Chapter IV: Sacred Men and Women (2)

(M66) The Romans and Greeks appear to have also believed that the souls of the dead were incarnate in the bodies of serpents. Among the Romans the regular symbol of the _genius_ or guardian spirit of every man was a serpent,(286) and in Roman houses serpents were lodged and fed in such numbers that if their swarms had not been sometimes reduced by conflagrations there would have been no living for them.(287) In Greek legend Cadmus and his wife Harmonia were turned at death into snakes.(288) When the Spartan king Cleomenes was slain and crucified in Egypt, a great serpent coiled round his head on the cross and kept off the vultures from his face. The people regarded the prodigy as a proof that Cleomenes was a son of the gods.(289) Again, when Plotinus lay dying, a snake crawled from under his bed and disappeared into a hole in the wall, and at the same moment the philosopher expired.(290) Apparently superstition saw in these serpents the souls of the dead men. In Greek religion the serpent was indeed the regular symbol or attribute of the worshipful dead,(291) and we can hardly doubt that the early Greeks, like the Zulus and other African tribes at the present day, really believed the soul of the departed to be lodged in the reptile. The sacred serpent which lived in the Erechtheum at Athens, and was fed with honey-cakes once a month, may have been supposed to house the soul of the dead king Erechtheus, who had reigned in his lifetime on the same spot.(292) Perhaps the libations of milk which the Greeks poured upon graves(293) were intended to be drunk by serpents as the embodiments of the deceased; on two tombstones found at Tegea a man and a woman are respectively represented holding out to a serpent a cup which may be supposed to contain milk.(294) We have seen that various African tribes feed serpents with milk because they imagine the reptiles to be incarnations of their dead kinsfolk;(295) and the Dinkas, who practise the custom, also pour milk on the graves of their friends for some time after the burial.(296) It is possible that a common type in Greek art, which exhibits a woman feeding a serpent out of a saucer, may have been borrowed from a practice of thus ministering to the souls of the departed.(297)

(M67) Further, at the sowing festival of the Thesmophoria, held by Greek women in October, it was customary to throw cakes and pigs to serpents, which lived in caverns or vaults sacred to the corn-goddess Demeter.(298) We may guess that the serpents thus propitiated were deemed to be incarnations of dead men and women, who might easily be incommoded in their earthy beds by the operations of husbandry. What indeed could be more disturbing than to have the roof of the narrow house shaken and rent over their heads by clumsy oxen dragging a plough up and down on the top of it? No wonder that at such times it was thought desirable to appease them with offerings. Sometimes, however, it is not the dead but the Earth Goddess herself who is disturbed by the husbandman. An Indian prophet at Priest Rapids, on the Middle Columbia River, dissuaded his many followers from tilling the ground because “it is a sin to wound or cut, tear up or scratch our common mother by agricultural pursuits.”(299) “You ask me,” said this Indian sage, “to plough the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom? You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? You ask me to cut grass and hay and sell it and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut off my mother’s hair?”(300) The Baigas, a primitive Dravidian tribe of the Central Provinces in India, used to practise a fitful and migratory agriculture, burning down patches of jungle and sowing seed in the soil fertilized by the ashes after the breaking of the rains. “One explanation of their refusal to till the ground is that they consider it a sin to lacerate the breast of their mother earth with a ploughshare.”(301) In China the disturbance caused to the earth-spirits by the operations of digging and ploughing was so very serious that Chinese philosophy appears to have contemplated a plan for allowing the perturbed spirits a close time by forbidding the farmer to put his spade or his plough into the ground except on certain days, when the earth-spirits were either not at home or kindly consented to put up with some temporary inconvenience for the good of man. This we may infer from a passage in a Chinese author who wrote in the first century of our era. “If it is true,” he says, “that the spirits who inhabit the soil object to it being disturbed and dug up, then it is proper for us to select special good days for digging ditches and ploughing our fields. (But this is never done); it therefore follows that the spirits of the soil, even though really annoyed when it is disturbed, pass over such an offence if man commits it without evil intent. As he commits it merely to ensure his rest and comfort, the act cannot possibly excite any anger against him in the perfect heart of those spirits; and this being the case, they will not visit him with misfortune even if he do not choose auspicious days for it. But if we believe that the earth-spirits cannot excuse man on account of the object he pursues, and detest him for annoying them by disturbing the ground, what advantage then can he derive from selecting proper days for doing so?”(302) What advantage indeed? In that case the only logical conclusion is, with the Indian prophet, to forbid agriculture altogether, as an impious encroachment on the spiritual world. Few peoples, however, who have once contracted the habit of agriculture are willing to renounce it out of a regard for the higher powers; the utmost concession which they are willing to make to religion in the matter is to prohibit agricultural operations at certain times and seasons, when the exercise of them would be more than usually painful to the earth-spirits. Thus in Bengal the chief festival in honour of Mother Earth is held at the end of the hot season, when she is supposed to suffer from the impurity common to women, and during that time all ploughing, sowing, and other work cease.(303) On a certain day of the year, when offerings are made to the Earth, the Ewe farmer of West Africa will not hoe the ground, and the Ewe weaver will not drive a sharp stake into it, “because the hoe and the stake would wound the Earth and cause her pain.”(304) When Ratumaimbulu, the god who made fruit-trees to blossom and bear fruit, came once a year to Fiji, the people had to live very quietly for a month lest they should disturb him at his important work. During this time they might not plant nor build nor sail about nor go to war; indeed most kinds of work were forbidden. The priests announced the time of the god’s arrival and departure.(305) These periods of rest and quiet would seem to be the Indian and Fijian Lent.

