CHAPTER XL

88Seeinfra,p. 420sq.

89Frazer,Golden Bough, iii. 217sq.

90Herodotus, ii. 40.

91Allen,op. cit.p. 407.

92Yasts, x. 122.

93See Hirn,Origins of Art, p. 64.

An ascetic practice may also be the survival of an earlier sacrifice. We have seen that this is frequently the case with fasting and almsgiving, and the same may hold true of other forms of asceticism.94The essence of the act then no longer lies in the benefit which the god derives from it, but in the self-denial or self-mortification which it costs the worshipper. In the sacred books of India “austerity” is mentioned as a means of expiation side by side with sacrifice, fasting, and giving gifts.95

94Cf.Tertullian,De resurrectione carnis, 8 (Migne,op. cit.ii. 806).

95Gautama, xix. 11.Vasishtha, xx. 47; xxii. 8.Baudháyana, iii. 10. 9.

When an ascetic practice develops out of a previous custom of a different origin, it may be combined with an idea which by itself has been a frequent source of self-inflicted pain, to wit, the belief that such pain is an expiation for sin, that it may serve as a substitute for a punishment which would otherwise be inflicted by the offended god; and almost inseparably connected with this belief there may be that desire to suffer which is so often, vaguely or distinctly, involved in genuine repentance.96The idea of expiation very largely underlies the penitential discipline of the Christian Church and the asceticism of its saints. From the days of Tertullian and Cyprian the Latins were familiar with the notion that the Christian has to propitiate God, that cries of pain, sufferings, and deprivations are means of appeasing his anger, that God takes strict account of the quantity ofthe atonement, and that, where there is no guilt to have blotted out, those very means are regarded as merits.97According to the doctrine of the Church, penance should in all grave cases be preceded by sorrow for the sin and also by confession, either public or private; repentance, as we have noticed above, is the only ground on which pardon can be given by a scrupulous judge.98But the notion was only too often adopted that the penitential practice itself was a compensation for sin, that a man was at liberty to do whatever he pleased provided he was prepared to do penance afterwards, and that a person who, conscious of his frailty, had laid in a large stock of vicarious penance in anticipation of future necessity, had a right “to work it out,” and spend it in sins.99The idea that sins may be expiated by certain acts of self-mortification is familiar both to Muhammedans100and Jews.101According to Zoroastrian beliefs, it is possible to wipe out by peculiarly severe atonements not only the special sin on account of which the atonement is performed, but also other offences committed in former times or unconsciously.102In the sacred books of the Hindus we meet with a strong conviction that pain suffered in this life will redeem the sufferer from punishment in a future existence. It is said that “men who have committed crimes and have been punished by the king go to heaven, being pure like those who performed meritorious deeds”;103and the same idea is at the bottom of their penitential system.104But in Brahmanism, as in Catholicism, the effect of ascetic practices is supposed to go beyond mere expiation. They are regarded as means of accumulating religious merit or attaining superhuman powers. Brahmanical poems tell of marvellous self-mortificationsby which sages of the past obtained influence over the gods themselves; nay, even the power wielded by certain archdemons over men and gods is supposed to have been acquired by the practice of religious austerities.105How largely ascetic practices are due to the idea of expiation is indicated by the fact that they hardly occur among nations who have no vivid sense of sin, like the Chinese before the introduction of Taouism and Buddhism,106and the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians. In Greece, however, people sometimes voluntarily sacrificed a part of their happiness in order to avoid the envy of the gods, who would not allow to man more than a moderate share of good fortune.107

96Seesupra,i. 105sq.

97Tertullian,De jejuniis, 7 (Migne,op. cit.ii. 962).Idem,De resurrectione carnis, 8 (Migne, ii. 806sq.). Harnack,History of Dogma, ii. 110, 132; iii. 311.

98Supra,i. 85.

99See Thrupp,The Anglo-Saxon Home, p. 259.

100Supra,ii. 315,317. Pool,op. cit.p. 264.

101Supra,ii. 315sqq.Allen,op. cit.p. 130.

102Geiger,Civilization of the Eastern Irānians, i. 163.

103Laws of Manu, viii. 318.

104Ibid.xi. 228.

