n6 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



teeming they take old pieces of our shoes to hang about 

 them ; for, as they take our nation to be more fertile 

 and of a stronger disposition of body than theirs, they 

 fancy the virtue of our body communicates itself to our 

 clothing." 1 This virtue, however, is often looked 

 upon as transferred by the same means from one body 

 to another, to the detriment of the former. Such 

 appears to be the danger contemplated by the supersti- 

 tion in the Erzgebirge that a bride must not give away 

 the first shoes she casts off, lest she become unlucky. 2 

 That is to say, her luck (by which fertility was doubt- 

 less originally meant, and in which it is still the chief 

 element) would be given away with the shoes. We 

 shall meet with further examples of transfer in the 

 next chapter. 



The virtue of sacred vestments is derived from 

 contact with persons either personally or ritually holy. 

 One in that condition, as the tales abundantly witness, 

 has the power of fecundating barren women. The 

 relics of Lha-tsiin, the patron saint of Sikhim, are 

 celebrated as a certain cure for barrenness. They 

 consist of his full-dress robes, including hat and boots, 

 his hand-drum, bell and dorje, or Buddhist sceptre 

 typical of the thunderbolt, and a miraculous dagger 



1 Egede, A Description of Greenland (London, 1818), 198. The 

 first edition of the Danish original was published in 1741. Compare 

 the custom of flinging old shoes at a bride (supra, p. 109). The 

 wearing of a garment belonging to a prolific friend may be com- 

 pared with a custom among the Besisi of Selangor in the Malay 

 Peninsula. In the course of a ceremony for the purpose of 

 promoting the fertility of a mangostin, the fruit-tree is decorated with 

 festoons of palm-leaves and they are allowed to remain upon it 

 (Skeat and Blagden, ii. 302). The analogy is perhaps even closer 

 with the practices of simulation by means of a living child or a doll 

 described on a later page. 2 Wuttke, 376. 



