Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/254

 238 The Lifting of the Bride.

his shoulders will peel off the next time he raises his burden ; in South Africa, " if a woman steps over her husband's stick he cannot aim or hit anyone with it in a village brawl ; it is simply useless for its proper purpose. If she steps over his assegai it will never kill or even hit an enemy, and it is at once discarded and given to the boys to play and practise with."^ In these cases the influence is twofold — in some it affects the person who steps over the article, in others the thing stepped over is influenced.

But it is in relation to marriage and fertility charms that the idea is most prominent. Thus, the Jewish bride and bridegroom step seven times over a fish, and the Targum Onkelos on Genesis (c. xlviii.) recites the prayer : " As the fish of the sea, so may they multiply among the sons of men." ^ The virtue of the fish charm is familiar to all students of folklore.^ With the same object the bride in Egypt leaps over a sword, and the gipsy bride in East Anglia jumps over the bough of a tree laid on the ground in the presence of the chiefs of her tribe. We all know that jumping over the besom or broomstick is a popular form of left-handed marriage.

I pass on to the second group of custom which I propose to consider, that of lifting the bride over the doorstep or threshold on her arrival at the house of her husband. Since the time of Plutarch people have asked : "What should be the reason that they would not permit the new-wedded bride to passe of herselfe over the doore-sill or threshold when she is brought home to her husband's house, but they that accompanie her lift her from the ground, and so convey her

' Folk-Lore Record, ii., 39 ; Joitnial Anthropological Institute, xx., 130.

- Sixth Series Notes and Queries, ix., 134 seq. ; viii., 513.

3 Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, i., 249 seq.

•* Dalyell, Darker Superstitions of Scotland, quoting Light, Travels in Egypt, 40 ; Third Series Notes and Queries, iii., 461. In India if any one leaps over you he communicates his diseases to you. The counter-charm is to make him leap back again, Journal Anthropological Society of Bombay, i., 359 ; and com- pare Crawley, Mystic Rose, 113, 207.