(M68) Thus behind the Greek notion that women may conceive by a serpent-god(306) seems to lie the belief that they can conceive by the dead in the form of serpents. If such a belief was ever held, it would be natural that barren women should resort to graves in order to have their wombs quickened, and this may explain why they visited the shrine of the serpent-god Aesculapius for that purpose; the shrine was perhaps at first a grave. It is significant that in Syria the shrines of St. George, to which childless women go to get offspring, always include a tomb or the likeness of one;(307) and further, that in the opinion of Syrian peasants at the present day women may, without intercourse with a living man, bear children to a dead husband, a dead saint, or a jinnee.(308) In the East Indies also it is still commonly believed that spirits can consort with women and beget children on them. The Olo Ngadjoe of Borneo imagine that albinoes are the offspring of the spirit of the moon by mortal women, the pallid hue of the human children naturally reflecting the pallor of their heavenly father.(309)

(M69) Such beliefs are closely akin to the idea, entertained by many peoples, that the souls of the dead may pass directly into the wombs of women and be born again as infants. Thus the Hurons used to bury little children beside the paths in the hope that their souls might enter the passing squaws and be born again;(310) and similarly some negroes of West Africa throw the bodies of infants into the bush in order that their souls may choose a new mother from the women who pass by.(311) Among the tribes of the Lower Congo “a baby is always buried near the house of its mother, never in the bush. They think that, if the child is not buried near its mother’s house, she will be unlucky and never have any more children.” The notion probably is that the dead child, buried near its mother’s house, will enter into her womb and be born again, for these people believe in the reincarnation of the dead. They think that “the only new thing about a child is its body. The spirit is old and formerly belonged to some deceased person, or it may have the spirit of some living person.” For example, if a child is like its mother, father, or uncle, they imagine that it must have the spirit of the relative whom it resembles, and that therefore the person whose soul has thus been abstracted by the infant will soon die.(312) Among the Bangalas, a tribe of cannibals in Equatorial Africa, to the north of the Congo, a woman was one day seen digging a hole in the public road. Her husband entreated a Belgian officer to let her alone, promising to mend the road afterwards, and explaining that his wife wished to become a mother. The good-natured officer complied with his request and watched the woman. She continued to dig till she had uncovered a little skeleton, the remains of her first-born, which she tenderly embraced, humbly entreating the dead child to enter into her and give her again a mother’s joy. The officer rightly did not smile.(313) The Bagishu, a Bantu tribe of Mount Elgon, in the Uganda Protectorate, practise the custom of throwing out their dead “except in the case of the youngest child or the old grandfather or grandmother, for whom, like the child, a prolonged life on earth is desired.... When it is desired to perpetuate on the earth the life of some old man or woman, or that of some young baby, the corpse is buried inside the house or just under the eaves, until another child is born to the nearest relation of the corpse. This child, male or female, takes the name of the corpse, and the Bagishu firmly believe that the spirit of the dead has passed into this new child and lives again on earth. The remains are then dug up and thrown out into the open.”(314)

