If, in primitive states, men are honored according to their prowess—if their prowess is estimated here by the number of heads they can show, there by the number of jawbones, and elsewhere by the number of scalps—if such trophies are treasured up for generations, and the pride of families is proportioned to the number of them taken by ancestors—if of the Gauls in the time of Posidonius we read that "the heads of their enemies that were the chiefest persons of quality they carefully deposit in chests, embalming them with the oil of cedars, showing them to strangers, glory and boast" that they or their forefathers had refused great sums of money for them—then, obviously, a kind of class-distinction is initiated by trophies. On reading that in some places a man's rank varies with the quantity of bones in or upon his dwelling, we cannot deny that the display of these proofs of personal superiority originates a regulative influence in social intercourse.
As political control evolves, trophy-taking becomes in several ways instrumental to the maintenance of authority. Beyond the awe felt for the chief whose many trophies show his powers of destruction, there comes the greater awe which, on growing into a king with subordinate chiefs and dependent tribes, he excites by accumulating the trophies others take on his behalf; rising into dread when he exhibits in numbers the relics of slain rulers. As the practice assumes this developed form, the receipt of such vicariously-taken trophies passes into a political ceremony. The heap of hands laid before an ancient Egyptian king served to propitiate; as now serves the mass of jawbones sent by an Ashantee captain to the court. When we read of Timour's soldiers that "their cruelty was enforced by the peremptory command of producing an adequate number of heads," we are conclusively shown that the presentation of trophies hardens into a form expressing obedience. Nor is it thus only that a political effect results. There is the derived kind of governmental restraint produced by fixing up the bodies or heads of felons.
Though offering part of a slain enemy to propitiate a ghost does not enter into what is commonly called religious ceremonial, yet it obviously so enters when the aim is to propitiate a god developed from an ancestral ghost. We are shown the transition by such a fact as that, in a battle between two tribes of Khonds, the first man who "slew his opponent struck off his right arm and rushed with it to the priest in the rear, who bore it off as an offering to Laha Pennoo in his grave;" Laha Pennoo being their "god of arms." Joining with this such other facts as that, before the Tahitian god Oro, human immolations were frequent, and the preserved relics were built into walls "formed entirely of human skulls," which were "principally, if not entirely, the skulls of those who have been slain in battle, we are shown that gods are worshiped by bringing to them, and accumulating round their shrines, these portions of enemies killed—killed,