105Monier-Williams,Brāhmanism and Hindūism, pp. 231, 427. Oldenberg,Buddha, p. 302.

106Réville,La religion Chinoise, p. 221.

107Aeschylus,Agamemnon, 1008sqq.Schmidt,Die Ethik der alten Griechen, i. 82.

Self-mortification is also sometimes resorted to not so much to appease the anger of a god as rather to excite his compassion. In some of the Jewish fasts, as we have seen before, these two objects are closely interwoven.108The Jewish custom of fasting in the case of a drought is in a way parallel to the Moorish practice of tying holy men and throwing them into a pond in order that their pitiful condition may induce God to send rain. Mr. Williams tells us of a Fijian priest who, “after supplicating his god for rain in the usual way without success, slept for several successive nights exposed on the top of a rock, without mat or pillow, hoping thus to move the obdurate deity to send a shower.”109

108Supra,ii. 315.

109Williams and Calvert,Fiji, p. 196.

Not only is suffering voluntarily sought as a means of wiping off sins committed, but it is also endured with a view to preventing the commission of sin. This is the second or, in importance, the first great idea upon which Christian asceticism rests. The gratification of every worldly desire is sinful, the flesh should be the abject slave of the spirit intent upon unearthly things. Man was created for a life in spiritual communion with God,but he yielded to the seduction of evil demons, who availed themselves of the sensuous side of his nature to draw him away from the contemplation of the divine and lead him to the earthly. Moral goodness, therefore, consists in renouncing all sensuous pleasures, in separating from the world, in living solely after the spirit, in imitating the perfection and purity of God. The contrast between good and evil is the contrast between God and the world, and the conception of the world includes not only the objects of bodily appetites but all human institutions, as well as science and art.110And still more than any theoretical doctrine, the personal example of Christ led to the glorification of spiritual joy and bodily suffering.

110Harnack,op. cit.ii. 214sqq., iii. 258sqq.von Eicken,Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, p. 313sqq.

The antithesis of spirit and body was not peculiar to Christianity. It was an old Platonic conception, which was regarded by the Fathers of the Church as the contrast between that which was precious and that which was to be mortified. The doctrine that bodily enjoyments are low and degrading was taught by many pagan philosophers; even a man like Cicero says that all corporeal pleasure is opposed to virtue and ought to be rejected.111And in the Neo-Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean schools of Alexandria an ascetic ideal of life was the natural outcome of their theory that God alone is pure and good, and matter impure and evil. Renunciation of the world was taught and practised by the Jewish sects of the Essenes and Therapeutæ. In India, Professor Kern observes, “climate, institutions, the contemplative bent of the native mind, all tended to facilitate the growth of a persuasion that the highest aims of human life and real felicity cannot be obtained but by the seclusion from the busy world, by undisturbed pious exercises, and by a certain amount of mortification.”112We read in the Hitopadesa, “Subjection to the senses has been called the road to ruin, andtheir subjugation the path to fortune.”113The Jain regards pleasure in itself as sinful:—“What is discontent, and what is pleasure? One should live subject to neither. Giving up all gaiety, circumspect, restrained, one should lead a religious life.”114According to Buddhism, there are two causes of the misery with which life is inseparably bound up—lust and ignorance; and so there are two cures—the suppression of lust and desire and the removal of ignorance.115It is said in the Dhammapada, “There is no satisfying lusts, even by a shower of gold pieces; he who knows that lusts have a short taste and cause pain, he is wise.”116Penances, as they were practised among the ascetics of India, were discarded by Buddha as vexatious, unworthy, unprofitable. “Not nakedness, not platted hair, not dirt, not fasting, or lying on the earth, not rubbing with dust, not sitting motionless, can purify a mortal who has not overcome desires.”117Where all contact with the earthly ceases, there, and there only, are deliverance and freedom.

111Cicero,De officiis, i. 30; iii. 33.

112Kern,Manual of Indian Buddhism, p. 73.

113Hitopadesa, quoted by Monier-Williams,Indian Wisdom, p. 538.

114Hopkins,op. cit.p. 291.

115Oldenberg,op. cit.p. 212sq.Monier-Williams,Buddhism, p. 99.

116Dhammapada, 186sq.

