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Section 12 of 18 - Table of Contents
XII. THE SEX-TABOO
In the course of the last few chapters I have spoken more
than once of the solidarity and continuity of Christianity,
in its essential doctrines, with the Pagan rites. There is,
however, one notable exception to this statement. I refer
of course to Christianity's treatment of Sex. It is
certainly very remarkable that while the Pagan cults generally
made a great deal of all sorts of sex-rites, laid
much stress upon them, and introduced them in what
we consider an unblushing and shameless way into the
instincts connected with it. I say 'the Christian Church,'
on the whole took quite the opposite line--ignored sex,
condemned it, and did much despite to the perfectly natural
instincts connected with it. I say 'the Christian Church,'
because there is nothing to show that Jesus himself (if we
admit his figure as historical) adopted any such extreme
or doctrinaire attitude; and the quite early Christian teachers
(with the chief exception of Paul) do not exhibit this bias
to any great degree. In fact, as is well known, strong
currents of pagan usage and belief ran through the Christian
assemblies of the first three or four centuries. "The Christian
art of this period remained delightfully pagan. In the
catacombs we see the Saviour as a beardless youth, like a
young Greek god; sometimes represented, like Hermes the
guardian of the flocks, bearing a ram or lamb round
his neck; sometimes as Orpheus tuning his lute among
the wild animals."[1] The followers of Jesus were at times
even accused--whether rightly or wrongly I know not--
of celebrating sexual mysteries at their love-feasts. But
as the Church through the centuries grew in power and scope
--with its monks and their mutilations and asceticisms, and
its celibate clergy, and its absolute refusal to recognize the
sexual meaning of its own acclaimed symbols (like the
Cross, the three fingers of Benediction, the Fleur de Lys
and so forth)--it more and more consistently defined itself
as anti-sexual in its outlook, and stood out in that way in
marked contrast to the earlier Nature-religions.
[1] Angels' Wings, by E. Carpenter, p. 104.
It may be said of course that this anti-sexual tendency
can be traced in other of the pre-Christian Churches, especially
the later ones, like the Buddhist, the Egyptian,
and so forth; and this is perfectly true; but it would seem
that in many ways the Christian Church marked the culmination
of the tendency; and the fact that other cults participated
in the taboo makes us all the more ready and anxious
to inquire into its real cause.
To go into a disquisition on the Sex-rites of the various pre-
Christian religions would be 'a large order'--larger than
I could attempt to fill; but the general facts in this connection
are fairly patent. We know, of course, from the
Bible that the Syrians in Palestine were given to sexual
worships. There were erect images (phallic) and "groves"
(sexual symbols) on every high hill and under every green
tree;[1] and these same images and the rites connected
with them crept into the Jewish Temple and were popular
enough to maintain their footing there for a long period from
King Rehoboam onwards, notwithstanding the efforts of
Josiah[2] and other reformers to extirpate them. Moreover
there were girls and men (hierodouloi) regularly attached
during this period to the Jewish Temple as to the heathen
Temples, for the rendering of sexual services, which were
recognized in many cases as part of the ritual. Women
were persuaded that it was an honor and a privilege to be
fertilized by a 'holy man' (a priest or other man connected
with the rites), and children resulting from such
unions were often called "Children of God"--an appellation
which no doubt sometimes led to a legend of miraculous
birth! Girls who took their place as hierodouloi in the
Temple or Temple-precincts were expected to surrender
themselves to men-worshipers in the Temple, much in the
same way, probably, as Herodotus describes in the temple
of the Babylonian Venus Mylitta, where every native
woman, once in her life, was supposed to sit in the
Temple and have intercourse with some stranger.[3] Indeed
the Syrian and Jewish rites dated largely from Babylonia.
"The Hebrews entering Syria," says Richard Burton[4]
"found it religionized. by Assyria and Babylonia, when the
Accadian Ishtar had passed West, and had become Ashtoreth,
Ashtaroth, or Ashirah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phoenician
Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-
goddess who is queen of Heaven and Love." The word
translated "grove" as above, in our Bible, is in fact Asherah,
which connects it pretty clearly with the Babylonian Queen
of Heaven.
[1] 1 Kings xiv. 22-24.
[2] 2 Kings xxiii.
