Though we usually think of scalp-taking in connexion with the North American Indians, yet it is not restricted to them. Herodotus describes the Scythians as scalping their conquered enemies; and at the present time the Nagas of the Indian hills take scalps and preserve them.

Preservation of hair alone, as a trophy, is less general; doubtless because the evidence of victory which it yields is inconclusive: one head might supply hair for two trophies. Still there are cases in which an enemy’s hair is displayed in proof of success in war. Speaking of a Naga, Grange says his shield “was covered over with the hair of the foes he had killed.” The tunic of a Mandan chief is described as “fringed with locks of hair taken by his own hand from the heads of his enemies.” And we read of the Cochimis that “at certain festivals their sorcerers . . . wore long robes of skin, ornamented with human hair.”

§ 353. Among easily-transported parts carried home to prove victory, may next be named hands and feet. By the Mexican tribes, Ceris and Opatas, “the slain are scalped, or a hand is cut off, and a dance performed round the trophies on the field of battle.” So, too, of the California Indians, who also took scalps, we are told that “the yet more barbarous habit of cutting off the hands, feet, or head of a fallen enemy, as trophies of victory, prevailed more widely. They also plucked out and carefully preserved the eyes of the slain.” Though this is not said, we may assume that either the right or the left foot or hand was the trophy; since, in the absence of any distinction, victory over two enemies instead of one might be alleged. In one case, indeed, I find the distinction noted. “The right hands of the slain were hung up by both parties [of hostile Khonds] on the trees of the villages.” Hands were trophies among ancient peoples of the old world also. The inscription on a tomb at El Kab in Upper Egypt, tells how Aahmes, the son of Abuna, the chief of the steersmen, “when he had won a hand [in battle], he received the king’s commendation, and the golden necklace in token of his bravery;” and a wall-painting in the temple of Medinet Abou at Thebes, shows the presentation of a heap of hands to the king.

This last instance introduces us to yet another kind of Edition: current; Page: [45] trophy. Along with the heap of hands thus laid before the king, there is represented a phallic heap; and an accompanying inscription, narrating the victory of Meneptah I. over the Libyans, besides mentioning the “cut hands of all their auxiliaries,” as being carried on donkeys following the returning army, mentions these other trophies as taken from men of the Libyan nation. And here a natural transition brings us to trophies of an allied kind, the taking of which, once common, has continued in the neighbourhood of Egypt down to modern times. The great significance of the account Bruce gives of a practice among the Abyssinians, must be my excuse for quoting part of it. He says:—

“At the end of a day of battle, each chief is obliged to sit at the door of his tent, and each of his followers who has slain a man, presents himself in his turn, armed as in fight, with the bloody foreskin of the man he has slain. . . . If he has killed more than one man, so many more times he returns. . . . After this ceremony is over, each man takes his bloody conquest, and retires to prepare it in the same manner the Indians do their scalps. . . . The whole army . . . on a particular day of review, throws them before the king, and leaves them at the gate of the palace.”

Here it is noteworthy that the trophy, first serving to demonstrate a victory gained by the individual warrior, is subsequently made an offering to the ruler, and further becomes a means of recording the number slain: facts verified by the more recent French traveller d’Hericourt. That like purposes were similarly served among the Hebrews, proof is yielded by the passage which narrates Saul’s endeavour to betray David when offering him Michal to wife:—“And Saul said, Thus shall ye say to David, The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines, to be avenged of the king’s enemies;” and David “slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and gave them in full tale to the king.”

§ 354. Associated with the direct motive for taking trophies there is an indirect motive, which probably aids considerably in developing the custom. When treating of primitive ideas, we saw that the unanalytical mind of the savage thinks the qualities of any object beside in all its parts; and that, among others, the qualities of human beings are thus conceived by him. From this we found there arise such customs as swallowing parts of the bodies of dead relatives, or their ground bones in water, with the view of inheriting their virtues; devouring the heart of a slain brave to gain his courage, or his eyes in the expectation of seeing further; avoiding the flesh of certain timid animals, lest their timidity should be acquired. A further implication of this belief that the spirit of each person is diffused throughout him, is, that possession of a part of his body gives possession of a part of his spirit, and, consequently, a power over his spirit: one corollary being that anything done to a preserved part of a corpse is done to the corresponding part of the ghost; and that thus a ghost may be coerced by maltreating a relic. Hence, as before pointed out (§ 133), the origin of sorcery; hence the rattle of dead men’s bones so prevalent with primitive medicine-men; hence “the powder ground from the bones of the dead” used by the Peruvian necromancers; hence the portions of corpses which our own traditions of witchcraft name as used in composing charms.

