Among the Port
Lincoln tribe of South Australia a lizard is said to have divided man from
woman.[355] Among the Chiriguanos of Bolivia, on the appearance of
menstruation, old women ran about with sticks to hunt the snake that had
wounded the girl. Frazer, who quotes this example from the "_Lettres
edifiantes et curieuses_," also refers to a modern Greek folk-tale,
according to which a princess at puberty must not let the sun shine upon
her, or she would be turned into a lizard.[356] The lizard was a sexual
symbol among the Mexicans. In some parts of Brazil at the onset of puberty
a girl must not go into the woods for fear of the amorous attacks of
snakes, and so it is also among the Macusi Indians of British Guiana,
according to Schomburgk. Among the Basutos of South Africa the young girls
must dance around the clay image of a snake. In Polynesian mythology the
lizard is a very sacred animal, and legends represent women as often
giving birth to lizards.[357] At a widely remote spot, in Bengal, if you
dream of a snake a child will be born to you, reports Sarat Chandra
Mitra.[358] In the Berlin Museum fuer Volkerkunde there is a carved wooden
figure from New Guinea of a woman into whose vulva a crocodile is
inserting its snout, while the same museum contains another figure of a
snake-like crocodile crawling out of a woman's vulva, and a third figure
shows a small round snake with a small head, and closely resembling a
penis, at the mouth of the vagina.
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