Note 164.2 — Chapter VI · THE SUPERNATURAL BIRTH IN PRACTICAL SUPERSTITIONS.

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 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.