The special selection and preservation of the head as an object of worship thus noted in New Guinea and the Malay Archipelago is also still found among many other primitive peoples. For instance, the Andamanese widows keep the skulls of their husbands as a precious possession: and the New Caledonians, in case of sickness or calamities, “present offerings of food to the skulls of the departed.” Mr. Spencer quotes several similar examples, a few of which alone I extract from his pages.
“‘In the private fetish-hut of King Adolee, at Badagry, the skull of that monarch’s father is preserved in a clay vessel placed in the earth.’ He ‘gently rebukes it if his success does not happen to answer his expectations.’ Similarly among the Mandans, who place the skulls of their dead in a circle, each wife knows the skull of her former husband or child, ‘and there seldom passes a day that she does not visit it, with a dish of the best cooked food.... There is scarcely an hour in a pleasant day, but more or less of these women may be seen sitting or lying by the skull of their child or husband--talking to it in the most pleasant and endearing language that they can use (as they were wont to do in former days), and seemingly getting an answer back.’”
This { 071}affectionate type of converse with the dead, almost free from fear, is especially characteristic of the first or corpse-preserving stage of human death-conceptions. It seldom survives where burial has made the feeling toward the corpse a painful or loathsome one, and it is then confined to the head alone, while the grave itself with the body it encloses is rather shunned and dreaded.
A little above this level, Mr. Du Chaillu notes that some of his West African followers, when going on an expedition, brought out the skulls of their ancestors (which they religiously preserved) and scraped off small portions of the bone, which they mixed with water and drank; giving as a reason for this conduct that their ancestors were brave, and that by drinking a portion of them they too became brave and fearless like their ancestors. Here we have a simple and early case of that habit of “eating the god” to whose universality and importance Mr. Frazer has so forcibly called attention, and which we must examine at full in a subsequent chapter.