117Ibid.141. See also Oldenberg,op. cit.p. 301sq.

The idea that man ought to liberate himself from the bondage of earthly desires is the conclusion of a contemplative mind reflecting upon the short duration and emptiness of all bodily pleasures and the allurements by which they lead men into misery and sin. And separation from the material world is the ideal of the religious enthusiast whose highest aspiration is union with God conceived as an immaterial being, as pure spirit.

MAN’Ssexual nature gives rise to various modes of conduct on which moral judgments are passed. We shall first consider such relations between the sexes as are comprised under the heading Marriage.

In a previous work I have endeavoured to show that in all probability there has been no stage in the social history of mankind where marriage has not existed, human marriage apparently being an inheritance from some ape-like progenitor.1I then defined marriage as a more or less durable connection between male and female, lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till after the birth of the offspring. This is marriage in the natural history sense of the term. As a social institution, on the other hand, it has a somewhat different meaning: it is a union regulated by custom or law.2Society lays down rules relating to the selection of partners, to the mode of contracting marriage, to its form, and to its duration. These rules are essentially expressions of moral feelings.

1Westermarck,History of Human Marriage, ch. iii.sqq.

2The best definition of marriage as a social institution which I have met with is the following one given by Dr. Friedrichs (‘Einzeluntersuchungen zur vergleichenden Rechtswissenschaft,’ inZeitschr. f. vergl. Rechtswiss.x. 255):—“Eine von der Rechtsordnung anerkannte und privilegirte Vereinigung geschlechtsdifferenter Personen, entweder zur Führung eines gemeinsamen Hausstandes und zum Geschlechtsverkehr, oder zum ausschliesslichen Geschlechtsverkehr.”

There is, first, a circle of persons within which marriage is prohibited. It seems that the horror of incest is well-nigh universal in the human race, and that the few cases in which this feeling is said to be absent can only be regardedas abnormalities. But the degrees of kinship within which marriage is forbidden are by no means the same everywhere. It is most, and almost universally, abominated between parents and children. It is also held in general abhorrence between brothers and sisters who are children of the same mother as well as of the same father. Most of the exceptions to this rule refer to royal persons, for whom it is considered improper to contract marriage with individuals of less exalted birth; but among a few peoples incestuous unions are practised on a larger scale on account of extreme isolation or as a result of vitiated instincts.3It seems, however, that habitual marriages between brothers and sisters have been imputed to certain peoples without sufficient reason.4This is obviously true of the Veddahs of Ceylon, who have long been supposed to regard the marriage of a man with his younger sister astheproper marriage.5“Such incest,” says Mr. Nevill, “never was allowed, and never could be, while the Vaeddacustoms lingered. Incest is regarded as worse than murder. So positive is this feeling, that the Tamils have based a legend upon the instant murder of his sister by a Vaedda to whom she had made undue advances. The mistake arose from gross ignorance of Vaedda usages. The title of a cousin with whom marriage ought to be contracted, that is, mother’s brother’s daughter, or father’s sister’s daughter, isnagâornangî. This, in Sinhalese, is applied to a younger sister. Hence if you ask a Vaedda, ‘Do you marry your sisters?’ the Sinhalese interpreter is apt to say, ‘Do you marry your nagâ?’ The reply is (I have often tested it), ‘Yes—we always did formerly, but now it is not always observed.’ You say then, ‘What? marry your own-sister-nagâ?’ and the reply is an angry and insulted denial, the very question appearing a gross insult.” The same writer adds:—“In no case did a person marry one of the same family, even though the relationship was lost in remote antiquity. Such a marriage is incest. The penalty for incest was death.”6

3Westermarck,op. cit.ch. xiv.sq.

