Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/305

Rh the Kemele wells, where they sit on a stake until the midwife fetches them. At Ried, in the Inn-Viertel, they say that you will find the new babies in the well which lies behind the Pfarrenkirche at St. Pantaleon.

It is not always the stork who is the carrier of the babies. In some places in Germany it is the little beetle, known to English children as the lady-bird or lady-cow, that carries the souls of the children from the wells to their parents.

In some cases the babies are supposed to come from marshes, lakes, rivers, or the sea itself The Basutos in South Africa told the missionaries that the human race originally came from a sedge-covered morass. In the mythology of Japan the lake of Fakone is regarded as the dwelling-place of the children's souls. In Lower Austria they say that the babies come from a tree that stands in the midst of the sea. The baby grows in a basket hanging on to the tree by a string. When it is big enough, the string breaks and the basket swims through the water till it is caught.

Then we have the stork. It is not difficult to connect the stork with water, since he was the messenger of the rain and thunder god, to whom, it is supposed, as we shall see later on, children used to be sacrificed.

Now, at this point we see opened out before us that wide dominion of our lore associated with the goddesses of fertility. It is interesting, from our standpoint, to remember that the moon, waters, and women were all three connected together, and placed under the control of the goddess of fertility, because all three manifest curious natural phenomena, curiously similar.

In Iranian tradition, Anahita, the white-clad virgin moon-goddess is also the goddess of the waters "which were above the firmament," from which all earthly water