Pagan and Christian Creeds: XII. The Sex-taboo

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

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.

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; 2 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 3 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

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. 1 Indeed the Syrian and Jewish rites dated largely from Babylonia. "The Hebrews entering Syria," says Richard Burton 2 "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.

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--

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 ☥ 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,

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

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

1 and so forth.

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

Consciousness. 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 den 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 sanctum of 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.

A monstrous Eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth;
For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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." 2 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. 3 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.

1

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

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."

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Footnotes

181:1 Angels' Wings, by E. Carpenter, p. 104.

181:2 1 Kings xiv. 22-24.

181:3 2 Kings xxiii.

182:1 See Herodotus i. 199; also a reference to this custom in the apocryphal Baruch, vi. 42, 43.

182:2 The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886 edn.), vol. x, p. 229.

183:1 "He shall establish" and "In it is strength'" are in the Bible the marginal interpretations of these two words.

183:2 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."

184:1 For further development of this subject see ch. xv (pp. 244-248) infra.

185:1 For the Aztecs, see Acosta, vol. ii, p. 324 (London, 1604).

188:1 See Havelock Ellis, The Objects of Marriage, a pamphlet published by the "British Society for the Study of Sex-psychology."

194:1 For other absurd Sunday taboos see Westermarck on The Moral Ideas, vol. ii, p. 289.

194:2 For a tracing of this taboo from useless superstition to practical utility see Hastings's Encycl. Religion and Ethics, art. "The Sabbath."

195:1 See Westermarck, Ibid., ii. 586.

195:2 Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, p. 66.

195:3 See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Australia.

196:1 The author of The Mystic Rose seems to take this view. See p. 214 of that book.

197:1 See Theocritus, Idyll xviii.

197:2 Published at Leipzig about 1893.