Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/79

Rh amuletic symbols with a figure of the Virgin, and have illustrated amulets in which a figure of the Virgin is used to turn a profane amulet (a lunar crescent) into a religious pendant (the Virgin standing, as is usual, upon a lunar crescent). Recently I have seen the four-petalled emblem as the decoration upon the robe of the Virgin in certain religious pendants of the sixteenth century. These facts suggest that this emblem, (concerning the meaning of which I have never succeeded in obtaining definite information from users of the amulets on which it occurs), is an emblem connected with the Virgin, and that its presence in the Portuguese amulets is for the purpose of giving a religious flavour to the profane "fig" hand, and in the Spanish amulets of turning the combination of the crescent and the "fig" hand into an amulet associated with the Virgin. In these connections it is worth recalling that the "fig" hand is a feminine emblem bearing somewhat the same relation to the vulva that the horn bears to the phallus. And one is led to speculate as to whether there can be traced some kinship between the "fig" hand, a distinctive survival of the days when Spain was Roman, with its feminine associations, and the almost similarly distinctively Semitic open hand now commonly known in Northern Africa as the "Hand of Fatima," — an amulet which, as Mohammedan, must have been most severely repressed by the Church authorities. Fig. 3 (Pl. I.). A crescent-shaped ornament, of thin brass, in which the projection at the centre of the inner curve is suggestive of a conventionalization of the "fig" hand ; Madrid. Hands. — A number of specimens of "fig" hands were noted, but of these none, with the exception of some of those of jet, seemed to be contemporary types. One specimen, of a material not noted in the original paper, is of ivory, painted red, in a silver socket. Almost all of the "fig" hands noted were left hands ; right hands seem to be comparatively rare. At Madrid "fig" hands of jet are still made and sold, some naturalistic, but others greatly conventionalized. (See also Crescents above.)