The Curing of Barrenness.
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.
One extraordinary method of procuring children, which long troubled our magistrates in Upper India, was for the would-be mother to burn down the hut of some neighbour. The Panjâbi woman, who under the reign of British law is prevented from burning the house of her neighbour, now takes a little grass from seven thatches and burns it.[99]
In another form of the charm the Khândh priest takes the woman to the confluence of two streams, sprinkles water over her to purify her from the dangerous influence of the spirit and makes an offering to the god of births.
Some special influence has been in many lands considered to attach to a person who has been publicly executed, and to the appliances used by the hangman.
Recently at an execution in Bombay, the hangman was observed to carefully secure the rope, and particularly that part of it which had encircled the neck of the culprit. He stated that he could sell every quarter inch of it, as it averted evil spirits and ghosts, and even prevented death from hanging. This idea accounts for the respect paid throughout Europe to the mandrake, which is supposed to be generated from the droppings of the brain of a thief on the gallows. In Cornwall a wen or strumous swelling can be cured by touching it with the hand of a man who has been publicly hanged.[100] According to the same principle, barren women in India bathe underneath a person who has been hanged, and women of the middle classes try to obtain a piece of the wood of the gallows for the same object.
Another practice depends upon the principle that creeping under a bent tree or through a perforated stone expels the demon. Other instances of this will be given in another place. Hence in Gujarât, when an ascetic of the Dûndiya sect dies, women who seek the blessing of a son try to secure it by creeping under the litter on which his corpse is removed.[101]
A rite carried out with the same object rests on a sort of symbolic magic indicating fertility. Along the roads may often be seen trees almost destroyed by a noxious creeper known as the Akâsh Bel. Women in hope of offspring often transplant this from one tree to another, and are thus a decided nuisance to a district officer with a taste for arboriculture.
But the most approved plan is to visit a shrine with a reputation for healing this class of malady. There the patient is given a cocoanut, which is a magic substance, a fruit, or even a barley-corn from the holy of holies. Mr. Hartland has recently made an elaborate study of this subject, and he points out the principle on which the eating of such substances produced the desired effect. “Whether from an analogy between the normal act of impregnation and that of eating and drinking, or because savages had learnt that at least one mode of operating effectively on the organism, for purposes alike of injury and healing, was by drugs taken through the mouth, this was the favourite method of supernatural impregnation.”
And again—“Flowers, fruit and other vegetables, eggs, fishes, spiders, worms, and even stones, are all capable of becoming human beings. They only await absorption in the shape of food, or in some other appropriate manner, into the body of a woman, to enable the metamorphosis to be accomplished.”[102]
The same idea constantly occurs in Indian folk-lore. The barren queen is given the juice of a pomegranate by a Faqîr, or the king plucks one of the seven mangoes which grow on a special tree, or a beggar gives the princess the drug which causes her to give birth to twins.[103] Even in the Râmâyana we read that Râja Dasaratha divides the oblation among his wives and they conceive. Even nowadays in Florence, if a woman wishes to be with child, she goes to a priest and gets from him an enchanted apple, with which she repairs to Saint Anna, who was the Lucina of Roman times, and repeats a prayer or a spell.[104]
Some holy men, it must be admitted, do not escape the tongue of slander for their doings in this department of their business.