OF THE RITES WHICH ACCOMPANY AND SUCCEED THE
DEATH OF AN ABIPONE.
Death is dreadful to most mortals, but particularly so to the Abipones.
They cannot even bear the sight of a dying person. Hence, whenever any
one's life is despaired of, his fellow inmates immediately forsake the
house, or are driven away by the old women who remain to take care of
the sick, lest they should be so affected by the mournful spectacle,
that fear of death should make them shrink from endangering their lives
in battle. They are, therefore, obliged to pass many nights in another
person's tent, or in the open air. As they have very little experience
of persons dying a natural death, they do not know the signs of it when
it draws near. A short abstinence from food, unusual silence, or
sleeplessness, makes them presage approaching dissolution. As soon as a
report is spread that a man is dying, the old women, who are either
related to the person, or famed for medical skill, flock to his house.
They stand in a row round the sick man's bed, with dishevelled hair and
bare shoulders, striking a gourd, the mournful sound of which they
accompany with violent motion of the feet and arms, and loud
vociferations. She who excels the rest in age, or fame for medical
skill, stands nearest to the dying man's head, and strikes an immense
military drum, which returns a horrible bellowing. Another, who is
appointed to watch the sick man, removes every now and then the bull's
hide with which he is covered, examines his face, and if he seems yet to
breathe, sprinkles him plentifully with cold water, a jug of which is
placed under the bed. When I first witnessed these things, I pitied the
fate of the sick man, who, I feared, would be killed, if not by the
disease, at any rate by the howling of the women and the noise of the
drum, or else smothered by the weight of the hide, with which the whole
body is covered, and which is as hard and as heavy as a board. Under the
pretext of compassion, they use all this cruelty to the departing soul,
that the women may be spared the sight of his last agonies, and the
hearing of his groans.
If the respiration of the dying man be not heard at a distance like a
pair of bellows in Vulcan's workshop, and if his breath stop even for a
moment, they proclaim with a Stentorian voice, that he has given up the
ghost. A great crowd assembles on all sides, exclaiming, he is dead, he
is no more. All the married women and widows of the town crowd to the
mourning, attired as I have described before, and whilst they are
filling the streets with confused wailings, with the rattling of gourds
and beating of pans covered with stags' skins, a sudden shout is often
heard announcing, that the man whom they mourn for as dead is come to
life again. The joyous exclamation, he is revived, is instantly
substituted for the mournful howling of the women, some of whom return
home, whilst others hasten to the miserable mortal on the confines of
life and death, and torment him with their dreadful yellings, till at
last they deprive him of life. After his death, the first business of
the bystanders is to pull out the heart and tongue of the deceased, boil
them, and give them to a dog to devour, that the author of his death may
soon die also. The corpse, while yet warm, is clothed according to the
fashion of his country, wrapped in a hide, and bound with leathern
thongs, the head being covered with a cloth, or any garment at hand. The
savage Abipones will not endure the body of a dead man to remain long in
the house; while yet warm, it is conveyed on ready horses to the grave.
Women are appointed to go forward on swift steeds, to dig the grave, and
honour the funeral with lamentations. What, if we say that many of the
Abipones are buried because they are thought dead, but that in reality
they die, because they are buried? It is not unlikely that these poor
wretches are suffocated, either by the hide with which they are bound,
or by the earth which is heaped over them. But as they pull out the
heart and tongue of the deceased, it cannot be doubted that they are
dead when they are buried; though I strongly suspect that the heart is
sometimes cut out when they are half alive, and would perhaps revive
were they not prematurely deprived of this necessary instrument of life.
The savages, who hasten the burying of their dead so much, presumed to
censure us for keeping the Christian Indians out of their graves many
hours after their decease.
