§ 5. Seclusion of Girls at Puberty among the Indians of South America

[Seclusion of girls at puberty among the Guaranis, Chiriguanos, and Lengua Indians of South America.]

When symptoms of puberty appeared on a girl for the first time, the Guaranis of Southern Brazil, on the borders of Paraguay, used to sew her up in her hammock, leaving only a small opening in it to allow her to breathe. In this condition, wrapt up and shrouded like a corpse, she was kept for two or three days or so long as the symptoms lasted, and during this time she had to observe a most rigorous fast. After that she was entrusted to a matron, who cut the girl's hair and enjoined her to abstain most strictly from eating flesh of any kind until her hair should be grown long enough to hide her ears. Meanwhile the diviners drew omens of her future character from the various birds or animals that flew past or crossed her path. If they saw a parrot, they would say she was a chatterbox; if an owl, she was lazy and useless for domestic labours, and so on. 132 In similar circumstances the Chiriguanos of southeastern Bolivia hoisted the girl in her hammock to the roof, where she stayed for a month: the second month the hammock was let half-way down from the roof; and in the third month old women, armed with sticks, entered the hut and ran about striking everything they met, saying they were hunting the snake that had wounded the girl. 133 The Lengua Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco under similar circumstances hang the girl in her hammock from the roof of the house, but they leave her there only three days and nights, during which they give her nothing to eat but a little Paraguay tea or boiled maize. Only her mother or grandmother has access to her; nobody else approaches or speaks to her. If she is obliged to leave the hammock for a little, her friends take great care to prevent her from touching the Boyrusu, which is an imaginary serpent that would swallow her up. She must also be very careful not to set foot on the droppings of fowls or animals, else she would suffer from sores on the throat and breast. On the third day they let her down from the hammock, cut her hair, and make her sit in a corner of the room with her face turned to the wall. She may speak to nobody, and must abstain from flesh and fish. These rigorous observances she must practise for nearly a year. Many girls die or are injured for life in consequence of the hardships they endure at this time. Their only occupations during their seclusion are spinning and weaving. 134

[Seclusion of girls at puberty among the Yuracares of Bolivia.]

Among the Yuracares, an Indian tribe of Bolivia, at the eastern foot of the Andes, when a girl perceives the signs of puberty, she informs her parents. The mother weeps and the father constructs a little hut of palm leaves near the house. In this cabin he shuts up his daughter so that she cannot see the light, and there she remains fasting rigorously for four days. Meantime the mother, assisted by the women of the neighbourhood, has brewed a large quantity of the native intoxicant called chicha, and poured it into wooden troughs and palm leaves. On the morning of the fourth day, three hours before the dawn, the girl's father, having arrayed himself in his savage finery, summons all his neighbours with loud cries. The damsel is seated on a stone, and every guest in turn cuts off a lock of her hair, and running away hides it in the hollow trunk of a tree in the depths of the forest. When they have all done so and seated themselves again gravely in the circle, the girl offers to each of them a calabash full of very strong chicha. Before the wassailing begins, the various fathers perform a curious operation on the arms of their sons, who are seated beside them. The operator takes a very sharp bone of an ape, rubs it with a pungent spice, and then pinching up the skin of his son's arm he pierces it with the bone through and through, as a surgeon might introduce a seton. This operation he repeats till the young man's arm is riddled with holes at regular intervals from the shoulder to the wrist. Almost all who take part in the festival are covered with these wounds, which the Indians call culucute. Having thus prepared themselves to spend a happy day, they drink, play on flutes, sing and dance till evening. Rain, thunder, and lightning, should they befall, have no effect in damping the general enjoyment or preventing its continuance till after the sun has set. The motive for perforating the arms of the young men is to make them skilful hunters; at each perforation the sufferer is cheered by the promise of another sort of game or fish which the surgical operation will infallibly procure for him. The same operation is performed on the arms and legs of the girls, in order that they may be brave and strong; even the dogs are operated on with the intention of making them run down the game better. For five or six months afterwards the damsel must cover her head with bark and refrain from speaking to men. The Yuracares think that if they did not submit a young girl to this severe ordeal, her children would afterwards perish by accidents of various kinds, such as the sting of a serpent, the bite of a jaguar, the fall of a tree, the wound of an arrow, or what not. 135

[Seclusion of girls at puberty among the Indians of the Gran Chaco.]

