TRANSFORMATION 231 



Murder, or a ritual survival of murder, is however 

 by no means always necessary to obtain the child. 

 We have found advantage taken of the death of one 

 of special powers, as a saint, or of otherwise un- 

 exhausted powers, as an unmarried man or an executed 

 criminal, to endeavour to secure a transfer to a barren 

 woman of the departed life that she may reproduce it in a 

 child. With these practices we must connect the 

 stories attributing pregnancy to the absorption of a 

 portion of a dead man's body, all of which point to a 

 belief in the possibility of fertilisation by such means 

 without sexual intercourse. Often in the stories the 

 identity of the child with the deceased is expressly 

 affirmed. The customs we have just been studying 

 are in complete concord with this affirmation. It may 

 be further suggested that here we have one at least of 

 the causes which have concurred to produce so widely 

 extended a custom as that which I have studied else- 

 where of eating the corpses of the kin. 1 When we are 

 told, for instance, of the Botocudos of South America 

 that mothers ate their dead children as a mark of affec- 



(though he does not express it) that the sacrificed life was expected 

 to pass into the barren woman and be re-born. In the story he 

 cites of King Somaka from the Mahdbhdrata, when the king's only 

 son was sacrificed, we are expressly told that the king's one 

 hundred wives all smelt the smell of the burnt offering and became 

 pregnant of sons, the eldest of whom was the sacrificed son born 

 again of his former mother (Westermarck, Moral Ideas , i. 457 sqq.). 



The Paraiyans, or Pariahs, of Madras bury children in the ordinary 

 burial-ground, unless the child be a first-born and a boy. It is 

 then buried by the house or even within the house. The reason 

 alleged is " that the corpse may not be carried off by a witch or 

 sorcerer, as the body of a first-born child is supposed to possess 

 special virtues" (Madras Govt. Mus. Bull. v. 82). There can be 

 little doubt as to the real meaning of this. 



1 Leg. Pers. ii. 278, sqq. 



