), one of the
ancient Maya monuments at Copan, Central America (after Maudslay's
photograph and diagram).

The girdle of the chief figure is decorated both with shells (_Oliva_ or
_Conus_) and amulets representing human faces corresponding to the
Hathor-heads on the Narmer palette (Fig. 18).]

Thus gradually there developed out of the cowry-amulet the conception of
a creator, the giver of life, health, and good luck. This Great Mother,
at first with only vaguely defined traits, was probably the first deity
that the wit of man devised to console him with her watchful care over
his welfare in this life and to give him assurance as to his fate in
the future.

At this stage I should like to emphasize the fact that these beliefs had
taken shape long before any definite ideas had been formulated as to the
physiology of animal reproduction and before agriculture was practised.

Man had not yet come to appreciate the importance of vegetable
fertility, nor had he yet begun to frame theories of the fertilizing
powers of water, or give specific expression to them by creating the god
Osiris in his own image.

Nor had he begun to take anything more than the most casual interest in
the sun, the moon, and the stars. He had not yet devised a sky-world nor
created a heaven. When, for reasons that I have already discussed,[261]
the theory of the fertilizing and the animating power of water was
formulated, the beliefs concerning this element were assimilated with
those which many ages previously had grown up in explanation of the
potency of blood and shells. In addition to fertilizing the earth, water
could also animate the dead. The rivers and the seas were in fact a vast
reservoir of this animating substance. The powers of the cowry, as a
product of the sea, were rationalized into an expression of the great
creative force of the water.

A bowl of water became the symbol of the fruitfulness of woman. Such
symbolism implied that woman, or her uterus, was a receptacle into which
the seminal fluid was poured and from which a new being emerged in a
flood of amniotic fluid.

The burial of shells with the dead is an extremely ancient practice, for
cowries have been found upon human skeletons of the so-called "Upper
Palaeolithic Age" of Southern Europe.

At Laugerie-Basse (Dordogne) Mediterranean cowries were found arranged
in pairs upon the body; two pairs on the forehead, one near each arm,
four in the region of the thighs and knees