Besides proving victory over an enemy, the trophy therefore serves for the subjugation of his ghost; and that possession of it is, at any rate in some cases, supposed to make his ghost a slave, we have good evidence. The primitive belief everywhere found, that the doubles of men and animals slain at the grave, accompany the double of the deceased, to serve him in the other world—the belief which leads here to the immolation of wives, who are to manage the future household of the departed, there to the sacrifice of horses needed to carry him on his journey after death, Edition: current; Page: [47] and elsewhere to the killing of dogs as guides; is a belief which, in many places, initiates the kindred belief that, by placing portions of bodies on his tomb, the men and animals they belonged to are made subject to the deceased. We are shown this by the bones of cattle, &c., with which graves are in many cases decorated; by the placing on graves the heads of enemies or slaves, as above indicated; and by a like use of the scalp. Concerning the Osages, Mr. Tylor cites the fact that they sometimes “plant on the cairn raised over a corpse a pole with an enemy’s scalp hanging to the top. Their notion was that by taking an enemy and suspending his scalp over the grave of a deceased friend, the spirit of the victim became subjected to the spirit of the buried warrior in the land of spirits.” The Ojibways have a like practice, of which a like idea is probably the cause.

§ 355. A collateral development of trophy-taking, which eventually has a share in governmental regulation, must not be forgotten. I refer to the display of parts of the bodies of criminals.

In our more advanced minds the enemy, the criminal, and the slave, are well discriminated; but they are little discriminated by the primitive man. Almost or quite devoid as he is of the feelings and ideas we call moral—holding by force whatever he owns, wresting from a weaker man the woman or other object he has possession of, killing his own child without hesitation if it is an incumbrance, or his wife if she offends him, and sometimes proud of being a recognized killer of his fellow-tribesmen; the savage has no distinct ideas of right and wrong in the abstract. The immediate pleasures or pains they give are his sole reasons for classing things and acts as good or bad. Hence hostility, and the injuries he suffers from it, excite in him the same feeling whether the aggressor is without the tribe or within it: the enemy and the felon are undistinguished. This confusion, now seeming Edition: current; Page: [48] strange to us, we shall understand better on remembering that even in early stages of civilized nations, the family-groups which formed the units of the national group, were in large measure independent communities, standing to one another on terms much like those on which the nation stood to other nations. They had their small blood-feuds as the nation had its great blood-feuds. Each family-group was responsible to other family-groups for the acts of its members, as each nation to other nations for the acts of its citizens. Vengeance was taken on innocent members of a sinning family, as vengeance was taken on innocent citizens of a sinning nation. And thus in various ways the inter-family aggressor (answering to the modern criminal), stood in a like relative position with the inter-national aggressor. Hence the naturalness of the fact that he was similarly treated. Already we have seen how, in mediæval days, the heads of destroyed family-enemies (murderers of its members or stealers of its property) were exhibited as trophies. And since Strabo, writing of the Gauls and other northern peoples, says that the heads of foes slain in battle were brought back and sometimes nailed to the chief door of the house, while, up to the time of the Salic law, the heads of slain private foes were fixed on stakes in front of it; we have evidence that identification of the public and the private foe was associated with the practice of taking trophies from them both. A kindred alliance is traceable in the usages of the Jews. Along with the slain Nicanor’s head, Judas orders that his hand be cut off; and he brings both with him to Jerusalem as trophies: the hand being that which he had stretched out in blasphemous boasts. And this treatment of the transgressor who is an alien, is paralleled in the treatment of non-alien transgressors by David, who, besides hanging up the corpses of the men who had slain Ishbosheth, “cut off their hands and their feet.”

It may, then, be reasonably inferred that display of Edition: current; Page: [49] executed felons on gibbets, or their heads on spikes, originates from the bringing back of trophies taken from slain enemies. Though usually a part only of the slain enemy is fixed up, yet sometimes the whole body is; as when the dead Saul, minus his head, was fastened by the Philistines to the wall of Bethshan. And that fixing up a felon’s body is more frequent, probably arises from the fact that it has not to be brought from a great distance, as would usually have to be the body of an enemy.

