Garden Magic

Arabian women of Morocco, on being convinced that they are barren, will overcome their disability by going naked on midsummer night, and threading their way through a lusty vegetable garden 1. Such a practice is a bit of ceremony, and it seems to indicate that in some manner of thinking the garden is a sort of woman, or is at least analogous to a woman's abdomen; and that the barren woman can become inoculated with fertility if she identifies herself with a garden in which plants are growing prolifically.

There is, however, an opportunity for an ambivalent view in such garden-and-woman concepts, as may be witnessed amongst the Baganda tribe of British East Africa. The Baganda men are said to divorce their wives if they are barren, because they infect their husbands' gardens with their own infertility, to the end that the trees are prevented from bearing fruit 2. The Galelareese on the island of Halmahera believe that unfruitful trees are masculine. These trees can be brought into bearing by the simple expediency of changing the tree's sex, and that is done by tying a woman's skirt to a tree 3.

When a vegetable garden or a fruit orchard is viewed either consciously or unconsciously as being the same in its basic functioning, as a woman's belly, regardless of how different the outward aspect of the garden and a woman may be, we should be led to suspect that there lies under this identification some notion that either the woman or the garden is the Primal Mother. The garden as a differentiated aspect of Mother Earth is probably thought of as the mother of humanity, and of all plants. Then, if like begets like, the woman is a type of the earth, and her abdomen is a type of gardens upon the earth. Their reproductive functionings will therefore be fundamentally the same, since they have a common ancestress in Mother Earth.

The natives of the Nicobar Islands think it lucky to get a pregnant woman and her husband to plant seeds for them in their gardens 4. Such a view seemingl