(M70) Again, just as measures are adopted to facilitate the rebirth of good ghosts, so on the other hand precautions are taken to prevent the rebirth of bad ones. Thus, with regard to the Baganda of Central Africa we read that, “while the present generation know the cause of pregnancy, the people in the earlier times were uncertain as to its real cause, and thought that it was possible to conceive without any intercourse with the male sex. Hence their precautions in passing places where either a suicide had been burnt, or a child born feet first had been buried. Women were careful to throw grass or sticks on such a spot, for by so doing they thought that they could prevent the ghost of the dead from entering into them, and being reborn.”(315) The fear of being got with child by such ghosts was not confined to married women, it was shared by all women alike, whether young or old, whether married or single; and all of them sought to avert the danger in the same way.(316) And Baganda women imagined that without the help of the other sex they could be impregnated not only by these unpleasant ghosts but also by the flower of the banana. If while a woman was busy in her garden under the shadow of the banana trees, a great purple bloom chanced to fall from one of the trees on her back or shoulders, it was quite enough, in the opinion of the Baganda, to get her with child; and were a wife accused of adultery because she gave birth to a child who could not possibly have been begotten by her husband, she had only to father the infant on a banana flower to be honourably acquitted of the charge. The reason why this remarkable property was ascribed to the bloom of the banana would seem to be that ghosts of ancestors were thought to haunt banana groves, and that the afterbirths of children, which the Baganda regarded as twins of the children, were commonly buried at the root of the trees.(317) What more natural than that a ghost should lurk in each flower, and dropping adroitly in the likeness of a blossom on a woman’s back effect a lodgment in her womb?

(M71) Again, when a child dies in Northern India it is usually buried under the threshold of the house, “in the belief that as the parents tread daily over its grave, its soul will be reborn in the family. Here, as Mr. Rose suggests, we reach an explanation of the rule that children of Hindus are buried, not cremated. Their souls do not pass into the ether with the smoke of the pyre, but remain on earth to be reincarnated in the household.”(318) In the Punjaub this belief in the reincarnation of dead infants gives rise to some quaint or pathetic customs. Thus, “in the Hissar District, Bishnois bury dead infants at the threshold, in the belief that it would facilitate the return of the soul to the mother. The practice is also in vogue in the Kangra District, where the body is buried in front of the back door. In some places it is believed that, if the child dies in infancy and the mother drops her milk for two or three days on the ground, the soul of the child comes back to be born again. For this purpose milk diluted with water is placed in a small earthen pot and offered to the dead child’s spirit for three consecutive evenings. There is also a belief in the Ambala and Gujrat Districts that if jackals and dogs dig out the dead body of the child and bring it towards the town or village, it means that the child will return to its mother, but if they take it to some other side, the soul will reincarnate in some other family. For this purpose, the second day after the infant’s death, the mother goes out early in the morning to see whether the dogs have brought the body towards the village. When the child is being taken away for burial the mother cuts off and preserves a piece of its garment with a view to persuade the soul to return to her. Barren women or those who have lost children in infancy tear a piece off the clothing of a dead child and stitch it to their wearing apparel, believing that the soul of the child will return to them instead of its own mother. On this account, people take great care not to lose the clothes of dead children, and some bury them in the house.”(319) In Bilaspore “a still-born child, or one who has passed away before the _Chhatti_ (the sixth day, the day of purification) is not taken out of the house for burial, but is placed in an earthen vessel and is buried in the doorway or in the yard of the house. Some say that this is done in order that the mother may bear another child.”(320) Here in Bilaspore the people have devised a very simple way of identifying a dead person when he or she is born again as an infant. When anybody dies, they mark the body with soot or oil, and the next baby born in the family with a similar mark is hailed as the departed come to life again.(321) Among the Kois of the Godavari district, in Southern India, the dead are usually burnt, but the bodies of children and of young men and women are buried. If a child dies within a month of its birth, it is generally buried close to the house “so that the rain, dripping from the eaves, may fall upon the grave, and thereby cause the parents to be blessed with another child.”(322) Apparently it is supposed that the soul of the dead child, refreshed and revived by the rain, will pass again into the mother’s womb. Indian criminal records contain many cases in which “the ceremonial killing of a male child has been performed as a cure for barrenness, the theory being that the soul of the murdered boy becomes reincarnated in the woman, who performs the rite with a desire to secure offspring. Usually she effects union with the spirit of the child by bathing over its body or in the water in which the corpse has been washed. Cases have recently occurred in which the woman actually bathed in the blood of the child.”(323)