§ 356. Though no direct connexion exists between trophy-taking and ceremonial government, the foregoing facts reveal such indirect connexions as to make it needful to note the custom. It enters as a factor into the three forms of control—social, political, and religious.

If, in primitive states, men are honoured according to their prowess—if their prowess is estimated here by the number of heads they can show, there by the number of jaw-bones, and elsewhere by the number of scalps,—if such trophies are treasured up for generations, and the pride of families is proportioned to the number of them taken by ancestors—if of the Gauls in the time of Posidonius, we read that “the heads of their enemies that were the chiefest persons of quality, they carefully deposit in chests, embalming them with the oil of cedars, showing them to strangers, glory and boast” that they or their forefathers had refused great sums of money for them; then, obviously, a kind of class distinction is initiated by trophies. On reading that in some places a man’s rank varies with the quantity of bones in or upon his dwelling, we cannot deny that the display of these proofs of personal superiority, originates a regulative influence in social intercourse.

As political control evolves, trophy-taking becomes in several ways instrumental to the maintenance of authority. Beyond the awe felt for the chief whose many trophies show his powers of destruction, there comes the greater Edition: current; Page: [50] awe which, on growing into a king with subordinate chiefs and dependent tribes, he excites by accumulating the trophies others take on his behalf; rising into dread when he exhibits in numbers the relics of slain rulers. As the practice assumes this developed form, the receipt of such vicariously-taken trophies passes into a political ceremony. The heap of hands laid before an ancient Egyptian king, served to propitiate; as now serves the mass of jawbones sent by an Ashantee captain to the court. When we read of Timour’s soldiers that “their cruelty was enforced by the peremptory command of producing an adequate number of heads,” we are conclusively shown that the presentation of trophies hardens into a form expressing obedience. Nor is it thus only that a political effect results. There is the governmental restraint produced by fixing up the bodies or heads of the insubordinate and the felonious.

Though offering part of a slain enemy to propitiate a ghost, does not enter into what is commonly called religious ceremonial, yet it obviously so enters when the aim is to propitiate a god developed from an ancestral ghost. We are shown the transition by such a fact as that in a battle between two tribes of Khonds, the first man who “slew his opponent, struck off his right arm and rushed with it to the priest in the rear, who bore it off as an offering to Laha Pennoo in his grave:” Laha Pennoo being their “God of Arms.” Joining with this such other facts as that before the Tahitian god Oro, human immolations were frequent, and the preserved relics were built into walls “formed entirely of human skulls,” which were “principally, if not entirely the skulls of those slain in battle;” we are shown that gods are worshipped by bringing to them, and accumulating round their shrines, these portions of enemies killed—killed, very often, in fulfilment of their supposed commands. This inference is verified on seeing similarly used other kinds of spoils. The Philistines, besides otherwise displaying relics of the dead Saul, put “his Edition: current; Page: [51] armour in the house of Ashtaroth.” By the Greeks the trophy formed of arms, shields, and helmets taken from the defeated, was consecrated to some divinity; and the Romans deposited the spoils of battle in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Similarly among the Fijians, who are solicitous in every way to propitiate their blood-thirsty deities, “when flags are taken they are always hung up as trophies in the mbure,” or temple. That hundreds of gilt spurs of French knights vanquished by the Flemish in the battle of Courtrai, were deposited in the church of that place, and that in France flags taken from enemies were suspended from the vaults of cathedrals (a practice not unknown in Protestant England), are facts which might be joined with these, did not joining them imply the impossible supposition that Christians think to please “the God of love” by acts like those used to please the diabolical gods of cannibals.

Because of inferences to be hereafter drawn, one remaining general truth must be named, though it is so obvious as to seem scarcely worth mention. Trophy-taking is directly related to militancy. It begins during a primitive life that is wholly occupied in fighting men and animals; it develops with the growth of conquering societies in which perpetual wars generate the militant type of structure; it diminishes as growing industrialism more and more substitutes productive activities for destructive activities; and complete industrialism necessitates entire cessation of it.

The chief significance of trophy-taking, however, has yet to be pointed out. The reason for here dealing with it, though in itself scarcely to be classed as a ceremony, is that it furnishes us with the key to numerous ceremonies prevailing all over the world among the uncivilized and semicivilized. From the practice of cutting off and taking away portions of the dead body, there grows up the practice of cutting off portions of the living body.