corner of the hut.  In the morning she may cook her food, but it must be at a separate fire and in a vessel of her own.  After about ten days the magician comes and undoes the spell by muttering charms and breathing on her and on the more valuable of the things with which she has come in contact.  The pots and drinking-vessels which she used are broken and the fragments buried.  After her first bath, the girl must submit to be beaten by her mother with thin rods without uttering a cry.  At the end of the second period she is again beaten, but not afterwards.  She is now “clean,” and can mix again with people.[142] Other Indians of Guiana, after keeping the girl in her hammock at the top of the hut for a month, expose her to certain large ants, whose bite is very painful.[143] Sometimes, in addition to being stung with ants, the sufferer has to fast day and night so long as she remains slung up on high in her hammock, so that when she comes down she is reduced to a skeleton.  The intention of stinging her with ants is said to be to make her strong to bear the burden of maternity.[144] Amongst the Uaupes of Brazil a girl at puberty is secluded in the house for a month, and allowed only a small quantity of bread and water.  Then she is taken out into the midst of her relations and friends, each of whom gives her four or five blows with pieces of sipo (an elastic climber), till she falls senseless or dead.  If she recovers, the operation is repeated four times at intervals of six hours, and it is considered an offence to the parents not to strike hard.  Meantime, pots of meats and fish have been made ready; the sipos are dipped into them and then given to the girl to lick, who is now considered a marriageable woman.[145]

[Custom in South America of causing young men to be stung with ants as an initiatory rite.]

The custom of stinging the girl at such times with ants or beating her with rods is intended, we may be sure, not as a punishment or a test of endurance, but as a purification, the object being to drive away the malignant influences with which a girl in this condition is believed to be beset and enveloped.  Examples of purification, by beating, by incisions in the flesh, and by stinging with ants, have already come before us.[146] In some Indian tribes of Brazil and Guiana young men do not rank as warriors and may not marry till they have passed through a terrible ordeal, which consists in being stung by swarms of venomous ants whose bite is like fire.  Thus among the Mauhes on the Tapajos river, a southern tributary of the Amazon, boys of eight to ten years are obliged to thrust their arms into sleeves stuffed with great ferocious ants, which the Indians call tocandeira (Cryptocerus atratus, F.).  When the young victim shrieks with pain, an excited mob of men dances round him, shouting and encouraging him till he falls exhausted to the ground.  He is then committed to the care of old women, who treat his fearfully