Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c5.111

v1.c5.111

Zeitalter des Sonnengottes, Bd. i, p. 223 ff.; and P. Saintyves, Les vierges mères et les naissances miraculeuses (Paris, 1908). The two last-named works are, I am sorry to say, not to my hand, and I know them only from reviews. Supernatural fertilization has been very thoroughly treated by E. S. Hartland, Legend of Perseus, vol. i, and then in the earlier chapters of his careful and luminous book, Primitive Paternity (1909). As is well known, girls at the coming of puberty or of the first monthly course must among the most various peoples and tribes of the earth be carefully looked after, generally even shut up for a shorter or longer time, and especially kept from the sun; and it is quite an astonishment when we are told by C. G. and Brenda Z. Seligmann, The Veddas (Cambridge, 1911), p. 94, that this people, both on this and remarkably so on many other points (cp. for instance, p. 190 f.), has no superstitions, except where it has lost some of its primitiveness through contact with foreigners. The girl is at this very time highly susceptible to magical influences, and easily brings ill-hap on others. It is particularly by the sun or its beams that women in general and above all at the first monthly course can be impregnated. See Frazer, The Golden Bough (1900), iii, p. 204 ff., especially 219 and 222, and the evidence there; Hartland, Primitive Paternity, i, 25 f., 89 ff., 97 ff.; Anthropos, Bd. vi, p. 699; Bd. vii, p. 93; Crooke, Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India, new ed., i, 11, 69, and the references there; Reitzenstein, Zeitschr. f. Ethnol., 1909, p. 658 f.; R. Schmidt, Liebe u. Ehe in Indien, p. 477. With Kuntī’s swoon, cf. the Maidu Indian tale of Oankoitupeh, the red cloud’s son, Hartland, loc. cit., i, 195 f. A Rājput tale often reminding us of the MBh. tale is given by Tod, Rajasthan, i, 251-52; and that the Rājput should thus trace the origin of one of their kings to the sun seems the more natural in that it is their highest god (Tod, Rajasthan, i, 596 ff., 250).