(M72) On the fifth day after a death the Gonds perform the ceremony of bringing back the soul. They go to the bank of a river, call aloud the name of the deceased, and entering the water catch a fish or an insect. This creature they then take home and place among the sainted dead of the family, supposing that in this manner the spirit of the departed has been brought back to the house. Sometimes the fish or insect is eaten in the belief that it will be thus reborn as a child.(324) This last custom explains the widely diffused story of virgins who have conceived by eating of a plant or an animal or merely by taking it to their bosom.(325) In all such cases we may surmise that the plant or animal was thought to contain the soul of a dead person, which thus passed into the virgin’s womb and was born again as an infant. Among the South Slavs childless women often resort to a grave in which a pregnant woman is buried. There they bite some grass from the grave, invoke the deceased by name, and beg her to give them the fruit of her womb. After that they take a little of the mould from the grave and carry it about with them thenceforth under their girdle.(326) Apparently they imagine that the soul of the unborn infant is in the grass or the mould and will pass from it into their body.

(M73) Among the Kai of German New Guinea, “impossible as it may be thought, it is yet a fact that women here and there deny in all seriousness the connexion between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. Of course most people are clear as to the process. The ignorance of some individuals is perhaps based on the consideration that not uncommonly married women remain childless for years or for life. Finally, the animistic faith contributes its share to support the ignorance.”(327) In some islands of Southern Melanesia the natives appear similarly to believe that sexual intercourse is not necessary to impregnation, and that a woman can conceive through the simple passage into her womb of a spirit-animal or a spirit-fruit without the help of a man. In the island of Mota, one of the Banks’ group, “the course of events is usually as follows: a woman sitting down in her garden or in the bush or on the shore finds an animal or fruit in her loincloth. She takes it up and carries it to the village, where she asks the meaning of the appearance. The people say that she will give birth to a child who will have the characters of this animal or even, it appeared, would be himself or herself the animal. The woman then takes the creature back to the place where she had found it and places it in its proper home; if it is a land animal on the land; if a water animal in the pool or stream from which it had probably come. She builds up a wall round it and goes to feed and visit it every day. After a time the animal will disappear, and it is believed that that is because the animal has at the time of its disappearance entered into the woman. It seemed quite clear that there was no belief in physical impregnation on the part of the animal, nor of the entry of a material object in the form of the animal into her womb, but so far as I could gather, an animal found in this way was regarded as more or less supernatural, a spirit animal and not one material, from the beginning. It has happened in the memory of an old man now living in Mota that a woman who has found an animal in her loincloth has carried it carefully in her closed hands to the village, but that when she opened her hands to show it to the people, the animal has gone, and in this case it was believed that the entry had taken place while the woman was on her way from the bush to the village.... When the child is born it is regarded as being in some sense the animal or fruit which had been found and tended by the mother. The child may not eat the animal during the whole of its life, and if it does so, will suffer serious illness, if not death. If it is a fruit which has been found, the child may not eat this fruit or touch the tree on which it grows, the latter restriction remaining in those cases in which the fruit is inedible.... I inquired into the idea at the bottom of the prohibition of the animal as food, and it appeared to be that the person would be eating himself. It seemed that the act would be regarded as a kind of cannibalism. It was evident that there is a belief in the most intimate relation between the person and all individuals of the species with which he is identified.

