fertility offering superstition

Lewis, like many observers of southern Italy, kept seeing traces of pre-Christian cult under Catholic practice. Campania offers plenty of material for the idea. The Matres Matutae of Capua are hundreds of tufa statues of seated mothers holding swaddled infants, offered to a mother-goddess between the sixth and first centuries BC. Temples across the region yielded thousands of terracotta votive wombs, breasts and genitals. Pompeii is full of phallic amulets against misfortune.

Whether particular modern gestures really descend from such cults is hard to prove. Folklorists now tend to be more cautious than earlier writers about “survivals”, noting that customs are reinvented as often as they are inherited. But the continuity of function is striking: offering a body part to a protector in exchange for health or fertility runs unbroken from the ancient votive deposits to the silver ex-votos still pinned around Neapolitan altars.