THE SUPERNATURAL BIRTH IN PRACTICAL SUPERSTITIONS.
{147}
The result of the inquiries of the last two chapters has been to
show that the incident of the Supernatural Birth, in forms identical
with, or at least analogous to, those of the Perseus cycle, is found,
broadly speaking, over the whole world,--and that, not merely as a
tale whereto no serious belief is attached, but, even more widely, as
a saga, or record of what are deemed to have been actual events. But
if, amid all differences of race and culture, birth has thus been held
to have been caused on various occasions in these marvellous ways, it
is natural to ask whether it has also been thought possible still to
make effectual use of such means to produce pregnancy in barren women.
The answer is, that it has been, and still is, thought possible. In
other words, the traditions of past miracles are organically connected
in the popular mind with practices expressly calculated to produce
repetitions of those miracles. It will be observed, however, that
parthenogenesis is often spoken of in the stories; whereas, for the
most part, the object of the practices I am about to describe is to
promote conception by women who are in the habit of having sexual
intercourse. The distinction is {148} often immaterial. In the stage
of civilisation wherein the stories are told and the practices obtain,
medicine and surgery are not as yet separated from magic. We cannot
therefore, speak positively as to the meaning and intention of all.
But it is clear that a large number of the practices, as well as of
the stories, imply, if we are not told in so many words, that the real
origin of the child afterwards born is not the semen received in the
act of coition, but the drug, or the magical potency of the
incantation.
In discussing the practices I shall ask the reader’s pardon if I do
not limit myself to such as are precisely analogous to the means found
in the stories, nor even to such as are explicable by reasons already
known to be accepted in barbaric life. I desire, beyond these, to call
the attention of scholars to some of the problems yet to be solved. We
have learned to understand much that used to be mysterious in the ways
and the thoughts of savages. But much remains unknown or
misunderstood. And even if a solitary student cannot explain, he may
render some small service to science in inquiring into, that which
needs explanation.
The favourite method of supernatural impregnation in stories is
perhaps by eating some fruit or herb. Nor is this method by any means
neglected in practice. The maxim attributed to the Druids leaps to the
mind, namely, that powder of mistletoe makes women fruitful. As held
by the Druids this is doubtless to be understood literally, just as
among the ancient Medes, Persians and Bactrians the juice of the
sacred Soma was prescribed to procure for unproductive women fair
children and a pure succession.[148.1] Thus the birth of Zoroaster
himself was, as we have seen, believed {149} to have been caused.
Among the rules for the performance of the Vedic domestic ceremonies,
given in the _Grihya-Sûtras_, the householder who does not study the
_Upanishad_ treating of the rules for securing conception, the male
gender of the child, and so forth, is directed in the third month of
his wife’s pregnancy to give her, after she has fasted, in curds from
a cow which has a calf of the same colour as the dam, two beans and a
barleycorn for each handful of curds. Then he is to ask her: “What
dost thou drink?” To which she is to reply: “Generation of a male
child.” When the curds and the question and response have been thrice
repeated, he is to insert into her right nostril the sap of a herb
which is not withered.[149.1] One can hardly doubt that this is a
ceremonial to procure offspring, though not performed, according to
the rubric, until after conception has taken place. In the book of
medical receipts deemed to be derived from the ancient Physicians of
Myddfai, printed in the year 1861 from a Welsh manuscript bearing date
in 1801, we find it stated that a decoction of mistletoe causes
fruitfulness of body and the getting of children.[149.2] Here the
magical plant seems to have faded into one of merely natural efficacy.
On the other hand, something more than the light of common day still
glorifies the rosemary. Among other things we are told that to carry a
piece of this plant is to keep every evil spirit at a distance, and
that rosemary has all the virtues of the stone called jet. It was
because it was obnoxious to evil spirits that it was used at funerals.
But it was not only used at {150} funerals. There is a story of a
widower who wished to be married again on the day of his former wife’s
funeral, because the rosemary employed at the funeral could be used
for the wedding also. For its use at weddings there was an additional
reason, which is given in the Welsh manuscript; to wit, one of its
remarkable powers was that “it was sovran against barrenness.”[150.1]
Hindu women eat little balls of rice with intent to obtain children. A
woman who wishes for a child, especially a son, observes the fourth
lunar day of every dark fortnight as a fast, and breaks her fast only
after seeing the moon, generally before nine or ten o’clock in the
evening. A dish of twenty-one balls of rice having been prepared, in
one of which is put some salt, it is then placed before her; and if
she first put her hand on the ball containing salt, she will be
blessed with a son. In this case no more is eaten; otherwise she goes
on until she takes the salted ball.[150.2] At the festival of Ráhu,
the tribal god of the Dosádhs of Behar and Chota Nagpur, the priest
distributes to the crowd tulsi-leaves which heal diseases else
incurable, and flowers which have the virtue of causing barren women
to conceive;[150.3] but whether they are to be eaten or only smelt
does not appear. The same omission occurs in a report by Mr. Leland
that a Tuscan woman who desires offspring goes to a priest, gets a
blessed apple {151} and pronounces over it an invocation to Saint
Anna.[151.1] Presumably she then eats it. At all events, in Hungary a
Gipsy woman in the like circumstances eats at waxing moon grass from
the grave of a pregnant woman.[151.2] Among the Southern Slavs the
woman goes to a pregnant woman’s grave, calls upon her by name, bites
some of the grass off the grave, calls upon her again, conjuring her
to grant her a child, and then, taking some earth from the grave,
binds it in her girdle.[151.3] In the Spreewald no Wendish woman dares
to eat of two plums grown together on one stalk, or she will bear
twins.[151.4] About Mentone it is believed that a woman who finds a
double fruit will have twins.[151.5] The aboriginal inhabitants of
Paraguay supposed that a woman who ate a double ear of maize would
give birth to twins.[151.6] In Saxony, Mecklenburg and Voigtland it
would appear that only pregnant women are forbidden to eat double
fruit; among the Tangalas the prohibition is extended to the husband;
in all cases for the same reason.[151.7] These taboos are inexplicable
save on the supposition that the fruit causes pregnancy.
