to protect infants and women in childbed, in Bavaria, in Russia, in Hungary, among the Graeco-Wallachs of Monastir, and in Southern India, are given by Samter (pp. 35, 36); in Franconia and in Moravia a broom is stood inverted before the door in order to prevent, in one case the "changing" or the harming of the unbaptised infant, in the other the harming of the parturient woman;[1] and, as we have already noted (p. 198, supra), in Sicily a broom is included among the defences of a new-born child.
Now, amongst many peoples there is a belief that if a person passes over a thing, some more or less permanent effect is produced by his action.[2] In Japan, the effect believed to be produced would appear to be either (a) the creation of some sort of more or less definite psychical relationship between the person and the thing; or (b) a physical weakening of the thing, due to some psychical action; or (c) a sense of resentment on the part of the psychical portion of the thing, due to a passing-over being regarded generally as such an insult that anything subjected to it becomes displeased. These three kinds of effects are not thought necessarily to be produced independently one of the other; usually, it would appear—as, indeed, we should anticipate—two or all of them are thought to be produced simultaneously. It is not always easy to determine which of the effects are the ones thought to underlie some particular one of the many operations of Japanese magic—whether negative (i.e. taboo) or positive—in which passing-over appears. It will be worth our while, therefore, before proceeding further with our investigation of the Japanese taboo forbidding the stepping-over of a broom, to glance momentarily at a few typical examples of Japanese
