a mother before she is a wife '. If an unmarried woman has a child people say 'She jumped o'er t'besom' or 'She jumped o'er t'besom before she went to t'church'.[1] According to Serbians, Bulgarians and Greeks, a corpse will be re-animated as a vampire if a cat jumps over it; coitus with the dead leading to a ghastly form of life.[2]
Thus in all these instances 'stepping over' manifestly signifies intercourse, but we must not forget that another element is contained in the custom about 'passing through a window'. This concerns not only stepping over, but also pulling through. Now these customs in regard to pulling through have already been recognised by Liebrecht and Zachariae as magic repetitions of birth.[3]
The well-known bifurcated trees (Zwieselböune) through which sick children are drawn have a similar significance. Such healing powers are however not by any means attributed to every forked tree; it is necessary that at the point of junction of the limbs the tree should have a formation resembling the female genitals. There is a tree in Lutzow with just such a contour: above the junction there is a bulging which looks exactly like an abdomen with hips and navel. The whole aspect therefore resembles the lower part of the body of a woman who is spreading open her legs; the curative power lies in this resemblance: whoever crawls through the legs of a woman is re-born. For this reason women push sickly children through their own legs at night or let them crawl through.[4]
- ↑ S.O. Addy: Household Tales with other traditional Remains, 1895, p. 102. A besom is laid across the path by which the new maid-servant has to come to the house (p. 13) as an augury of her industrious habits, but originally probably with the intention that she should step over it.
- ↑ W. R. S. Ralston: The Songs of the Russian People, 1872, p. 412. G.F. Abbott: Macedonian Folklore, 1903, pp. 219, 220. F. S. Krauss: Slavische Volksforschungen, 1908, S. 125, 126.
- ↑ See Liebrecht: Zur Volkskunde, 1879, S. 379; Zachariae: 'Scheingeburt', Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, 1910, Bd. XX, S. 153.
- ↑ K. Bartsch: Sagen, Mārchen und Gebrāuche aus Mecklenburg, 1879, Bd. I, S. 418. The fact that it is also prohibited to call a child a toad (in connection with the prohibition of crawling through, see above), may arise because the toad is a symbol for the uterus. See R. Andree: Votive und Weihegaben des katholischen Volkes in Süddeutschland, 1904, S. 130. The pregnant woman is drawn through a hoop. Ploss-Bartels: Das Weib, 1908, Bd. I, S.311. She is led over the threshold three times
