Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/160

136 us even in their most inflated descriptions of the splendour that is now departed.

Among the acquaintances which I made during my census tour was an elderly rather decrepit Kuki, with an unquenchable thirst, and a memory. My interest in him awoke when I saw his feats with the flagons of beer, but it was more than maintained when he opened to me the stores of his recollections. He had taken part in more than one notorious raid, and chuckled with glee over the discomfiture of the expeditionary columns which had wearily tramped the hills, burnt some villages,—in more than one case quite innocent villages, (at any rate so far as the immediate outrage was concerned),—and had marched home like the King of France and his forty thousand men. In all these raids on tea gardens one and only one motive was at work, the desire to secure heads to grace the funeral of some chief. My garrulous friend was not clear as to the reason why the heads were needed, or what useful purpose they served, except that their owners became the slaves of the chief in the future world. I found this belief among my Nāga tribes, and with it the view that one of the many compartments into which heaven is divided is reserved for those whose heads have been cut off.

Clearly the precise significance of head-hunting as ancillary to and as part of funeral rites can only be ascertained by consideration of funeral ritual as a whole, and of the causes which determine it. It is characteristic of funerary ritual in this area that through eschatological belief it is affected by considerations, (1) of the social status of the deceased, and (2) of the manner of his death. In life the Kuki chief is conspicuously the secular head of his village. His funeral is incomplete without the head of a human victim. His body is placed inside the trunk of a tree, —surely again a survival of note,—there