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The means by which women most commonly protect themselves on these occasions are the wearing of amulets; the fastening of a bunch of garlic over the house-door; the painting of a cross in black upon the lintel (this custom may be a Christianised form of the ancient practice, mentioned by Photius[322], of smearing houses with pitch at the birth of children as a means of driving away powers of evil); and, if any strange visitants are heard about the house at night, the maintenance of strict silence. But steps are also sometimes taken to appease the Nereids; offerings of food, in which honey is the essential ingredient, are set out for them, and formerly in Athens[323] to this a bride used to add two chemises out of her trousseau.

Such precautions after a confinement are regularly continued for forty days. It would appear that in ancient times this was the period during which women were held to be specially exposed to the evil eye and all other ghostly and sinister influences[324], including probably, as now, the assaults of nymphs; and in modern usage the duration of the time of peril is so well established that the word σαραντίζω, literally to ‘accomplish forty (σαράντα) days,’ is used technically of the churching of women at the end of that period; while a more frankly pagan survival is to be found in the fact that for forty days no right-minded mother will cross the threshold of her own house to go out, nor enter a neighbour’s house, without stepping on the door-key, that being the most easily available piece of iron, a metal, which in the folk-lore of ancient Greece[325], as in that of many other countries, was a charm and safeguard against the supernatural.