PROCREATIVE POWERS OF WATER SPIRITS.
Water-spirits being authors of fertility in general, it is natural that
they should be credited with the power of fertilizing human beings as
well as animals. In many places the power of bestowing offspring is
ascribed to them, and several wells in India have a reputation for
conferring the blessings of parenthood.
The Hindus believe that “a son secures three worlds, a grandson bliss,
and a great grandson a seat even above the highest heavens. By begetting
a virtuous son one saves oneself as well as the seven preceding and seven
succeeding generations.” Childless women, therefore, resort to various
expedients. Of these pilgrimages to shrines of saints and visits to
Faqirs and Mullas who have miraculous charms in their possession are most
common. But the most effective charm is water. In many parts of India the
water of seven wells is collected on the night of the Dewali, or feast of
lamps, and barren women bathe in it as a means of procuring children. A
more elaborate ritual is observed by the domiciled Hindus of Baluchistan.
There the childless woman takes water from seven different wells, tanks
or springs and places into it leaves of seven kinds of fruit-bearing
trees. She then doffs her clothes, wraps a cotton sheet around her and
sits over the board of a spinning wheel under the wooden spout of a
house, with some of the leaves under her feet. Another woman, blest with
living children, mounts to the top of the house, and pours the mystical
water on the roof so that it trickles over the childless woman through
the spout. After the bath she dons new clothes and greets her husband and
impregnation takes place immediately. The same ceremony is resorted to in
cases in which successive girls have been born, and the birth of a son is
assured.[30]
In a _vav_ in Orissa priests throw betel-nuts into the mud and barren
women scramble for them. Those who find them will have their desire
for children gratified. For the same reason, the mother is taken after
childbirth to worship the village well. She walks round it in the course
of the sun and smears the platform with red lead, which is a survival of
the original rite of blood sacrifice. In Dharwar the child of a Brahman
is taken in the third month to worship water at the village well. There
is also a belief in Gujarat that barren couples get children if they
bathe in a waterfall and offer cocoanuts.
In the Punjab sterile women desiring offspring are let down into a well
on a Sunday or a Tuesday night during the Dewali. After the bath they
are drawn up again and they perform the _Chaukpurna_ ceremony with
incantations. When this ceremony has been performed, the well is supposed
to run dry. Its quickening and fertilizing virtue has been abstracted by
the woman.[31] This practice has its counterpart in a custom observed by
Syrian women at the present day. Some of the channels of the Orontos are
used for irrigation, but at a certain season of the year the streams are
turned off and the dry bed of the channels is cleared of mud and other
impurities, obstructing a free flow of water. The first night that the
water is turned on again, it is said to have the power of procreation.
Accordingly, barren women take their places in the channel, waiting for
the entrance of the water-spirit in the rush of the stream.
Sir James Frazer says that in Scotland the same fertilizing virtue used
to be, and probably still is, ascribed to certain springs. Wives who
wished to become mothers formerly resorted to the well of St. Fillan at
Comrie and to the wells of St. Mary at Whitekirk and in the Isle of May.
In the Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway, women desirous of children
pray at St. Eany’s Well and the men pray at the Rag Well by the Church
of the Four Comely Ones at Onaght. Similarly, Child’s Well in Oxford was
supposed to have “the virtue of making barren women to bring forth.” Near
Bingfield in Northumberland there is a copious sulphur spring known as
the Borewell. About Midsummer day a great fair is held there and barren
women pray at the well that they might become mothers.