4This is apparently the case with various peoples mentioned by Sir J. G. Frazer (Pausanias’s Description of Greece, ii. 84sq.) as being addicted to incestuous unions. Mr. Turner’s short statement (Samoa, p. 341) that among the New Caledonians no laws of consanguinity were observed in their marriages, and that even the nearest relatives united, radically differs from M. de Rochas’ description of the same people. “Les Néo-Calédoniens,” he says (Nouvelle Calédonie, p. 232), “ne se marient pas entre proches parents du côté paternel; mais du côté maternel, ils se marient à tous les degrés de cousinage.” Brothers and sisters, after they have reached years of maturity, are no longer permitted to entertain any social intercourse with each other; they are prohibited from keeping each other company even in the presence of a third person; and if they casually meet they must instantly go out of the way or, if that is impossible, the sister must throw herself on the ground with her face downwards. “Cet éloignement,” M. de Rochas adds (ibid.p. 239), “qui n’est certes l’effet ni du mépris ni de l’inimitié, me parait né d’une exagération déraisonnable d’un sentiment naturel, l’horreur de l’inceste.” Sir J. G. Frazer says that, according to Mr. Thomson, the marriage of brothers with sisters has been practised among the Masai; but a later and, as it seems, better informed authority tells us that “the Masai do not marry their near relations” and that “incest is unknown among them” (Hinde,The Last of the Masai, p. 76). Again, the statement that among the Obongos, a dwarf race in West Africa, sisters marry with brothers, is only based on information derived from another people, the Ashangos, who have a strong antipathy to them (Du Chaillu,Journey to Ashango-Land, p. 320). Liebich’s assertion (Die Zigeuner, p. 49) that the Gypsies allow a brother to marry his sister is certainly not true of the Gypsies of Finland, who greatly abhor incest (Thesleff, ‘Zigenarlif i Finland,’ inNya Pressen, 1897, no. 331 B).

5Bailey, ‘Wild Tribes of the Veddahs of Ceylon,’ inTrans. Ethn. Soc.N.S. ii. 294sq.

6Nevill, ‘Vaeddas of Ceylon,’ inTaprobanian, i. 178.

As a rule, the prohibited degrees are more numerous among peoples unaffected by modern civilisation than they are in more advanced communities, the prohibitions in a great many cases referring even to all the members of the tribe or clan; and the violation of these rules is regarded as a most heinous crime.7

7Westermarck,op. cit.p. 297sqq.

The Algonquins speak of cases where men have been put to death by their nearest kinsfolk for marrying women of their own clan.8Among the Asiniboin, a Siouan tribe, a chief can commit murder with impunity if the murdered person be without friends, but if he married within hisgenshe would be dismissed, on account of the general disgust which such a union would arouse.9The Hottentots used to punish alliances between first or second cousins with death.10A Bantu of the coast region considers similar unions to be “something horrible, something unutterably disgraceful.”11The Busoga of the UgandaProtectorate held in great abhorrence anything like incest even amongst domestic animals.12Among the Kandhs of India “intermarriage between persons of the same tribe, however large or scattered, is considered incestuous and punishable with death.”13In the Malay Archipelago submersion is a common punishment for incest,14but among certain tribes the guilty parties are killed and eaten15or buried alive.16In Efate, of the New Hebrides, it would be a crime punishable with death for a man or woman to marry a person belonging to his or her mother’s clan;17and the Mortlock Islanders are said to inflict the same punishment upon anybody who has sexual intercourse with a relative belonging to his own “tribe.”18Nowhere has marriage been bound by more severe laws than among the Australian aborigines. Their tribes are grouped in exogamous subdivisions, the number of which varies; and at least before the occupation of the country by the whites the regular punishment for marriage or sexual intercourse with a person belonging to a forbidden division was death.19

8Frazer,Totemism, p. 59.

9Dorsey, ‘Siouan Sociology,’ inAnn. Rep. Bur. Ethn.xv. 224.

10Kolben,Present State of the Cape of Good Hope, i. 155sq.

11Theal,History of the Boers in South Africa, p. 16.

12Johnston,Uganda Protectorate, ii. 719.

13Macpherson, quoted by Percival,Land of the Veda, p. 345.Cf.Hunter,Annals of Rural Bengal, iii. 81.

14Wilken,Huwelijken tusschen bloedverwanten, p. 26sq.Riedel,De sluik- en kroesharige rassen tusschen Selebes en Papua, p. 460.

15Wilken,Over de verwantschap en het huwelijks- en erfrecht bij de volken van het maleische ras, p. 18.

16Glimpses of the Eastern Archipelago, p. 105.

17Macdonald,Oceania, p. 181sq.