[3] See Herodotus i. 199; also a reference to this custom in the
apocryphal Baruch, vi. 42, 43.
[4] The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886 edn.), vol. x, p. 229.
In India again, in connection with the Hindu Temples and
their rites, we have exactly the same institution of girls
attached to the Temple service--the Nautch-girls--whose
functions in past times were certainly sexual, and whose
dances in honor of the god are, even down to the
present day, decidedly amatory in character. Then we
have the very numerous lingams (conventional representations
of the male organ) to be seen, scores and scores of
them, in the arcades and cloisters of the Hindu Temples--
to which women of all classes, especially those who wish to
become mothers, resort, anointing them copiously with
oil, and signalizing their respect and devotion to them in
a very practical way. As to the lingam as representing
the male organ, in some form or other--as upright stone
or pillar or obelisk or slender round tower--it occurs all
over the, world, notably in Ireland, and forms such a memorial
of the adoration paid by early folk to the great emblem
and instrument of human fertility, as cannot be mistaken.
The pillars set up by Solomon in front of his temple were
obviously from their names--Jachin and Boaz[1]--meant to
be emblems of this kind; and the fact that they were
crowned with pomegranates--the universally accepted symbol
of the female--confirms and clinches this interpretation.
The obelisks before the Egyptians' temples were
signs of the same character. The well-known T-shaped
cross was in use in pagan lands long before Christianity, as
a representation of the male member, and also at the same
time of the 'tree' on which the god (Attis or Adonis or Krishna
or whoever it might be) was crucified; and the same
symbol combined with the oval (or yoni) formed THE
Crux Ansata {Ankh} of the old Egyptian ritual--a figure which
is to-day sold in Cairo as a potent charm, and confessedly
indicates the conjunction of the two sexes in one
design.[2] MacLennan in The Fortnightly Review (Oct. 1869)
quotes with approval the words of Sanchoniathon, as saying
that "men first worship plants, next the heavenly bodies,
supposed to be animals, then 'pillars' (emblems of the
Procreator), and last, the anthropomorphic gods."
[1] "He shall establish" and "In it is strength" are in the Bible
the marginal interpretations of these two words.
[2] The connection between the production of fire by means of the
fire-drill and the generation of life by sex-intercourse is a
very obvious one, and lends itself to magical ideas. J. E. Hewitt
in his Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times (1894) says (vol. i, p.
8) that "Magha, the mother-goddess worshipped in Asia Minor, was
originally the socket-block from which fire was generated by the
fire-drill." Hence we have, he says, the Magi of Persia, and the
Maghadas of Indian History, also the word 'Magic."
It is not necessary to enlarge on this subject. The
facts of the connection of sexual rites with religious services
nearly everywhere in the early world are, as I say, sufficiently
patent to every inquirer. But it IS necessary to try
to understand the rationale of this connection. To dispatch
all such cases under the mere term "religious prostitution"
is no explanation. The term suggests, of
course, that the plea of religion was used simply as an
excuse and a cover for sexual familiarities; but though
this kind of explanation commends itself, no doubt, to
the modern man--whose religion is as commercial as his
sex-relationships are--and though in CASES no doubt it
was a true explanation--yet it is obvious that among people
who took religion seriously, as a matter of life and death
and who did not need hypocritical excuses or covers for
sex-relationships, it cannot be accepted as in general the
RIGHT explanation. No, the real explanation is--and I
will return to this presently--that sexual relationships are
so deep and intimate a part of human nature that from
the first it has been simply impossible to keep them OUT
of religion--it being of course the object of religion to bring
the whole human being into some intelligible relation with
the physical, moral, and if you like supernatural order of
the great world around him. Sex was felt from the first
to be part, and a foundational part, of the great order of the
world and of human nature; and therefore to separate
it from Religion was unthinkable and a kind of contradiction
in terms.[1]
[1] For further development of this subject see ch. xv.