“A further aspect of the belief in the animal nature of a child is that it partakes of the physical and mental characters of the animal with which it is identified. Thus, if the animal found has been a sea-snake, and this is a frequent occurrence, the child would be weak, indolent and slow; if an eel, there will be a similar disposition; if a hermit crab, the child will be hot-tempered; if a flying fox, it will also be hot-tempered and the body will be dark; if a brush turkey, the disposition will be good; if a lizard, the child will be soft and gentle; if a rat, thoughtless, hasty and intemperate. If the object found has been a fruit, here also the child will partake of its nature. In the case of a wild Malay apple (_malmalagaviga_) the child will have a big belly, and a person with this condition will be asked, ‘Do you come from the _malmalagaviga_?’ Again, if the fruit is one called _womarakaraqat_, the child will have a good disposition.

(M74) “In the island of Motlav not far from Mota they have the same belief that if a mother has found an animal in her dress, the child will be identified with that animal and will not be allowed to eat it. Here again the child is believed to have the characters of the animal, and two instances given were that a child identified with a yellow crab will have a good disposition and be of a light colour, while if a hermit crab has been found, the child will be angry and disagreeable. In this island a woman who desires her child to have certain characters will frequent a place where she will be likely to encounter the animal which causes the appearance of these characters. Thus, if she wants to have a light coloured child, she will go to a place where there are light coloured crabs.”(328)

(M75) Throughout a large part of Australia, particularly in the Centre, the North, and the West, the aborigines hold that the commerce of the human sexes is not necessary to the production of children; indeed many of them go further and deny that sexual intercourse is the real cause of the propagation of the species. Among the Arunta, Kaitish, Luritcha, Ilpirra and other tribes, who roam the barren steppes of Central Australia, it appears to be a universal article of belief that every person is the reincarnation of a deceased ancestor, and that the souls of the dead pass directly into the wombs of women, who give them birth without the need of commerce with the other sex. They think that the spirits of the departed gather and dwell at particular spots, marked by a natural feature such as a rock or a tree, and that from these lurking-places they dart out and enter the bodies of passing women or girls. When a woman feels her womb quickened, she knows that a spirit has made its way into her from the nearest abode of the dead. This is their regular explanation of conception and childbirth. “The natives, one and all in these tribes, believe that the child is the direct result of the entrance into the mother of an ancestral spirit individual. They have no idea of procreation as being associated with sexual intercourse, and firmly believe that children can be born without this taking place.”(329) The spots where the souls thus congregate waiting to be born again are usually the places where the remote ancestors of the dream-time are said to have passed into the ground; that is, they are the places where the forefathers of the tribe are supposed to have died or to have been buried. For example, in the Warramunga tribe the ancestor of the Black-snake clan is said to have left many spirits of Black-snake children in the rocks and trees which border a certain creek. Hence no woman at the present day dares to strike one of these trees with an axe, being quite convinced that the blow would release one of the spirit-children, who would at once enter her body. They imagine that the spirit is no larger than a grain of sand, and that it enters the woman through her navel and grows into a child in her womb.(330) Again, at several places in the wide territory of the Arunta tribe there are certain stones which are in like manner thought to be the abode of souls awaiting rebirth. Hence the stones are called “child-stones.” In one of them there is a hole through which the spirit-children look out for passing women, and it is firmly believed that a visit to the stone would result in conception. If a young woman is obliged to pass near the stone and does not wish to have a child, she will carefully disguise her youth, pulling a wry face and hobbling along on a stick. She will bend herself double like a very old woman, and imitating the cracked voice of age she will say, “Don’t come to me, I am an old woman.” Nay, it is thought that women may conceive by the stone without visiting it. If a man and his wife both wish for a child, the husband will tie his hair-girdle round the stone, rub it, and mutter a direction to the spirits to give heed to his wife. And it is believed that by performing a similar ceremony a malicious man can cause women and even children at a distance to be pregnant.(331)

