There is, however, general agreement in the belief that the ancestral parents brought into the world the spirit children, who are continually reborn. Among many tribes, as the Dieri and the Warramunga, it is believed that the sex changes at every rebirth, so that the ancestral spirit once takes the form of a male and the next time that of a female. The conditions are such among the Australians that their ignorance of the connection between sexual intercourse and propagation is not at all surprising. Spencer points out that among the Australians there are no "virgins," for as soon as a girl is sexually ripe she is given to a particular man, with whom she has sexual intercourse right through life. In this respect there is no difference among the native women; yet the people see that some women have children and others none, and also that the women with children have them at unequal intervals that have no connection with sexual intercourse. Besides, the women know that they are pregnant only when they feel the quickening, and that is often at a time when they have had nothing to do with a man. Therefore they attempt to explain the origin of children in some other manner, which is in accordance with the very primitive mode of thought of these unprogressive people. In this connection it may be mentioned that the Australian mothers attribute the birth of half-castes to their having eaten too much of the white man's flour. Therefore old Australians accept without question as their own the half-caste children of their wives, and treat them as such. Though the natives of Northern Queensland know that the animals propagate sexually, they dispute this as regards human beings, because man, in contradistinction to the animals, has a living spirit, a soul, which could not be begotten by a material process. A. Lang thinks that with regard to the genesis of mankind the psychology of these primitive people has obscured their knowledge of physiology. According to him, the idea that there is no connection between cohabitation and generation cannot be considered as primary in man.
A proof of this ignorance of the fertilisation process among the Australians is the splitting of the penis practised by them. Otherwise these tribes, which have a scarcity of women and children, and which desire progeny, would not perform an operation by which the semen fails to fulfil its function in the majority of cases of cohabitation. It is becoming more and more certain that this splitting of the penis serves exclusively the purpose of lust, and is least of all intended as a deliberate birth preventative (von Reitzenstein).
Evidences of the ignorance of generation are also to be found elsewhere in cases where the above-mentioned objection of Lang does not apply. In Melanesia the connection between cohabitation and conception seems to have been unknown until lately. R. Thurnwald says that among the tribes on the Bismarck and Solomon Islands visited by him this connection is well known nowadays, but the causal relationship is not so clearly conceived as by our psychologically trained physicians. As a natural phenomenon conception sometimes occurs and sometimes not. Intentional and real forgetting, inexact calculation of time, and the strangeness of men towards women, who are held as inferiors, all make it appear logically probable that conception can take place without cohabitation. To this must be added the weirdness of the whole process, which is therefore given a mysterious interpretation, and also that mode of thought which connects the young product with the place where it is found, with the fruits of a plant, and with the young ones of a bird, etc. Codrington reports the same conditions among the Banks Islanders.
Many tribes of Central Borneo, being mentally and economically far above the Australian natives, assume that pregnancy only lasts four or five months, namely, as long as it is recognised externally in the woman, and that the child enters the body of the woman shortly before the sign of pregnancy. These tribes of Borneo also do not know that the testicles are necessary for propagation (Nieuwenhuis, p. 144).
In Africa it has been established, at least of the Baganda, that they believe in the possibility of conception without cohabitation. Conceptional totemism, the assumption of impregnation by the animals venerated as totems, which exists among the Bakalai in the Congo region, points to a similar belief. Conceptional totemism also exists among the Indian tribes of North-western America (Frazer, Vol. II., pp. 506, 507, and 611, 612).
Among the ancient Mexicans there existed, according to von Reitzenstein, the belief that the children come from a supernal habitation, the flower land, to enter into the mother. Various objects were thought to carry the fœtal germs, especially shuttlecocks and green jewels. For this reason these were placed on the mat for the Mexican bridal pair after the marriage ceremony. The rattle club is perhaps also considered as the bearer of fertility. In India various trees play a rôle in fertilisation ideas.
Noteworthy is the belief found in various places that only the nourishment of the child is supplied by the mother before birth, while the germ of the new being comes from the father. This is the opinion of certain tribes of South-east Australia described by Howitt and the same belief exists among South American tribes who have the well-known couvade. Karl von den Steinen writes regarding this: "One might be tempted to explain this curious custom, which is very advantageous to the women, by the hunting life. But even if the custom suits the women, it is not evident why the men should have submitted to it. The father cuts off the navel cord of the new-born child, goes to bed, looks after the child, and fasts strictly until the rest of the navel cord falls off (or even longer). One might consider him as the professional doctor who also fasts like the student medicine-man, as otherwise his cure would be endangered and the child harmed. But not only the Xingu, but many other tribes, say that the father must not eat fish, meat, or fruit, as it would be the same as if the child itself ate them; and there is no reason to doubt that this is the real belief of the natives. The medicine-man of the village is always at disposal, and he is called in in all cases when the mother or child falls ill. The father is the patient in so far as he feels himself one with the child. Nor is it difficult to understand how this comes about. The native cannot very well know anything about the egg cell and the Graafian follicle, and he cannot know that the mother harbours elements corresponding to the bird's egg. For the native the man is the bearer of the egg, which, to put it clearly and concisely, he lays into the mother, and which she hatches during pregnancy." This idea of the couvade is confirmed by linguistic peculiarities: there are the same or similar words for "father," "testicle," "egg," and "child." The child is considered part of the father, and therefore, as long as the child is at its weakest, the father must keep diet, and must avoid anything that the other could not digest. The child is considered the reproduction of the father, and "for the sake of the helpless, unintelligent creature, representing a miniature copy of himself, he must behave as if he were a child to whom no harm must come. Should the child happen to die in the first days, how could the father, with such views as he has, doubt that he is to blame, seeing that he has eaten indigestible things, particularly as all illnesses are due to the fault of others? What we call pars pro toto prevails in all folk belief in connection with witch or healing magic," though it cannot be assumed "that the magic worker has a clear conception of the 'part' with which he works. The couvade proceeds according to the same logic, only that in this case the whole stands for the 'part.' It comes to the same whether the enemy's hair is poisoned, and he is thus brought into a decline, or whether food is eaten which is harmful to the child detached from one's own body, because it could not digest it, at least not during the time when the detachment takes place."
Besides South America and Australia, the couvade is also frequent in Asia and Africa. Previously it existed also in South-western Europe. Hugo Kunike, who gives a survey of the prevalence and literature of the couvade, thinks that this custom arose from prohibitions which the man was subject to in matriarchal families. The prohibitions condemned the man to inactivity for some time after the birth, so that he took to his hammock. There resulted an external condition which led to an analogy with the lying-in period. There can, according to Kunike, be no question of an imitation of the woman's lying-in, for with the South American Indians and other primitive peoples among whom the couvade is found no lying-in of the women occurs.