{152}
It would seem like a relic of the same thought that in Swabia a woman
who is “in an interesting condition” for the first time should eat of
a tree which bears for the first time; then both of them will become
very fruitful. To this there is one exception: if an apple be grafted
on a whitethorn, and some of the fruit be given to a pregnant woman to
eat, she cannot bear.[152.1] In contrast to this is a Bosnian custom
in which the childless woman seeks for a plant called _apijun_, cuts
its roots small and steeps them in foam she has caught from a
millwheel, afterwards drinking of the liquid. She then winds her
wedding-girdle round a newly grafted fruit-tree, when, if the graft
prosper, she also will bear. Another curious magical custom in Bosnia,
still more instructive, is employed when a woman has been married for
upwards of eleven years without having issue. A lady friend who is so
fortunate as to be in that state in which “women wish to be who love
their lords” must endeavour to find a stone lying in a pear-tree, as
sometimes happens when it is thrown at the ripening fruit and caught
by one of the branches. She must then shake the tree until the stone
fall. This she must catch in her hands ere it reach the ground, carry
it in the left skirt of her dress to the brook, put it into a pitcher,
fill the pitcher from the brook so far as to cover the stone, and
carry it home. {153} Next, she gathers dewy grass (it is not stated
what she does with it), and speaks into the pitcher and into the water
the conjuring formula: “So-and-so shall conceive.” After that, she
brings the pitcher with the water to the barren woman to drink, and,
winding the wedding-garment (it does not appear what portion of the
dress is meant) of the latter about her own body, wears it for three
months, or longer, until the woman for whom the ceremony is performed
shall feel that her desire has been accomplished. The friend, however,
must neither eat anything in the patient’s house, nor according to one
account speak during the ceremony.[153.1] Now I am not prepared to
explain every detail of this performance, though I may revert to some
of the items hereafter. The important matter for the moment is the
meaning of the stone shaken down from the tree. This can hardly be
understood to represent anything but a pear; and inasmuch as the
patient cannot eat the stone, its virtues as fruit are transmitted to
the water which is given her to drink, the intention being made clear
by the utterance of the command, “So-and-so shall conceive.”
In China and Japan a medicine called _Kay-tu-sing_, made from the
leaves of a tree belonging to the class Ternstromaceæ, is given at
full moon with cabalistic formulæ. In the Fiji Islands the woman
bathes in a stream, and then both husband and wife take a drink made
with the grated root of a kind of bread-fruit tree and the nut of a
sort of turmeric, immediately before congress. Siberian brides before
the marriage-night eat the cooked fruit of the _Iris Sibirica_.
Asparagus seeds and young hop-buds are given {154} as salad to women
in Styria against barrenness. The Czech women of Bohemia drink an
infusion of juniper to obtain children; and coffee enjoys a high
reputation in Franconia. Serb women get a woman already pregnant to
put yeast into their girdles; they sleep with it over night, and eat
it in the morning at breakfast.[154.1]
Before passing from the eating of fruit and vegetables, let me point
out that the mandrakes, or love-apples, for which Rachel bargained
with Leah, were believed to be possessed of power to put an end to
barrenness; and this, as it appears by the record in Genesis, quite
independently of sexual intercourse, for Rachel gave up her husband to
her sister in exchange for them. Whether it be from the narcotic
properties of the fruit, or from the likeness of the root to the human
form, or both, the mandrake has been during all history credited with
supernatural powers. In particular, it has been held potent as a cause
of pregnancy. Henry Maundrell, travelling in Palestine in the spring
of 1697--barely two centuries ago--was informed that it was then
customary for women who wanted children to lay mandrakes under the
bed.[154.2] The recipe current during the Middle Ages for gathering
mandrakes was very much like that still practised by Danubian Gipsies
to obtain a kind of orchid which they call boy-root. The root is half
laid bare with a knife never before used, and a black dog is tied by
the tail to it. A piece of ass-flesh is then offered to the {155}
animal; and when he springs after it he pulls out the plant. The
representation of a linga is carved out of the root, wrapped in a
piece of hart’s leather, and worn on the naked left arm to promote
conception.[155.1] The Persians are said still to use the mandrake as
an amulet for the same purpose, and to call it man’s root or
love-root.[155.2]
Animal substances of various kinds have been taken with the like
intent. An insect in India, called _pillai-púchchi_, or son-insect,
is swallowed in large numbers by women in the hope of bearing
sons.[155.3] They thus do voluntarily what the mothers of Conchobar
and Cuchulainn are reported to have done against their wills. English
gallants at one time were said to swallow loaches in wine to become
prolific. Farquhar in _The Constant Couple_, written at the end of the
seventeenth century, puts into the mouth of one of his characters the
words: “I have toasted your ladyship fifteen bumpers successively, and
swallowed Cupids like loaches in every glass.”[155.4] On every
Christmas Eve unfruitful wives among the Transylvanian Saxons eat fish
and throw the bones into flowing water, in the hope of bringing
children into the world.[155.5] Hungarian Gipsy-women gather the
floating threads of cobweb from the fields in autumn, and in the
waxing of the moon they with their husbands eat them, murmuring an
incantation to the Keshalyi, or Fate, whose sorrow at this season for
her lost mortal husband causes her to tear out her hair. These threads
are believed to be the Keshalyi’s hair; and the incantation attributes
the hoped-for child to {156} them, and invites the Fate to the
baptism.[156.1] In Kamtchatka, women outdo the Hungarian Gipsies. They
eat the spiders themselves to obtain children; and a woman who, on
bearing, desires to become pregnant soon again, eats her infant’s
navel-string. Among the Southern Slavs the wife places a wooden bowl
full of water beneath a beam of the roof where it is worm-eaten and
the worm-dust falls. Her husband strikes the beam with something
heavy, so as to shake the dust out of the worm-holes; and she drinks
the water containing the dust that falls. Many a woman seeks in knots
of hazelwood for a worm, and eats it when found. Masur women in the
province of West Prussia make use of the water which drips from a
stallion’s mouth after he has drunk. Worse is said to be done in
Algiers. There, when a woman has already had a child, but has ceased
for a long period to conceive, she must drink sheep’s urine, or water
wherein wax from a donkey’s ear has been macerated.[156.2] The ancient
Prussian bride and bridegroom, having been put to bed, but before
consummating the marriage, were served with a dish of buck’s, bull’s,
or bear’s testicles,[156.3] probably with a view to begetting a boy.