Among the Matacos or Mataguayos, an Indian tribe of the Gran Chaco, a girl at puberty has to remain in seclusion for some time. She lies covered up with branches or other things in a corner of the hut, seeing no one and speaking to no one, and during this time she may eat neither flesh nor fish. Meantime a man beats a drum in front of the house. 136 Similarly among the Tobas, another Indian tribe of the same region, when a chief's daughter has just attained to womanhood, she is shut up for two or three days in the house, all the men of the tribe scour the country to bring in game and fish for a feast, and a Mataco Indian is engaged to drum, sing, and dance in front of the house without cessation, day and night, till the festival is over. As the merrymaking lasts for two or three weeks, the exhaustion of the musician at the end of it may be readily conceived. Meat and drink are supplied to him on the spot where he pays his laborious court to the Muses. The proceedings wind up with a saturnalia and a drunken debauch. 137 Among the Yaguas, an Indian tribe of the Upper Amazon, a girl at puberty is shut up for three months in a lonely hut in the forest, where her mother brings her food daily. 138 When a girl of the Peguenches tribe perceives in herself the first signs of womanhood, she is secluded by her mother in a corner of the hut screened off with blankets, and is warned not to lift up her eyes on any man. Next day, very early in the morning and again after sunset, she is taken out by two women and made to run till she is tired; in the interval she is again secluded in her corner. On the following day she lays three packets of wool beside the path near the house to signify that she is now a woman. 139 Among the Passes, Mauhes, and other tribes of Brazil the young woman in similar circumstances is hung in her hammock from the roof and has to fast there for a month or as long as she can hold out. 140 One of the early settlers in Brazil, about the middle of the sixteenth century, has described the severe ordeal which damsels at puberty had to undergo among the Indians on the south-east coast of that country, near what is now Rio de Janeiro. When a girl had reached this critical period of life, her hair was burned or shaved off close to the head. Then she was placed on a flat stone and cut with the tooth of an animal from the shoulders all down the back, till she ran with blood. Next the ashes of a wild gourd were rubbed into the wounds; the girl was bound hand and foot, and hung in a hammock, being enveloped in it so closely that no one could see her. Here she had to stay for three days without eating or drinking. When the three days were over, she stepped out of the hammock upon the flat stone, for her feet might not touch the ground. If she had a call of nature, a female relation took the girl on her back and carried her out, taking with her a live coal to prevent evil influences from entering the girl's body. Being replaced in her hammock, she was now allowed to get some flour, boiled roots, and water, but might not taste salt or flesh. Thus she continued to the end of the first monthly period, at the expiry of which she was gashed on the breast and belly as well as all down the back. During the second month she still stayed in her hammock, but her rule of abstinence was less rigid, and she was allowed to spin. The third month she was blackened with a certain pigment and began to go about as usual. 141

[Seclusion of girls at puberty among the Indians of Guiana; custom of beating the girls and of causing them to be stung by ants.]

Amongst the Macusis of British Guiana, when a girl shews the first signs of puberty, she is hung in a hammock at the highest point of the hut. For the first few days she may not leave the hammock by day, but at night she must come down, light a fire, and spend the night beside it, else she would break out in sores on her neck, throat, and other parts of her body. So long as the symptoms are at their height, she must fast rigorously. When they have abated, she may come down and take up her abode in a little compartment that is made for her in the darkest corner of the hut. In the morning she may cook her food, but it must be at a separate fire and in a vessel of her own. After about ten days the magician comes and undoes the spell by muttering charms and breathing on her and on the more valuable of the things with which she has come in contact. The pots and drinking-vessels which she used are broken and the fragments buried. After her first bath, the girl must submit to be beaten by her mother with thin rods without uttering a cry. At the end of the second period she is again beaten, but not afterwards. She is now "clean," and can mix again with people. 142 Other Indians of Guiana, after keeping the girl in her hammock at the top of the hut for a month, expose her to certain large ants, whose bite is very painful. 143 Sometimes, in addition to being stung with ants, the sufferer has to fast day and night so long as she remains slung up on high in her hammock, so that when she comes down she is reduced to a skeleton. The intention of stinging her with ants is said to be to make her strong to bear the burden of maternity. 144 Amongst the Uaupes of Brazil a girl at puberty is secluded in the house for a month, and allowed only a small quantity of bread and water. Then she is taken out into the midst of her relations and friends, each of whom gives her four or five blows with pieces of sipo (an elastic climber), till she falls senseless or dead. If she recovers, the operation is repeated four times at intervals of six hours, and it is considered an offence to the parents not to strike hard. Meantime, pots of meats and fish have been made ready; the sipos are dipped into them and then given to the girl to lick, who is now considered a marriageable woman. 145

[Custom in South America of causing young men to be stung with ants as an initiatory rite.]

