The Origin of Clothing

The cowry and its surrogates were supposed to be potent to confer fertility on maidens; and it became the practice for growing girls to wear a girdle on which to suspend the shells as near as possible to the organ their magic was supposed to stimulate. Among many peoples this girdle was discarded as soon as the girls reached maturity.

This practice probably represents the beginning of the history of clothing; but it had other far-reaching effects in the domain of belief.

It has often been claimed that the feeling of modesty was not the reason for the invention of clothing, but that the clothes begat modesty. This doctrine contains a certain element of truth, but is by no means the whole explanation. For true modesty is displayed by people who have never worn clothes.

Before mankind could appreciate the psychological fact that the wearing of clothing might add to an individual's allurement and enhance her sexual attractiveness, some other circumstances must have been responsible for suggesting the experiments out of which this empirical knowledge emerged. The use of a girdle (a) as a protection against danger to life, and (b) as a means of conferring fecundity on girls provided the circumstances which enabled men to discover that the sexual attractiveness of maidens, which in a state of nature was originally associated with modesty and coyness, was profoundly intensified by the artifices 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. 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.

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 purposes in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea and in Cyprus and Syria respectively (vide infra).

In Greece and Italy, the sweet basil has a reputation for magical properties analogous to those of the cowry. Maidens collect the plant and wear bunches of it upon their body or upon their girdles; while married women fix basil upon their heads. It is believed that the odour of the plant will attract admirers: hence in Italy it is called Bacia-nicola. "Kiss me, Nicholas".

In Crete it is a sign of mourning presumably because its life-prolonging attributes, as a means of conferring continued existence to the dead, have been so rationalized in explanation of its use at funerals.

On New Year's day in Athens boys carry a boat and people remark, "St. Basil is come from Cæsarea".