If that is true--it will be asked--how was it that that
divorce DID take place--that the taboo did arise? How was
it that the Jews, under the influence of Josiah and the
Hebrew prophets, turned their faces away from sex and
strenuously opposed the Syrian cults? How was it that
this reaction extended into Christianity and became even
more definite in the Christian Church--that monks went
by thousands into the deserts of the Thebaid, and that
the early Fathers and Christian apologists could not find
terms foul enough to hurl at Woman as the symbol (to them)
of nothing but sex-corruption and delusion? How was it
that this contempt of the body and degradation of sex-
things went on far into the Middle Ages of Europe, and
ultimately created an organized system of hypocrisy, and
concealment and suppression of sex-instincts, which, acting
as cover to a vile commercial Prostitution and as a
breeding ground for horrible Disease, has lasted on even
to the edge of the present day?
This is a fair question, and one which demands an answer.
There must have been a reason, and a deep-rooted one, for
this remarkable reaction and volte-face which has characterized
Christianity, and, perhaps to a lesser degree, other
both earlier and later cults like those of the Buddhists, the
Egyptians, the Aztecs,[1] and so forth.
[1] For the Aztecs, see Acosta, vol. ii, p. 324 (London, 1604).
It may be said--and this is a fair answer on the SURFACE
of the problem--that the main reason WAS something in
the nature of a reaction. The excesses and corruptions of
sex in Syria had evidently become pretty bad, and that very
fact may have led to a pendulum-swing of the Jewish
Church in the opposite direction; and again in the same way
the general laxity of morals in the decay of the Roman empire
may have confirmed the Church of early Christendom in its
determination to keep along the great high road of asceticism.
The Christian followed on the Jewish and Egyptian Churches,
and in this way a great tradition of sexual continence and
anti-pagan morality came right down the centuries even into
modern times.
This seems so far a reasonable theory; but I think we
shall go farther and get nearer the heart of the problem if
we revert to the general clue which I have followed already
more than once--the clue of the necessary evolution of human
Consciousnss. In the first or animal stage of human
evolution, Sex was (as among the animals) a perfectly
necessary, instinctive and unself-conscious activity. It
was harmonious with itself, natural, and unproductive of
evil. But when the second stage set in, in which man
became preponderantly SELF-conscious, he inevitably set
about deflecting sex-activities to his own private pleasure
and advantage; he employed his budding intellect in
scheming the derailment of passion and desire from tribal
needs and, Nature's uses to the poor details of his own
gratification. If the first stage of harmonious sex-instinct
and activity may be held as characteristic of the Golden
Age, the second stage must be taken to represent the Fall
of man and his expulsion from Paradise in the Garden of
Eden story. The pleasure and glory of Sex having been
turned to self-purposes, Sex itself became the great Sin. A
sense of guilt overspread man's thoughts on the subject. "He
knew that he was naked," and he fled from the voice
and face of the Lord. From that moment one of
the main objects of his life (in its inner and newer activities)
came to be the DENIAL of Sex. Sex was conceived of as the
great Antagonist, the old Serpent lying ever in wait to
betray him; and there arrived a moment in the history
of every race, and of every representative religion, when
the sexual rites and ceremonies of the older time lost their
naive and quasi-innocent character and became afflicted with
a sense of guilt and indecency. This extraordinarily
interesting and dramatic moment in human evolution was
of course that in which self-consciousness grew powerful
enough to penetrate to the centre of human vitality, the
sanctumof man's inner life, his sexual instinct, and to deal
it a terrific blow--a blow from which it has never yet
recovered, and from which indeed it will not recover, until
the very nature of man's inner life is changed.
It may be said that it was very foolish of Man to
deny and to try to expel a perfectly natural and sensible
thing, a necessary and indispensable part of his own nature.
And that, as far as I can see, is perfectly true. But sometimes
it is unavoidable, it would seem, to do foolish things--
if only to convince oneself of one's own foolishness. On
the other hand, this policy on the part of Man was certainly
very wise--wiser than he knew--for in attempting to drive
out Sex (which of course he could not do) he entered into
a conflict which was bound to end in the expulsion of
SOMETHING; and that something was the domination, within
himself, of self-consciousness, the very thing which makes and
ever has made sex detestable. Man did not succeed in
driving the snake out of the Garden, but he drove himself
out, taking the real old serpent of self-greed and self-
gratification with him. When some day he returns to
Paradise this latter will have died in his bosom and
been cast away, but he will find the good Snake there as
of old, full of healing and friendliness, among the branches
of the Tree of Life.