(M76) Such beliefs are not confined to the tribes of Central Australia but prevail among all the tribes from Lake Eyre northwards to the sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria.(332) Thus the Mungarai say that in the far past time their old ancestors walked about the country, making all the natural features of the landscape and leaving spirit-children behind them where they stopped. These children emanated from the bodies of the ancestors, and they still wait at various spots looking out for women into whom they may go and be born. For example, near McMinn’s bar on the Roper River there is a large gum tree full of spirit-children, who all belong to one particular totem and are always agog to enter into women of that totem. Again, at Crescent Lagoon an ancestor, who belonged to the thunder totem, deposited numbers of spirit-children; and if a woman of the Gnaritjbellan subclass so much as dips her foot in the water, one of the spirit-children passes up her leg and into her body and in due time is born as a child, who has thunder for its totem. Or if the woman stoops and drinks water, one of the sprites will enter her through the mouth. Again, there are lagoons along the Roper River where red lilies grow; and the water is full of spirit-children which were deposited there by a kangaroo man. So when women of the Gnaritjbellan subclass wade into the water to gather lilies, little sprites swarm up their legs and are born as kangaroo children. Again, in the territory of the Nullakun tribe there is a certain spring where a man once deposited spirit-children of the rainbow totem; and to this day when a woman of the right totem comes to drink at the spring, the spirit of a rainbow child will dart into her and be born. Once more, in the territory of the Yungman tribe the trees and stones near Elsey Creek are full of spirit-children who belong to the sugar-bag (honeycomb) totem; and these sugar-bag children are constantly entering into the right women and being born into the world.(333)

(M77) The natives of the Tully River in Queensland do not recognize sexual intercourse as a cause of conception in women, though curiously enough they do recognize it as the cause of conception in all animals, and pride themselves on their superiority to the brutes in that they are not indebted for the continuance of their species to such low and vulgar means. The true causes of conception in a woman, according to them, are four in number. First, she may have received a particular species of black bream from a man whom the European in his ignorance would call the father; this she may have roasted and sat over the fire inhaling the savoury smell of the roast fish. That is quite sufficient to get her with child. Or, secondly, she may have gone out on purpose to catch a certain kind of bull-frog, and if she succeeds in capturing it, that again is a full and satisfactory explanation of her pregnancy. Thirdly, some man may have told her to conceive a child, and the mere command produces the desired effect. Or, fourth and lastly, she may have simply dreamed that the child was put into her, and the dream necessarily works its own fulfilment. Whatever white men may think about the matter, these are the real causes why babies are born among the blacks on the Tully River.(334) About Cape Bedford in Queensland the natives believe that babies are sent by certain long-haired spirits, with two sets of eyes in the front and back of their heads, who live in the dense scrub and underwood. The children are made in the far west where the sun goes down, and they are made not in the form of infants but full grown; but on their passage from the sunset land to the wombs they are changed into the shape of spur-winged plovers, if they are girls, or of pretty snakes, if they are boys. So when the cry of a plover is heard by night, the blacks prick up their ears and say, “Hallo! there is a baby somewhere about.” And if a woman is out in the bush searching for food and sees one of the pretty snakes, which are really baby boys on the look out for mothers, she will call out to her mates, and they will come running and turn over stones, and leaves, and logs in the search for the snake; and if they cannot find it they know that it has gone into the woman and that she will soon give birth to a baby boy.(335) On the Pennefather River in Queensland the being who puts babies into women is called Anje-a. He takes a lump of mud out of one of the mangrove swamps, moulds it into the shape of an infant, and insinuates it into a woman’s womb. You can never see him, for he lives in the depths of the woods, among the rocks, and along the mangrove swamps; but sometimes you can hear him laughing there to himself, and when you hear him you may know that he has got a baby ready for somebody.(336) Among the tribes of the Cairns district in North Queensland “the acceptance of food from a man by a woman was not merely regarded as a marriage ceremony, but as the actual cause of conception.”(337)

