Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 2, 2025
I allude to the singular custom of the "couvade," in which the father is put to bed on the birth of a child. I take the following account of this curious practice from Mr. Tylor's philosophical "Early History of Mankind". The couvade is developed to the highest degree in South America and the West Indies. The following account is given by Du Tertre of the Carib couvade in the West Indies.
"Another Asiatic people, recorded to have practised the couvade, are the Tibareni of Pontus, at the south of the Black Sea, among whom, when the child was born, the father lay groaning in bed with his head tied up, while the mother tended him with food and prepared his baths." In Europe the couvade may be traced up from ancient into modern times in the neighbourhood of the Pyrenees.
The same author goes on to state that the practice is said still to exist in some cantons of Bearn, where it is called 'faire la couvade. Lastly, Diodorus Siculus notices the same habit of the wife being neglected, and the husband put to bed and treated as the patient among the natives of Corsica about the beginning of the Christian era."
Unless we say that these phenomena are 'impossible, whereas totemism, the couvade, cannibalism, are possible, the testimony to belief in clairvoyance, and the other peculiar occurrences, is as good in its way as the evidence for the practice of wild customs and institutions. There remains a last and notable circumstance.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking