The conjecture that the practice of cutting out the tongues of dead animals may sometimes be a precaution to prevent their ghosts from telling tales, is to some extent confirmed by a ceremony which the Bechuanas used to observe after a battle. It was customary with them on these occasions to sacrifice a fine black ox, called the expiatory victim (pekou), cut off the tip of its tongue, and extract one of its eyes together with a piece of the hamstring and a piece of the principal tendon of the shoulder; and the severed parts were afterwards carefully fried, along with some medicinal herbs, in a horn by a medicine-man. The reasons for thus mutilating the animal were explained by a native to two French missionaries. “If we cut out and purify the victim's tongue,” said he, “the motive is to induce the guardian deities to prevent the enemy from speaking ill of us. We ask also that the sinews of their feet and hands may fail them in the battle; and that their eyes may not cast a covetous look on our herds.”792 In this custom the sacrificial ox appears to be treated as the ceremonial equivalent of the enemy; accordingly by cutting out its tongue you obviously prevent your enemy from cursing you, for how can he curse you if he has no tongue? Similarly, by hamstringing the beast you ensure that the legs and arms of your adversary will fail him in the battle, and by gouging out the ox's eye you make perfectly certain that the foe will never be able to cast a longing eye on your fat beeves. Thus for all practical purposes the mutilation of the ox is quite as effective as the mutilation of the enemy's dead, which is sometimes practised by savages from similar superstitious motives. Thus on the return from a field of battle the Baganda used to cut up one or two of the enemy's dead, scoop out the eyes, cut off the ears, and lay the limbs on the road taken by the returning army “to [pg 272] prevent evil following them.”793 The nature of the evil which the Baganda warriors feared to incur if they did not mutilate the dead in this fashion, is not mentioned, but we may conjecture that by gouging out the eyes and ears of their slain foes they hoped to make their angry ghosts blind and deaf; or perhaps, upon the principles of homoeopathic magic, they counted on maiming their living foes in like manner. Some of the aborigines of Australia cut off the thumbs of their dead enemies in order that their ghosts may not be able to throw spears.794 Other Australian tribes burn off the thumb nails of their own dead to prevent the poor ghost from scratching a way for himself out of the grave.795 When the Tupi Indians of Brazil killed and ate a prisoner, “the thumb was cut off because of its use in archery, an art concerning which they were singularly superstitious; what was done with it does not appear, except that it was not eaten like the rest.”796 Perhaps these Indians, like the Australians, thought by this mutilation to disarm the dangerous ghost of their victim. When any bad man died, the Esquimaux of Bering Strait used to cut the sinews of his arms and legs, “in order to prevent the shade from returning to the body and causing it to walk at night as a ghoul.”797 In Travancore the ghosts of men who have been hanged for murder are particularly dreaded; so in order to incapacitate them from roaming about and attacking people, it used to be customary to slice off a criminal's heels with a sword or hamstring him at the moment when he swung free from the ladder.798 The Omaha Indians used to slit the soles of a man who had been killed by lightning in order to prevent his ghost from walking.799 Among the Awemba of [pg 273] Northern Rhodesia murderers often inflicted shocking mutilations on the bodies of their victims. “This was done, it is said, to prevent the spirit of the murdered person from exacting vengeance, and even if only the joint of the first or the little finger were cut off, such mutilation would suffice for this purpose.”800 These examples suggest that many other mutilations which savages practise on their dead enemies may spring, not from the blind fury of hatred, but from a cool calculation of the best mode of protecting themselves against the very natural resentment of the ghosts; by mutilating the corpse they apparently hope to maim the ghost and so to render him incapable of harming them. At all events it appears that in certain circumstances some savages treat the dead bodies of men and beasts much alike, by hamstringing them in order to prevent their ghosts from getting up and walking. So consistent and impartial is the primitive philosopher in his attitude to the spirit world.