Since the beginning of man, in all times and in all places, there has been suicide, but the way a culture judges its suicides varies from place to place and time to time, largely depending on how that culture views death. Attitudes have ranged from fierce condemnation and hostility to mild disapproval and tolerance, to acceptance, encouragement, and incorporation into the sociocultural system. If our ancient Egyptian had killed himself in pre-Christian Scandinavia, for example, he would have been guaranteed a place in Viking paradise. If he had taken his life during the Roman Empire, his death would have been honored as a glorious demonstration of his wisdom. If he had cut open his stomach in feudal Japan, he would have been praised as a man of principle. If he had killed himself in fifteenth-century Metz, however, his corpse would have been crammed into a barrel and floated down the Moselle. In seventeenth-century France his corpse would have been dragged through the streets, hanged upside down, then thrown on the public garbage heap. In seventeenth-century England his estate would have been forfeited to the crown and his body buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart.
According to Christianity suicide was a sin against God and a crime against the state, and such punishments were designed to deter despairing people from its evil. These penalties (often waived if the suicide was deemed insane) gradually disappeared during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The last recorded crossroads burial of an English suicide took place in 1823, when a man named Griffiths was interred at the intersection of Eaton Street, Grosvenor Place, and King’s Road, London. By that time the scientific study of suicide had begun, and the question became not whether suicide was a sin or a crime but why it occurred. Gradually, suicide was seen not as a moral issue but as an act of pathology. Still, the rationality of science hardly dispelled the opprobrium attached to the act: In England, confiscation of a suicide’s property was not abolished until 1870, and as late as 1955 a man was sentenced to two years in prison for trying to kill himself. Punishment for attempted suicide was finally abolished in 1961 when Parliament passed the Suicide Act. Even after that, moral outrage found legal approval. In 1969 an Isle of Man court ordered a teenager who had attempted suicide to be flogged.
When John Roscoe, an English missionary, lived among the Baganda of central Africa for several years in the late nineteenth century, he found that the lives of the Baganda, like those of most primitive tribespeople, were circumscribed by an elaborate web of myths. “The Baganda were very superstitious about suicides,” wrote the Reverend Mr. Roscoe. “They took innumerable precautions to remove the body and destroy the ghost, to prevent the latter from causing further trouble.” Some of those precautions must have seemed familiar to the Englishman. After a suicide the body was taken “to a distant place where cross-roads met” and burned, in an attempt to destroy the ghost, using as fuel the tree or hut from which he had hanged himself. (People would not live in the hut in which a suicide had taken place for fear they might be tempted to follow suit.) When women passed the spot, they threw grass or twigs on the site to prevent the suicide’s restless ghost from entering them and being reborn.
Contemporary historians suggest that Christian punishments of suicide echoed the purification rituals of primitive tribes. But the law that condemned Mr. Griffiths to burial at a London crossroads in 1823 was born of moral disgust, while the Baganda custom was born of fear that the suicide’s ghost would return to impregnate young tribeswomen. (The same precautions were taken with the corpses of twins and of children born feetfirst.) In the former instance it was the act itself that provoked horror; in the latter it was the consequence of the act.
Primitive fear of the suicide’s ghost stemmed in part from a general fear of the dead, especially of those who met a sudden or violent death. Their ghosts were considered particularly restless because of the desperate state of mind in which they left life. The soul had not made a smooth break; it was considered “unclean.” Extensive purification rituals were performed to expiate the “blood guilt,” to appease the ghost of the slain, and to dissuade it from haunting the living. Such precautions were crucial in the case of suicides, whose ghosts were notoriously malevolent. Not only had the suicide spilled blood, he had spilled family blood, which was even more “powerful.” And while the ghost of a murdered man haunted only his murderer, the ghost of a suicide might seek revenge against an entire tribe, an entire world that had troubled him. In various cultures a suicide’s ghost was believed to cause tempests, famine, hailstorms, or drought, or to make barren the earth that it touched.
Some tribes, therefore, like the Baganda, buried a suicide’s corpse at a crossroads so that the ghost might not find its way home. In other tribes the corpse was mutilated or burned so that the suicide’s spirit would be unable to “walk.” In others the body was buried far from the graves of his kinsmen so that his soul might be quarantined. The Bannaus of Cambodia buried suicides in a corner of the forest; natives of Dahomey left the bodies of suicides in the fields to be devoured by wild beasts. And Alabama Indians threw them into the river. Among the Wajagga of East Africa, after a man hanged himself a goat was sacrificed with the same noose in hopes of mollifying the dead man’s soul.
Such measures, it was hoped, would isolate the suicide’s soul and render it unable to cause mischief. The Jakuts believed that the soul of a suicide never came to rest; the Omaha Indians believed that a self-murderer was excluded from the spirit world; the Paharis of India believed that the suicide’s ghost hovered eternally between heaven and earth. Both the Iroquois and Hidatsa Indians maintained that the souls of suicides occupied a separate village in the land of the dead because their presence made other dead souls uneasy. The Dyaks of Borneo said that suicides went to a special place where those who had drowned themselves lived forever up to their waists in water and those who had poisoned themselves lived in houses built of poisonous wood, surrounded by plants that emitted noxious fumes. The Dakotas believed that a suicide’s ghost was forever doomed to drag behind him the tree on which he had hanged himself—hence women hanged themselves from the smallest trees that would bear their weight.
