guard against early and sudden ejection. Although, doubtless, she is in complete ignorance of the reasons for and origin of the philtre she employs, she secretly mixes with her husband's food the summit of a cone of white sugar, an article of commerce procured from the large centres of civilization and to be found in every village of the Aures. With it she also mixes in the food another ingredient which I have specified elsewhere, while a man, should he desire to secure the affections of a woman, adds two other ingredients to the point of the cone of sugar.[1] I have as yet heard of no substitute for the sugar which might indicate the nature of the substance used in the philtre before such sugar was obtainable. Cone-sugar is the variety commonly employed to sweeten coffee, etc., but the sugar extensively used in practical medicine by the Shawiya doctors is of a different kind.
In discussing "Sacred prostitution in the worship of the Paphian Aphrodite and of other Asiatic goddesses," Sir James Frazer points out that in Cyprus "before marriage all women were formerly obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at the sanctuary of the goddess, whether she went by the name of Aphrodite, Astarte, or what not," and that a similar course was pursued in Phoenician and other temples.
It seems highly probable that a survival of some such custom is to be found in the notorious immorality of a Shawiya tribe, the Ulad Abdi, who inhabit a valley of the north-western Aures within eight miles of the holy Jebel Bus, among whom the tip of the sugar cone is used as a philtre and who celebrate the Feast of the Spring in the manner I have described in the Geographical Journal.
Sir James Frazer himself refers to the habits of these people, quoting from Professor Doutté the statement that when the French authorities attempted to interfere with
- ↑ Hilton-Simpson, "Some Arab and Shawiya Remedies," Journ. Roy. Anth. Inst. vol. xliii. p. 714.
