Sex and Procreation in the Ancestral World

Manufacturing children according to the Nggerikudi

Anje-a originally made by Thunder, is the individual, according to the Pennefather [River] Blacks [Australia], who fashions the piccaninnies out of swamp-mud, and inserts them in the bellies of the women. He is never seen, but can be heard…

Speared by his father, eaten by his mother

In the Ingarda tribe at the mouth of the Gascoyne River [Australia], I found a belief that a child is the product of some food of which the mother has partaken just before her first sickness in pregnancy. My prinicipal informant on this subject told me…

Copulation is not the cause of conception

[Dr. Frodsham, the Bishop of North Queensland,] told me that he had travelled among the…

Pregnancy taboos

There were many things which a pregnant woman was not permitted to look at, and many things which she must not eat. Among the latter were the cormorant and the abelone. If she ate the former, the child would defecate all of the time; if the latter, it would have its neck turned around. She must not…

Hair and nails

The Tlingits [Canada] not only believe that the dead are reborn in men and women, but also take steps to facilitate their rebirth. Thus, when a beloved person dies, the relatives often take the nail from the little finger of his right hand and a lock of hair from the right side of his head and put…

Dreaming a procreative spirit

Spirit-children, nagarlala, sometimes referred to as rai, invisible, live in definite centres such as waterholes, springs, trees and rocks on the land and in the sea. The medicine-men are said to know, through dreams, the whereabouts of these places which are, of course, rai…

The conception of a child in the Trobriand Island

Tomwaya Lakwabulo and other informants maintain that such spirit-children never float far away from Tuma. They are transported to the Trobriands by the help of another spirit. Tomwaya Lakwabulo gives the following account.

Food, conception and totem

A.R. Brown (1912)

In the Ingarda tribe at the mouth of the Gascoyne River, I found a belief that a child is the product of some food of which the mother has partaken just before her first sickness in pregnancy. My principal informant on this subject told…