The custom of stinging the girl at such times with ants or beating her with rods is intended, we may be sure, not as a punishment or a test of endurance, but as a purification, the object being to drive away the malignant influences with which a girl in this condition is believed to be beset and enveloped. Examples of purification, by beating, by incisions in the flesh, and by stinging with ants, have already come before us. 146 In some Indian tribes of Brazil and Guiana young men do not rank as warriors and may not marry till they have passed through a terrible ordeal, which consists in being stung by swarms of venomous ants whose bite is like fire. Thus among the Mauhes on the Tapajos river, a southern tributary of the Amazon, boys of eight to ten years are obliged to thrust their arms into sleeves stuffed with great ferocious ants, which the Indians call tocandeira (Cryptocerus atratus, F.). When the young victim shrieks with pain, an excited mob of men dances round him, shouting and encouraging him till he falls exhausted to the ground. He is then committed to the care of old women, who treat his fearfully swollen arms with fresh juice of the manioc; and on his recovery he has to shew his strength and skill in bending a bow. This cruel ordeal is commonly repeated again and again, till the lad has reached his fourteenth year and can bear the agony without betraying any sign of emotion. Then he is a man and can marry. A lad's age is reckoned by the number of times he has passed through the ordeal. 147 An eye-witness has described how a young Mauhe hero bore the torture with an endurance more than Spartan, dancing and singing, with his arms cased in the terrible mittens, before every cabin of the great common house, till pallid, staggering, and with chattering teeth he triumphantly laid the gloves before the old chief and received the congratulations of the men and the caresses of the women; then breaking away from his friends and admirers he threw himself into the river and remained in its cool soothing water till nightfall. 148 Similarly among the Ticunas of the Upper Amazon, on the border of Peru, the young man who would take his place among the warriors must plunge his arm into a sort of basket full of venomous ants and keep it there for several minutes without uttering a cry. He generally falls backwards and sometimes succumbs to the fever which ensues; hence as soon as the ordeal is over the women are prodigal of their attentions to him, and rub the swollen arm with a particular kind of herb. 149 Ordeals of this sort appear to be in vogue among the Indians of the Rio Negro as well as of the Amazon. 150 Among the Rucuyennes, a tribe of Indians in the north of Brazil, on the borders of Guiana, young men who are candidates for marriage must submit to be stung all over their persons not only with ants but with wasps, which are applied to their naked bodies in curious instruments of trellis-work shaped like fantastic quadrupeds or birds. The patient invariably falls down in a swoon and is carried like dead to his hammock, where he is tightly lashed with cords. As they come to themselves, they writhe in agony, so that their hammocks rock violently to and fro, causing the hut to shake as if it were about to collapse. This dreadful ordeal is called by the Indians a maraké. 151

[Custom of causing men and women to be stung with ants to improve their character and health or to render them invulnerable.]

The same ordeal, under the same name, is also practised by the Wayanas, an Indian tribe of French Guiana, but with them, we are told, it is no longer deemed an indispensable preliminary to marriage; "it is rather a sort of national medicine administered chiefly to the youth of both sexes." Applied to men, the maraké, as it is called, "sharpens them, prevents them from being heavy and lazy, makes them active, brisk, industrious, imparts strength, and helps them to shoot well with the bow; without it the Indians would always be slack and rather sickly, would always have a little fever, and would lie perpetually in their hammocks. As for the women, the maraké keeps them from going to sleep, renders them active, alert, brisk, gives them strength and a liking for work, makes them good housekeepers, good workers at the stockade, good makers of cachiri. Every one undergoes the maraké at least twice in his life, sometimes thrice, and oftener if he likes. It may be had from the age of about eight years and upward, and no one thinks it odd that a man of forty should voluntarily submit to it." 152 Similarly the Indians of St. Juan Capistrano in California used to be branded on some part of their bodies, generally on the right arm, but sometimes on the leg also, not as a proof of manly fortitude, but because they believed that the custom "added greater strength to the nerves, and gave a better pulse for the management of the bow." Afterwards "they were whipped with nettles, and covered with ants, that they might become robust, and the infliction was always performed in summer, during the months of July and August, when the nettle was in its most fiery state. They gathered small bunches, which they fastened together, and the poor deluded Indian was chastised, by inflicting blows with them upon his naked limbs, until unable to walk; and then he was carried to the nest of the nearest and most furious species of ants, and laid down among them, while some of his friends, with sticks, kept annoying the insects to make them still more violent. What torments did they not undergo! What pain! What hellish inflictions! Yet their faith gave them power to endure all without a murmur, and they remained as if dead. Having undergone these dreadful ordeals, they were considered as invulnerable, and believed that the arrows of their enemies could no longer harm them." 153 Among the Alur, a tribe inhabiting the south-western region of the upper Nile, to bury a man in an ant-hill and leave him there for a while is the regular treatment for insanity. 154

[In such cases the beating or stinging was originally a purification; at a later time it is interpreted as a test of courage and endurance.]