The corresponding portion of a hare was prescribed in wine by our
Anglo-Saxon forefathers to the woman who desired a son. “In order that
a woman may kindle a male child,” a hare’s belly dried and sliced and
rubbed with a drink is also recommended in the leechbook to be taken
by both husband and wife. If the wife alone drank it, she would
produce an hermaphrodite. {157} The hare’s magical reputation is well
known, nor are the foregoing the only prescriptions in the same work
from its flesh. Four drachms of female hare’s rennet to the woman, and
the like quantity of male hare’s to the man, in wine, were to be
given; and, after directing that the wife should be dieted on
mushrooms and forego her bath, we are told: “Wonderfully she will be
pregnant.”[157.1] We shall not be inclined to dispute the wonder. In
Fezzan a woman’s fruitfulness is said to be increased by the plentiful
enjoyment of the dried intestines of a young hare which has never been
suckled. The flesh of the kangaroo, like the hare a swift animal, is
held by the Australian aborigines to cause fertility.[157.2] A fox’s
genital organs dried and rubbed to powder are given to women in the
Land beyond the Forest against barrenness.[157.3]
Eggs are naturally supposed to ensure pregnancy. A Gipsy husband will
sometimes take an egg and blow the contents into his wife’s mouth, she
swallowing them;[157.4] or in Transylvania she will give him at full
moon the egg of a black hen to eat by himself.[157.5] On the island of
Keisar in the East Indies, an infertile woman takes a hen’s first egg
to an old man with a reputation for knowledge, and asks him for help.
He lays the egg on a nunu-leaf, and with it presses her breast,
muttering blessings the while. Then he cooks the egg in a koli-leaf,
takes a bit of it, lays it again on the nunu-leaf, and gives it to the
woman to eat. After {158} that, he presses the leaf on her nose and
breasts, and lightly rubs it upon her shoulders, passing it always
downwards, wraps another bit of the egg in the nunu-leaf, and causes
it to be preserved in the branches of one of the highest trees in the
neighbourhood of her dwelling.[158.1] On the other hand, in Galicia
the _last_ egg laid by a hen is credited with having two yolks. It is
said to be no bigger than a pigeon’s egg. A barren woman who swallows
its contents will henceforth bear; or it is given to a cow or other
animal with a similar object.[158.2]
The _Grihya-Sûtra_ of Gobhila gives minute directions for the
sacrifice offered by the ancient Aryans of India. The object of the
Anvashtakya ceremony was the propitiation of the ancestral spirits, to
whom three Pindas, or lumps of food, consisting of rice and cow-beef
mixed with a certain juice, are offered. After the offering, if the
sacrificer’s wife wish for a son, she is to eat the middle Pinda,
dedicated among the manes especially to her husband’s grandfather,
uttering at the same time the verse from the _Mantra-Brâhmana_: “Give
fruit to the womb, O Fathers!”[158.3] No doubt the virtue of this
prescription consists in the food’s having been part of the
sacrificial offering. But the cow is so intimately connected with the
well-being of all tribes in the Old World who have passed beyond the
lower stages of savagery, and has consequently become so
well-recognised a symbol of fecundity, that we need not be surprised
to find it used in charms to produce offspring. An Old English recipe
for a woman who miscarries is to let her take milk of a one-coloured
cow in her hand and sup it up {159} into her mouth, and then go to
running water and spit out the milk therein. Next, she must ladle up
with the same hand a mouthful of the water and swallow it down,
uttering certain words. Lastly, she must, without looking about her
either in her going or coming, return, but not into the same house
whence she came out, and there taste of meat.[159.1] Among the Kaffirs
an amulet to remove the reproach from a childless woman is made by the
medicine-man of the clan from the tail-hairs of a heifer. The heifer
must be given to the husband by a kinsman for the purpose; and the
charm, when made, is hung round the woman’s neck.[159.2] In Belgium,
women desirous of offspring are advised to drink a mixture of the milk
of the goat, ass, and sheep.[159.3]
Of mineral substances Russian women take saltpetre; and in Styria a
woman will grate her wedding-ring and swallow the filings.[159.4] It
was a classical superstition that mice were impregnated by tasting
salt.[159.5]
The drinking of water under certain conditions has been held to be
productive of children. In the first instance I am about to mention,
however, reliance is not placed wholly on the draught. Beside the
Groesbeeck spring at Spa in the Ardennes is a footprint of Saint
Remacle. Barren women pay a nine days’ devotional visit to the shrine
of the saint at Spa, and drink every morning a glass of the Groesbeeck
water. While drinking, one foot must be placed in the holy
footprint.[159.6] Maidens, we know, in more than one of the tales,
have proved the efficacy of divine footprints. In other cases it is
unmistakably the draught {160} which has the virtue. In Thuringia and
Transylvania, women who wished to be healed of unfruitfulness drank
consecrated water from the baptismal font.[160.1] A Transylvanian
Gipsy woman is said to drink water wherein her husband has cast hot
coals, or, better still, has spit, saying as she does so: “Where I am
flame be thou the coals! Where I am rain be thou the water!”[160.2] A
South Slavonic woman holds a wooden bowl of water near the fire on the
hearth. Her husband then strikes two firebrands together until the
sparks fly. Some of them fall into the bowl, and she then drinks the
water.[160.3] The Tusayan, one of the pueblo tribes of North America,
have a legend of one of their women who, being pregnant, was left
behind on the Little Colorado in their wanderings. Beneath her
dwelling is a spring, and any sterile woman who drinks of it will bear
children.[160.4] For Arab women the third chapter of the Koran (which,
among other things, relates the birth of the Virgin Mary) is written
out in its whole interminable length with saffron in a copper basin;
boiling water is poured upon the writing; and the woman in need drinks
a part of the water thus consecrated, and washes her face, breast and
womb with the remainder.[160.5] At Bombay a barren woman would cut off
the end of the robe of a woman who has borne at least one child, when
hung up to dry; or would steal a new-born infant’s shirt, steep one
end of it in water, drink the water and destroy the shirt. The child
to which {161} the clothing belonged would then die and be born again
from the womb of the woman performing this ceremony.[161.1] Other
women in India wash the loin-cloth of a sanyásí, or devotee, and
drink the water.[161.2] We can only surmise that this filthy practice
is followed in the hope of obtaining the benefit experienced by the
Princess Chand Ráwati in the Sanskrit romance, or the nymph Adrikâ
in the _Mahâbhârata_, cited above.
