of clothing and adornment.

Among people (such as those of East Africa and Southern Arabia) in which
it was customary for unmarried girls to adorn themselves with a girdle,
it is easy to understand how the meaning of the practice underwent a
change, and developed into a device for enhancing their charms and
stimulating the imaginations of their suitors.

Out of such experience developed the idea of the magical girdle as an
allurement and a love-provoking charm or philtre. Thus Aphrodite's
girdle acquired the reputation of being able to _compel_ love. When
Ishtar removed her girdle in the under-world reproduction ceased in the
world. The Teutonic Brunhild's great strength lay in her girdle. In fact
magic virtues were conferred upon most goddesses in every part of the
world by means of a cestus of some sort.[267] But the outstanding
feature of Aphrodite's character as a goddess of love is intimately
bound up with these conceptions which developed from the wearing of a
girdle of cowries.

[Illustration: Fig. 4.--Two representations of Astarte (Qetesh).

(a) The mother-goddess standing upon a lioness (which is her Sekhet
form): she is wearing her girdle, and upon her head is the moon and the
cow's horns, conventionalized so as to simulate the crescent moon. Her
hair is represented in the conventional form which is sometimes used as
Hathor's symbol. In her hands are the serpent and the lotus, which again
are merely forms of the goddess herself.

(b) Another picture of Astarte (from Roscher's "Lexikon") holding the
papyrus sceptre which at times is regarded as an animate form of the
mother-goddess herself and as such a thunder weapon.]

In the Biblical narrative, after Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden
fruit, "the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were
naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons,"
or, as the Revised Version expresses it, "girdles". The girdle of
fig-leaves, however, was originally a surrogate of the girdle of
cowries: it was an amulet to give fertility. The consciousness of
nakedness was part of the knowledge acquired as _the result_ of the
wearing of such girdles (and the clothing into which they developed),
and was not originally the motive that impelled our remote ancestors to
clothe themselves.

The use of fig-leaves for the girdle in Palestine is an interesting
connecting link between the employment of the cowry and the mandrake for
similar purpose