[277.1] Riedel, 138, 137.
[277.2] H. Crawford Angus in Zeits. f. Ethnol., xxx., Verhandl., 479.
[277.3] Duff Macdonald, i. 126; Jas. Macdonald, in J. A. I., xxii. 101.
[277.4] H. Zache, in Zeits. f. Ethnol., xxxi. 76. More than thirty years ago a French writer cited by Hertz (Giftmädchen, 41) reported that among the Bafiote of the Loango Coast the girls were led round the village and their virginity put up to auction. This looks like a puberty rite of a similar character. I have not seen the book, however, and think it not impossible that the writer may have misunderstood the ceremony usual on emerging from the “paint-house.”
[278.1] J. A. I., xxxi. 121.
[278.2] Ploss, i. 307, 308. Puberty ceremonies to which girls are subjected are by no means confined to “initiation-mysteries”—that is to say, collective rites performed on a number of candidates at the same time. Several of the above-cited ceremonies are performed on individual girls as they reach puberty; and examples might very easily be multiplied. In Cyprus, on the other hand, there seem to have been collective rites, with the sacrifice of virginity.
[280.1] Mannhardt, Wald- und Feldkulte, ii. 284; Frazer, Adonis, 32 note.
[281.1] Rev. Hist. Rel., xli. 315.
[282.1] Farnell, Cults, v. 423.
[283.1] We are reminded of the risk incurred in relieving Kamtchadal widows of their “sins” (supra, [p. 223]). There, however, the Russian soldiers who assisted them belonged to a totally different mental and social environment. They contemned the native superstition. It is improbable that any strangers at Babylon or Heliopolis could have been on a plane of civilization so far removed from that of the natives that they were either ignorant of, or indifferent to, the native ideas. Rather, they are likely to have shared them. Among the Baronga, when a similar service is required to be rendered, the man must be inveigled by a trick: he would not knowingly incur the risk (Junod, R. E. S., i. 163).