And similarly the belief was that a man's clothes and other possessions contained part of his life by contact; this is the explanation of the custom of representing a person by some implement or article of clothing, such as performing the marriage ceremony with the bridegroom's sword instead of himself, and sending the bride's shoes home with the bridegroom to represent her.

A barren woman will try to obtain a piece of a pregnant woman's breast-cloth and will burn it and eat the ashes, thinking thereby to transfer the pregnant woman's quality of fertility to herself.

When a Hindu widow is remarried her clothes and ornaments are sometimes buried on the boundary of her second husband's village and she puts on new clothes, because it is thought that her first husband's spirit will remain in the old clothes and give trouble.
62.

The recurrence of events.
A brief digression may be made here in order to suggest an explanation of another important class of primitive ideas.

These arise from the belief that when something has happened, that same event, or some other resembling it, will again occur, or, more briefly, the belief in the recurrence of events.