The belief that a suicide’s ghost might return to pester the living went hand in hand with the notion of revenge suicide. In some primitive societies suicide was committed as a direct act of vengeance, in the belief that as a ghost one was more easily able to persecute his persecutors. “Man has an enemy whom he cannot fight successfully,” observed an ancient proverb. “He can successfully disgrace his enemy by hanging himself in his enemy’s front yard.” An ancient Chinese law placed responsibility for the death on the person who had supposedly caused it, and people frequently killed themselves to entangle an adversary in legal proceedings, to embarrass him, or to ensure his harassment by the suicide’s angry ghost. The ghost was believed to haunt the place where the act had been committed, trying to persuade others to follow his example and attempting to strangle those who chose to live.
Some revenge suicides worked more directly. The Tshi-speaking peoples of Africa’s Gold Coast believed that if, before committing suicide, a person blamed his act on another, that person was required to kill himself using the same method unless the suicide’s family was financially compensated. For many years India had several accepted forms of revenge suicide. In certain areas of southern India, if a man plucked out his eye or killed himself after a quarrel, his adversary was required to do the same either to himself or to a relative. An eye for an eye, a suicide for a suicide, was the rule. A woman who had been insulted might smash her head against the door of the woman who insulted her, whereupon that woman had to do the same. If a woman poisoned herself, the woman who “drove her to her death” followed suit; if she refused, her house was burned down and her cattle stolen. Until recently a legal method of debt collection in India was to sit at the debtor’s door and refuse food or drink until the charge was paid. If “sitting dharna,” as it was called, ended in starvation, the creditor believed that public opinion would avenge him upon his enemy. When one of
the Rajput rajas levied a war tax on the Brahmans, a number of the wealthiest, having argued in vain, stabbed themselves with daggers in front of the raja while cursing him with their last breaths. Thus denounced, the raja was shunned even by his friends.
The notion of revenge suicide or “killing oneself upon the head of another” may seem archaic, but the primitive tribesman who hangs himself on his enemy’s doorstep provides a literal illustration of Freud’s theory that suicide is a sort of inverted murder in which anger meant for another is turned inward on the self. Today, revenge, conscious or unconscious, remains a powerful motive in many suicides, although the punishment exacted is, of course, more psychological than physical. A particularly cruel example, pointed out by English historian Henry Romilly Fedden, is that of the nineteenth-century Frenchman whose mistress was unfaithful. Before killing himself he told his servant that after his death a candle should be made of his fat and carried, lighted, to the woman. To accompany it he composed a note telling her that as he burned for her in life, so, too, he burned for her in death.
Among most tribes, primitive fear of suicide was not based on moral judgment, although precautions taken to assuage vengeful ghosts might eventually have given birth to the idea that the act of suicide was in itself, like murder, something “wrong.” (And precautions may have evolved into punishments.) In fact, certain cultures tolerated and even encouraged suicide. The Goths believed that those who died naturally were doomed to languish eternally in caves full of venomous creatures; therefore, old men threw themselves off a precipice called the Rock of the Forefathers. The Iglulik are among several Eskimo tribes who believed that a violent death ensured a place in paradise, which they called the Land of Day; those who died by natural causes were confined to the Narrow Land. In some cultures elderly suicides were provoked by the belief that a man entered into the next world in the same condition as he left this one; consequently, it behooved him to take his own life before he grew feeble. The ancient Celts considered natural death shameful, and men who threw themselves from cliffs were celebrated with song. “They are a nation lavish of their blood and eager to face death,” wrote the Roman poet Silius Italicus of the Spanish Celts. “As soon as the Celt has passed the age of mature strength, he endures the flight of time impatiently and scorns to await old age; the term of his existence depends upon himself.” Among the Chukchee of Siberia, those who died voluntarily were said to have the best abode in the afterlife: “They dwell on the red blaze of the aurora borealis and pass their time playing ball with a walrus-skull.” In pre-Christian Scandinavia only those who died a violent death were permitted to enter Valhalla, where they fought mock battles and drank from the skulls of their enemies; Vikings unlucky enough not to die in combat often slew themselves with swords or threw themselves from cliffs. Odin, the Viking god of war, was himself said to be a suicide. As death approached, he assembled his followers and stabbed himself in nine places, declaring that he would join the gods at their immortal feast, where he would welcome all those who died with weapons in their hands.