Besides it is evident from other considerations that
this moment of the denial of sex HAD to come. When
one thinks of the enormous power of this passion, and its
age-long, hold upon the human race, one realizes that once
liberated from the instinctive bonds of nature, and backed
by a self-conscious and self-seeking human intelligence it was
on the way to become a fearful curse.
A monstrous Eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth;
For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran.
And this may have been all very well and appropriate in
the carboniferous Epoch, but WE in the end of Time have
no desire to fall under any such preposterous domination,
or to return to the primal swamps from which organic nature
has so slowly and painfully emerged.
I say it was the entry of self-consciousness into the sphere
of Sex, and the consequent use of the latter for private
ends, which poisoned this great race-power at its root.
For above all, Sex, as representing through Childbirth the
life of the Race (or of the Tribe, or, if you like,
of Humanity at large) should be sacred and guarded from
merely selfish aims, and therefore to use it only for such
aims is indeed a desecration. And even if--as some maintain
and I think rightly[1]--sex is not MERELY for child-birth
and physical procreation, but for mutual vitalizing and
invigoration, it still subserves union and not egotism; and to
use it egotistically is to commit the sin of Separation indeed.
It is to cast away and corrupt the very bond of life and
fellowship. The ancient peoples at any rate threw an illumination
of religious (that is, of communal and public) value over
sex-acts, and to a great extent made them into matters either of
Temple-ritual and the worship of the gods, or of communal and
pandemic celebration, as in the Saturnalia and other similar
festivals. We have certainly no right to regard these
celebrations--of either kind--as insincere. They were, at any
rate in their inception, genuinely religious or genuinely social
and festal; and from either point of view they were far better
than the secrecy of private indulgence which characterizes our
modern world in these matters. The thorough and shameless
commercialism of Sex has alas! been reserved for what is
called "Christian civilization," and with it (perhaps as
a necessary consequence) Prostitution and Syphilis have
grown into appalling evils, accompanied by a gigantic degradation
of social standards, and upgrowth of petty Philistinism
and niaiserie. Love, in fact, having in this modern
world-movement been denied, and its natural manifestations
affected with a sense of guilt and of sin, has really languished
and ceased to play its natural part in life; and a vast number
of people--both men and women, finding themselves
barred or derailed from the main object of existence,
have turned their energies to 'business' or 'money-making'
or 'social advancement' or something equally futile,
as the only poor substitute and pis aller open to them.
[1] See Havelock Ellis, The Objects of Marriage, a pamphlet
published by the "British Society for the Study of
Sex-psychology."
Why (again we ask) did Christianity make this apparently
great mistake? And again we must reply: Perhaps the
mistake was not so great as it appears to be. Perhaps
this was another case of the necessity of learning by loss.
Love had to be denied, in the form of sex, in order that it
might thus the better learn its own true values and needs. Sex
had to be rejected, or defiled with the sense of guilt and self-
seeking, in order that having cast out its defilement it might
return one day, transformed in the embrace of love.
The whole process has had a deep and strange world-
significance. It has led to an immensely long period of
suppression--suppression of two great instincts--the physical
instinct of sex and the emotional instinct of love. Two
things which should naturally be conjoined have been
separated; and both have suffered. And we know from
the Freudian teachings what suppressions in the root-instincts
necessarily mean. We know that they inevitably
terminate in diseases and distortions of proper action,
either in the body or in the mind, or in both; and that
these evils can only be cured by the liberation of the said
instincts again to their proper expression and harmonious
functioning in the whole organism. No wonder then that,
with this agelong suppression (necessary in a sense though
it may have been) which marks the Christian dispensation,
there should have been associated endless Sickness and Crime
and sordid Poverty, the Crucifixion of animals in the
name of Science and of human workers in the name of
Wealth, and wars and horrors innumerable! Hercules
writhing in the Nessus-shirt or Prometheus nailed to the
rocks are only as figures of a toy miniature compared with
this vision of the great and divine Spirit of Man caught in the
clutches of those dread Diseases which through the centuries
have been eating into his very heart and vitals.
