Of course, it being Scarfolk, the real scandal came from how the local druidclergy was not making the upper part of the cross longer to be the traditional satanicSt. Peter’s cross that was council tradition. As I recall, the next year they did inverted pentagrams, and applied the ash with branding irons.
So your link says that scalping is “an old EUROPEAN tradition brought to the New World”, without citing any sources.
This peer-reviewed paper describes skeletons with injuries consistent with having been scalped, from a massacre several decades before Columbus.
Meanwhile in Europe, there is no evidence or account of the practice of taking scalps later than ancient times (the Scythians did it).
Again, I am not saying that European settlers never offered bounties on scalps- they almost certainly did. But your claim that it was a commonplace practice in Europe that they brought to the Americas doesn’t hold water. Possibly the settlers came up with it themselves independently, possibly they took the idea from one Native tribe and used it on others. But I’m going to need more than some random blog to convince me, in the face of widely-accepted archaeological evidence, that the practice was a long-standing tradition in Europe and unknown in the Americas before colonisation.
The church we attend makes a point of saving some specifically for this purpose (plus collecting all the ones people drop during service) AND also spend the month prior asking if people have any at their homes to bring in. We always seem to have some that I wove into a cross that we turn in.
I had no idea before this story that ash was “sourced”. I mean, my church has a crazy amount of people and they burn/create their own. How hard can it be to light something on fire and walk away?
Apparently that differs by denomination. Sacramental bread - Wikipedia
In England in 1036, Earl Godwin, father of Harold Godwinson, was reportedly responsible for scalping his enemies. According to the ancient Abingdon manuscript, 'some of them were blinded, some maimed, some scalped.
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