Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/307

Rh likes, simply by cutting the head off a calf and throwing it over his own head over a bridge into the water, sacrificing to the water-god we may suppose. Then he must hurry home without looking back.

Of other waters where babies can be obtained, and where sterility can be cured, we may mention in ancient Greece, the river Elatus in Arcadia and the Thespian well at Helicon. According to the reports of Sonidas and Photius, the well at Pyna also, on the Hymettos, in the vicinity of the temple of Aphrodite, possessed the property of curing sterility; and in ancient Roman times there were some wells at Baiae, near Pompeii, resorted to by women for the same reason.

In the mythology of India and China also, the supposed fertilizing power of water is met with. An Indian virgin goddess, as a result simply of bathing, gave birth to Ganesh, the elephant god; and the mother of the Chinese Buddha, Fo, had a similar experience.

In Algeria, not far from Constantine, there is a bath beside the well Burmal-ar-Rabba, which Jewish and Moorish women have used for ages in the hope of becoming mothers.

In Servia an offering of wine and some flour baked into a cake is made by women to flowing water, in order to remove the reproach of barrenness.

In and about Jerusalem, "childless couples will go long distances to bathe in certain pools, and barren women visit the hot springs in various districts, not, as might be supposed, for any medicinal properties, but because the jinn who causes the vapour is regarded as being capable, in a definite and physical sense, of giving them offspring."