Demons, Caves and Death (NefHxMotherhood)

cod_gabriel, flickr

Prehistory is, as its name suggests, before written records. Prehistoric birth rituals, are, therefore, lost to time.

Anthropologists look to primitive contemporary cultures, with little or no exposure to Western medicine and philosophy, to try to fill in the gaps.

This, unfortunately, is as fraught with hazards as childbirth itself. Even the great Margaret Mead got some egg on her face making generalizations from observation of a “primitive” culture–it turns out that primitive teenage girls, like our teens, are capable of making up great stories.

Nonetheless, that’s all we’ve got. Take them, as with everything, with a grain of salt (or a glass of wine).

The Aborigines of Australia believe that the spirits of unborn children live in the rivers and streams. When a woman wades into the water, the spirits pick good mothers (great excuse, yes?).

The Kayapo tribe of Brazil has a similar legend about the forests. They have an elaborate fertility ritual, wherein they are brushed with leaves, bound with vines and drink an elixir of bark. We don’t have any data on how well this works, or if failure to complete the ritual is an effective form of birth control.

Caves, with their obvious female symbolism, were the home of the Great Goddess, and commonly part of fertility rituals among pagan cultures in Europe and elsewhere. As were holes in trees.  In difficult labors, women were occasionally passed through these tree holes, or carried into caves, as a form of sympathetic magic.

[Men are capable of taking over even this blatantly feminine imagery. The Mithra cult of Persia and Ancient Rome often met in caves, symbolizing the death and rebirth of the Sun God. Mithraism was an exclusively male club.

The early Christians viewed Mithrasim as a subversive parody of their religion (let's see, dead and reborn god, hmmm...), despite the fact that Sun God worship is as old as the caves themselves. They collapsed entrances to caves and forbade rituals in them. Many churches are built at the mouths of caves, as ancient sites of worship (of both Mithras and the Great Goddess) were co-opted.]

Midwives often were more involved in the supernatural aspects of birth than in the mechanical delivery of the child.

In the desert tribes of Algeria, the midwife delayed the birth by holding the head of the child and preventing further delivery. Why subject the mother to this torture? It enlightened the child by keeping him at the mystic border between life and death.

Swahili wise women singed off the pubic hairs before the birth, to smoke out any demons residing there. Cutting or shaving just didn’t have the demon protective quality of fire.

After the birth, the Bolivian Quechua tribes hide the blood, making sure that it never gets outside, where the evil spirits might notice it and come after the woman and child in their vulnerable state. They also spread grain around the entrance to the house, making it clear to the spirits that the household  is too large to attack.

It seems that primitive societies believed that childbirth was the prerogative of the child. Faced with a difficult birth, Native Americans would often attempt to scare the child out, by nearly running the woman down with a horse. Or they suspended her from a tree, and bounced her up and down, pulling on her belly with ropes.

If all else failed, of course, the women would call in the laboring men from the field, who would carve out the child piecemeal, attempting at least to save the mother.

If this seems harsh, remember that the word “deliver” was not, ever, intended to refer to the child. It was about the woman, and her torment. “She should be safely delivered.” It was not until the development of operative obstetrics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the fetus became a life of its own, separate from the mother whose life it regularly stole.

Women died in childbirth. Routinely. Commonly.

How many?

It’s not hard to fathom that we don’t have maternal mortality records for prehistoric times. But, in fact, we have no attempt to even collect these statistics until the mid-nineteenth century. Then, the earliest numbers were that about 6 in every thousand laboring women died (a number that, despite male meddling, stayed fairly constant until the mid-1950s). That rate parallels those reported in non-Westernized societies today.

As much fun as we will make of the wackiness of the history of obstetrics, that history has combined to reduce maternal mortality in developed countries to the current 0.1/1000 in the US.

Feel free to kiss your obstetrician.

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