It would not be fair to pile on the Christian Church the
blame for all this. It had, no doubt, its part to play in the
whole great scheme, namely, to accentuate the self-motive; and it
played the part very thoroughly and successfully. For it must be
remembered (what I have again and again insisted on) that in the
pagan cults it was always the salvation of the CLAN, the TRIBE,
the people that was the main consideration; the advantage of the
individual took only a very secondary part. But in
Christendom--after the communal enthusiasms of apostolic days and
of the medieval and monastic brotherhoods and sisterhoods had
died down--religion occupied itself more and more with
each man or woman's INDIVIDUAL salvation, regardless of
what might happen to the community; till, with the rise
of Protestantism and Puritanism, this tendency reached
such an extreme that, as some one has said, each
man was absorbed in polishing up his own little soul in a
corner to himself, in entire disregard to the damnation which
might come to his neighbor. Religion, and Morality
too, under the commercial regime became, as was natural,
perfectly selfish. It was always: "Am _I_ saved? Am
_I_ doing the right thing? Am _I_ winning the favor of God
and man? Will my claims to salvation be allowed?
Did _I_ make a good bargain in allowing Jesus to be crucified
for me?" The poison of a diseased self-consciousness entered
into the whole human system.
As I say, one must not blame the Christians too much for
all this--partly because, AFTER the communal periods which
I have just mentioned, Christianity was evidently deeply
influenced by the rise of COMMERCIALISM, to which during
the last two centuries it has so carefully and piously
adapted itself; and partly because--if our view is anywhere
near right--this microbial injection of self-consciousness
was just the necessary work which (in conjunction with
commercialism) it HAD to perform. But though one does
not blame Christianity one cannot blind oneself to its defects
--the defects necessarily arising from the part it had to
play. When one compares a healthy Pagan ritual--say
of Apollo or Dionysus--including its rude and crude sacrifices
if you like, but also including its whole-hearted spontaneity
and dedication to the common life and welfare--with the
morbid self-introspection of the Christian and the eternally
recurring question "What shall I do to be saved?"--the
comparison is not favorable to the latter. There is (at
any rate in modern days) a mawkish milk-and-wateriness
about the Christian attitude, and also a painful self-
consciousness, which is not pleasant; and though Nietzsche's
blonde beast is a sufficiently disagreeable animal, one almost
thinks that it were better to be THAT than to go about with
one's head meekly hanging on one side, and talking always
of altruism and self-sacrifice, while in reality one's heart was
entirely occupied with the question of one's own salvation.
There is besides a lamentable want of grit and substance
about the Christian doctrines and ceremonials. Somehow
under the sex-taboo they became spiritualized and etherealized
out of all human use. Study the initiation-rites of any
savage tribe--with their strict discipline of the young
braves in fortitude, and the overcoming of pain and fear;
with their very detailed lessons in the arts of war and life
and the duties of the grown man to his tribe; and with
their quite practical instruction in matters of Sex; and then
read our little Baptismal and Confirmation services, which
ought to correspond thereto. How thin and attenuated and
weak the latter appear! Or compare the Holy Communion,
as celebrated in the sentimental atmosphere of
a Protestant Church, with an ancient Eucharistic feast of
real jollity and community of life under the acknowledged
presence of the god; or the Roman Catholic service of the
Mass, including its genuflexions and mock oblations and
droning ritual sing-song, with the actual sacrifice in early
days of an animal-god-victim on a blazing altar; and I think
my meaning will be clear. We do not want, of course,
to return to all the crudities and barbarities of the past; but
also we do not want to become attenuated and spiritualized
out of all mundane sense and recognition, and to live in an
otherworld Paradise void of application to earthly
affairs.
The sex-taboo in Christianity was apparently, as I have
said, an effort of the human soul to wrest itself free from
the entanglement of physical lust--which lust, though normal
and appropriate and in a way gracious among the
animals, had through the domination of self-consciousness
become diseased and morbid or monstrous in Man. The
work thus done has probably been of the greatest value
to the human race; but, just as in other cases it has sometimes
happened that the effort to do a certain work has resulted
in the end in an unbalanced exaggeration so here. We
are beginning to see now the harmful side of the repression
of sex, and are tentatively finding our way back again to a
more pagan attitude. And as this return-movement is
taking place at a time when, from many obvious signs, the
self-conscious, grasping, commercial conception of life is
preparing to go on the wane, and the sense of solidarity to
re-establish itself, there is really good hope that our
return-journey may prove in some degree successful.