(M78) Similarly among the Australian tribes of the Northern Territory, about Port Darwin and the Daly River, especially among the Larrekiya and Wogait, “conception is not regarded as a direct result of cohabitation.” The old men of the Wogait say that there is an evil spirit who takes babies from a big fire and puts them in the wombs of women, who must give birth to them. In the ordinary course of events, when a man is out hunting and kills game or collects other food, he gives it to his wife and she eats it, believing that the game or other food will cause her to conceive and bring forth a child. When the child is born, it may on no account partake of the food which caused conception in the mother until it has got its first teeth.(338) A similar belief that conception is caused by the food which a woman eats is held by some tribes of Western Australia. On this subject Mr. A. R. Brown reports as follows: “In the Ingarda tribe at the mouth of the Gascoyne River, I found a belief that a child is the product of some food of which the mother has partaken just before her first sickness in pregnancy. My principal informant on this subject told me that his father had speared a small animal called _bandaru_, probably a bandicoot, but now extinct in this neighbourhood. His mother ate the animal, with the result that she gave birth to my informant. He showed me the mark in his side where, as he said, he had been speared by his father before being eaten by his mother. A little girl was pointed out to me as being the result of her mother eating a domestic cat, and her brother was said to have been produced from a bustard.... The bustard was one of the totems of the father of these two children and, therefore, of the children themselves. This, however, seems to have been purely accidental. In most cases the animal to which conception is due is not one of the father’s totems. The species that is thus connected with an individual by birth is not in any way sacred to him. He may kill or eat it; he may marry a woman whose conceptional animal is of the same species, and he is not by the accident of his birth entitled to take part in the totemic ceremonies connected with it.

“I found traces of this same belief in a number of tribes north of the Ingarda, but everywhere the belief seemed to be sporadic; that is to say, some persons believed in it and others did not. Some individuals could tell the animal or plant from which they or others were descended, while others did not know or in some cases denied that conception was so caused. There were to be met with, however, some beliefs of the same character. A woman of the Buduna tribe said that native women nowadays bear half-caste children because they eat bread made of white flour. Many of the men believed that conception is due to sexual intercourse, but as these natives have been for many years in contact with the whites this cannot be regarded as satisfactory evidence of the nature of their original beliefs.

(M79) “In some tribes further to the north I found a more interesting and better organised system of beliefs. In the Kariera, Ñamal, and Injibandi tribes the conception of a child is believed to be due to the agency of a particular man, who is not the father. This man is the _wororu_ of the child when it is born. There were three different accounts of how the _wororu_ produces conception, each of them given to me on several different occasions. According to the first, the man gives some food, either animal or vegetable, to the woman, and she eats this and becomes pregnant. According to the second, the man when he is out hunting kills an animal, preferably a kangaroo or an emu, and as it is dying he tells its spirit or ghost to go to a particular woman. The spirit of the dead animal goes into the woman and is born as a child. The third account is very similar to the last. A hunter, when he has killed a kangaroo or an emu, takes a portion of the fat of the dead animal which he places on one side. This fat turns into what we may speak of as a spirit-baby, and follows the man to his camp. When the man is asleep at night the spirit-baby comes to him and he directs it to enter a certain woman who thus becomes pregnant. When the child is born the man acknowledges that he sent it, and becomes its _wororu_. In practically every case that I examined, some forty in all, the _wororu_ of a man or woman was a person standing to him or her in the relation of father’s brother own or tribal. In one case a man had a _wororu_ who was his father’s sister. The duties of a man to his _wororu_ are very vaguely defined. I was told that a man ‘looks after’ his _wororu_, that is, performs small services for him, and, perhaps, gives him food. The conceptional animal or plant is not the totem of either the child or the _wororu_. The child has no particular magical connection with the animal from which he is derived. In a very large number of cases that animal is either the kangaroo or the emu.”(339)

(M80) Thus it appears that a childlike ignorance as to the physical process of procreation still prevails to some extent among certain rude races of mankind, who are accordingly driven to account for it in various fanciful ways such as might content the curiosity of children. We may safely assume that formerly a like ignorance was far more widely spread than it is now; indeed in the long ages which elapsed before any portion of mankind emerged from savagery, it is probable that the true cause of childbirth was universally unknown, and that people made shift to explain the mystery by some such theories as are still current among the savage or barbarous races of Central Africa, Melanesia, and Australia. A little reflection on the conditions of savage life may satisfy us that the ignorance is by no means so surprising as it may seem at first sight to a civilized observer, or, to put it otherwise, that the true cause of the birth of children is not nearly so obvious as we are apt to think. Among low savages, such as all men were originally, it is customary for boys and girls to cohabit freely with each other under the age of puberty, so that they are familiar with a commerce of the sexes which is not and cannot be attended with the birth of children. It is, therefore, not very wonderful that they should confidently deny the connexion of sexual intercourse with the production of offspring. Again, the long interval of time which divides the act of conception from the first manifest symptoms of pregnancy might easily disguise from the heedless savage the vital relation between the two. These considerations may remove or lessen the hesitation which civilized man naturally feels at admitting that a considerable part or even the whole of his species should ever have doubted or denied what seems to him one of the most obvious and elementary truths of nature.(340)