18Kubary, ‘Die Bewohner der Mortlock Inseln,’ inMittheil. d. Geogr. Gesellsch. in Hamburg, 1878-9, p. 251.

19Westermarck,op. cit.p. 299sq.See, besides the authorities quoted there, Roth,Ethnol. Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines, p. 182; Spencer and Gillen,Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 15.

Not less intense is the horror of incest among nations that have passed beyond savagery and barbarism. Among the Chinese incest with a grand-uncle, a father’s first cousin, a brother, or a nephew, is punishable by death, and a man who marries his mother’s sister is strangled; nay, punishment is inflicted even on him who marries a person with the same surname as his own, sixty blows being the penalty.20So also incest was held in the utmost horror by the so-called Aryan peoples in ancient times.21In the ‘Institutes of Vishnu’ it is said that sexual intercoursewith one’s mother or daughter or daughter-in-law is a crime of the highest degree, for which there is no other atonement than to proceed into the flames.22

20Medhurst, ‘Marriage, Affinity, and Inheritance in China,’ inTrans. Roy. Asiatic Soc. China Branch, iv. 21sqq.

21Leist,Alt-arisches Jus Gentium, p. 394sq.

22Institutes of Vishnu, xxxiv. 1sq.

Various theories have been set forth to account for the prohibition of marriage between near kin. I criticised some of them in my book on the ‘History of Human Marriage,’ and ventured at the same time on an explanation of my own.23I pointed out that there is an innate aversion to sexual intercourse between persons living very closely together from early youth, and that, as such persons are in most cases related by blood, this feeling would naturally display itself in custom and law as a horror of intercourse between near kin. Indeed, an abundance of ethnographical facts seem to indicate that it is not in the first place by the degree of consanguinity, but by the close living together, that prohibitory laws against intermarriage are determined. Thus many peoples have a rule of “exogamy” which does not depend on kinship at all, but on purely local considerations, all the members of a horde or village, though not related by blood, being forbidden to intermarry.24The prohibited degrees are very differently defined in the customs or laws of different nations, and it appears that the extent to which relatives are prohibited from intermarrying is nearly connected with their close living together. Very often the prohibitions against incest are more or less one-sided, applying more extensively either to the relatives on the father’s side or to those on the mother’s, according as descent is reckoned through men or women. Now, sincethe line of descent is largely connected with local relationships, we may reasonably infer that the same local relationships exercise a considerable influence on the table of prohibited degrees. However, in a large number of cases prohibitions of intermarriage are only indirectly influenced by the close living together.25Aversion to the intermarriage of persons who live in intimate connection with one another has called forth prohibitions of the intermarriage of relations; and, as kinship is traced by means of a system of names, the name comes to be considered identical with relationship. This system is necessarily one-sided. Though it will keep up the record of descent either on the male or female side, it cannot do both at once;26and the line which has not been kept up by such means of record, even where it is recognised as a line of relationship, is naturally more or less neglected and soon forgotten. Hence the prohibited degrees frequently extend very far on the one side—to the whole clan—but not on the other. It should also be remembered that, according to primitive ideas, the name itself constitutes a mystic link between those who have it in common. “In Greenland, as everywhere else,” says Dr. Nansen, “the name is of great importance; it is believed that there is a spiritual affinity between two people of the same name.”27Generally speaking, the feeling that two persons are intimately connected in some way or other may, through an association of ideas, give rise to the notion that marriage or sexual intercourse between them is incestuous. Hence the prohibitions of marriage between relations by alliance and by adoption. Hence, too, the prohibitions of the Roman and Greek Churches on the ground of what is called “spiritual relationship.”

23Westermarck,op. cit.p. 310sqq.

24Herr Cunow (Die Verwandtschafts-Organisationen der Australneger, p. 187) finds this argument “rather peculiar,” and offers himself a different explanation of the rule in question. He writes:—“In der Wirklichkeit erklärt sich das Verbot einfach daraus, dass sehr oft die Lokalgruppe mit dem Geschlechtsverband beziehungsweise dem Totemverband kongruirt, und demnach das was für die Gens gilt, zugleich auch für die Lokalgruppe Geltung hat.” This, however, is only Herr Cunow’s own inference. And it may be asked why it is more “peculiar” to suppose that the prohibition of marriage between near kin has sprung from aversion to sexual intercourse between persons living closely together, than to assume that the rule which forbids marriage between unrelated persons living in the same community has sprung from the prohibition of marriage between kindred.

