he further learned, were
simply a precaution against witchcraft, for if a man were not thus
careful in disposing of his hair, some of it might fall into the hands
of his enemies, who would, by means of it, be able to cast spells
over him and so compass his destruction. When the top-knot of a
Siamese child has been cut with great ceremony, the short hairs
are put into a little vessel made of plantain leaves and set adrift on
the nearest river or canal. As they float away, all that was wrong or
harmful in the child's disposition is believed to depart with them.
The long hairs are kept till the child makes a pilgrimage to the holy
Footprint of Buddha on the sacred hill at Prabat. They are then
presented to the priests, who are supposed to make them into
brushes with which they sweep the Footprint; but in fact so much
hair is thus offered every year that the priests cannot use it all, so
they quietly burn the superfluity as soon as the pilgrims' backs are
turned. The cut hair and nails of the Flamen Dialis were buried
under a lucky tree. The shorn tresses of the Vestal Virgins were
hung on an ancient lotus-tree. 5
Often the clipped hair and nails are stowed away in any secret
place, not necessarily in a temple or cemetery or at a tree, as in
the cases already mentioned. Thus in Swabia you are
recommended to deposit your clipped hair in some spot where
neither sun nor moon can shine on it, for example in the earth or
under a stone. In Danzig it is buried in a bag under the threshold. In
Ugi, one of the Solomon Islands, men bury their hair lest it should
fall into the hands of an enemy, who would make magic with it and
so bring sickness or calamity on them. The same fear seems to be
general in Melanesia, and has led to a regular practice of hiding
cut hair and nails. The same practice prevails among many tribes
of South Africa, from a fear lest wizards should get hold of the
severed particles and work evil with them. The Caffres carry still
further this dread of allowing any portion of themselves to fall into
the hands of an enemy; for not only do they bury their cut hair and
nails in a secret spot, but when one of them cleans the head of
another he preserves the vermin which he catches, "carefully
delivering them to the person to whom they originally appertained,
supposing, according to their theory, that as they derived their
support from the blood of the man from whom they were taken,
should they be killed by another, the blood of his neighbour would
be in his possession, thus placing in his hands the power of some
superhuman influence." 6
Sometimes the severed hair and nails are preserved, not to
prevent them from falling into the hands of a magician, but that the
owner may have them at the resurrection of the body, to which
some races look forward. Thus the Incas of Peru "took extreme care
to preserve the nail-parings and the hairs that were shorn off or
torn out with a comb; placing them in holes or niches in the walls;
and if they fell out, any other Indian that saw them picked them up
and put them in their places again. I very often asked different
Indians, at various times, why they did this, in order to see what
they would say, and they all replied in the same words saying,
`Know that all persons who are born must return to life' (they have
no word to express resurrection), `and the souls must rise out of
their tombs with all that belonged to their bodies. We, therefore, in
order that we may not have to search for our hair and nails at a
time when there will be much hurry and confusion, place them in
one place, that they may be brought together more conveniently,
and, whenever it is possible, we are also careful to spit in one
place.'" Similarly the Turks never throw away the parings of their
nails, but carefully stow them in cracks of the walls or of the
boards, in the belief that they will be needed at the resurrection.
The Armenians do not throw away their cut hair and nails and
extracted teeth, but hide them in places that are esteemed holy,
such as a crack in the church wall, a pillar of the house, or a
hollow tree. They think that all these severed portions of themselves
will be wanted at the resurrection, and that he who has not stowed
them away in a safe place will have to hunt about for them on the
great day. In the village of Drumconrath in Ireland there used to be
some old women who, having ascertained from Scripture that the
hairs of their heads were all numbered by the Almighty, expected to
have to account for them at the day of judgment. In order to be able
to do so they stuffed the severed hair away in the thatch of their
cottages. 7
Some people burn their loose hair to save it from falling into the
hands of sorcerers. This is done by the Patagonians and some of
the Victorian tribes. In the Upper Vosges they say that you should
never leave the clippings of your hair and nails lying about, but
burn them to hinder the sorcerers from using them against you. For
the same reason Italian women either burn their loose hairs or throw
them into a place where no one is likely to look for them. The
almost universal dread of witchcraft induces the West African
negroes, the Makololo of South Africa, and the Tahitians to burn or
bury their shorn hair. In the Tyrol many people burn their hair lest
the witches should use it to raise thunderstorms; others burn or bury
it to prevent the birds from lining their nests with it, which would
cause the heads from which the hair came to ache. 8
This destruction of the hair and nails plainly involves an
inconsistency of thought. The object of the destruction is avowedly
to prevent these severed portions of the body from being used by
sorcerers. But the possibility of their being so used depends upon
the supposed sympathetic connexion between them and the man
from whom they were severed. And if this sympathetic connexion
still exists, clearly these severed portions cannot be destroyed
without injury to the man. 9
