Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/256

 240 The Lifting of the Bride.

possibly originally identical) were analogues of the Ashma stone of India and of the Churinga of the natives of Australia, to which reference has already been made : — in short, that they represented the sacred stones in which the ancestral spirit was confined. Hence it may be suggested that in some cases, as in the instances which we have been considering, the rite of lifting the bride over it may have been regarded as a charm intended to promote her fertility.

Reviewing other cases of lifting, it may be noted that it is not confined to marriage. Thus, in Central Asia, when a boy is about to undergo the rite of circumcision, he is carried to the place where the operation is to be performed on the shoulders of another boy.^ The same is the rule at the cruel initiation ceremonies of the natives of Australia.''^ Among the Tsinyai of Central Africa, after a funeral one of the wives of the deceased is carried from the burial place on the shoulders of a man.^

The only reasonable explanation of these practices seems to be that persons undergoing such rites are in a state of taboo. Now this conception of taboo acts in two quite different ways. In the one, as in the case of the girl at the period when she reaches womanhood, the tabooed person is supposed to communicate some dangerous influence which is prejudicial to the land and its inhabitants. Hence she is suspended in a cage and her feet are not allowed to touch the ground.** In the other, the person under taboo is himself or herself regarded as specially liable to be affected by the Evil Eye or other dangerous influences, and one source of danger is supposed to lie in his or her touching the ground. With this latter belief we may compare the

' Schuyler, Turkistan, i., 141.

- Roth, Ethnographical Studies, fig. 415, and pp. 170 seq. \ Journal Anthro- pological Institute, xiii., 455.

^ Journal Anthropological Institute, xxiii., 421.

^ Frazer, Golden Bough, Second Edition ; i., 326 ; iii., 304 seq. ; Crawley, Mystic Rose, 99.