236 The Lifting of the Bride.
bride puts her foot on the stone used for grinding spices, which the bridegroom removes,^ and the same or very nearly the same customs prevail generally at marriages in Northern India.
We reach the explanation of such rites in the rule of the Deshashth Brahmans of Dharwar. Among them the couple first walk thrice round the sacred fire. A stone called the Ashma, or " Spirit Stone," that which is used at the funeral rites of the tribe, and into which, like the Churinga of the natives of Australia, the spirit of the dead man is supposed to enter, is kept near the fire, and at each circuit, as the bride followed by the bridegroom approaches this stone, she stands on it till the priest finishes reciting a hymn." Here it seems clear that the idea underlying the rite is that the spirit of one of the tribal or family ancestors occupying the stone becomes reincarnated in her, and so she becomes " a joyful mother of children." For it must be remembered that according to Indian popular belief, all conception is, as the Australian natives believe, the result of a process of this kind, one of the ancestors becoming reborn in each succes- sive generation. Hence, as we have seen, the dolmen which is the home of the spirits of the dead becomes connected with the union of the sexes and the birth of children. By a natural process of development in custom, the rite of stepping over the stone becomes in some places a kind of chastity test, a lady in an " interesting condition " being supposed to be unable to perform the feat of jumping over the stone. ^
Hence it seems not unreasonable to infer that one at any rate of the ideas on which rites such as those of the " Petting
' Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, i., 450.
- Bombay Gazetteer, xxii., 81.
' With this may be compared the Mabinogion story quoted by Hartland, Legend of Perseus, i., 127, and the Lorik tale in Crooke, Popular Religion and Folklore, ii., 161. Among the Manchus, the bride, on coming out of the bride- groom's house, has to step over a miniature saddle, as a sign that she will never marry a second husband {Folk-Lore, i., 487). In Cumberland women
