Note 419.1 — Chapter XV · THE COUVADE AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE STRENGTH OF THE BLOOD-TIE—CONCLUSION OF THE INQUIRY INTO THE THEORY OF THE LIFE-TOKEN.

The ceremony of Adoption is sometimes found as a simulation of the act of birth, at other times as suckling or a simulation of suckling. Diodorus relates a legend of the adoption of Herakles by Hera which doubtless exhibits the ceremony as practised by the prehistoric Greeks. The scene, it will be remembered, is laid in Heaven; for it was to make things agreeable there after the hero’s apotheosis that Zeus persuaded his jealous and vindictive consort to take this course. We are told that Hera having gone to bed, Herakles was brought close to her body, in order to imitate a real birth; and she then dropped him down from under her clothes to the ground. The writer adds that even in his own day this was the rite of adoption observed by the barbarians;419.1 nor have we any reason to disbelieve him, seeing that it is still practised by the Turks in Bosnia. In Dalmatia the man who intends to adopt a son (the ceremony is the same if it be performed by a woman) girds the son with one end of his girdle and himself with the other, saying in the presence of witnesses: “This is my son. I make over to him after my life my whole property.” A Slavonic folksong represents an empress as taking the son to be adopted into the palace and passing him through her silken vest that he might be called her heart’s child.420.1 Here we are reminded of a mediæval usage at weddings in France and Germany. In the former country a canopy, or veil, was (and perhaps still is) held suspended over the heads of the pair to be married while the service is being performed. It bears the significant name of abrifou, or fool-shelter. The Hessian practice, now extinct, was more picturesque. The bridegroom wore a large black mantle; and as he stood with his bride before the altar he flung with one strong sweep its ample folds around her, so that both of them were covered by it. If the bride, or her husband, had any child, born before marriage, and she took it there and then under the canopy or the mantle, this act was sufficient to render it legitimate.420.2 The same usage may once have prevailed in England; for a belief is said to have lingered into recent times among “the folk” here that a mother might legitimate her children born before marriage, by taking them under her clothes during the ceremony.420.3 Though the object of the practice is said to be legitimation, the rite is that of adoption. Legitimation and Adoption are in this connection convertible terms.