Man progresses generally, not both legs at once like a
sparrow, but by putting one leg forward first, and then
the other. There was this advantage in the Christian
taboo of sex that by discouraging the physical and sensual
side of love it did for the time being allow the spiritual
side to come forward. But, as I have just now indicated,
there is a limit to that process. We cannot always keep
one leg first in walking, and we do not want, in life, always
to put the spiritual first, nor always the material and sensual.
The two sides in the long run have to keep pace with each other.
And it may be that a great number of the very curious
and seemingly senseless taboos that we find among the primitive
peoples can be partly explained in this way: that is,
that by ruling out certain directions of activity they
enabled people to concentrate more effectually, for the time
being, on other directions. To primitive folk the great world,
whose ways are puzzling enough in all conscience to us,
must have been simply bewildering in its dangers and
complications. It was an amazement of Fear and Ignorance.
Thunderbolts might come at any moment out of the blue sky,
or a demon out of an old tree trunk, or a devastating
plague out of a bad smell--or apparently even out of nothing
at all! Under those circumstances it was perhaps wise,
wherever there was the smallest SUSPICION of danger or
ill-luck, to create a hard and fast TABOO--just as we tell
our children ON NO ACCOUNT to walk under a ladder (thereby
creating a superstition in their minds), partly because it
would take too long to explain all about the real dangers
of paint-pots and other things, and partly because for the
children themselves it seems simpler to have a fixed and
inviolable law than to argue over every case that occurs.
The priests and elders among early folk no doubt took the
line of FORBIDDAL of activities, as safer and simpler, even if
carried sometimes too far, than the opposite, of easy
permission and encouragement. Taboos multiplied--many of
them quite senseless--but perhaps in this perilous maze
of the world, of which I have spoken, it really WAS simpler
to cut out a large part of the labyrinth, as forbidden ground,
thus rendering it easier for the people to find their way in
those portions of the labyrinth which remained. If
you read in Deuteronomy (ch. xiv) the list of birds and
beasts and fishes permitted for food among the Israelites,
or tabooed, you will find the list on the whole reasonable,
but you will be struck by some curious exceptions (according
to our ideas), which are probably to be explained by the
necessity of making the rules simple enough to be comprehended
by everybody--even if they included the forbiddal of some quite
eatable animals.
At some early period, in Babylonia or Assyria, a very
stringent taboo on the Sabbath arose, which, taken up in turn
by the Jewish and Christian Churches, has ruled the
Western World for three thousand years or more, and still
survives in a quite senseless form among some of our rural
populations, who will see their corn rot in the fields rather
than save it on a Sunday.[1] It is quite likely that this taboo
in its first beginning was due not to any need of a weekly
rest-day (a need which could never be felt among nomad
savages, but would only occur in some kind of industrial
and stationary civilization), but to some superstitious fear,
connected with such things as the changes of the Moon,
and the probable ILL-LUCK of any enterprise undertaken on
the seventh day, or any day of Moon-change. It is probable,
however, that as time went on and Society became more
complex, the advantages of a weekly REST-DAY (or market-
day) became more obvious and that the priests and legislators
deliberately turned the taboo to a social use.[2] The
learned modern Ethnologists, however, will generally have
none of this latter idea. As a rule they delight in representing
early peoples as totally destitute of common sense
(which is supposed to be a monopoly of us moderns!);
and if the Sabbath-arrangement has had any value or use
they insist on ascribing this to pure accident, and not to
the application of any sane argument or reason.
[1] For other absurd Sunday taboos see Westermarck on The Moral
Ideas, vol. ii, p. 289.
[2] For a tracing of this taboo from useless superstition to
practical utility see Hastings's Encycl. Religion and Ethics,
art. "The Sabbath."
It is true indeed that a taboo--in order to be a proper
taboo--must not rest in the general mind on argument or
reason. It may have had good sense in the past or even
an underlying good sense in the present, but its foundation
must rest on something beyond. It must be an absolute
fiat--something of the nature of a Mystery[1] or of Religion
or Magic-and not to be disputed. This gives it its blood-
curdling quality. The rustic does not know what would
happen to him if he garnered his corn on Sunday, nor does
the diner-out in polite society know what would happen if
he spooned up his food with his knife--but they both
are stricken with a sort of paralysis at the very suggestion of
infringing these taboos.
