Note 266 — Chapter III

It is important to remember that shell-girdles were used by both sexes for general life-giving and luck-bringing purposes, in the funerary ritual of both sexes, in animating the dead or statues of the dead, to attain success in hunting, fishing, and head-hunting, as well as in games. Thus men also at times wore shells upon their belts or aprons, and upon their implements and fishing nets, and adorned their trophies of war and the chase with them. Such customs are found in all the continents of the Old World and also in America, as, for example, in the girdles of Conus- and Oliva-shells worn by the figures sculptured upon the Copan stelæ. See, for example, Maudslay's pictures of stele N, Plate 82 (Biologia Centrali-Americana; Archæology) inter alia. But they were much more widely used by women, not merely by maidens, but also by brides and married women, to heighten their fertility and cure sterility, and by pregnant women to ensure safe delivery in childbirth. It was their wider employment by women that gives these shells their peculiar cultural significance.