(M81) In the light of the foregoing evidence, stories of the miraculous birth of gods and heroes from virgin mothers lose much of the glamour that encircled them in days of old, and we view them simply as relics of superstition surviving like fossils to tell us of a bygone age of childlike ignorance and credulity.

§ 8. Sacred Stocks and Stones among the Semites.

(M82) Traces of beliefs and customs like the foregoing may perhaps be detected among the ancient Semites. When the prophet Jeremiah speaks of the Israelites who said to a stock or to a tree (for in Hebrew the words are the same), “Thou art my father,” and to a stone, “Thou hast brought me forth,”(341) it is probable that he was not using vague rhetorical language, but denouncing real beliefs current among his contemporaries. Now we know that at all the old Canaanite sanctuaries, including the sanctuaries of Jehovah down to the reformations of Hezekiah and Josiah, the two regular objects of worship were a sacred stock and a sacred stone,(342) and that these sanctuaries were the seats of profligate rites performed by sacred men (_ḳedeshim_) and sacred women (_ḳedeshoth_). Is it not natural to suppose that the stock and stone which the superstitious Israelites regarded as their father and mother were the sacred stock (_asherah_) and the sacred stone (_massebah_) of the sanctuary, and that the children born of the loose intercourse of the sexes at these places were believed to be the offspring or emanations of these uncouth but worshipful idols in which, as in the sacred trees and stones of Central Australia, the souls of the dead may have been supposed to await rebirth? On this view the sacred men and women who actually begot or bore the children were deemed the human embodiments of the two divinities, the men perhaps personating the sacred stock, which appears to have been a tree stripped of its branches, and the women personating the sacred stone, which seems to have been in the shape of a cone, an obelisk, or a pillar.(343)

(M83) These conclusions are confirmed by the result of recent researches at Gezer, an ancient Canaanitish city, which occupied a high, isolated point on the southern border of Ephraim, between Jerusalem and the sea. Here the English excavations have laid bare the remains of a sanctuary with the sacred stone pillars or obelisks (_masseboth_) still standing in a row, while between two of them is set a large socketed stone, beautifully squared, which perhaps contained the sacred stock or pole (_asherah_). In the soil which had accumulated over the floor of the temple were found vast numbers of male emblems rudely carved out of soft limestone; and tablets of terra-cotta, representing in low relief the mother-goddess, were discovered throughout the strata. These objects were no doubt votive-offerings presented by the worshippers to the male and female deities who were represented by the sacred stock and the sacred stones; and their occurrence in large quantities raises a strong presumption that the divinities of the sanctuary were a god and goddess regarded as above all sources of fertility. The supposition is further strengthened by a very remarkable discovery. Under the floor of the temple were found the bones of many new-born children, none more than a week old, buried in large jars. None of these little bodies showed any trace of mutilation or violence; and in the light of the customs practised in many other lands(344) we seem to be justified in conjecturing that the infants were still-born or died soon after birth, and that they were buried by their parents in the sanctuary in the hope that, quickened by the divine power, they might enter again into the mother’s womb and again be born into the world.(345) If the souls of these buried babes were supposed to pass into the sacred stocks and stones and to dart from them into the bodies of would-be mothers who resorted to the sanctuary, the analogy with Central Australia would be complete. That the analogy is real and not fanciful is strongly suggested by the modern practice of Syrian women who still repair to the shrines of saints to procure offspring, and who still look on “holy men” as human embodiments of divinity. In this, as in many other dark places of superstition, the present is the best guide to the interpretation of the past; for while the higher forms of religious faith pass away like clouds, the lower stand firm and indestructible like rocks. The “sacred men” of one age are the dervishes of the next, the Adonis of yesterday is the St. George of to-day.