The Abipones think it a great happiness to be buried in a wood under the
shade of trees, and grieve for the fate of those that are interred in a
chapel, calling them captives of the Father. In the dread of such
sepulture, they at first shunned baptism. They dig a very shallow pit to
place the body in, that it may not be pressed by too great a weight of
earth heaped over it. They fill the surface of the grave with thorny
boughs, to keep off tigers, which delight in carcasses. On the top of
the sepulchre, they place an inverted pan, that if the dead man should
stand in need of water, he may not want a vessel to hold it in. They
hang a garment from a tree near the place of interment, for him to put
on if he chooses to come out of the grave. They also fix a spear near
the graves of men, that an instrument of war and the chase may be in
readiness for them. For the same purpose, beside the graves of their
Caciques, and men distinguished for military fame, they place horses,
slain with many ceremonies; a custom common to most of the equestrian
savages in Paraguay. The best horses, those which the deceased used and
delighted in most, are generally slain at the grave.
Laugh as much as you please at the sepulchral rites of the Abipones; you
cannot deny them to be a proof of their believing in the immortality of
the soul. They know that something of them will survive after death,
which will last to all eternity, and never die; but what becomes of that
immortal thing, which we call the soul, and they the image, shade, or
echo, when it is separated from the body, and whether it will enjoy
pleasures or receive punishments, they never think of enquiring. The
southern savages believe that it dwells under the earth in tents, and
employs itself in hunting, and that the spirits of dead emus descend
along with it to the same subterranean abode. The Abipones, who do not
credit such idle tales, believe that some part of them survives the
death of the body, and that it exists somewhere, but they openly confess
themselves ignorant of the place and other circumstances. They fear the
manes or shades of the defunct, and believe that they become visible to
the living when invoked by a magic incantation, to be interrogated
concerning future things. As I was passing the night on the banks of the
Parana, the Abipones, my companions, hearing their voices re-echoed
against the trees, and windings of the shores, attributed the
circumstance to ghosts and disembodied spirits wandering in these
solitudes, till I explained to them the nature of an echo. They call
little ducks, which fly about in flocks at night uttering a mournful
hiss, the shades of the dead. These, and other circumstances, which I
have related elsewhere, prove that the Abipones believe in the
immortality of the soul.
It is incredible how religiously the Abipones perform the sepulchral
honours of their friends. If they see one of their comrades fall in
battle they snatch the lifeless body from the midst of the enemies to
bury it properly in its native soil. To lessen the burden, they strip
off the flesh and bury it in the ground; the bones they put into a hide,
and carry home on a horse, a journey not unfrequently of two hundred
leagues. But if the enemy presses on them, and they are forced to leave
the body on the field of battle, the relations seek for the bones on the
first opportunity, and take no rest till they find them, however much
risk and labour must be encountered in accomplishing this. Moreover, the
Abipones are not content with any sepulchre, but take especial care that
fathers may lie with their sons, wives with their husbands,
grandchildren with their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and that
every family should have its own burying-place. This nation, having
formerly inhabited more towards the north, know that their ancestors'
monuments exist there, and venerate them as something divine. They feel
the most lively pleasure in mingling the bones of their countrymen,
wherever, amidst their perpetual peregrinations, they may have been
buried, with the bones of their ancestors. Hence it is that they dig
them up and remove them so often, and carry them over immense tracts of
land, till at length they repose in the ancient and woody mausoleum of
their forefathers; which they distinguish by certain marks cut in the
trees, and by other signs taught them by their ancestors. The Brazilians
and Guaranies formerly disliked the trouble of digging pits for
sepulchres. These hungry anthropophagi buried within their own bowels
the flesh of those that yielded to fate. It must be confessed however
that the Guaranies of after-times, more humane than their ancestors,
placed dead bodies in clay pitchers. Seeking the savages in Mbaeverà in
the midst of the woods, I met with a plain artificially made, the trees
being cut down for the purpose, and there I found three pitchers of this
kind, each of which would contain a man, but all empty. The bottoms of
the pitchers were placed toward the sky, the mouth towards the ground.
But from sepulchres, let us hasten to funeral obsequies.