[Sidenote: Rites performed by the Vestals for the fertility of the earth and the fecundity of cattle.] Amongst the Herero the chief’s daughter who tends the holy fire has also to perform certain priestly rites, which have for their object the prosperity and multiplication of the cattle.[745] So, too, it was with the Roman Vestals. On the fifteenth of April every year pregnant cows were sacrificed to the Earth goddess; the unborn calves were torn from their mothers’ wombs, the chief Vestal burned them and kept their ashes for use at the shepherds’ festival of the Parilia. This sacrifice of pregnant cows was a fertility charm designed, by a curious application of homoeopathic magic, to quicken both the seed in the ground and the wombs of the cows and the ewes.[746] At the Parilia, held on the twenty-first of April, the Vestals mixed the ashes of the unborn calves with the blood of a horse which had been sacrificed in October, and this mixture they distributed to shepherds, who fumigated their flocks with it as a means of ensuring their fecundity and a plentiful supply of milk.[747]
[Sidenote: The Vestals were probably regarded as embodiments of Vesta, who was a mother-goddess, the bestower of offspring on cattle and women.] Strange as at first it may seem to find holy virgins assisting in operations intended to promote the fertility of the earth and of cattle, this reproductive function accords perfectly with the view that they were of old the wives of the fire-god and the mothers of kings. On that view, also, we can understand why down to imperial times the Vestals adored the male emblem of generation,[748] and why Vesta herself, the goddess of whom they were the priestesses and probably the embodiments, was worshipped by the Romans not as a virgin but as a mother.[749] She was sometimes identified with Venus.[750] Like Diana, with whom she was identified at Nemi, she appears to have been a goddess of fecundity, who bestowed offspring both on cattle and on women. That she was supposed to multiply cattle is indicated by the ceremonies which the Vestals performed in April; that she made women to be mothers is hinted at not obscurely by the legends of the birth of the old Latin kings.[751] The ancient Aryan practice of leading a bride thrice round the hearth of her new home[752] may have been intended not merely to introduce her to the ancestral spirits who had their seats there, but also to promote conception, perhaps by allowing one of these very spirits to enter into her and be born again. When the ancient Hindoo bridegroom led his bride round the fire, he addressed the fire-god [Sidenote: Custom of leading a bride round the fire perhaps a fertility charm.] Agni with the words, “Mayst thou give back, Agni, to the husband the wife together with offspring.”[753] When a Slavonian bride enters her husband’s house after marriage she is led thrice round the hearth; then she must stir the fire with the poker, saying, “As many sparks spring up, so many cattle, so many male children shall enliven the new home.”[754] At Mostar, in Herzegovina, the bride seats herself on a bag of fruit beside the hearth in her new home and pokes the fire thrice. While she does so, they bring her a small boy and set him on her lap. She turns the child thrice round in order that she may give birth to male children.[755] Still more clearly does belief in the impregnation of a woman by fire come out in another South Slavonian custom. When a wife wishes to have a child, she will hold a vessel full of water beside the fire on the hearth, while her husband knocks two burning brands together so that the sparks fly out. When some of them have fallen into the vessel, the woman drinks the water which has thus been fertilised by the fire.[756] The same belief seems still to linger in England; for there is a Lincolnshire saying that if a woman’s apron is burned above the knee by a spark or red-hot cinder flying out of a fire, she will become a mother.[757] Thus the superstition which gave rise to the stories of the birth of the old Roman kings holds its ground to this day in Europe, even in our own country. So indestructible are the crude fancies of our savage forefathers. Thus we may safely infer that the old practice of leading a bride formally to or round the hearth was designed to make her fruitful through the generative virtue ascribed to the fire.