of lustration of infants, the purifications by fire have especial importance ethnologically, not because this proceeding is more natural to the savage mind than that of bathing or sprinkling with water, but because this latter ceremony may sometimes have been imitated from Christian baptism. The fact of savage and barbaric lustration of infants being in several cases associated with the belief in re-birth of ancestral souls seems to mark the rite as belonging to remote pre-Christian ages.[1]
The purification of women at childbirth, &c., is ceremonially practised by the lower races under circumstances which do not suggest adoption from more civilized nations. The seclusion and lustration among North American Indian tribes have been compared with those of the Levitical law, but the resemblance is not remarkably close, and belongs rather to a stage of civilization than to the ordinance of a particular nation. It is a good case of independent development in such customs, that the rite of putting out the fires and kindling 'new fire' on the woman's return is common to the Iroquois and Sioux in North America,[2] and the Basutos in South Africa. These latter have a well-marked rite of lustration by sprinkling, performed on girls at womanhood.[3] The Hottentots considered mother and child unclean till they had been washed and smeared after the uncleanly native fashion.[4] Lustrations with water were usual in West Africa.[5] Tatar tribes in Mongolia used bathing, while in Siberia the custom of leaping over a fire answered the purpose of purification.[6] The Mantras of the Malay Peninsula have made the bathing of the mother after
- ↑ See pp. 5, 437.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 261; part iii. p. 243, &c. Charlevoix, 'Nouvelle France,' vol. v. p. 425. Wilson in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iv. p. 294.
- ↑ Casalis, 'Basutos,' p. 267.
- ↑ Kolben, vol. i. pp. 273, 283.
- ↑ Bosman, in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. pp. 423, 527; Meiners, vol. ii. pp. 107, 463.
- ↑ Pallas, 'Mongolische Völkerschaften,' vol. i. p. 166, &c.; Strahlenberg, 'Siberia,' p. 97.
vol. ii. p. 279 (Watje); 'Anthropological Review,' Nov. 1864, p. 243 (Mpongwe): Barker-Webb and Berthelot, vol. ii. p. 163 (Tenerife).
