36 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



eating of fruit is in fact practised by Arab women to 

 procure fecundity. 1 A Tuscan woman who desires 

 offspring goes to a priest, gets a blessed apple and 

 pronounces over it an invocation to Saint Anne. 2 The 

 mother of the Virgin is a most sympathetic saint for 

 these cases, since she only gave birth in her old age. 

 Presumably the apple is then eaten ; but Mr. Leland 

 in reporting the custom does not explicitly say so. 

 In the Morbihan a story is told of a girl who was 

 crossed in love and bargained with the Devil for the 

 man of her choice, the consideration being her first 

 child. The Devil however was defrauded by her 

 husband, who plunged the child immediately on birth 

 into a large basin of holy water. In revenge the 

 Evil One carried off the mother, and she was found 

 by a seigneur of Pleguien hanging by the hair to one 

 of the oaks in his avenue. He took her down. 

 She was just able to tell him her story, and to 

 add that she had by incessantly making the sign 

 of the cross protected herself from the tortures 

 which the Devil had designed for her in hell, and 

 consequently he had kicked her with one blow back 

 to earth, where she had been caueht by the tree. 

 Before she had time to give her name and place of 

 abode she died. Since that time, whenever a woman 

 of the neighbourhood desires a child she eats a leaf 



1 Jaussen, 35. 



2 Leland, Gip Sore, 101 ; Id. Etr. Rom. 246. At King-yang-fu 

 in the Chinese province of Kan-su a goddess of fecundity is wor- 

 shipped by the women. Her shrine is on the top of a mountain 

 and is approached by a long flight of stone steps, which the devotee 

 must ascend on her knees. The goddess appears in a dream and 

 gives fruit to the pilgrim, an apple or a peach if she is to have a 

 boy, plums or pears if a girl (Anthropos, iii. 762). 