In like manner it is probable that beating or scourging as a religious or ceremonial rite was originally a mode of purification. It was meant to wipe off and drive away a dangerous contagion, whether personified as demoniacal or not, which was supposed to be adhering physically, though invisibly, to the body of the sufferer. 155 The pain inflicted on the person beaten was no more the object of the beating than it is of a surgical operation with us; it was a necessary accident, that was all. In later times such customs were interpreted otherwise, and the pain, from being an accident, became the prime object of the ceremony, which was now regarded either as a test of endurance imposed upon persons at critical epochs of life, or as a mortification of the flesh well pleasing to the god. But asceticism, under any shape or form, is never primitive. The savage, it is true, in certain circumstances will voluntarily subject himself to pains and privations which appear to us wholly needless; but he never acts thus unless he believes that some solid temporal advantage is to be gained by so doing. Pain for the sake of pain, whether as a moral discipline in this life or as a means of winning a glorious immortality hereafter, is not an object which he sets himself deliberately to pursue.

[This explanation confirmed with reference to the beating of girls at puberty among the South American Indians; treatment of a girl at puberty among the Banivas of the Orinoco; symptoms of puberty in a girl regarded as wounds inflicted by a demon.]

If this view is correct, we can understand why so many Indian tribes of South America compel the youth of both sexes to submit to these painful and sometimes fatal ordeals. They imagine that in this way they rid the young folk of certain evils inherent in youth, especially at the critical age of puberty; and when they picture to themselves the evils in a personal form as dangerous spirits or demons, the ceremony of their expulsion may in the strict sense be termed an exorcism. This certainly appears to be the interpretation which the Banivas of the Orinoco put upon the cruel scourgings which they inflict on girls at puberty. At her first menstruation a Baniva girl must pass several days and nights in her hammock, almost motionless and getting nothing to eat and drink but water and a little manioc. While she lies there, the suitors for her hand apply to her father, and he who can afford to give most for her or can prove himself the best man, is promised the damsel in marriage. The fast over, some old men enter the hut, bandage the girl's eyes, cover her head with a bonnet of which the fringes fall on her shoulders, and then lead her forth and tie her to a post set up in an open place. The head of the post is carved in the shape of a grotesque face. None but the old men may witness what follows. Were a woman caught peeping and prying, it would go ill with her; she would be marked out for the vengeance of the demon, who would make her expiate her crime at the very next moon by madness or death. Every participant in the ceremony comes armed with a scourge of cords or of fish skins; some of them reinforce the virtue of the instrument by tying little sharp stones to the end of the thongs. Then, to the dismal and deafening notes of shell-trumpets blown by two or three supernumeraries, the men circle round and round the post, every one applying his scourge as he passes to the girl's back, till it streams with blood. At last the musicians, winding tremendous blasts on their trumpets against the demon, advance and touch the post in which he is supposed to be incorporate. Then the blows cease to descend; the girl is untied, often in a fainting state, and carried away to have her wounds washed and simples applied to them. The youngest of the executioners, or rather of the exorcists, hastens to inform her betrothed husband of the happy issue of the exorcism. "The spirit," he says, "had cast thy beloved into a sleep as deep almost as that of death. But we have rescued her from his attacks, and laid her down in such and such a place. Go seek her." Then going from house to house through the village he cries to the inmates, "Come, let us burn the demon who would have taken possession of such and such a girl, our friend." The bridegroom at once carries his wounded and suffering bride to his own house; and all the people gather round the post for the pleasure of burning it and the demon together. A great pile of firewood has meanwhile been heaped up about it, and the women run round the pyre cursing in shrill voices the wicked spirit who has wrought all this evil. The men join in with hoarser cries and animate themselves for the business in hand by deep draughts of an intoxicant which has been provided for the occasion by the parents-in-law. Soon the bridegroom, having committed the bride to the care of his mother, appears on the scene brandishing a lighted torch. He addresses the demon with bitter mockery and reproaches; informs him that the fair creature on whom he, the demon, had nefarious designs, is now his, the bridegroom's, blooming spouse; and shaking his torch at the grinning head on the post, he screams out, "This is how the victims of thy persecution take vengeance on thee!" With these words he puts a light to the pyre. At once the drums strike up, the trumpets blare, and men, women, and children begin to dance. In two long rows they dance, the men on one side, the women on the other, advancing till they almost touch and then retiring again. After that the two rows join hands, and forming a huge circle trip it round and round the blaze, till the post with its grotesque face is consumed in the flames and nothing of the pyre remains but a heap of red and glowing embers. "The evil spirit has been destroyed. Thus delivered from her persecutor, the young wife will be free from sickness, will not die in childbed, and will bear many children to her husband." 156 From this account it appears that the Banivas attribute the symptoms of puberty in girls to the wounds inflicted on them by an amorous devil, who, however, can be not only exorcised but burnt to ashes at the stake.