25I do not understand how any reader of my book can, like Herr Cunow (op. cit.p. 186sqq.), attribute to me the statement that the group within which intermarriage is prohibited is identical with the group of people who live closely together. If he had read a little more carefully what I have said, he might have saved himself the trouble he has taken to prove my great ignorance of early social organisations.

26Cf.Tylor,Early History of Mankind, p. 285sq.

27Nansen,Eskimo Life, p. 230.

The question arises:—How has this instinctive aversion to marriage and sexual intercourse in general between persons living closely together from early youth originated? I have suggested that it may be the result of natural selection. Darwin’s careful studies of the effects of cross- and self-fertilisation in the vegetable kingdom, the consensus of opinion among eminent breeders, and experiments made with rats, rabbits, and other animals, seem to have proved that self-fertilisation of plants and close inter-breeding of animals are more or less injurious to the species; and it is probable that the evil chiefly results from the fact that the uniting sexual elements were not sufficiently differentiated. Now it is impossible to believe that a physiological law which holds good of the rest of the animal kingdom, as also of plants, would not apply to man as well. But it is difficult to adduce direct evidence for the evil effects of consanguineous marriages. We cannot expect very conspicuous results from other alliances than those between the nearest relatives—between brothers and sisters, parents and children,—and the injurious results even of such unions would not necessarily appear at once. The closest kind of intermarriage which we have opportunities of studying is that between first cousins. Unfortunately, the observations hitherto made on the subject are far from decisive. Yet it is noteworthy that of all the writers who have discussed it the majority, and certainly not the least able of them, have expressed their belief in marriages between first cousins being more or less unfavourable to the offspring; and no evidence which can stand the test of scientific investigation has hitherto been adduced against this view. Moreover, we have reason to believe that consanguineous marriages are much more injurious in savage regions, where the struggle for existence is often very severe, than they have proved to be in civilised societies, especially as it is among the well-to-do classes that such marriages occur most frequently.

Taking all these facts into consideration, I am inclined to think that consanguineous marriages are in some way orother detrimental to the species. And here I find a quite sufficient explanation of the horror of incest; not because man at an early stage recognised the injurious influence of close intermarriage, but because the law of natural selection must inevitably have operated. Among the ancestors of man, as among other animals, there was no doubt a time, when blood-relationship was no bar to sexual intercourse. But variations, here as elsewhere, would naturally present themselves—we know how extremely liable to variations the sexual instinct is; and those of our ancestors who avoided in-and-in breeding would survive, while the others would gradually decay and ultimately perish. Thus a sentiment would be developed which would be powerful enough, as a rule, to prevent injurious unions. Of course it would display itself, not as an innate aversion to sexual connections with near relatives as such, but as an aversion on the part of individuals to union with others with whom they lived; but these, as a matter of fact, would be blood-relations, so that the result would be the survival of the fittest. Whether man inherited this sentiment from the predecessors from whom he sprang, or whether it was developed after the evolution of distinctly human qualities, we cannot know. It must have arisen at a stage when family ties became comparatively strong, and children remained with their parents until the age of puberty or even longer. And exogamy, resulting from a natural extension of this sentiment to a larger group, would arise when single families united into hordes.

This attempt to explain the prohibition of marriage between kindred and exogamy has not lacked sympathetic support,28but more commonly, I think, it has been rejected. Yet after a careful consideration of the various objections raised against it I find no reason to alter my opinion. Some of my opponents have evidently failed to grasp theargument on which the theory is based. Thus Professor Robertson Smith argued that it begins by presupposing the very custom which it professes to explain, the custom of exogamy; that “it postulates the existence of groups which through many generations (for the survival of the fittest implies this) avoided wiving within the group.”29But what my theory postulates is not the existence of exogamous groups, but the spontaneous appearance of individual sentiments of aversion. And if, as Mr. Andrew Lang maintains, my whole argument is a “vicious circle,”30then the theory of natural selection itself is a vicious circle, since there never could be a selection of qualities that did not exist before.

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