Be this how it may, there is a group of practices to which reference
must be made, and which almost match the foregoing in nastiness.
Unfortunately the dislike of nastiness is an extremely civilised
feeling; and when we read of these things we must remember that we
ourselves are not very far removed from a date when powder of mummy
was one of the least objectionable remedies in our forefathers’
pharmacopœia. We have already found that a Gipsy woman will drink the
water wherein her husband has spit. What is the meaning of the
expression: “He is the very spit of his father!” current not only in
England, but also, according to the learned Liebrecht, in France,
Italy, and Portugal, and alluded to by Voltaire and La Fontaine, if it
point not back to a similar, perhaps a more repulsive, ceremony
formerly practised by the folk all over western Europe? Other Gipsy
customs, if Gipsy women are not belied, are quite as bad. A barren
woman who succeeds in touching a snake caught in Easter- or
Whitsun-week will become fruitful if she spit thrice on it and
sprinkle it with her menstruation-blood, repeating the following {162}
incantation: “Grow thick, thou snake! that I thereby may get a child.
I am lean as thou art now, therefore rest not. Snake, snake, glide
hence, and if I become pregnant I will give thee a crest, an old one,
that thy tooth may thereby receive much poison!”[162.1] Among the
Gipsies of Roumania and southern Hungary a sterile woman scratches her
husband’s left hand between finger and thumb; and he returns the
compliment. The blood of both is received in a new vessel, and buried
under a tree for nine days. It is then taken up and ass’ milk poured
into it; and husband and wife drink the mixture before going to bed,
saying an incantation which reminds us of the Zulu story of the blood
in the pot; for its earlier lines run thus: “In the dawn three Fates
will come. The first seeks our blood; the second finds our blood; the
third makes a child thereout.”[162.2] A Polish woman, to get children,
procures a small jar of the blood of another woman at her first
child-bearing, and drinks it mixed with brandy.[162.3] I mentioned
just now the practice of the Kamtchatkan women. A Magyar believes he
promotes conception by his wife if he mix with his blood white of egg
and the white spots in the yolk of a hen’s egg, fill a dead man’s bone
with the mixture, and bury it where he is accustomed to make
water.[162.4] Nay, shavings of a dead man’s bone taken in drink will
have the same effect; or if taken by a man, they will enhance his
{163} potency.[163.1] It was, as we have seen, a dead man’s bone
which, according to the Mexican saga, when sprinkled with blood,
produced the father and mother of the present race of mankind.
Portions of corpses are, in fact, as valuable for unfruitful women as
the blood and secretions of living persons, at least in the opinion of
the Danubian Gipsies. These people are said to make, for protection
from witchcraft, little figures of men and brutes out of a sort of
dough of grafting wax taken from the trees in a graveyard, mixed with
the powdered hair and nails of a dead child or maiden, and with ashes
left after burning the clothes of one who has died. The figures are
dried in the sun, and, when required for use, ground into powder.
Taken in millet-pap in the increase of the moon this powder
accelerates conception.[163.2] Mr. Lane records disgusting practices
on the part of barren women at Cairo. Near the place of execution
there is a table of stone where the body of every person who is, in
accordance with the usual mode of punishment, beheaded is washed
before burial. By the table is a trough to receive the water. This
trough is never emptied; and its contents are tainted with blood, and
fetid. A woman who desires issue silently passes under the stone table
with the left foot foremost, and then over it. After repeating this
process seven times, she washes her face in the trough, and, giving a
trifling sum of money to the old man and his wife who keep the place,
{164} goes silently away. Others, with the like intent, step over the
decapitated body seven times, also without speaking; and others again
dip in the blood a piece of cotton-wool, of which they afterwards make
use in a manner which Mr. Lane declines to mention.[164.1] The stories
I have quoted, wherein a skull, reduced to powder and given to a
maiden, renders her pregnant, also come from Danubian lands and from
the Mohammedan East. The incident of the skull is less horrible than
these practices; but what other distinction can be found?