[1] See Westermarck, Ibid., ii. 586.
Marriage-customs have always been a fertile field for the
generation of taboos. It seems doubtful whether anything
like absolute promiscuity ever prevailed among the human
race, but there is much to show that wide choice and
intercourse were common among primitive folk and that
the tendency of later marriage custom has been on the whole
to LIMIT this range of choice. At some early period the
forbiddal of marriage between those who bore the
same totem-name took place. Thus in Australia "no man of
the Emu stock might marry an Emu woman; no Blacksnake
might marry a Blacksnake woman, and so forth."[1] Among
the Kamilaroi and the Arunta of S. Australia the tribe was
divided into classes or clans, sometimes four, sometimes
eight, and a man of one particular clan was only marriageable
with a woman of another particular clan--say (1)
with (3) or (2) with (4), and so on.[2] Customs with a similar
tendency, but different in detail, seem to have prevailed
among native tribes in Central Africa and N. America.
And the regulations in all this matter have been so (apparently)
entirely arbitrary in the various cases that it would
almost appear as if the bar of kinship through the Totem
had been the EXCUSE, originating perhaps in some superstition,
but that the real and more abiding object was simply limitation.
And this perhaps was a wise line to take. A taboo
on promiscuity had to be created, and for this purpose any
current prejudice could be made use of.[3]
[1] Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, p. 66.
[2] See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Australia.
[3] The author of The Mystic Rose seems to take this view. See
p. 214 of that book.
With us moderns the whole matter has taken a different
complexion. When we consider the enormous amount of
suffering and disease, both of mind and body, arising from
the sex-suppression of which I have just spoken, especially
among women, we see that mere unreasoning taboos--which
possibly had their place and use in the past--can be
tolerated no longer. We are bound to turn the searchlight
of reason and science on a number of superstitions which
still linger in the dark and musty places of the Churches and
the Law courts. Modern inquiry has shown conclusively
not only the foundational importance of sex in the evolution
of each human being, but also the very great
VARIETY of spontaneous manifestations in different individuals
and the vital necessity that these should be recognized,
if society is ever to expand into a rational human
form. It is not my object here to sketch the future
of marriage and sex-relations generally--a subject
which is now being dealt with very effectively from many
sides; but only to insist on our using our good sense in the
whole matter, and refusing any longer to be bound by senseless
pre-judgments.
Something of the same kind may be said with regard to
Nakedness, which in modern Civilization has become the
object of a very serious and indeed harmful taboo; both
of speech and act. As someone has said, it became in the
end of the nineteenth century almost a crime to mention
by name any portion of the human body within a radius
of about twenty inches from its centre (!) and as a matter
of fact a few dress-reformers of that period were actually
brought into court and treated as criminals for going about
with legs bare up to the knees, and shoulders and chest
uncovered! Public follies such as these have been responsible
for much of the bodily and mental disease and
suppression just mentioned, and the sooner they are sent to
limbo the better. No sensible person would advocate
promiscuous nakedness any more than promiscuous sex-
relationship; nor is it likely that aged and deformed
people would at any time wish to expose themselves. But
surely there is enough good sense and appreciation of grace
and fitness in the average human mind for it to be able to
liberate the body from senseless concealment, and give it
its due expression. The Greeks of old, having on the
whole clean bodies, treated them with respect and distinction.
The young men appeared quite naked in the palaestra,
and even the girls of Sparta ran races publicly in
the same condition;[1] and some day when our bodies (and
minds too) have become clean we shall return to similar
institutions. But that will not be just yet. As long as
the defilement of this commercial civilization is on us we
shall prefer our dirt and concealment. The powers that
be will protest against change. Heinrich Scham, in his
charming little pamphlet Nackende Menschen,[2] describes the
consternation of the commercial people at such ideas:
" 'What will become of us,' cried the tailors, 'if you go
naked?'
"And all the lot of them, hat, cravat, shirt, and shoemakers
joined in the chorus.
" 'AND WHERE SHALL I CARRY MY MONEY?' cried one who had
just been made a director."
[1] See Theocritus, Idyll xviii.
[2] Published at Leipzig about 1893.
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