When it comes to primitive and distant tribes from the developed world, images of wild cannibals or bounty hunters usually pop up in the head. And although not all wild tribes are like that, such "stereotypes" did not appear from scratch.
One of the darkest and creepiest customs of the savage tribes really involves severed human heads. Moreover, this phenomenon is very popular in popular culture from horror films to cartoons ("Monsters on Vacation"). And this is not surprising, despite all its disgusting, he at the same time strangely attracts to himself.
Cutting off the heads of the enemy and taking them with you as trophies was found in ancient times in different cultures around the world. The Chinese, Celts and many other peoples were engaged in this. However, special processing of severed heads, drying and reducing them to the size of a fist, was used only in one place on earth - in the Amazonian jungle in Ecuador and Peru.
In the north of Peru and the south of Ecuador, the Jivaro Indian tribe lives, which for centuries led an aggressive lifestyle towards other tribes. This anciently was a tribe of warriors who believed that by killing other people, they get their energy.
The Spanish conquerors also faced the Jivaro in the 1600s, and these Indians were the only South American people who managed to resist the conquistadors and refused to submit to their authority. Subsequently, they also very successfully resisted the Spanish settlers, who liked the land of Jivaro very much, since there were rich deposits of gold.
True, when the flow of Europeans became especially powerful, and the hivaro themselves became much smaller, they preferred to hide from the Europeans in the dangerous jungle and throw them in the air. Only in the 19th century they were remembered again, when expeditions of adventurers-explorers became frequent on the Amazon.
And it was these adventurers who later told the whole world about the cruel savages who skillfully make dried fist-sized heads from the severed heads of opponents and wear them on a belt or around their neck. Such heads are called Tsantsa.
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This custom is built on the Khivaro tradition of violent revenge, in which the death of a person from one community requires the immediate death of another from the same community where the killer lived. And if not revenge, then Muisak's vengeful spirit will bring trouble to the entire tribe.
Especially such vengeful spirits love to live in the fallen warriors from the enemy tribe, and to keep this spirit from attacking, you need to lure it into a trap and lock it there.
The severed and dried head of the enemy is such a trap, and the sewn-up mouth does not allow him to get out of there.
The process of making such a head begins with an incision on the back of the neck, after which the skin and hair are gently pulled from the skull. The eyeballs and the skull itself are thrown away, and the skin and hair are boiled in a pot with a special mixture of different herbs. Cooking takes place over low heat for at least two hours.
There is a partial reduction in the size of the skin during cooking, but the main work is still ahead. When the skin is boiled, it is sewn up in the area of the eyes and in the area of incisions, and stones hot on a fire are placed inside. The stones burn away the remnants of the muscles from the inside. When the stones cool, they are taken out and new hot stones are thrown into the head.
Then the head is stuffed with hot sand, which burns off the remaining pieces of flesh and thinns the skin itself. When the sand cools down, it is changed to hot and similar is carried out several times. Then the owner of the trophy cleans the scalp from the inside with a knife, scraping it out.
During all stages, the skin shrinks strongly and ultimately shrinks several times. At the same time, the main difficulty of the procedure is to preserve the facial features of the murdered person during it, and the most curious thing is that, along with the scalp, the hair also gives some shrinkage.
Finally, the scalp is blackened with charcoal and ash, and wooden sticks are inserted into the lips or sewn up with twine. Then the head is suspended over the fire for the final "smoking".
When the world learned about this practice, many collectors wanted to get these heads in their collections. The demand for them rose so great that the Khivaro people began to kill much more than usual, including, according to rumors, Europeans were also killed.
However, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that countries began to impose bans on the production and trade of these creepy amulets. At first, Ecuador and Peru did it, and in the 1940s the ban was introduced in the United States.
True, the prohibitions did not completely eliminate this terrible practice, but partially transferred it to the category of underground. At the same time, many fakes began to be produced, for which they used monkey skin and corpses from the morgue. According to some experts, now in the world up to 80% of all dried heads from the collections are fakes.
There is another dark side to this phenomenon. It is said that the Nazis learned about the tradition of the dried heads of the Khivaro and repeated it on the prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp. True, it is not known for certain how many such victims were and whether these were isolated experiments of individual fanatical doctors or something put on stream in many concentration camps.
During the Nyunberg trial, one dried head was shown, found at the commandant of Buchenwald Karl Koch. Some sources identify her as the head of a prisoner named Schneigel, but nothing else is known about her. Now this head is kept in the Buchenwald Museum.
