Note 98 — Chapter IV · THE WORSHIP OF THE SAINTED DEAD.

Barrenness is in popular belief mainly due to the agency of evil spirits. Sterile women were in Rome beaten with rods by the naked youths who ran through the city at the Lupercalia. The barren, as Shakespeare says, “Touched by this holy chase, shake off their sterile curse.” In Bombay it is believed that the cause of not getting children is that the man or his wife must have killed a serpent in their former birth, whose spirit haunts them and makes the woman barren. To get rid of the spirit which causes sterility, the serpent’s image is burnt and its funeral rites are performed.98 The desire for male offspring is so intense that some of these shrines do a thriving trade in providing nostrums for this purpose.