Some folklorists, Sir James Frazer included, consider that sterility was
believed by people to be a disease due, as in the case of other maladies,
to the work of demoniacal agency. They therefore include this practice
of bathing in wells for the blessings of motherhood in the same category
in which they place the cult of the bath based on popular faith in the
healing powers of water. But there is probably another explanation for
this practice. Students of the rites and customs observed by the Semitic
people are aware that procreative power was attributed by these people
to the spirits. Professor Curtiss bears testimony to this and he says
that even Moslems and Christians of Syria conceived of God as possessed
of a complete male organism. It was a common belief amongst the Syrians
that the genii, both male and female, had sexual intercourse with human
beings and the view that the spirits of the dead may beget children also
prevailed. When a man had been executed for murder in Jerusalem, about
fifty years ago, some barren women rushed up to the corpse. It may be,
says Curtiss, that they felt that, inasmuch as the man had been released
by death from previous nuptials and was free, as a disembodied spirit, he
was endowed with supernatural power to give them the joy of motherhood by
proximity to his dead body. After his recent researches in Syria Curtiss
says that this belief in the procreative powers of the dead is still
common.
There are three places at the so-called baths of Solomon in Syria, where
the hot air comes out of the ground. One of these hot air vents, called
Abu Rabah, is a famous shrine for women who are barren and desire
children. They in fact regard the _Vali_ (Saint) of the shrine as the
father of children born after such a visit, as appears from the English
rendering of an Arabic couplet, which they repeat as they go inside the
small inclosure and allow the hot air to steam up their bodies:
“Oh, Abu Rabah,
To thee come the white ones,
To thee come the fair ones;
With thee is the generation,
With us is the conception.”
These verses clearly unfold the minds of the women who woo the spirits
for the joys of motherhood. May not the corresponding faith of Indian
women in sanctified waters be traced to similar ideas? The Bombay and
Orissa practices described above do not materially support that view, but
the Punjab practice and the belief of the Punjabis that the well runs dry
after the bath and that its fertilizing virtue is abstracted by the women
bathing in it are very significant.
The Jews also believed in the possibility of conception occurring in a
bath _in quo spermatizaverat homo_. Ben Sira was said to have been the
son of a daughter of Jeremiah who became _enceinte_ from her father in
that way. “Indeed,” says Dr. Feldman, “the Rabbi who expressed himself
as a believer in such an occurrence was Simon ben Zoma, a sage of the
second century A.D., who devoted a good deal of his time to metaphysical
problems, and whose mind gave way in consequence. The question that was
asked of him, no doubt sarcastically, was whether the High Priest, who
may only marry a virgin, was allowed to marry a pregnant virgin. Ben Zoma
answered the question in the affirmative, because, said he, conception
was possible in a bath in which a man had just before washed himself.”[32]
This theory, observes Dr. Feldman, was still in vogue even among
physicians of the twelfth century. Averroes, an Arabian physician who
died in 1198, records that an acquaintance of his, whose _bona fide_
was beyond dispute, stated on her oath that _impregnata fuerat subito
in balneo lavelti aquæ calidæ in quo spermatizaverunt mali homines cum
essent balneati in illo balneo_. Another author explains the possibility
of such an occurrence as follows: _Quia vulva trahit sperma propter suam
propriam virtutem_.
“In the sixteenth century,” continues Dr. Feldman, “we find the
Portuguese Amatus Lusitanus (1550) making use of the same theory to
explain the delivery of a mole by a nun; and, according to Stern, this
belief is prevalent in Turkey even at the present day. The Rabbis of the
Middle Ages also believed in such a possibility. Even as late as the
beginning of the eighteenth century this belief prevailed, and R. Juda
Rozanes, Rabbi of Constantinople, who, on the authority of Maimonides,
considered such an occurrence improbable, was reprimanded by Azulai.”
In Scotland persons who bore the name of the river Tweed were supposed to
have as ancestors the genii of the river of that name. Could this curious
belief have sprung from similar ideas concerning the procreative powers
of the water-spirits?
These conceptions of the generative power of water have their parallel
in a Semong tradition. These people, among whom marital relationship is
preceded by great ante-nuptial freedom, have a legend of a people in
their old home, composed of women only. “These women know not men, but
when the moon is at the full, they dance naked in the grassy places near
the salt lakes, the evening wind is their only spouse, and through him
they conceive and bear children.”[33]