Fat is removed from the head's flesh and a wooden ball is placed under the flesh so that it will keep the form. Originally, shrinking heads had a religious significance for the tribes in the northwestern region of the Amazon rainforest. The tribes believed in the existence of three main spirits: Wakani: innate to humans thus surviving their death.
Arutam — literally "vision" or "power", protects humans from a violent death. Muisak — vengeful spirit, which surfaces when a person carrying an arutam spirit is murdered.
The process is gruesome, according to Today I Found Out. First, the skin and hair had to be separated from the skull to allow them to shrink at different rates.
Then, the eyelids were sewn shut and the mouth was stuck closed with a peg. And for the actual shrinking, the heads were put in a big pot and boiled for a very specific amount of time. Then, Staci Lehman writes :. The skin would then be turned inside out and any leftover flesh scraped off with a knife.
The scraped skin was then turned with the proper side out again and the slit in the rear sewn together. The head was shrunk even further by inserting hot stones and sand to make it contract from the inside.
Once the head reached the desired size and was full of small stones and sand, more hot stones would be applied to the outside of the face to seal and shape the features.
The skin was rubbed with charcoal ash to darken it, and as tribesmen believed, to keep the avenging soul from seeping out. The finished product was hung over a fire to harden and blacken, then the wooden pegs in the lips pulled out and replaced with string to lash them together. When Westerners and Europeans started traveling and discovering cultures that practiced head shrinking, they were both terrified and fascinated. Many of them brought back shrunken heads and souvenirs.
In fact, they were popular and lucrative enough that unscrupulous head-peddlers started trading in fake shrunken heads, made from the heads of sloths and other animals. But, when tourists and collectors started to become interested, these tribes saw an opportunity to use shrunken heads as goods in trading practices.
Otherwise, they were often fed to animals or given to children as toys. In the 90 years since lawmakers made the sale of tsantsas illegal, it may have still been practiced by the older generations. But the more Western culture and religion seeped into the area, the less these rituals were executed. Tsantsas from South America were highly sought-after commodities by Westerners, especially during the late s and early s.
This meant that tribes actually started killing each other just to meet this commercial demand. As previously mentioned, the sale of them became illegal by the s which discouraged murder for this purpose. Shrunken head replicas can be made of synthetic materials such as leather or fabric while others are made of animals such as pigs, cows, or chimpanzees.
However, the legality of using animals for this purpose is also in question. As you might imagine, many fake tsantsas are offered and sold as genuine to collectors and casual buyers at relatively high prices. Overall, the heads have a gruesome yet interesting history and these artifacts have surely made their way into mainstream culture. Now, you probably associate shrunken heads with voodoo or Harry Potter magic. But hopefully, this sheds some light on their origins. His studies include a Bachelor's in Anthropology with a focus on archaeology.
In his free time he tutors students and writes independently. Are you enjoying this article?
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