We may illustrate the custom of stepping over the dead body, and at
the same time show that in both hemispheres the idea expressed in the
stories just referred to is an active principle of conduct. First let
me recall the superstition which leads a woman in Bombay to steal
another’s child; for that is what the ceremony described a page or two
back amounts to. In the same way Algonkin women who sought to become
mothers flocked to the couches of those about to die, in hope that the
vital principle, as it passed from the dying, would enter their bodies
and fertilise their sterile wombs.[164.2] Among the Hurons in the
seventeenth century babes who died under one or two months were not
placed, like older persons, in sepulchres of bark raised on stakes,
but buried in the road, in order that they might enter secretly into
the wombs of passing women and be born again. The Jesuit father who
reports this custom quaintly adds: “I doubt that the good Nicodemus
would have found much difficulty here, although he doubted only for
old men: _Quomodo potest homo nasci cum sit senex?_”[164.3] So {165}
one of the prescriptions of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers directs a
woman who has miscarried to go to the barrow of a deceased man and
step thrice over it with certain words conjuring the effects of the
miscarriage.[165.1] We are now in a position to understand why a Gipsy
woman eats grass from the grave of a pregnant woman. It is because she
expects that the life of the unborn child will enter into her by means
of the grass. Evidently the object sought by all these ceremonies
connected with the departed is to transfer to the unproductive womb
the life which has been snatched away. In the tales of parthenogenesis
by means of the powdered skull the identity of the child with the dead
man is openly declared; and it is equally unmistakable in the Slavonic
story of the girl who was given the hermit’s heart to eat. I shall
return to this subject in the next chapter.
The blood would impart its power to the water it putrified, wherein
the Cairene women washed. Washing in water endowed with supernatural
power is not uncommon elsewhere. Transylvanian Saxon women not only
drink of baptismal water: they also wash in it, preferably on
Midsummer Day.[165.2] Among the Galician Jews unfruitful women when
they bathe according to their ritual dip themselves nine times under
water.[165.3] Saint Verena, one of the illustrious obscure of
mediæval mythology, bathed in the Verenenbad at Baden in the Aargau,
and thereby conferred on it such virtue that pregnant women or such as
wish for children, if they bathe there, soon attain their
desire.[165.4] The {166} reference to pregnant women must no doubt be
understood of those who wish to avoid miscarriage and to be safely
delivered. German tales and popular saws used to speak--perchance they
still do--of a Kinderbrunnen, or Children’s Well, whence babies were
fetched, as in England from the parsley bed. The Bride’s Well, in
Aberdeenshire, was at one time the resort of every bride in the
neighbourhood on the evening before her marriage. Her maidens bathed
her feet and the upper part of her body with water drawn from it; and
this bathing, we are told, “ensured a family.”[166.1] The well into
which Pûran, that Panjâbî Joseph, was thrown, is situate on the
highroad between Siâlkot and Kalowâl. His residence in it sanctified
it to such an extent that the women of those parts believe that if
they bathe in it they will become fruitful.[166.2] Panjâbî women
sometimes adopt more questionable means. They wash naked in a boat in
a field of sugar-canes, or under a mango-tree. Mangoes, it will be
remembered, are favourite phallic fruits in Indian tales. Properly
these women ought to burn seven houses. But this is cruelly forbidden
by English law; and they have to content themselves with burning
secretly at murky midnight on Sunday, and as far as possible at a
cross-road, a small quantity of clay from seven dwellings. On this
fire they heat the water wherewith to wash. Or, during the night of
the feast of Divali--always a night in the moonless half of the
month--the husband draws water at seven different wells in an earthen
pot, and places in the water leaves plucked from seven trees. He
brings the pot to his wife at a crossway where the roads meet roughly
at right angles. She must sprinkle herself with the water unseen by
anybody. The husband then strips and puts on new {167} clothes. This
is indeed a putting-off of the old man. Or else the woman perfectly
nude covers a space in the middle of the crossway, and there lays
leaves from the five royal trees, the _ficus religiosa_, _ficus
indica_, _acacia speciosa_, mango, and _butea frondosa_. On these she
places a little figure of the god Rama, sits on the figure and washes
her entire body with water in five vases drawn from five wells, four
of which must be situated at the four points of the compass from the
town or village, and the fifth to the north-east in the outskirts. She
pours the water from the vases into a receptacle whose bottom is
pierced by a hole whence the contents may fall on her body. The
ceremony must be accomplished in absolute solitude, and all the
utensils must be left on the spot.[167.1]
Among the ancient Greeks various streams and springs were deemed of
virtue against barrenness. Dr. Ploss cites divers classical writers as
recording the claims of the river Elatus in Arcadia, the Thespian
spring on the island of Helicon, the spring near the temple of
Aphrodite on Hymettos, and the warm springs of Sinuessa. Others might
easily be found, if necessary, both ancient and modern. A curious rite
is reported among the Serbs. A young, sterile married woman cuts a
reed, fills it with wine, and sews it, together with an old knife and
a cake, in a linen bag. Holding this bag under her left arm she wades
in flowing water, while some one on the brink prays for her: “Fulfil
my prayer, O God, O Mother of God,” and so on through the whole gamut
of sanctities. During this prayer the wader drops the bag in the
stream, and, coming out, sets her feet in two braziers, out of which
her husband must lift her and carry her home. Here we have
unmistakably a prayer and {168} offerings of food and drink to the
water, the latter remaining but little changed while the former puts
on a Christian guise. A parallel case is that of the Burmal er Rabba
spring at Sidi Mecid, near Constantine, in Algeria, frequented both by
Jewesses and Moors for the removal of infecundity. Each of these women
slays a black hen before the door of the grotto, offers inside a wax
taper and a honey-cake, takes a bath and goes away assured of the
speedy accomplishment of her wishes. Inasmuch as sacrifices are
foreign to Islam, it is obvious that the ceremony is a survival of an
