How perfectly ghoulish and creepy, if one is predisposed to that mindset. The entertainment industry caters to that mindset. It made me recall George Harrison singing “Taxman.”
Back to the OP, which is a question of life, not death. Women’s breasts symbolize life. Speaking of survivals from ancient paganism, see The Powers of Tamil Women ed. by Susan S. Wadley and The Poems of Ancient Tamil: Their Milieu and their Sanskrit Counterparts by George L. Hart III. The religion of ancient Dravidian-speaking peoples was not of a transcendent deity, but based on the forces of nature. Ancient Dravidians believed that the divine power in nature, called ananku, was stronger in certain places, and it was strongest of all in women’s bodies, most of all in their breasts. This consciousness has continued into the modern era as examples from modern Tamil poetry would show.
Whether this concept of female power in nature and particularly localized in women’s breasts is found in other cultures, I don’t know but would be interested in knowing. One extension of the ancient Dravidian concept of power as feminine is the Sanskrit term shakti meaning the supreme feminine power of the universe, accessed in Tantric yoga via women. Ananku and Shakti are also used as goddess names. The persistence of the tradition of Shaktism within the Hindu world comes from the pre-Hindu worship of the Goddess or of a feminine power in nature. This kind of devotion has proven to be remarkably stable over time and across changes of civilizations.
The localization of the power of life in women’s breasts, which I found studying ancient Tamil, could explain the symbolism in the Creole ritual you noticed, if their culture used that concept. Touching money to the source of life energy ritually invokes prosperity for the married couple’s life.
Are they related? I have read speculation by an Afrocentric author, Clyde-Ahmad Winters, that Dravidian and African civilizations are ethnically, linguistically, and culturally related. I do not know enough about African ethnology and culture to be able to evaluate this claim. But I do know that linguistically Dravidian has a somewhat dodgy hypothetical connection, via the Nostratic macrofamily, to the Afro-Asiatic language family, which includes languages spoken by dark-skinned peoples in Africa including Hausa, Somali, Oromo, Tigriña. I do not know exactly which African languages Dr. Winters connects linguistically with Dravidian in his paper “The genetic unity of Dravidian and African languages and culture.” There are four language families indigenous to Africa: Afro-Asiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo, and Nilo-Saharan. They are not known to be related to one another. I have never heard of any Dravidian linguistic connections to either Niger-Congo or Nilo-Saharan, apart from perhaps the work of Dr. Winters.
The global genetic studies of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza have shown distinct correlations between language families on a large scale and genetic populations. For example, not only are the Khoisan languages more unlike the world’s other languages than any other group, genetically the Khoisan speakers are more unlike the rest of the world’s population than any other group. The Urheimat of Khoisan appears to be the lake region of East Africa. The presence of two Khoisan languages there, Hadza and Sandawe, is a survival of the earliest presence. Evidently Khoisan speakers were the first population to branch off from proto-humanity. Although most Khoisan languages today have survived in Southern Africa, their origin in East Africa probably dates to the origin of human language itself. Anyway, if I had more time, I would check the results of Cavalli-Sforza’s work to see if there’s any genetic proximity between Dravidian and other African language families. The Nostraticists felt somewhat vindicated by the data.
None of this adds up to more than speculation about a possible Dravidian explanation for a possibly African custom. We haven’t even established for sure whether the coins on the nipples custom is of African origin.
