NOT in need of a shrink after all...

I just read that Knut Haugland had died and so in today's dog-walking reverie I was thrown back to the Kontiki and Thor Heyerdahl's absorbing account of the entire adventure.  I love the Kontiki Expedition,  although you know the outcome before you even start to read, and I always pretend that I would have jumped at the chance to be on board (this is a sham-thought, because even an Easyjet hop scares me into drink).

But there was one passage which particularly stays with me, and that is the brief reference, before they set off, to the jungle head shrinkers.  Thor and Herman are in Ecuaduor, looking for balsa for the raft, if I recall correctly; their Spanish guide warns them of the headshrinkers still lurking in the jungles they want to pass through, and tells them how his own friend had had his head shrunk.  I know it's a grisly subject but can you really not smile at this bit?

"One day this friend was killed in the jungle.  Jorge tracked down the murderer and threatened to shoot him.  Now the murderer was one of those who were suspected of selling shrunken human heads and Jorge promised to spare his life if he handed over the head at once.  The murderer at once produced the head of Jorge's friend, now as small as a man's fist.  Jorge was quite upset when he saw his friend again, for he was quite unchanged, except that he had become so very small.  Much moved, he took the little head home to his wife.  She fainted when she saw it and Jorge had to hide his friend in a trunk. But it was so damp in the jungle that clusters of green mould formed on the head so that Jorge had to take it out now and then and dry it in the sun.  It hung very nicely by the hair on a clothes line, and Jorge's wife fainted everytime she caught sight of it."

Thor Heyerdahl - The Kontiki Expedition,  (Flamingo 1992) p47

Of course, head shrinking really did go on. Heads were scraped out and filled with hot stones to reduce the fat.  Hot sand was poured into the hard-to-reach crevices, and so the head would shrink while maintaining all it's characteristics.  It really does turn you into a mini-you. Although it was originally done to ensure the soul of the enemy would remain in abyss and not be narked at you from the grave, it became quite a business once they realised tourists would pay money for these little heads of victims and take them home for, well, the mantlepiece, one assumes.

And guess what?  National Geographic have "genuine footage" of the head shrinking process, that you can watch, right now, from your kitchen table!   I'm not putting the actual film here because although I'm thinking about this today, I don't plan to think of it tomorrow, as, surely, to think about such a subject regularly would be very strange indeed.

However, back to the video, now I was beginning to worry.  I can think of someone who, currently, would quite possibly be rather partial to my head, shrunk, and it is not too comforting to see there are videos showing how to do it.   I was reassured to see, however, that they DO add a warning that this should not be tried at home. In this litigious world, I guess that is important.


If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...

Rudyard Kipling

Oh how true.

AFTERTHOUGHT
If I do disappear and turn up, petite, in a fleamarket, please do buy me. I want pride of place on a mantlepiece somewhere.