older cult. Curiously enough, the Dyaks of Borneo, who are still
frankly heathen, offer domestic fowls to the water-goddess against
unfruitfulness. The afflicted person (sometimes it is a man) gives a
big feast called Cararamin, and goes to the haunt of the Jata, or
goddess, in question in a boat beautifully adorned, taking a domestic
and other fowls with gilded beaks as offerings. They are thrown living
into the water, or their heads are merely cut off and offered, while
the body is consumed by the votary. In many instances, we are told,
carved wooden figures of birds are made use of instead of the real
article. In the islands of Watabela, Aaru and the Sula Archipelago,
barren women and their husbands go to the ancestral graves, or, if
Moslems, on Friday to a certain sacred tomb, to pray together with
some old women. They bring offerings which include a goat or pig and
water. The husband prays for a medicine, and promises, if a child be
given him, to offer the goat (or pig, if a heathen), or to give it to
the people to eat. It is expected that after this the medicine will be
prescribed to both husband and wife in dreams. They both wash with the
water they have brought, which is consecrated by standing for a while
on the grave, and eat together some of {169} the food, leaving the
rest on the grave. They take the goat, or pig, back home, to be
sacrificed in accordance with the husband’s vow, only if the wife
become pregnant. The Nature-goddess of the Yorubas on the west coast
of Africa is represented as a pregnant female; and the water that is
consecrated by being kept in her temple is highly esteemed for
infertility and difficult labours.[169.1] And in general we may refer
not only to the numerous wells and springs that even yet in Europe
have a similar reputation, but also to the rites practised in
connection with water by a bride on being brought to her new home. It
would be too great a wandering from our present subject to discuss
these rites in detail. But one at least of the objects they have in
view is the production of offspring. I add a few references at the
foot of the page for those who wish to pursue the inquiry.[169.2]
Meantime it will be seen that the practices passed in review
throughout this and the preceding paragraph bear a remarkable analogy
to the stories wherein we are presented with the Supernatural Birth as
caused by bathing; and it will not be forgotten that the mother of the
Erse hero Aedh Sláine does not succeed in bearing a human child until
she has washed in the consecrated water: drinking of it alone was
insufficient. Having regard to the stories {170} of Danae and the
Mexican goddess who was fructified by the rain, it is interesting too
to note that Hottentot maidens must run about naked in the first
thunderstorm after the festival when their maturity is celebrated. The
rain, pouring down over the whole body, has the virtue of making
fruitful the girl who receives it and rendering her capable of having
a large offspring.[170.1] It is even possible that a similar
superstition was once known in Germany. A saying current in many parts
points in this direction, namely, that when it rains on St. John’s day
the nuts will be wormy and many girls pregnant[170.2]--unless, as a
Slav practice already cited may suggest, the pregnancy be the result
of their eating the wormy nuts.
A few other usages must be referred to before we leave the subject.
Several of the stories I have cited attribute pregnancy to the rays of
the sun. The ancient Parsees, as we might have expected, believed that
the beams of the rising sun were the most effective means for giving
fruitfulness to the newly wedded; and even to-day, in Persia and among
the Tartars in Central Asia, the morning after the marriage has been
consummated the pair are brought out to be greeted by the rising
sun.[170.3] At old Hindu marriages the bride was made to look towards
the sun, or in some other way exposed to its rays. This was expressly
called the Impregnation-rite.[170.4] Among the Chacos, an aboriginal
tribe of the southern part of South America, the bride {171} and
bridegroom sleep the first night on a skin with their heads towards
the west; for, we are told, the marriage is not considered as ratified
until the rising sun shines on their feet the succeeding
morning.[171.1] Whether or not it is really their feet on which the
sun is expected to shine, the ratification of the marriage by the sun
must be intended to obtain the blessing of fertility.
It was customary at Rome to offer goats at the Lupercal; and two
youths underwent the pretence of a human offering, doubtless once
anything but a sham. A sacrificial meal followed. The Luperci, then,
girt with skins of some of the slain animals, cut other skins into
strips, and armed with the strips ran up and down the Via Sacra,
across the Forum and through the city, striking all whom they met.
Women who desired to be made fruitful used, it is said, to place
themselves naked in the way and receive the blows upon their
palms.[171.2] Dr. Ploss compares with this the procedure in Voigtland
and other parts of Germany at the Easter festival, when the young
fellows chase the girls out of their beds with green twigs.[171.3]
Similar is the object of the custom observed from India to the
Atlantic Ocean of throwing grain and seeds of one sort or another over
a bride, and apparently of the custom of flinging old shoes. The
wandering Gipsies of Transylvania are said to throw old shoes and
boots on a newly married pair when they enter their tent, expressly to
enchance the fertility of the union. In Germany, pieces of cake are
thrust against the bride’s body.[171.4] About Chemnitz a table-cloth
seems to acquire prolific virtue by serving at a first christening
{172} dinner; and it is sometimes cast over a barren wife.[172.1] The
Asturian ballad already cited in an earlier chapter ascribes to the
borage the power to affect any woman treading on it as it affected the
unfortunate princess Alexandra.[172.2] Rolling beneath a solitary
apple-tree seems an approved method of obtaining pregnancy among the
Kara Kirghiz women.[172.3]
Amulets play a great part in procuring offspring. I have only space
for a few examples. A porcupine’s foot is a favourite talisman among
the Moorish women of Marocco. The Northern Basuto in the Transvaal lay
the fault of childlessness on the husband. He has done to death by
witchcraft one of his kin, or committed some other wrong towards the
dead man, who is therefore angry. After consulting a wizard, and
ascertaining to whom is to be ascribed the evil, he goes to the grave,
acknowledges his fault, prays to the dead for forgiveness, and takes
back from the tomb a stone, a twig, or some other object, which he
carries about, or deposits in his courtyard, as a fetich or a charm.
