Note 116 — Chapter V · WORSHIP OF THE MALEVOLENT DEAD.

Professor Max Müller thinks that it is clear that the poor husband was at first tyrannized over by his female relations and afterwards frightened into superstition. He then began to make a martyr of himself, till he made himself really ill, or took to bed in self-defence. The custom appears, however, to rest on a much more primitive set of ideas. It partly implies, perhaps, the transition from that social state in which, owing to the laxity of the connection between the sexes, the only recognized form of descent was through the mother, and partly, the kindred conception that the father has more to do with the production of the child than the mother, and that the father must, at the critical period of the baby’s existence, exercise particular caution that through his negligence no demoniacal influence may assail the infant,116