Ritual and belief : $b Studies in the history of religionHartland, Edwin Sidney
Religion
Ritual and belief : $b Studies in the history of religion
Hartland, Edwin Sidney
Ethnopsychology; Magic; Religion; Rites and ceremonies
head.[261.4] And of many peoples the description by a French writer
of the mourning garb among the Agni of Sanwi on the Ivory Coast would
hold literally true: “Old black loin-cloths, unwashed for a long time.
_On ne se peigne pas--on ne fait pas de toilette--on reste
modeste._”[261.5]
This is not all. Mourners fast, abstaining altogether from food or
indulging only in restricted diet, and that of an inferior kind. On
the island of Aurora all who are in mourning refrain from certain
food. The immediate relatives may not eat any cultivated food. {262}
They are limited to gigantic caladium, bread-fruit, cocoa-nuts,
mallow, and other things which must be sought in the bush where they
grow.[262.1] The ancient Hurons were forbidden, even in cold weather,
to eat warm food.[262.2] Among the Charruas of South America the
adult sons of a dead man remain for two days entirely naked in their
huts and almost without food.[262.3] In Togoland the Ewhe widow is
forbidden beans, flesh, fish, palm-wine and rum; any infringement of
these prohibitions would cost her life.[262.4]
Many nations add to their other rites that of laceration or even
mutilation of the body. In Central Australia the Warramunga women
fight with one another and cut one another’s scalps, and all who stand
in any near relation to the deceased, reckoned according to the
classificatory system--which greatly widens the area of
relationship--also cut their own scalps open with yam-sticks, the
actual widows even searing the wound with red-hot fire-sticks.[262.5]
It was forbidden to the ancient Hebrews, by what was evidently a
reform of a pre-existing custom, to make a baldness between the eyes
for the dead--in other words, to cut themselves on the brow.[262.6]
Among the Arawaks a drinking-feast is held, at which all the men of
the village assemble and scourge one another with whips made of a
climbing plant, until the blood runs in streams and strips of skin and
muscle hang down. Those who participate in the rite often die of their
wounds.[262.7] As if mere wounding were not enough, {263}
finger-joints are frequently cut off. In the Fiji Islands the
amputation of a finger-joint is a common sign of mourning. In one case
in Tonga when a king died orders were issued that one hundred fingers
should be cut off.[263.1] In Montana, one of the north-western states
of America, on the execution of four aborigines for murder in December
1890, they were mourned by two squaws, who scalped their children. One
of them gashed her own face, while the other cut off two of her
fingers and threw them into the grave.[263.2] When a Charrua dies his
widow and his married daughters and sisters amputate each of them a
finger-joint, besides inflicting other wounds on themselves.[263.3]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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