If he duly honour it, it will restore the good understanding between
the deceased and himself, and give him the benefit he desires. An
Otchi Negress will take a fetich conditionally on its giving her
children. If a child be born, it is a fetich-child and is considered
to belong to the fetich, just as in many of the tales the child is
given by an ogre upon the stipulation that it shall belong to the
ogre, and be fetched away, either when he pleases, or at a fixed
period. The women of Mecca commonly {173} wear a magical girdle to
yield them fertility. In Persia, as we have seen, the mandrake is worn
as an amulet.[173.1] On the Banks’ Islands, women take certain stones
to bed with them for the same purpose.[173.2]
In the interior of western Africa, over the border of Angola, on the
way from Malange, barren Negresses have been found wearing two little
carved ivory figures representing the two sexes in a string round the
body.[173.3] The phalloi worn by Italian women are familiar to every
student of folklore; and the images worn by Danubian Gipsies have
already been mentioned. The worship of the linga is a favourite one
with Hindu women. The representation is sometimes carved and painted
red, at other times a mere rough upright stone. Such idols are to be
seen everywhere in India; and their pious worshippers may often be
observed decking them with flowers, red cloth or gilt paper, like the
Madonna in Roman Catholic churches. Siva himself, the third in the
modern Hindu Trimurti, is represented under this form; and under this
form--softened down by Southey in his finest poem from the grotesque
obscenity of the original story--he appeared when
“Brahma and Vishnu wild with rage contended,
And Siva in his might their dread contention ended.”
A cannon, old and useless and neglected, belonging to the Dutch
Government, lay in a field at Batavia, on the island of Java. It was
taken by the native women for a linga. Dressed in their best, and
adorned with flowers, they used to worship this piece of senseless
iron, presented it with {174} offerings of rice and fruits, miniature
sunshades, and coppers, and completed the performance by sitting
astride upon it as a certain method of winning children. At length an
order arrived from the Government to remove it as lumber; and removed
it was, to the great dismay of the priests, who had pocketed the
coppers and had manufactured and sold the sunshades--probably also to
the dismay of the ladies who depended upon its miraculous power--but
at all events, it is satisfactory to know, without injuriously
affecting the increase of the population.[174.1] At Roman weddings one
of the ceremonies was the culminating rite so dear to these Batavian
women; and its object was that the bride might conceive.[174.2] At
Athens there is a rock near the Callirrhoe, whereon women who wish to
be made fruitful rub themselves, calling on the Moirai to be gracious
to them. And Bernhard Schmidt, writing on the subject, recalls that
not far from that very spot the heavenly Aphrodite was honoured in
ancient times as the eldest of the Fates.[174.3] At the foot of
another hill is a seat cut in the rock on the banks of a stream. There
the Athenian women were wont to sit and let themselves slip on the
back into the brook, calling on Apollo for an easy delivery. The stone
is black and polished with the constant repetition of these
invocations; for still on a clear moonlit night young women steal
silently to the spot to indulge in the same exercise, though we may
presume their prayers are nominally addressed to some other
divinity.[174.4] Near Verdun in Luxemburg, Saint {175} Lucia’s
arm-chair is also to be seen in the living rock. There childless women
sit and pray, afterwards awaiting with confidence the fulfilment of
their petitions. A curious rite used until the Reformation to be
performed at the shrine of Saint Edmund at Bury St. Edmund’s. A white
bull was kept on the fields of the manor of Habyrdon, and never yoked
to the plough nor baited at the stake. When a married woman wished for
offspring he was “led in procession through the principal streets of
the town to the principal gate of the monastery, attended by all the
monks singing, and a shouting crowd; the woman walking by him and
stroking his milk-white sides and pendent dewlaps. The bull being then
dismissed, the woman entered the church, and paid her vows at the
altar of Saint Edmund, kissing the stone, and entreating with tears
the blessing of a child.”[175.1] In the Pyrenees near Bourg d’Oueil is
a stone figure of a man about five feet in height, on which barren
women rub themselves, embracing and kissing it. In Brittany there are
several shrines of this worship. Newly-wedded pairs from the
neighbourhood of Plouarnel and Saint Renan sometimes go to the menhir
of Kervéathon in the _lande_ of Kerloas; and there bride and
bridegroom rub simultaneously their abdomens against the two rough
sides of the stone. By this the husband hopes to get many sons--the
wife hopes to get not merely fecundity but the whip-hand of her
husband. Near Rennes the newly married go, the first Sunday of Lent,
to jump on a stone called the Bride-stone (_Pierre des Épousées_),
singing the while a special song. Down to the Revolution there stood
at {176} Brest a chapel of Saint Guignolet, containing a priapian
statue of the holy man. Women who were, or feared to be, sterile, used
to go and scrape a little of the phallos, which they put into a glass
of water from the well and drank. Another Breton saint called
Guerlichon was similarly honoured.[176.1]
There is a miraculous stone on the sacred hill of Nikko in Japan, at
which women who want to become mothers throw stones, sure of having
their ambition gratified if they succeed in striking it. And in the
Uyeno Park at Tokio is a seated statue of Buddha. Whoso succeeds in
flinging a stone upon the sacred knees attains the same result. At
Whitchurch near Cardiff, in the last century, a woman animated by the
wish for children would go on Easter Monday to the parish churchyard,
armed with two dozen tennis balls, half of them covered with white
leather and the other half with black, and would throw them over the
church. The operation was to be repeated every year until her wish was
accomplished.[176.2] I shall return to these practices in a future
chapter. In the Tirol there are miraculous images beside which little
waxen figures in the shape of toads are hung. The figures are called
_Muettern_. It is believed that every woman has inside her a creature
in this form. Many a mother has gone to sleep with her mouth open, and
the muetter has crept out and gone to plunge into the nearest water.
