It has further to be noticed that certain forms of the couvade involve actually giving over the parentage to the father, and leaving the mother out of the question. This was an ancient Egyptian idea, as Southey points out when mentioning its most startling development in the practice of the Tupinambas of Brazil, who would give their own women as wives to their male captives, and then, without scruple, eat the children when they grow up, holding them simply to be of the flesh and blood of their enemies. It is strange that writers who have spoken of the couvade during the half-century since Southey wrote, and have even quoted him, should have so neglected the contribution he made to the psychology of the lower races in bringing forward as the source of this remarkable practice at once the Egyptian, and American theory of parentage, and the belief in bodily union between father and child.[1] Nor is the doctrine of special parentage from the father unknown to the Aryan race. We may take it up in the Hindu code of Manu, which compares the mother to the field bringing forth the plant according to whatever seed is sown in it. The idea is conspicuous in the Eumenides of Æschylus, where the very plea of Orestes is that he is not of kin to his mother Klytemnestra, and the gods decide that she who bears the child is but as a nurse to it. Lastly, we may leave it in the hands of Swedenborg, who declares that the soul, which is spiritual and is the real man, is from the father, while the body, which is natural and as it were the clothing of the soul, is from the mother. Here, he tells us, we may see the reason why the mind and disposition of the father is communicated to the children for generations.[2] Which seems a somewhat lopsided argument.
To trace now the geographical distribution of the couvade in
- ↑ Diod. Sic. i. 80. Southey, vol. i, pp. 227, 248. Compare Spix and Martius, p. 1339, and Martius, p. 392.
- ↑ Manu, ix. 31–40. J. F. M'Lennan in Fortnightly Rev., Apr. 15, 1866. Swedenborg, 'The True Christian Religion;' 103.
Guiana,' p. 29. For further evidence and argument in support of the sympathetic-magical explanation of the couvade, see Bastian's important paper on Comparative Psychology in the 'Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie,' vol. v. (1867), and the elaborate dissertation on the couvade in Ploss, 'Das Kind, in Branch und Sitte der Völker,' Stuttgart, 1876, vol. i. p. 125, etc. [Note to 3rd Edition.]
