a privy and used for washing the hands; it often becomes very dirty from much use); or to whom various other misadventures occur. We may, I think, from what we have seen of the beliefs attached to the broom in Japan, reasonably conclude that the harm to which a person is thought to become exposed when struck with a broom is (or is due to) the driving away of or an injury to some psychical part of himself.[1]
The broom in Japan is also associated, as is the case in many parts of the world, with the phenomena of childbirth. Thus, there is a recommendation that a parturient woman and her assistant should grasp a bamboo-broom, in order that the course of the afterbirth may be favoured;[2] whilst another warns a woman against stepping over such a broom, lest at some future time her delivery be made difficult.[3] Now, taboos forbidding the stepping-over of brooms are of widespread occurrence, and in a number of them the penalty threatened is in some way associated with childbirth. "Pythagoras," for example, in ancient Greece, "warned his followers against stepping over a broom. In some parts of Bavaria, housemaids, in sweeping out the house, are careful not to step over the broom for fear of the witches (5). Again, it is a Bavarian rule not to step over a broom while a confinement is taking place in a house; otherwise the birth will be tedious, and the child will always remain small with a large head. But if anyone has stepped over a broom inadvertently, he can undo the spell by stepping backwards over it again(6). So in Bombay they say you should never step across a broom, or you
- ↑ When photography was first introduced into Japan it was "considered dangerous, because likely to absorb some portion of the life or spirit of the person photographed" (B. H. Chamberlain, op. cit. s.v. "Superstitions").
- ↑ ten Kate, op. cit. p. 129. Compare with this Kunze's quotation (op. cit. p. 136; it appears to refer to Transylvanian Saxony) to the effect that brooms forward the course of the afterbirth.
- ↑ Ibid. loc. cit.