If she do not close her mouth, the muetter by-and-bye gets back
safely, and the woman, previously sick, is restored to health. But if
she close her mouth, she dies. Unfruitful women offer these waxen
{177} figures to images of the Madonna, or of the Pietà.[177.1] On
the Gold Coast, Bassamese women who are possessed by a demon of
barrenness meet at the fetich hut and deposit consecrated vases and
figures of clay representing mothers nursing, while they present to
the fetich offerings of tobacco and handkerchiefs. The demons are
frightened away by the noise of fire-arms, drums and the blowing of
horns. The officiating chief makes an offering of gold-dust, and then
spirts a mouthful of rum over the belly of every woman who desires
issue. An improvised banquet brings the solemnity to a close.[177.2]
The figures in both these cases may be regarded as a symbolic
dedication of the mother, or more probably the child, to the
supernatural being whose aid, like that of the ogre in the tale, is
invoked. The women on the Babar islands in the Malay Archipelago take
measures bearing some superficial resemblance to the last, but widely
different in meaning. The help of a man who is rich in children is
first obtained. The husband then collects fifty or sixty young kalapa
fruits, while the wife prepares a doll about twenty inches long in red
kattun. On the appointed day the man comes to their hut, puts the
husband and wife to sit near together, and sets before them a plate
containing sirih-pinang and a young kalapa fruit. The latter is
opened, and both husband and wife are sprinkled with the juice. The
assistant then takes a fowl, holds its feet against the woman’s head
and prays, apparently in her name: “O Upulero, make use of this fowl,
let fall a man, let him step down into my hands, I pray thee, I {178}
implore thee, let fall a man, let him step down into my hands and on
my lap!” He asks the woman: “Is the child come?” She answers: “Yes, it
is already sucking.” Then he touches the man’s head with the fowl’s
feet and mutters certain formulæ. The fowl is put to death by a blow
against the posts of the hut, opened, and the veins about the heart
probed. It is laid on a plate and put on the domestic altar. The news
is spread in the village that the woman is pregnant, and every one
comes and congratulates her. The husband borrows a cradle, in which
the doll is placed, and for seven days it is treated as a new-born
child.[178.1] Here it is simulation that plays the important part. In
addition to the prayer and sacrifice, which might be found anywhere,
the Babar islander pretends that the prayer has been granted, and acts
accordingly. Simulation as a form of magic is well known over the
whole earth. As applied to cause conception it is not one of the
practices to which we have had to direct special attention in this
chapter. But it deserves a passing notice as strengthening the general
argument that conception is held to be caused by other than natural
means. A common form of simulation for the purpose of obtaining
children is found in the custom of putting a boy to sit on the bride’s
lap at a wedding. The ceremony was usual among the ancient Aryans, and
is prescribed in detail in the _Âpastamba_.[178.2] It is still
followed in the east of Europe and elsewhere. In England, to rock an
empty cradle is to rock a new baby into it. The Bechuana, Basuto and
Agni women carry dolls, which they treat like children.[178.3] And in
China a barren {179} woman adopts a little girl to produce
conception--a practice for which an elaborate reason is assigned. In
the invisible world, it is said, every woman is represented by a tree,
which bears as many flowers as she is fated to bear children. If she
be sterile, her tree will not bear; and then, just as a fruit-tree is
grafted to make it bring forth fruit, so by adopting a little girl she
will provoke on her tree the germination of flowers, and thus become
fruitful.[179.1]
Reviewing the superstitious rites here brought together, it will be
seen that no case is found where fecundity has been held to be
procured by the sense of smell, or of sight, as in some of the tales.
It was, however, an ancient classical belief that partridges were
impregnated in some such way; for Pliny tells us that if the female
only stood opposite to the male and the wind blew from him towards
her, or if he simply flew over her head, or very often if she merely
heard his voice, it would be enough.[179.2] Though we do not find the
possibility of obtaining fecundity by a glance, we have in the
superstitions of the Evil Eye so widely, well-nigh universally, spread
a belief in a power quite as great, though exercised in a different
way. In the power of magicians to eat by a look, the Evil Eye
performed the converse of impregnation. The authorities on this
subject have been laboriously collected by M. Tuchmann, to whose work
the reader is referred.[179.3] Belief in impregnation by the wind only
would seem to present difficulties at least as great as any of these.
Yet it was a common belief among {180} the ancients, not merely used
for a poetical ornament by Vergil, but repeated without question as a
literal fact by men of lofty intellect and wide attainments like Pliny
and Augustine, that mares were, in Lusitania, as the former asserts,
or in Cappadocia, according to the latter, fertilised by wind.[180.1]
And if the inhabitants of the district of Lampong, in the island of
Sumatra, be not maligned, they, at the beginning of the present
century, believed all the people on the neighbouring island of Engano
to be females who were impregnated in the same manner.[180.2]
It cannot of course be asserted that in every instance of magical
practices collected in the present chapter, pregnancy is believed to
be supernaturally caused by the means prescribed, apart from the
natural means, as in the tales. Indeed, the natural means are often
expressly to be employed in addition to the magical ceremonies. Yet
the line between natural and supernatural is so faint in savage minds
that it is difficult to know how much is to be ascribed to the one and
how much to the other. And we are justified in believing, not only
that the practices tend to render credible the stories, but further
that the stories and the practices--as well as superstitions, like
those mentioned in the last paragraph, unconnected with practice--are
inextricably intermingled, and owe their origin to the same habit of
thought. Nor must we forget that the relationship between father and
child was in early times imperfectly recognised. The researches of the
last five-and-twenty or thirty years have established that among many
savage races the father was held to be no relation to his children.
Even where he exercised, as among the native Australians, {181}
despotic power over wife and children, the latter were held to be his
rather as owner than as begetter; and the ownership of both wife and
children passed at his death to his brothers, while at the same time
the relationships of the children were reckoned exclusively with their
mother’s kin. This system of relationships, known scientifically as
Mother-right, traces whereof are almost everywhere found, can only
have sprung either from a kind of promiscuity wherein the true father
could not have been ascertained, or from an imperfect recognition of
the great natural fact of fatherhood. Both causes, perhaps, played
their part. But at least we may say that the attitude of mind which
favours the practices and beliefs we have been discussing is one which
would be consistent, and consistent alone, with the imperfect
recognition of paternity. And it is unquestionable that the
superstitions, once rooted, would be likely to survive long after
paternity had become an accepted fact, and, tenacious of their
existence, would seek new grounds of justification. This would have
the effect of gradually transforming the stories from matter-of-fact
statements of no unusual interest into sacred legends, into mere tales
told for pleasure, and into wonders believed but unexplained, and the
practices into religious rites and rude medical prescriptions.