Note on the practice of self-mutilation

Note: this text is extracted from Book VI, chapter 28:

She, with heart captivated by the beauty of his eyes, said to him: ‘How came such a handsome man as you to undertake such a severe vow as this? Happy is the woman who is gazed upon with this eye of yours!’. When the begging hermit was thus addressed by the lady, he tore out one eye and, holding it in his hand, said: ‘Mother, behold this eye, such as it is; take the loathsome mass of flesh and blood, if it pleases you. And the other is like it; say, what is there attractive in these?’. When he said this to the merchant’s wife, and she saw the eye, she was despondent, and said: ‘Alas! I, unhappy wretch that I am, have done an evil deed, in that I have become the cause of the tearing out of your eye!’”

As is well known, self-mutilation has entered largely into religion from very early times, and even exists to-day, though it is now chiefly found only among the practices of modern savagery. The connection between the religious rite and savage practice is one of considerable interest and difficulty. An examination of examples of the two varieties will show a closer relationship than may be at firct expected, for the crudest savage practice may be based on a religious foundation, and is, in fact, merely a form of asceticism. The subject has been fully discussed by Herbert Spencer, Ceremonial Institutions (Principles of Sociology, part iv), London, 1879, pp- 52-80. He would reduce both classes to a common denomination by the theory that the practices were for the purpose of securing and indicating the marks of subjugation of the conquered to his conqueror, and that they were repeated as religious rites for the same reason—the subjugation of the worshipper to the god.

Evidence, however, shows that this view cannot be accepted. See Lawrence Gomme, Mutilations,” Hastings’ Ency. Rel. Eth., vol. ix, pp. 62, 63. Among other points Gomme notes that religious mutilations are personal and voluntary, in contradiction to savage practice, where mutilations are imposed by compulsion upon conquered enemies or enslaved peoples or persons. This contrast is illustrated by two independent pieces of evidence. Arnobius Orestes (adv. Gentes, v, 7) relates that the daughter of a Gallus cut off her breasts out of devotion to Aphrodite the mother. A curious passage in the Old Irish Treatise on the Law of Adavinan (ed. and trans. Kuno Meyer, Oxford, 1905, p. 3) says that before Adamnan’s time “it was the head of a woman or her two breasts which were taken as trophies.” The trophy and the sacrifice in those two cases do not seem to belong to the same plane of thought, and yet they belong to the same range of civilisation.

The list of mutilations is long and gruesome. It includes hair, scalp, eyes, nose, lips, cheeks, ears, jaws, fingers, circumcision, infibulation, excision, castration, blood-letting, etc.

For further details reference should be made to J. A. Macculloch, Austerities,” Hastings’ Ency. Rel. Eth., vol. ii, pp. 232-234; and V. Chauvin, op. cit., viii, p. 136, under Moyens pour échapper au danger.”—n.m.p.