no PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



ceremony of forty sheaves of rye, over which the 

 sheets are spread. Barrels full of wheat and barley 

 are set round it, and at night the wedding torches are 

 stuck in them. 1 



Among the Masai of German East Africa many 

 women, especially women hitherto barren, take part 

 in the festival at the circumcision of the youths. The 

 barren women come in order to be pelted by the 

 youths with fresh cow-dung, for by the universal belief 

 of the Masai they will thereby be rendered fruitful. 2 

 Possibly the same may be the meaning of a curious 

 rite performed by the Australian blackfellows in 

 Victoria when a girl attains the age of puberty. She 

 is rubbed all over with charcoal and spotted with 

 white clay. " As soon as the painting is finished she 

 is made to stand on a log, and a small branch, stripped 

 of every leaf and bud, is placed in her right hand, 

 having on the tip of each bare twig a very small piece 

 of some farinaceous food. Young men, perhaps to 

 the number of twenty, slowly approach her dne by 

 one ; each throws a small bare stick at her, and bites 

 off the food from the tip of one of the twigs, and spits 

 it into the fire, and, returning from the fire, stamps, 

 leaps and raves, as in a corrobboree." The sticks are 

 afterwards buried to prevent sorcerers from taking 



1 Mannhardt, Myth. Forsch. 355. The same chapter is rich in 

 illustrations of the custom of throwing grain and seeds of various 

 kinds over a bride, and of decking her with ears of corn and so 

 forth, and abundantly justifies Mannhardt's observation that " the 

 custom undeniably takes its rise from the feeling of a sympathetic 

 connection between mankind and seed-bearing grasses and the 

 comparison between the fruit of the body and of corn." 



2 Merker,6i. Their neighbours the Nandi apparently consider the 

 mere presence of a barren woman at a certain part of the boys' circum- 

 cision ceremonies enough to cause pregnancy (Hollis, -Nandi^ 55, 68). 



