Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/258

 242 The Lifting of the Bride.

the threshold when she returned from the honeymoon, and the same is, or was, the rule in Scotland.^ But this idea was probably a later conception based on the older cere- monial observance.

The lifting over the threshold may then be in some cases a fertility charm ; in others it may have been intended to protect the bride from some contamination, or to avoid ill- luck.

Cases of bride-lifting are specially common in India, and though the meaning of the rite is now obscured by the fact that the bride is usually quite a little girl, whom it is neces- sary to carry to the marriage pavilion, the explanation above suggested seems to be the most easy method of accounting for the observance. At any rate^ the fact that the lifting is done by the near relations of the bride, and that it is not connected with even the vaguest pretence of a scuffle, puts the suggestion that it is a survival of marriage by capture out of the question. Thus, at the wedding dance of the Oraons, the pair are borne round seated on the hips of two of their friends, and they must not touch the ground." The Khond bride is covered with a red blanket, perhaps as a protective against the Evil Eye, and is carried astride on the shoulders of her maternal uncle to her husband's village, accompanied by a procession of the other young women of her clan.^ Among the Kattais, a tribe of leather-workers of Ahmadnagar, on the wedding night the bride and bride- groom are lifted by their respective maternal uncles, and a

' Eighth Series Notes afid Queries, x., 328 ; Dalyell, Darker Superstitions of Scotland, 291. An instance is quoted from Lincolnshire in 1888. *' When the carriage containing the bride and bridegroom drove up to the door of the bride- groom's father, the husband lifted his wife from the carriage and carried her up the steps and into the house." Eighth Scr. N. and Q., x., 328.

"^Journal Asiatic Society Bengal, N.S., xxxv., pt. ii., 180. The custom, of course, is not peculiar to India. It prevails among the native American races, for instance the Nahuas and Californians. — Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, i., 411 ; ii., 261.

' Mallby T.cman, Manual of Ganjam District, 69