Recommending violent death as a path to paradise was a way of promoting a properly bellicose spirit in warrior societies. Elsewhere, “economic suicide” by the elderly and infirm was encouraged during periods of hardship so that there would be sufficient rations for the tribe to survive. In some cultures sacrificial suicides were carried out to honor the gods or to ensure a good harvest. Among the Aztecs, a young man was selected each year to impersonate the god Tezcatlipoca. He received the homage of his people for one year, at the end of which he offered himself up to death at the altar, and his living heart was cut out. Each year, in the mountains of Tien-tai in China, several Buddhist monks sacrificed their lives, hoping to obtain nirvana for themselves and protection from evil spirits for their community. On the appointed day the monk, observed by a crowd of spectators, entered a furnace and sat on a wooden seat. The door was shut and the fuel lit. Afterward the ashes were collected, washed, and revered as the relics of a saint.
Such suicides were ostensibly voluntary, but social custom rendered them all but compulsory. In India, when sacrificial suicides were, on occasion, rescued by the military, the victims escaped whenever possible and returned to embrace death. Similarly, according to an old custom in Malabar, people who were taken ill prayed to their idol for recovery. Once healthy they fattened themselves up for a year or more and then on a festival day gratefully cut off their heads before the idol who had saved their life.
Some contemporary suicides kill themselves in the fantasy that their death may reunite them with a lost loved one. In primitive societies such suicides were common, but the act was compelled less by grief than by cultural tradition. “There is another world, and they who kill themselves to accompany their friends thither will live with them there.” This Druid maxim expresses the motivation behind a custom dating back to ancient Egypt, where wives and servants took poison and were buried with their pharaohs, along with weapons, furniture, perfumes, combs, tools for grinding corn, and anything else that would make life in the next world comfortable. As Egyptian civilization progressed, the corpses of wives and servants were replaced by symbolic figurines; in other societies, however, the practice persisted. In Siam, after the king’s corpse was laid in his grave, his wives, concubines, and ministers of state drank poison and were placed next to him along with six horses, twelve camels or elephants, and twenty hunting dogs, thus providing the king with means of diversion in the afterlife. In Scythia, Herodotus tells us, a king was buried with his cook, butler, groom, steward, chamberlain, and one of his concubines—all of them strangled—who were expected to wait on their master in the next world as they had in this. A year after the king’s death fifty of his servants and fifty of his horses were strangled, stuffed with chaff, and mounted on scaffolds around his tomb, each dead servant riding a dead horse, ever prepared to fight for his dead master. At the interment of the king of Benin in western Africa, the ruler’s favorite lords and servants leaped into his tomb, vying for the honor of being buried alive with their master’s corpse. According to Herodotus, the death of a Thracian man triggered a “keen competition” among his wives to determine which among them he had most loved. The winner was slain over the grave and buried with her husband.
The custom of a widow or concubine taking her life on the death of her husband has been practiced in nearly every part of the world. (The gender reverse of this has seldom been observed, although in one tribe on the Gold Coast a man of low rank who married a sister of the king was expected to kill himself on the death of his wife. “Should he outrage native custom and neglect to do so,” noted one anthropologist, “a hint is conveyed to him that he will be put to death, which usually produces the desired effect.”) The best-known example of wifely suicide is suttee, named for a heroine of Hindu mythology who threw herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre to prove her devotion. Historically, the act has been a blend of choice and coercion. A Hindu wife is expected to dedicate herself to her husband—no matter how miserably he may treat her—even after his death. The Padmapurana, an eleventh-century religious text, outlined a virtuous woman’s duties to her husband—“whatever his defects may be, a wife should always look upon him as her god”—and instructed her that when her husband dies, she should “allow herself to be burnt alive on the same funeral pyre; then everyone will praise her virtue.” Hindu widows are bypassed by inheritance laws; they are forbidden to attend wedding or birthday celebrations or to wear jewelry, makeup, or bright clothing. The alternative is suttee, for which a widow is honored above all other women, bringing respect to her memory and to her family.
Suttee was already in vogue when Alexander the Great invaded India in 327 BC, and when the English arrived two millennia later, they were horrified to find it still practiced widely; in 1821 there were 2,366 reported cases. Outraged by this “primitive act,” the British declared it illegal in 1829—only six years after they abolished stake-and-crossroads burial in their own country. But the cus
tom persisted in remote areas well into the twentieth century. In 1987, in the village of Deorala, several days after her husband’s death from a ruptured appendix, eighteen-year-old Roop Kanwar climbed onto his funeral pyre and cradled his head in her lap. The pyre of sandalwood and coconuts soaked with clarified butter was set ablaze and she burned to death. Twelve days later, more than one hundred thousand Rajputs gathered in Deorala to glorify her act. The village took on a carnival atmosphere; booths were set up to sell pictures of the dead couple, vendors sold refreshments, and a loudspeaker system was installed to help locate lost children. Kanwar’s suicide also inspired international outrage, protests by Indian feminists, and the enactment of federal legislation providing the death penalty for anyone convicted of abetting suttee. Fifteen years later, when a sixty-five-year-old woman burned to death on her husband’s funeral pyre in the village of Tamoli, her sons were accused of forcing her into suttee because they wanted her property and were arrested for murder. “The government of Madhya Pradesh will not tolerate a few demented people dragging the entire state into prehistoric times,” said the minister for rural development in the central Indian state.
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